Mediation and Immediacy: A Key Issue for the Semiotics of Religion 3110690322, 9783110690323

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Figures
Introduction: Mediation and immediacy, a key issue for the semiotics of religion
Part I: Classical traditions
Immediacy and mediation in Philo’s interpretation of divine names
“Anì velo mal’akh”: Are angels in the Torah a sort of medium?
The angel as an intercultural medium
Medieval theology and the theory of signs
Transcending the body: The semiotics of an out-of-body experience reported by Mechthild of Magdeburg
The supremacy of the Qur’anic sign and its impacts on the Arabic Muslim culture
Arguments for immediacy and mediation in classical Advaita-Vedānta
Part II: Contemporary movements
Religious-artistic epiphanies in 20th-century literature: Joyce, Claudel, Weil, C.S. Lewis, Rebora, and Papini
On vain repetitions: The enactment of collective subjectivities through speaking in unison
The other Buddha: Leaving monasteries, fighting the enemy
Part III: Religious legal systems
Mediation and immediacy in the Jewish legal tradition
The doodling of Jesus: A semiotic inquiry into the rhetoric of immediacy
Legal theology and communication: The meaning of Christian eschatology between immanence and transcendence in contemporary social sciences
Post-secular jurisprudence: A visual semiotics of the sacred source of law’s authority
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Mediation and Immediacy

Religion and Reason Founded by Jacques Waardenburg (†) Edited by Gustavo Benavides, Michael Stausberg, and Ann Taves

Volume 62

Semiotics of Religion Edited by Massimo Leone, Fabio Rambelli, and Robert Yelle

Volume 4

Mediation and Immediacy A Key Issue for the Semiotics of Religion Edited by Jenny Ponzo, Robert A. Yelle, and Massimo Leone

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757314).

ISBN 978-3-11-069032-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069034-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069035-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943596 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments This volume is the fruit of several years’ cooperation between the three editors. We wish to thank the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich and its Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) for supporting Jenny Ponzo as a LMU Research Fellow during 2014– 2016; the CAS for hosting Massimo Leone as a visiting fellow in July 2015; the University of Turin and CIRCe (Interdepartmental Center of Research on Communication at the University of Turin) for hosting both Jenny Ponzo and Robert Yelle (in 2017) as visiting scholars, and finally the European Research Council (ERC), which supported Jenny Ponzo’s more recent research.¹ The conference out of which this volume grew was held at the University of Turin, 8 – 10 June 2016 with support from LMU’s CAS and Interfaculty Program in Religious Studies. We would like to thank all of the participants at that conference, as well as those who contributed to the work of organization, including Simona Stano, Gabriele Marino, Bruno Surace, Vincenzo Idone Cassone, and Mareile Vaupel. Wenzel Braunfels contributed to copy editing and checking the references. Finally, we would like to thank our two editors at De Gruyter: Alissa Jones Nelson, who helped to launch the Semiotics of Religion series, and Sophie Wagenhofer, who has steered this project toward completion. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Michael Silverstein (1945 – 2020), who gave a keynote lecture at the 2016 conference. Michael was one of the most brilliant lights in contemporary semiotics, and a dear colleague and teacher. He will be sorely missed.

 This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757314). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-001

Table of Contents Figures

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Jenny Ponzo, Robert A. Yelle, and Massimo Leone Introduction: Mediation and immediacy, a key issue for the semiotics of religion 1

Part I: Classical traditions Naomi Janowitz Immediacy and mediation in Philo’s interpretation of divine names Ugo Volli “Anì velo mal’akh”: Are angels in the Torah a sort of medium? Atsushi Okada The angel as an intercultural medium

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33

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Costantino Marmo Medieval theology and the theory of signs

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Volkhard Krech Transcending the body: The semiotics of an out-of-body experience reported by Mechthild of Magdeburg 85 Mohamed Bernoussi The supremacy of the Qur’anic sign and its impacts on the Arabic Muslim 111 culture Annette Wilke Arguments for immediacy and mediation in classical Advaita-Vedānta

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Table of Contents

Part II: Contemporary movements Jenny Ponzo Religious-artistic epiphanies in 20th-century literature: Joyce, Claudel, Weil, C.S. Lewis, Rebora, and Papini 149 Fred Cummins On vain repetitions: The enactment of collective subjectivities through 165 speaking in unison Enzo Pace The other Buddha: Leaving monasteries, fighting the enemy

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Part III: Religious legal systems Bernard S. Jackson Mediation and immediacy in the Jewish legal tradition

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Massimo Leone The doodling of Jesus: A semiotic inquiry into the rhetoric of immediacy 231 Paolo Heritier Legal theology and communication: The meaning of Christian eschatology between immanence and transcendence in contemporary social 247 sciences Richard K. Sherwin Post-secular jurisprudence: A visual semiotics of the sacred source of law’s authority 263 Contributors Index

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Figures Figure . Cupid Trademark (left) and Angel Trademark (right). Figure . Zanobi Strozzi, Conversion of St. Augustine, ca. , Firenze, Museo San Marco (f. r). Figure . Raffaello, Sistine Madonna,  – , Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Figure . Donatello, Anunciation (detail), ca. , Florence, Basilica di Santa Croce. Figure . Garland Sarcophagus,  – , Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum. Figure . Angel as Nike, rd century, Aquileia, Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta. Figure . Adoration of Magi, ca. , Cividale di Friuli, Museo Cristiano. Figure . Angel Rounds the Sky (Breviary of Love), th century, London, National Library (Royal  C. , f v). Figure . Frederic Watts, All Pervading,  – , Compton, Watts Gallery. Figure . Andrei Rublev, Holy Trinity,  – , Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery. Figure . Hildegard von Bingen, The First Vision (from Scivias), . Figure . The interfolding of sense-perception, body and psyche by religious meaning. Figure . The nine relations between the sign S, the object O, and the interpretant I. Figure . The OBE of Mechthild of Magdeburg as a semiotic system in a certain synchronous state. Figure . Mechthild’s OBE as a religious semiotic system in a certain synchronous state. Figure . Hypothetical continuum from (left) conversational dialogue, through (middle) liturgy, to (right) unison speech. Figure . Left: Sense-making: The relation of a dynamically individuated self-sustaining entity with its environment. Right: Participatory sense-making. Figure . Religious prerequisites for the construction of the other as an enemy. Figure . The three social functions of Sinhalese Buddhism. Figure . Religious demographics in Sri Lanka. Figure . Banning shari’a and halal in the web page of BBS. Figure . The power of the index finger. Figure . Heads of cows taken by BBS militants who stormed against halal butchers (Dematagoda, March , ). Figure a. Gabriel Metsu, Jesus defends the adulterous woman, .  x  cm. Oil on canvas. Paris: Louvre. Figure b. Gabriel Metsu, Jesus defends the adulterous woman, . Detail.  x  cm. Oil on canvas. Paris: Louvre. Figure . Pietro della Vecchia, Christ and the adulterous woman, third quarter of the th century.  x  cm. Oil on canvas. Paris: Louvre. Figure . Pietro della Vecchia, Christ and the adulterous woman, third quarter of the th century.  x  cm. Oil on canvas. London: sold at Christie’s auction, .

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-002

                          

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Figures

Figure . Pietro della Vecchia, Christ and the adulterous woman, third quarter of the th century.  x  cm. Oil on canvas. Rome: A. Sabatello (photograph from the Federico Zeri archives). Figure . Biasio Ugolino. Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum,  vols. Venice: Apud Joannem Gabrielem Herthz, et Sebastianum Coletti,  – . Figure . Biasio Ugolino. Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, :  – . Figure . Valentin de Boulogne, Jesus and the adulterous woman, . . x . cm. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Figure . Jan Vermeer, Girl With A Red Hat, . Figure . Wisdom Dominates the Stars, . Figure . Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, . Figure . Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, . Figure . Joshua Oppenheimer (director), The Look of Silence, . Figure . Joshua Oppenheimer (director), The Look of Silence, .

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        

Jenny Ponzo, Robert A. Yelle, and Massimo Leone

Introduction: Mediation and immediacy, a key issue for the semiotics of religion

1 Semiotics of religion: A point of departure The field of semiotics of religion is wide and varied. It is however possible to distinguish within it three different types of studies. The first two types were recognized already by Patte and Volney (1986), who distinguished between studies implicitly based on a semiotic theory and studies explicitly based on a semiotic theory. The first type is composed of studies undertaken before the birth of semiotics as a modern discipline but containing reflections on the sign as applied to religion (for instance, Sigmund Freud’s theories of dream interpretation [Freud 1900]). The second type produces more specific and systematic elaborations. Studies belonging to this second type aim at interpreting the anthropology and the sociology of religion, as well as theological thought, through a semiotic theory. Some of these studies were inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce, while others were inspired by the French school, which looks back to key figures such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Algirdas Greimas, and Paul Ricoeur. Exemplars of this type of study are Louis Panier, Louis Marin, and Michel de Certeau. The third type, which contains the major number of works, includes all the studies that analyze corpora of texts, rituals, and other signs belonging to a certain religious culture with a semiotic method. Even though it is not the intention of these studies to provide a semiotic interpretation of religion, they influence or provide an empirical ground for the elaboration of the theories of the second type. Centers developing this line of research can be found in France, in Germany, in Italy, and in the U.S.¹ The contributions contained in this volume can be placed mainly in this third type.

Note: For formal purposes, please consider section 1 of this Introduction as authored by Massimo Leone, section 1.1 as authored by Robert Yelle, and sections 1.2 and 2 as authored by Jenny Ponzo.  The French school, and in particular the Centre pour l’Analyse du Discours Religieux (CADIR) hosted by the Catholic University of Lyon, publishes since 1975 the journal Sémiotique et Bible. In Germany, there was a research group led by Erhardt Güttgemans, in Italy there is a research group in semiotics of religion at the University of Turin, including Massimo Leone, Ugo Volli, and Jenny Ponzo, while in the U.S. there is a research group led by Daniel Patte. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-003

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While an earlier phase of the discipline was focused primarily on Christian religious culture, semiotic studies of other religious traditions and of interreligious issues are increasing and gaining in importance, especially in the third category of works described above. Examples are the works of Ugo Volli (2019) and Bernard Jackson (2000) on Jewish tradition, of Fabio Rambelli (2013) and Tatsuma Padoan (forthcoming) on Buddhism, of Robert Yelle (2003) on Hinduism, and of Massimo Leone (2014) and Mohamed Bernoussi (2018) on Islam. The semiotic ideologies² that structure religious experiences and their interpretation in different traditions constitute one of the most promising lines of research for the semiotics of religion, which in the last twenty years has taken root as a vibrant and independent branch of the wider discipline of cultural semiotics.³ Semiotics is essentially an analytical discipline. Adopting a semiotic standpoint means to renounce direct access to immediate religious experience, and to rely exclusively on mediated accounts. Of course, it is vital for the development of the semiotics of religion to maintain an interdisciplinary dialogue and a crosscultural reflection on the patterns and ideologies of religious communication and their historical transformations. One such opportunity for an interdisciplinary dialogue between semiotics and the historical or comparative study of religion is raised by the issue of mediation. Properly understood, semiosis is nothing other than a form of mediation; while religious praxis is largely structured precisely in terms of the dialectic between mediation and immediacy.

1.1 The dialectic between mediation and immediacy in religion Religion, like any other domain of culture, is mediated through symbolic forms and communicative behaviors, which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality.⁴ While many traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to

 On the concept of semiotic ideology see Silverstein (1979); Keane (2003); Kroskrity (2003).  For a broader description of the field of semiotics of religion, see Leone (2013).  The growing recognition of the importance of mediation for religious traditions is signaled by, for example, Parmentier and Leone (2014), which devotes a special issue of Signs and Society to the theme of “Representing Transcendence”; the Social Science Research Council (U.S.) project on “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” (2011– 2015): https://www.ssrc. org/programs/component/religion-and-the-public-sphere/new-directions-in-the-study-ofprayer/ (accessed March 31, 2020); and the rise of the subfields of material religion and the aesthetics of religion, as represented by Koch and Wilkens (2019).

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the divine, or to some transcendent dimension of experience, such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility of mediation, for example through habits of discipline that inculcate special experiences or modes of connection. Zen spontaneity requires many years of practice, after all. Traditions that imagine a separation between a transcendent dimension and an immanent one are bound to posit channels of communication and exchange between these two dimensions, as in the cases of prayer and sacrifice. An understanding of these dynamics is therefore necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the “ineffability” of the deity or of mystical experience (see Naomi Janowitz’s chapter in this volume). The history of religions provides evidence for Friedrich Max Müller’s argument that religion is, at heart, an attempt to solve the problem of communication with the beyond, a problem made more intractable by iconoclasm and the prohibition against idolatry: If once the idea of the Godhead is so conceived that the divine nature is totally separated from human nature, then, unless all religion becomes extinct, nothing remains for a time but the admission of intermediate beings. […] In all parts of the world, where living beings are separated by a river, human ingenuity will devise means of communication: and among all races of men where reason has created an impassable gulf between the Divine and the Human, faith will throw its bridges, or strive to soar across on angels’ wings.⁵

For Müller the Protestant, it was Christianity, with its doctrines of the Incarnation and Logos, that had posed the best solution to this problem. However, we see that all traditions have grappled with this tension in their own way. Even in the most fervently iconoclastic religion, namely that of the Hebrew Bible, God needs angels to bring messages and to do his bidding on earth, as Ugo Volli shows in his chapter in this volume. Moreover, despite the biblical prohibition against representation, especially of the divine, angels have long been a theme for artistic representation in the West and elsewhere, as Atsushi Okada shows in his chapter. The anthropologist Melford Spiro defined religion as a form of mediation, or “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings” (Spiro 1966: 96; see also Alles 2000). Such interaction often takes the form of offerings, including prayers and sacrifices, which already constitute efforts to establish a circuit of communication that operates in both directions. The traditional expectation (or hope) that prayers will be an-

 Friedrich Max Müller, “Mantissa to Leviticus,” Bodleian Ms. Eng. 2357, pp. 130 – 37, quoted in Yelle 2013a: 206n209.

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swered, or sacrifices rewarded, depends upon the belief in such a circuit. This is the basis of the theory of sacrifice as reciprocal, a matter of mutual giving (do ut des). The widespread modelling of religious behavior on ordinary modes of interpersonal exchange—not only gift-giving but also commensality and dialogical speech—shows that gods are imagined and interacted with as if they were humans, even if they also belong to a higher level of being, one that transcends ordinary categories. We bow down in prayer, as the smoke of the sacrifice rises up to meet God in heaven. While the normality of such modes of interaction structures their basic form, the special circumstances (as well as dangers) of encounter with the divine require, in turn, special procedures as well as particular places “set apart” for such purposes, this being the original meaning of “sacred.” Thus we find god(s) in the wilderness, on the mountaintop, in caves, or in buildings dedicated for this purpose. Exchange between immanence and transcendence involves signs, which are codified into hieratic languages, sacred texts, and liturgical performances. Such codification entails a dialectical movement between the desire for immediacy and the longing for mediation; this desire is never static, but dynamic and tensive, being expressed in a successive attraction to one or the other pole. On the one hand, many if not most religious cultures conceive places and moments where the barrier between immanence and transcendence is suddenly abolished, thus allowing apparently immediate and unmediated contact between them; mystical rapture is the epitome of this, as diagrammed in Volkhard Krech’s chapter in this volume. On the other hand, religious cultures tend to structure spiritual immediacy into ritualized formulas, which are not exceptional any longer to the extent that they can be shared by a community and handed down by a tradition. The dialectic between these two tendencies is not always peaceful. On the contrary, as illustrated below, certain religious conflicts can be explained as resulting from the tension produced by this dialectic. Stanley Tambiah’s concept of “ritual involution,” meaning the loss of attachment to traditional ritual forms, described this process in terms close to the concerns of semiotics (Tambiah 1985: 153, 165 – 66). Tambiah focused on the contribution of the formalization of communication to ritual performance, but left the explanation of revolts against formalism as a desideratum. The dialectic between mediation and immediacy provides a useful shift of perspective on this problem, as ritual involution can in many cases be interpreted as resulting from an insistence on immediacy. Enzo Pace’s chapter in this volume illustrates this dynamic in the case of the Bodu Bala Sena, a fundamentalist Buddhist movement in contemporary Sri Lanka.

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This dialectic is nothing new. Arguably, it is at least as old as the tendency toward iconoclasm in ancient Israelite religion and subsequent monotheisms. However, the latest great wave of attacks against religious mediation in European civilization was associated with the Protestant Reformation, which demoted the authority of priestly intercessors, as well as of a community of worshippers or Church, in favor of the individual believer’s direct engagement with scripture, and with God. Luther’s doctrines of sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia (scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone) aimed to demolish the economy of exchange that had grown with the medieval Catholic Church; indulgences as well as other rituals could not purchase salvation from God, by whose grace alone we are saved. The Puritan movement went further in this regard, ushering in the developments that Max Weber famously described as the “disenchantment of the world” (see Yelle and Trein 2020). Altars were stripped, images and stained-glass windows smashed. Theologically speaking, these had all been means of access to the deity, who now removed further into the heavens, remote and inaccessible, as either the deus absconditus who handed down an unfathomable predestination or the absent proprietor of the world order—the Deists’ “Watchmaker God.” Points of access and channels of communication between this world and the next were cut off. This was evident also with respect to those practices which had previously provided the primary means of access to the deity, namely prayer and sacrifice. The Puritan critique of “vain repetitions” in prayer denied the power of petitionary prayer to persuade God (Yelle 2013a: 103 – 35; Yelle 2013b: 113 – 36)⁶, while Protestants from Luther onward rejected the interpretation of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, arguing instead that this was a meal shared among the congregants (Yelle 2019). While this was still a form of communication, and communion, it was located increasingly within this world, rather than being directed toward the beyond: religion became immanent rather than transcendent. However, this process is—as stated above—a dialectic. The pendulum swings back and forth. Dissatisfied with the austerity of Puritan traditions, more emotional, immersive, or spontaneous forms of religiosity have emerged also among Protestants, such as in Pentecostalism and other charismatic movements, where the Holy Spirit continues to descend to earth, in the here and now, as evidenced by Signs and Wonders, including speaking in tongues or glossolalia (Ponzo 2019), a form of speech that, in its immediacy and unintelligibility, resists decipherment. More recently, new electronic media have become the vehicles for

 For a contemporary revaluation of such “vain repetitions,” see Fred Cummins’s chapter in this volume.

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religious communication, from online churches and prayer groups to the dissemination of the Word by iPhone app. While it remains to be seen how such technologies will impact human behavior, what is certain is that, as Müller said, “faith will throw its bridges” between the human and the divine, and build a Stairway to Heaven.

1.2 Semiotics and the mediated nature of religious communication So far, we have provided examples that illustrate the perennial concern of religious traditions with mediation, communication, and representation. What can the discipline of semiotics contribute to understanding these phenomena? Semiotics is generally known as the discipline devoted to the study of signs, or more precisely, of the relationship between the objects of communication and their meaning, with particular attention to the cultural as well as cognitive mediation that takes place during the codification and decoding of signs.⁷ Given such an object of study, semiotics has a double vocation. The first is speculative in nature, and indeed semiotics is often labeled as a branch of the philosophy of language. The second is applied: semiotic analytical methods are applied to a wide variety of corpora and objects of study, among which are religious texts and practices. Besides exploring the relation between sign and meaning and the conceptualization of this relation across different times and cultures, semiotics also tackles the issue of mediation under several other aspects which emerged clearly since the first phases of its foundation as a modern humanistic science. For instance, Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), who is considered one of the founders of the discipline, was well aware that communication is a mode of social action, namely a form of mediation between people that is basic for the construction of groups and institutions as interpersonal formations. Communication, which happens through the use of semiotic systems (e. g. verbal language and visual language), is fundamental to the building of the cultural universe in which we live and perform as agents; it is the thread that allows the formation of social webs. Based on these general premises, the raison d’être of semiotics resides in an elementary consideration, also underlined by Saussure: the problem of human communication is that it is not possible to transmit meaning in an immediate way. We cannot transfer an idea, a reason, a feeling directly from our head

 For a definition of semiotics, especially in the context of religious studies, see Yelle (2016).

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to our receiver’s head, namely we cannot communicate telepathically. Humans have invented ingenious solutions to this problem, substituting mental objects, such as ideas, with material objects, such as words and other kinds of signs. So, we could say that one of the concerns of semiotics is to give an account of how human beings transfer material objects in substitution of mental objects so as to be understood by their community.⁸ On the other hand, as pointed out by Charles Sanders Peirce, semiosis—i. e. the tendency to interpret reality by recognizing signs as mediating entities which “stand to somebody for something” else, according to the famous definition by Charles Sanders Peirce (1931– 1958: 2.228)—is intrinsic to human nature. The problem of the mediating nature of signs and communication is even more complex in the case of religious communication, as Webb Keane (1997: 48) writes: “By what means can we, and in what manner ought we, talk with invisible interlocutors? How can we get them to respond? How should we talk about them? By what marks do we know that some words originate from divine sources? Are these words true, fitting, efficacious or compelling in some special way?” Indeed, in many cases religious experience challenges the traditional schemes of communication. For instance, this is the case with possession and various other phenomena (such as prophecy, certain kinds of glossolalia and shamanic experiences) in which the speaker does not play the role of the “sender” as defined in the classic scheme of communication à la Jakobson (1966), but rather that of the “channel”, since she or he is not a subject with an autonomous agency, but only a “medium” channeling the message of a supernatural agent.⁹ Another atypical medium in religious experience is dreams, which are believed in many cultures to open a conduit between the human world and a supernatural dimension. A good instance of this mediating characteristic of dreams can be found in Serge Sauneron’s description of the religion of ancient Egypt: According to the Egyptian, the sleeping man accesses a universe which is different from the one he usually lives in. The night is for the Egyptians a dead time of creation, a way back to the forces of chaos: the sleeping man is therefore in contact with all the beings and all the fantastic visions that haunt the uncreated world. It is a domain where the gods, invisible in their veritable shapes during the blinding light of the Egyptian day, can appear, and where the future can be revealed. During this night of sleep, sometimes the man can become sensitive to the realities that surround him, the otherworldly realities: the Egyptian word that

 See in this respect the schemes of the speech circuit in Saussure (1916: chapter 3).  A similar communication scheme can be found for instance in the evangelical pericope of the man possessed by a legion of demons interacting with Jesus through his body (Luke 26:33), or in the case of the Delphic Pythia, who according to Plutarch (1878 [102 CE]: § 21) reflected the messages of the god Apollo as the moon reflects the sunbeams.

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indicates the “dream” derives, paradoxically for us, from the verb meaning to “stay awake” or to “wake up.” (Sauneron 1959: 19 – 20; trans. Jenny Ponzo)

Dreams were also a common part of the rituals of healing associated with the ancient Greek cult of Asclepius. Supposedly, dreams can constitute a medium for the transmission of higher truths from an otherworldly realm. At the same time, the messages transmitted in dreams—like those of the Delphic oracle— are notoriously difficult to decipher, and can even be deliberately misleading. Mediation always requires interpretation. And this is true also in the case of the religious traditions addressed in this volume. This is where semiotics comes in.

2 The structure of the volume This volume models and promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-cultural perspective on these issues by asking prominent semioticians, historians of religion and of art, linguists, sociologists of religion, and philosophers of law to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the topic of mediation and immediacy in religious traditions. The chapters of this book can be divided into three parts. Part One examines mediation and immediacy in classical religious traditions, from ancient Hebrew and early to medieval Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Naomi Janowitz points out that there are imprecise and reductive ideas about the late antique notion of ineffability, especially concerning the impossibility of naming the deity, which is based on a presumed negative or apophatic theology. Janowitz focuses in particular on Philo of Alexandria’s thought, and shows that he did not imagine an ineffable and nameless god, but used a plurality of divine names to articulate a balance between immediacy and mediation. By clarifying Philo’s divine name strategies, Janowitz contributes to the definition of a more nuanced history of the divine name and of Negative Theology in general. Angels are widespread figures in all the Abrahamic religions, as well as in a number of folkloric and spiritual traditions. Ugo Volli explores the theme of the angel specifically in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. Drawing on communication sciences and particularly on semiotics, Volli looks into the problematic question whether angels, as described by this culture, can be considered as “media.” He examines different passages in the Bible where the relationship between angels and God is deliberately vague: sometimes angels act as agents of God, while at other times they appear indistinguishable from the deity Himself. In this case the

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tension between mediation and immediacy impinges on fundamental questions of the nature and representation of the divine. Atsushi Okada’s contribution takes into consideration a number of verbal and visual sources to reflect on the intercultural quality of angelology. Okada explores some early Christian documents representing Christ as an angel and considers the similarity between this “angelomorphic Christology” and Greek and Roman mythology, which abound with figures of winged messengers, guiding spirits, and tutelary deities. Angel-like figures of mediators are also present in the Islamic tradition, as well as in Buddhism. Okada argues that these angelic images can be considered as mediators not only between the sacred and the profane, or heaven and earth, but also between monotheism and polytheism, or the orthodox and the heretical. Costantino Marmo studies the semiotic ideology developed in the framework of medieval Catholic theology, thus reinforcing the argument according to which theologians in the Middle Ages not only worked out specific semiotics to deal with particular problems (such as the real presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist or the identity of the three persons of the Holy Trinity), but also expressed the first attempts at a general semiotic approach to the interpretation of the Bible as well as of the world. Undoubtedly, Augustine of Hippo proposed a theory and classification of signs which played a crucial role in the whole Western culture: Marmo focuses in particular on the influence of Augustinian theory on the debates over transubstantion. Indeed, in the 9th century, a first important debate saw the opposition between theologians negating the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (e. g. Ratamnus of Corbie) and theologians affirming this presence (e. g. Paschasius Radbertus). Marmo argues that the basic point fueling the controversy was precisely the counterposition of two different sign theories: one was derived from the traditional Augustinian idea according to which a sign is something evoking something else in the interpreter’s mind, while the other was a new and non-Augustinian semiotic theory which, interestingly, presented the sacrament as granting an immediate access to Christ’s body and blood. The latter view, however, did not find a general consensus, and in the 12th century theologians definitively abandoned it and came back to the traditional Augustinian semiotics. Volkhard Krech describes out-of body experiences as meaningful events, produced through socio-cultural communication. The narration of such ineffable experiences is allowed by the use of metaphors, which serve a necessary cognitive function by making inaccessible mental states expressible. Krech focuses in particular on the book Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead) by the 13th-century German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, who reported a number of mystical experiences, including out-of-body ones. Krech

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uses Peirce’s triadic model of the sign to diagram several passages of Mechthild’s account, and illustrates with precision the convergence between religious experience and processes fundamental to semiosis. Mohamed Bernoussi reflects on the elaboration of the idea of the supremacy (al I’jaaz) of the Qur’anic sign and its impact on Arab culture. Bernoussi focuses on the thought of Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938 – 2009), a Moroccan literary critic, novelist and playwright who related the superiority of the Arabic Muslim culture to the original supremacy of the text of the Qur’an over all other texts. Bernoussi shows how this notion of I’jaaz has been institutionalized through the centuries in order to reinforce an absolute conception of textuality and knowledge, which has ironically eradicated the textuality and the materiality of the Qur’anic sign and hindered its intertextual development, with enormous consequences for Arabic Muslim culture. What emerges from Bernoussi’s argumentation is that the semiotic ideology of I’jaaz, which tries to make the Qur’an an “immediate,” universal, and absolute text, does not succeed in annihilating the capacity of the sacred text to “mediate” ever-new meanings and interpretations. Annette Wilke observes that the Advaita Vedānta tradition in Hinduism, which claims the non-dual oneness of self, world, and godhead, was a prime model of Eastern wisdom and of peak experiences that fueled modern debates about mysticism. Wilke explores the discourses within the tradition that argue for a more complex dynamics of immediacy and mediation. Indeed, the claim of immediacy is found in the original sources (the Upaniṣads, Śaṅkara’s commentaries, and Advaita Vedānta treatises), which claim to reveal directly a knowledge that cannot be reached by words and thoughts, and that is ineffable. At the same time, however, this immediacy is grounded in mediations, i. e. features and processes of semiosis, reckoned to be absolutely necessary: the Vedic and Upaniṣadic revelation of non-duality, i. e. the “word” as a unique means of knowledge, and a qualified teacher (guru, ācārya) who is both a well-versed scholar and himself deeply rooted in experiential non-dual knowledge (brahmaniṣṭa), and finally a specific mental disposition. In keeping with the sacred texts, the teacher must know how to communicate the non-communicable and how to use language in order to go beyond language, while the recipient must purify the mind to become a clear mirror able to reflect the “self-luminous” pure, unlimited consciousness, which is, according to the Advaita Vedānta, not only one’s own true self, but also the self of all beings. This reflection happens in an “unbroken, limitless thought form” which mediates the immediacy of limitless consciousness, the true self or subject that can never be objectified.

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Part Two considers the transformations in the dialectic of mediation and immediacy in certain contemporary traditions, including fictional literature and Buddhist fundamentalism. Jenny Ponzo focuses on the idea of epiphany and shows how art, and more specifically literature, plays a mediating role in 20th-century accounts of conversion to Christianity. Drawing on works by Paul Claudel, Simone Weil, C.S. Lewis, Giovanni Papini, and Clemente Rebora, Ponzo identifies a sort of hermeneutical circle between artistic expression and religion: a number of writers describe both paths from poetry or aesthetic experience to religious epiphany, and conversely, paths from religious epiphany to literature. By exploring the relationship between aesthetic-artistic experience and religious conversion, as well as writers’ theorizations of a direct relationship between the poetic faculty and divine inspiration and grace, Ponzo argues that a deep connection exists between “secularized” and “religious” epiphanies, and that the border between the two is actually a fine line. Fred Cummins focuses on the phenomenon of repetition in prayer and ritual, a phenomenon associated especially with joint speech or simultaneous collective utterance. Such forms of mediation challenge standard models of communication that regard speech as the transmission of a discrete message from a single sender to one or more passive receivers. Cummins observes that many of the formal characteristics of ritualized speech (repetition, rhythm, the beginnings of melody, synchronized gestures) are found in other situations—such as civic protests and football cheers—in which collective identities are manifested, and collective sentiments are expressed. While many contemporary psychological approaches model the mind as disembodied, unobservable and solipsistic, more recent embodied and interactive approaches provide a framework within which we can return to the voice and its role in the enactment of collective subjectivity. To understand what it is to speak, Cummins claims, we need to reconsider the role of the voice as it has functioned over millennia, long before widespread literacy allowed texts to float freely, without necessarily being vouched for by speakers. In oracles, in demonic possessions, and in the antics of ventriloquists, wherever voices emanate, we perceive subjects who are brought into being and sustained through the act of utterance. The same is true for the collective subjectivity that emerges through the performance of joint or unison speech. Enzo Pace describes a new Sinhala Buddhist movement called the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force) founded in 2012 by two monks in Sri Lanka. This case study is representative of the emergence in contemporary Buddhism of several movements displaying fundamentalist features. The common thread in these movements is the social construction of the image of the other (in this case Islam, in other cases Christian denominations) as the enemy. This

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construction works according to three principles: first, the identification of one text within the large corpus of the school of Theravada Buddhism—namely the Mahavamsa—as sacred, an indubitable and inerrant narrative about the history of Sinhala Buddhism and even of a whole people. Secondly, the conversion of symbols, signs, and rituals that pertain to the monastic tradition as symbolic resources for collective action in the political and social realm. Thirdly, the definition of the other (Muslim or Christian) as a potential corruption of the moral virtues of Buddhism, considered as the basis of the social bond and the foundation of the legitimacy of political power. Analyzing the Buddhist leaders’ communication styles (including the use of new media), Pace shows the importance of the process of relocating religious rituals from closed monasteries (sangha) to the public square as a revolutionary act. In this communication system, the traditional role of the Buddhist monks is subverted, in that they play an unprecedented role as “mediators” of an ideology with contingent political and social goals. Part Three focuses on the interplay between mediation and immediacy in traditions of religious law, including the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and later Christian and even post-secular traditions, where the secret desire remains direct access to the source of law’s sacred authority. Whether this dialectic is expressed as divine vs. immanent justice, sovereign charisma vs. static tradition, or rule vs. interpretation, it structures the life of the law in a manner that connects this with religion. Bernard Jackson adopts the perspective of Greimasian semiotics to explore the notions of divine law and justice in Jewish tradition. Jackson distinguishes between two extremes: an immediate, divine justice that is authored and executed by God without any human involvement; and a mediated justice, which adjudicates by means of the human interpretation of divinely revealed texts. Between these two extremes, Jackson also identifies a “charismatic” human justice and an institutionalized divine justice. He focuses on three episodes in Jewish tradition that have been particularly significant for the elaboration of justice: Abraham’s intervention in the divine judgment against Sodom, the judgment of Solomon, and the rabbinic story of the “oven of Akhnai,” where human decision-making finally triumphs over divine intervention. Jackson recognizes trust rather than truth as the basis for the functioning of both religious and secular legal systems, and draws a general distinction between decision-making and justification. Massimo Leone focuses on the pericope of the adulteress (John 8:6 – 8), one of the most famous passages in the Gospels. A number of interpretations have been offered through the centuries about why, how, and what Jesus writes on the ground on that occasion. Offering an alternative account, Leone first draws a parallel to different cultures, including Greek and Arab, where writing

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on the ground expresses a detachment from, and even an attitude of superiority toward, the received Law. Secondly, Leone surveys and comments on the rich iconography of the pericope and identifies three types of visual representations elaborated in different historical and cultural contexts, which present different interpretations of Jesus’s action and of the signs he produces. Finally, Leone proposes a general interpretative key of the evangelical episode: in many exegetical and iconographic texts, what Jesus does is not writing but un-writing or erasing the fundamentalist Law, through the exemplary symbolical act of doodling on the ground. Leone points out that doodling brings about a semi-symbolic system in which the mediation of the written religious Law is deconstructed as hypocritical and is replaced by a more immediate moral judgment that stems from direct, non-verbal contact with a dimension that is construed as hierarchically superior to that of the verbal code of the Law. Such immediate contact with transcendence, as opposed to the mediated contact offered by hypocritical immanence, is figuratively rendered through the opposition between the written book and doodling on the ground. Paolo Heritier focuses on the issue of Christological mediation between the two historical moments of the resurrection and the Parousia, and shows how this raises a radical anthropological question regarding the basis of social life. By discussing the relationship between Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt, as well as Taubes’s criticism of the eschatological thought of Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard, Heritier observes that, historically, the temporal enunciations of the link between individual resurrection and the Last Judgment at the end of time have been placed as the foundation of philosophical, legal, and social constructions. Drawing especially on the eschatology of the theologian Carlo Isoardi, Heritier proposes a reasoning that moves from theology—namely, from a theory of the immediacy of the divine and more specifically from a renewed perspective on the idea of Christological mediation—to anthropology and legal theory. Richard Sherwin claims that, in the history of culture, there are artworks that strike our senses with unusual forcefulness because of their anti-structural content. These artworks are of the utmost important in that they offer us a sudden and clear consciousness of an uncanny substratum, the appearance of which obliterates conventional aesthetic codes. A similar and parallel phenomenon can be observed in the history of law. Here, too, anti-structural forces are at work. They may be found in historic representations of law’s sovereignty—the source of law’s ultimate authority. These sovereign images attest to an underlying economy of excess in which ineffable and unmeasurable forces vie for dominance. Sherwin connects these exceptional and anti-structural features with the idea of the sacred, which subverts both aesthetic and ethical codes in the name of a different and deeper source of authority. Starting from this premise, Sherwin

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analyzes illustrative sovereign imaginaries from early to late modernity. Through a critical assessment of significant artworks, he sheds new light on the way in which post-secular culture simultaneously visualises sovereignty and the sacred as entangled sources of law’s legitimacy. Collectively, these chapters exemplify the range of intersections that connect mediation with immediacy, human with divine—and semiotics with religion. The productivity of this nexus is such that we cannot hope to exhaust it, but only to illustrate its potential. The impulse to communicate with the gods is as old as recorded history, and possibly even older. In Acts 17:23, Paul, preaching in Athens, finds an altar dedicated “to an unknown god,” and promises to reveal the identity and name of this god, which he of course says is Jesus. In the late 19th century, Friedrich Max Müller used the same phrase (“to an unknown god”) as the title for his translation of Rig Veda 10.121, a hymn to the god “Ka” (literally, “Who?”), which asks repeatedly, “Who is the god to whom we shall offer sacrifice?” (Müller 1891; see Yelle 2013a: 66). Although Müller tried to appropriate the Hindu hymn for Christian apologetic purposes, it is possible to read this refrain in a different way, namely as evidence that efforts at mediating with the divine— through prayer and sacrifice—are part of human nature, which will call out to gods even when it doesn’t yet know what to name them.

References Alles, Greg. 2000. Exchange. In Willi Braun & Russell McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion, 110 – 24. London: Continuum. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2018. Douces schizophrénies: études sémiotiques de la culture marocaine (Mimesis philosophie n. 59). Sesto San Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis. Freud, Sigmund. 1900. Die Traumdeutung. Leipizig & Vienna: Franz Deuticke. Jakobson, Roman. 1966. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350 – 377. New York & London: Wiley & Sons. Jackson, Bernard S. 2000. Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Keane, Webb. 1997. Religious Language. Annual Review of Anthropology 26. 47 – 71. Keane, Webb. 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication 23. 409 – 425. Koch, Anne & Katharina Wilkens (eds.). 2019. The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion. London: Bloomsbury. Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.). 2003. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Leone, Massimo. 2014. Sémiotique du fondamentalisme religieux: messages, rhétorique, force persuasive. Paris: L’Harmattan. Leone, Massimo. 2016. Sémiotique de la religion: histoire, méthodes et perspectives. In Jean-Daniel Dubois, Lucie Kaennel, Renée Koch Piettre & Valentine Zuber (eds.), Les

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sciences des religions en Europe: état des lieux, 2003 – 2016, 7 – 17. Paris: Société des Amis des Sciences Religieuses. Müller, Friedrich Max. 1891. Vedic Hymns, Part One. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Padoan, Tatsuma. Forthcoming. Towards a Semiotics of Pilgrimage: Ritual Space, Memory and Narration in Japan and Elsewhere. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. Parmentier, Richard & Massimo Leone (eds.). 2014. Representing Transcendence, supplement to Signs and Society 2 (S1). Patte, Daniel & Gay Volney. 1986. Religious Studies. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 3: 797 – 807. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931 – 1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch. 1878 [102 CE]. “Wherefore the Pythian Priestess Now Ceases to Deliver her Oracles in Verse.” In The Moralia, translated and edited by William Watson Goodwin. https://top ostext.org/work/276 (accessed September 6, 2020). Ponzo, Jenny. 2019. The Debate over Glossolalia between Conservative Evangelicals and Charismatics: A Question of Semiotic Style. In Robert A. Yelle, Courtney Handman & Christopher Lehrich (eds.), Language and Religion, 276 – 303. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rambelli, Fabio. 2013. A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics: Signs, Ontology, and Salvation in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Sauneron, Serge. 1959. Les songes et leur interprétation: Égypte ancienne, Babylone, Hittites, Canaan, Israël, Islam, peuples altaïques, Persans, Kurdes, Inde, Cambodge, Chine, Japon. Paris: Seuil. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In P.R. Clyne, W.F. Hanks & C.L. Hofbauer (eds.), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, 193 – 247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Spiro, Melford. 1966. Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation. In Michael S. Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, 85 – 126. London: Tavistock. Tambiah, Stanley. 1985. A Performative Approach to Ritual. In Culture, Thought, and Social Action, 123 – 66. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Volli, Ugo. 2019. Il resto è interpretazione: per una semiotica delle scritture ebraiche. Livorno: Salomone Belforte & C. Yelle, Robert A. 2003. Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra. London & New York: Routledge. Yelle, Robert A. 2013a. The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India. New York & London: Oxford University Press. Yelle, Robert A. 2103b. Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History. London: Bloomsbury. Yelle, Robert A. 2016. Semiotics. In Michael Stausberg & Steven Engler (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion, 208 – 219. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yelle, Robert A. 2019. From Sovereignty to Solidarity: Some Transformations in the Politics of Sacrifice from the Reformation to Robertson Smith. History of Religions 58. 319 – 46. Yelle, Robert A., and Lorenz Trein (eds.). 2020. Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization: Critiquing Max Weber’s Idea of Modernity. London: Bloomsbury.

Part I: Classical traditions

Naomi Janowitz

Immediacy and mediation in Philo’s interpretation of divine names 1 Introduction Numerous religious and philosophical thinkers make claims about the limits of language, stating that the most important dimensions of existence cannot be talked about and thus are ineffable.¹ How language is imagined to fail, and what exactly it is that cannot be talked about, depends on the historical and cultural context. Many contemporary notions of ineffability are based on a presumed late antique Negative or Apophatic Theology. This notion of primary ineffability posits that the deity is better described by what he is not rather than what he is, and best not described at all.² This view of the ineffable nature of the deity is said to represent a wide range of interpreters of Plato and articulates with Jewish claims that the deity is beyond naming.³ Any late antique thinker who uses the Greek modifier “un-speakable” (ἂρρητος) is assimilated into this ineffability.⁴ For example, John Whittaker, one of the most sophisticated interpreters of the 1st century CE Jewish exegete Philo, argues that Philo wanted to claim that the deity was nameless but was not able to due to the presence of divine names in scriptural texts (Whittaker 1992: 66). Philo himself does not make this argument. It is all too easy to read later ideas about names anachronistically into earlier texts.⁵ The over-simplified histories of the divine name do not distinguish between ineffability, distancing techniques when naming a deity (e. g. issues of deference and honorifics), and name taboos, which do not presume ineffability but rather the danger of speaking the Name aloud. The rich

 The bibliography on ineffability is extensive. In addition to the studies cited below, see the range of views in Budick and Iser (1989), which includes an influential piece by Derrida; and Franke (2007).  Apophatic comes from the Greek for “deny.”  On apophatic theology see Wolfson (1957), Ward (2002) and Louth (2012). For a standard summary of Jewish divine names as ineffable see Stroumsa (2005).  See the discussion of “arretos” below. Plotinus is often given a central role, as for example in Sells (1994). Prior texts are then read through the lens of Plotinus.  For example Stroumsa states, “Even in the Temple liturgy, there was a near absolute interdiction on using the Tetragrammaton: only the high Priest on Yom Kippur could pronounce it” (Stroumsa 2005: 185 – 186). This version of the liturgical use of the divine name is Rabbinic and thus from a later period. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-004

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linguistic analysis of the multifunctionality of personal names has not been introduced into studies of Philo’s use of divine names which, like so much written about Jewish divine names, substitutes homogenized theological summaries for analysis. Far from imagining a nameless, ineffable god, Philo uses divine names as a prism for viewing the problem of immediacy and mediation. Philo’s interpretations of divine names fall on the fault line between the frequent appearance of specific names for the deities in Hebrew Scriptures, including YHWH over three thousand times, and the philosophical articulation of a monotheistic imagining of divinity.⁶ Instead of being beyond language, this transition must be talked about from many angles in order for a new divine mediation to emerge. Clarifying Philo’s divine name strategies will in turn lead to a much more nuanced “history” of the divine name and of Negative Theology in general.

2 Names and name-givers Gods with personal divine names were not a problem in early Greek or Israelite religious texts, where names were the means for organizing both the appearances of divinity and the relationships between gods and specific locales.⁷ Philo’s ideas about divine names were articulated in the specific historical context of a shift towards a tenuous vision of a monotheistic deity who was the creator of matter, with both monotheism and the role of pre-existent matter being issues of interpretation in his time.⁸ If gods had to have personal names to distinguish them in previous theological traditions, the role of a name when there is a single deity presented linguistic challenges.⁹ Words that previously described a type of being are now closer to personal names, as in the shift from god to God and lord to Lord. The term “Lord” may have been usable to show deference, but that was no longer true when it became a personal name. Trying to pinpoint the problem exegetes had with names, David Runia argues that for Philo, a follower of Plato, using a name might seem to predicate

 For a summary of explanations for the shift, none of which are very convincing, see Vasileiadis (2014: 57).  These names had to be used with the correct deference, a topic which is beyond the scope of this paper.  For the general importance of monotheistic thought even in Greco-Roman philosophy see Frede (1999).  Some of them are still seen today in the irregular capitalization of divine names where the Jewish god is always capitalized even when the term is not used as a personal name.

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something about the object named: “[I]mplicit at this point is the Platonist argument, derived from the theological reflection on the first and second hypotheses of the Parmenides, that any name or attribute adds to Being. A name entails predication, which necessarily involves a measure of plurality and—the aspect that Philo will later stress—a degree of relationality” (Runia 1988: 77). However, Parmenides does not make this exact claim. The dialogue states: “But can that which does not exist have anything pertaining or belonging to it?” “Of course not.” “Then the one has no name, nor is there any description or knowledge or perception or opinion of it.” “Evidently not” (Parmenides 142a, translation by H. Fowler from Loeb Classical Library, hereinafter “LCL”¹⁰). The issue in Parmenides is predication about something that does not exist, which does not explain Philo’s stance. In the ancient Greek linguistic ideology, the term “name” (ὄνομα) was used indiscriminately for nouns, personal names and sometimes adjectives and other linguistic units as well (Plato, Sophist 262a).¹¹ The basic Platonic debate about language was whether names are “natural” (physis) or the result of custom and agreement (thesis).¹² The options are delineated in bewildering detail by Plato in the Cratylus, and associated with particular philosophical schools (Eleatic, Heraclitean). A hefty stream of modern commentary is still trying to clarify the options and Plato’s conclusion (if any).¹³ It is hard to overstate the importance of ideas about names and naming. The models migrate, re-appearing in other cultural debates; for example, are forms of government and political organizations fixed by nature or by communal agreement?¹⁴ Most ancient theorists retained some belief in a natural connection between names and the objects named.¹⁵ Socrates did not conventionalize all names but distinguished between types of names: standard naming is mostly based on convention while naming ideal forms involves a special type of “ideal” names (Parmentier 1994). This point lays out the basic path Philo and others will follow:

 For a list of classical texts and translations in the Loeb Classical Library, see https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Loeb_Classical_Library (accessed 11 September 2020).  For the Greek use of “name” for all nouns, see the discussions in Kretzmann (1971), Baxter (1992) and Sedley (2003). For this assumption carried over into Jewish exegesis see Runia (1988: 76n25) and Bietenhard (1991).  See the discussion by Sedley of the “celebrated opposition of nature (physis) and convention or custom (nomos), indelibly associated with fifth-century Sophistic thought” (Sedley 2003: 67).  In addition to the works already cited, see Smith (2014).  For the echoes of this debate, as well as the differing ways in which the options were organized, see Parmentier (1994).  For Epicurus as an extreme conventionalizer and thus possibly the target of Philo’s arguments, see Winston (1991).

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they are searching for the ideal divine name, a search which will only be abandoned long after Philo completed his exegesis. Philo at times made use of his belief in the natural connection between words and their objects, following the tracks of other Platonic interpreters closely. For example, his etymologies exploit the natural status of word-names.¹⁶ As a good Platonist, Philo was also committed to the role of name-givers as the originators of at least some names.¹⁷ According to Cratylus, the name-giver “is the rarest of craftsmen among men” (Plato, Cratylus 388e7– 389a3). Others were less sure: “Might the original name-makers have been ill-informed and encoded their misinformation in the names they coined?” (Cratylus 436b, trans. Sedley 2003). Philo happily enters into this discussion since it is an opportunity to present the superior Jewish name-givers. Without wanting to homogenize Philo’s distinct exegetical moves too much, we can trace a series of comments about Moses and Adam as name-givers. Moses offered “perfectly apt and expressive” names (On Husbandry 1– 2; Colson translation, LCL 3:109). Philo emphasizes that the fit between names and things is perfect since “the name given and that to which the name is given differ not a whit” (On the Cherubim 56; Colson translation, LCL 2:43). The Jewish version, giving the task to only one person, is even more likely to make it successful and “bring about harmony between name and thing” (Allegorical Interpretation 2, 15; Colson translation, LCL 1:235). Adam, who names the animals, is presented as a superior name-giver with royal status (On Creation 148 – 150; LCL 1:118 – 119).¹⁸ Naming was a test to show his wisdom and he was so successful that the nature of the being was understood through his naming. Adam knows that he does not truly know his own nature so he does not name himself (Allegorical Interpretation 1, 91– 2; LCL 1:209). Adam does have a name, but it is given to him by the deity who does know Adam’s nature. This exegesis sets up the problem similar to who will bell the cat: who can be the giver of a name to the deity? The deity must have an ideal name, like the Forms, which can only be known by revelation.

 On Philo’s etymologies, see Hanson (1967). For the etymologies in Plato see Sedley (1998).  See Cratylus 401B and the discussion in Baxter (1992: 41– 48).  See also Quest Gen 1, 20 – 21; LCL S1:12– 13. For discussion of Adam as name-giver see Winston (1991: 123 – 125) and Chidester (1992: 32– 33).

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3 Philo’s three strategies for divine names as mediation In addition to the problem of a name-giver for divine names, when Philo moves from the names of animals to those of the deity, he crosses over from common nouns into personal names. Personal names are a special test case where exegetes often articulate meanings and proper use even if they are not sure why. Philo, working from the idea that all nouns are names, outlines how he thinks names work and how they are a model for studying divinity. When he turns to divine names, Philo must balance intricate notions of deference against his commitment to the value of divine names. Philo views each name as a facet of the deity; no single name or idea about the meaning of names can encompass all the lessons to be learned. Philo adopts three approaches to the possibilities and problems of divine names: renaming divine names, adding new restrictions about their use, and differentiating human from divine word-use. These approaches are used as needed and a consistent overall integration of them is never made (and presumably not felt necessary) by Philo. The first approach for dealing with divine names is re-naming them.¹⁹ This strategy, employed in a number of different contexts, should not be over-systematized. In each instance Philo tries to direct the potential meanings and uses of divine names by renaming the deity with names that give greater emphasis to their symbolic meaning.²⁰ Emphasizing the symbolic content of divine names points to a timeless, “nomic” aspect of the deity and away from any suspicion that Philo is casually referring to the deity or oversimplifying the implications of divine address. As part of an extended investigation into names (Change of Names 11– 17), Philo glosses the enigmatic Hebrew phrase-name “I am he who is” (Exodus 3:14) as “my nature is to be, not to be spoken” (Change of Names 11; LCL 5:146 – 7).²¹ This re-named name, now a name-as-proposition, focuses attention

 These claims are all meta-semantic (claims about the meaning of words) as well as metapragmatic (claims about the use of words) due to the special nature of names discussed below (Silverstein 1993).  Philo endows the divine name with propositional content since “personal names, like true symbols, are nomically calibrated” (Fleming 2011: 149).  This section of Philo’s text is heavily emended, as if it posed challenges to ancient readers (Runia 1988: 76).

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on something about the deity that distinguishes him from other named objects.²² In this case the deity is described as “not to be spoken about” even while his name is being spoken. Philo’s explanation of the term is similar to the rhetorical trope “apophasis,” which is positing something by denying it (“I will not mention X”).²³ The name is employed against the act of naming as if that undoes naming itself, which it does not do any more than “I will not say X” negates saying X. The re-named name implies that the speaker is not using the name but only explaining the noun-phrase, splitting off the sense of the name (“not to be spoken”) from its reference to the deity.²⁴ How successful this strategy of describing and not using ultimately is, is not the issue. The status of this renamed name is explained and calibrated by means of a contrast between types of names: a “kurion” (κύριον) name which is not available and a “katakresis” (κατακρεσις) name which is. Colson translates the former term as “personal” while Runia prefers “legitimate.”²⁵ Neither of these translations capture Philo’s strategy. A natural name does not merely denote its object, but bears a necessary and essential relation to that object, which is far beyond the notion of “legitimate.” The translation “ideal” aligns Philo’s naming with the Platonic notion of an ideal Form; such a Form must have an ideal Name. A divine name must be fitting to divinity, containing its essence, mapping the name onto what is named, but it must do so carefully since it is a representation of what is hardest to name in the schema of truth. Philo uses “kurion” with a different connotation later in the same section (the name Lord [kurios] God) and it is hard not to see something of the “lordly” usage there influencing his idea of a “kurion” name, evidence of the slant towards a type of name that suits divinity. This harkens back to the Platonic idea of the special, “ideal” names that do fit the Forms which are names not easily accessible to humans.

 This interpretation builds upon the name-as-proposition already found in Exodus 13: 4. On the issue of the translation of the Hebrew name-phrase into Greek see the bibliography in Vasileiadis (2014).  As a rhetorical device, it permits the speaker to assert and deny at the same time and thus, for example, get around a taboo about a forbidden topic.  This renamed name is a brilliant use of an explicit statement about how words should be employed (a metapragmatic statement) that also functions as a new definition of the name itself (a metasemantic statement). The pragmatic implications of naming are discussed below.  Runia considers (1) legitimate and (2) improper and argues for the former (Runia 1988: 76). Aristotle’s use of kurion onoma, sometimes translated as normal, ordinary (Rhet 3.2 1404b6, 31, 35, 39), is discussed by Kennedy (1997: 189) and sometimes cited, but does not illuminate Philo’s linguistic ideology or high evaluation of the texts he exegetes.

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In this specific case, Philo argues that people do not have the “kurion” name but they have access to a “borrowed” name (katakresin).²⁶ The translation “borrowed” captures Philo’s contrast better than Colson’s translation as “license of language.”²⁷ A borrowed name will not be expected to be a perfect fit. The gap between it and what it stands for is obvious since it is not the “ideal” name (as in, the lordly name for the lord).²⁸ The deity’s name cannot be conventional. If it is natural, then it must have an essential fit with the deity. The post-Platonic debate is still toggling between natural and conventional; the natural name of the deity must be beyond easy access to humans. The same contrast between types of linguistic usages appears in several other treatises. In On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 101 (LCL 2:169 – 170), Philo compares the “ideal” (κυριολογια) and “borrowed” (κατακρεσιν) meaning of the phrase “as a man” from Deut. 1:31. Colson tries to capture the distinction with the contrasting translations “literal” and “as a figure.” He is unable, however, to use “literal” consistently due to the many different nuances Philo has of name-meanings. The basic point is that the phrase “as a man” cannot be an exact fit with divinity; it is needed due to “our feeble apprehension” (Colson translation). The same contrasting terms appear in On Abraham 120 (LCL 6:63), where Philo argues that it is not “ideal” to state that god has a shadow but a case of “borrowing.”²⁹ In the same discussion in On the Change of Names, Philo also states: “He allows them to use by borrowing as though it were his ideal (kurios) name, the name Lord (kurion) God” (Change of Names 12; LCL 5:147– 9). Colson struggles with this re-naming, translating “name” as “title” so the phrase reads: “title Lord God” (LCL 5:149). But Philo once again uses “name” as he is still working with the naming process. He tramples grammar a bit in order to have his re-naming work, as he urges the reader on as far as he can about a name which denotes something about the deity even as it refers to him, while at the same time not strictly being the ideal name.³⁰ Again, it is not possible to use terms like literal  As a form of rhetoric, katakresis emphasizes the use of one word (name) for another object. Given that this is similar to the loose meta-semantic model of the metaphor, specific contours of comparison can be motivated by many different explanations and needs.  See Whittaker’s (1983) detailed refutation of Runia’s attempt to over-translate Philo’s use of katakresis.  In On Dreams (1, 229) (LCL 5: 418 – 19) Philo contrasts the use of the plural for gods as a “borrowing” which Colson in this context translates as “improperly” (LCL 5: 419).  Colson contrasts “properly” and “loose speaking” (LCL 6: 63).  Colson described Philo as mixing up the term kurion onoma as 1) a noun used in its literal or strict sense, opposed to metaphorical or loose usage and 2) a proper or personal name (LCL 5: 149 n.a.).

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and metaphoric to describe Philo’s exegesis, though the rough overlap of the contemporary metasemantic implications of the terms makes it tempting.³¹ Cannibalizing the broadest linguistic model available, Philo re-names god’s name as “word” (λόγος) (Confusion of Tongues 146; LCL 4:89 – 90).³² This equation attempts to regiment the representational capacity of the divine name based on a model that is not exactly the same as name but close.³³ This metasemantic (and meta-pragmatic) equation shakes loose the tight connection between the deity and the name since “word” exhibits less rigid reference than “name.” The move quickly becomes circular when “word” is equated with (defined as) name, a step Philo does not make but others will (Janowitz 1993). A smattering of other re-named name types appears scattered throughout the extant works.³⁴ The deity’s name is re-named as “specific” (ἴδιος) which Colson translates as “special” (On Abraham 51; LCL 6: 29 – 30). The “eternal” name appears in On Dreams (1, 229; LCL 5:418) which Philo again contrasts with the “borrowed” name. These new names are employed on an ad hoc basis and each one encodes its own lesson. Philo’s second divine name strategy is to restrict their use very broadly though not entirely clearly. He wants divinity to be accessible to humanity since he has much to reveal to readers, but he must tread carefully. He emphasizes that divine names are often used, but not often used correctly. Using the appearance of name restrictions in the Decalogue as a launching point, Philo states that it is a sin to pronounce the “most holy” name using a mouth that utters unsuitable words and that people misuse the “many-named” (πόλυνομος) name as well (Decalogue 93; LCL 7:53 – 55). Using a divine name must not be done “lightly” (ῤᾴδιος) (Special Laws 2.3; LCL 7:309).³⁵ A person making an oath, for example, may know a specific divine name but that knowledge is superficial since knowing a name does not necessary mean knowing the god’s essence (Allegorical Interpretation 3, 207– 8; LCL 1:443). The person making the vow may not need to know anything about the deity’s essence in order for the vow to work, and vows made with impure mouths may still be considered vows. This mundane use must have seemed a waste to Philo since the user does not learn the significant lessons for which divine

 See the discussion below on the problem of trying to avoid the rigid reference of names.  See also “his word (logos) is his deed” (Sacrifices 65; LCL 2: 143).  For a contrast of this metasemantic renaming with renaming the name as Name, see Janowitz (1993).  For the “many-names” name see the next section on using the name.  This renamed name does not necessarily refer to the Tetragrammaton, in which Philo does not seem particularly interested. On swearing also see (Special Laws 4.40; LCL 8: 330).

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names are revealed in the first case. Such usages prove that the status of the vow makers is not that of wise initiates. Vows with divine names are just too much of an opportunity for Philo to let go by without correcting misnaming and insisting on his version of name deference. Whatever it meant in the Hebrew Scriptures to use god’s name incorrectly, Philo introduces new arguments by widening the notion of what “incorrect” might mean. The correct use of a divine name depends on the correct status of the person’s soul, adding a complex demand to the qualifications for uttering a divine name. He insists that using a name correctly maps the essence of what is named, making correct use of the divine name the end result of a long journey. Again, Philo does not claim that god has no name, only that his name has to match his essence.³⁶ Whether or not a true initiate would ever make a vow using a divine name remains an open question; the name-avoiding initiate is probably an idealized picture as is it in Josephus’ reference to the Essenes, who avoid oaths except for the single powerful one that binds them to their community.³⁷ As part of this strategy to limit misuse of divine names, Philo articulates the limitations of language and spells out some of the implications from the Platonic name debates. When the ideal name is lacking, people are left with namings that are destined to fail since the equation of name and object cannot be complete.³⁸ The more ideal the Form among the many Platonic Forms, the less likely anyone will know its name. In an apophatic naming of a name (a form of naming that denies naming) that leads to name restrictions, Philo uses the terms “not completely nameable” (ἀκατάνομαστος), “un-speakable” and “beyond comprehension” (ἀκατάλεπτος) (On Dreams 1, 67; LCL 5:331).³⁹ The same cluster of modifiers appear in various claims about the deity’s names.⁴⁰ These are near-ideal names for the deity since they are so explicit about the limits of naming.⁴¹ As noted by Leone and Parmentier (2014: S17), “what ‘cannot be spoken of’ becomes precisely the focal object of extentualized discourses that claim to know about what cannot be known and to represent what cannot be represented.”  This does not mean that he had any insight into the rigid reference of names, just that the more powerful the object named, the more power the name-object connection makes available to name-users in their folk ideology of naming.  See Josephus Jewish War 2.8.4; LCL 203: 2.135.  “Natural languages are, in fact, exceedingly poor in specifically and differentially metasemantic expressions” (Silverstein 1993: 44).  See Whittaker (1983: 306) which cites Tim 28c315 Par 142a3.  See also (Moses 75; LCL 6: 315) about the unavailability of an ideal name, discussed in Runia (1988: 77).  On the unknowability of the human mind which is like the unknowability of the deity, see Abraham 74– 76, LCL 6: 43; and On Dreams 1, 30; LCL 5: 311 discussed in Runia (1988: 76).

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4 The multi-functionality of personal names In all of these cases Philo was struggling with issues about naming and personal names that he only partially understood. In a striking case of cross-cultural agreement, personal names are subject to elaborate social restrictions and etiquette.⁴² In other words, as explained in the classic work by Kripke, personal names refer based on a “baptismal” event when a name is first “fixed” by ostension as referring to a specific person (Kripke 1972: 4). Every name is closely related to the social context in which it is conferred, encoding all sort of information about the speakers who endow the name and the addressee who is named. Thus a personal name is also a unique symbol for that person, indexically connected with the person at the moment it is given. In sum, as an “inherently inferring noun-phrase type,” a personal name (whether one word or several) refers uniquely and irrevocably to the person named even as it stands symbolically for that person (Fleming 2011: 146). With the new name “unnameable” Philo has crossed over here into a new metapragmatic strategy to point to the limits of the naming system as being coterminous with the limits of reality and truth. Philo argues for avoidance “of all tones (or ‘marks’) of tokens of the taboo type” (Fleming 2011: 155). Any name that might be construed as an icon (a formal image) of name is avoided. This step “reflects a reunification of the taboo-performativity as inherent in the material substance of the form itself, and no longer only insofar as the form is a token of the taboo type” (Fleming 2011: 155). Again, this stance does not deny that the deity has a name since not speaking the name is the source of the deference. The need for deference around the divine name is a lesson for the reader about the true nature of the deity. Despite Philo’s best efforts to completely reshape divine names, instituting maximal deference and not mischaracterizing the available names as ideal, he is left with a name that is just as problematic as ever. Once he uses the symbolic form of the name as any form of reference for the deity, due to the inherent function of names, the re-named name has the same rigid reference and indexical implications. Each new name may include a commentary about language (metasemantic statements about the limits of naming) and explicit cautions about use (explicit metapragmatic restrictions), but divine names are not so easily controlled. “The indexical dimension of reference always runs the risk of being convert-

 Among the many studies of name taboos, see Brown and Ford (1961) and Treis (2005). Names are the “domain in ethnolinguistic study uniquely amenable to cross-cultural study” (Fleming 2011: 143).

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ed into an all too explicit performativity” (Fleming 2011: 146). These risks cannot be avoided by re-naming the name. Later generations of exegetes of Plato and the Hebrew Scriptures will continue to struggle with divine names. It is very easy to read later reformulations of naming ideologies back into Philo’s stance, such as Plotinus’ linguistic attempts to place the deity entirely beyond language (Janowitz 2018). Each version seems to be the logical articulation of the basic notion of how names represent and therefore what the earlier exegete was trying, or hoping, to argue. A third, more indirect, strategy of name-containment is to differentiate the way humans speak from the way the deity speaks. In a very insightful analysis, Marion Niehoff characterizes Philo’s ideas about divine names as a “divine metalanguage” (Niehoff 2001). However, the deity does not have his own set of words which constitute a metalanguage. Instead god’s speech has its own pragmatic implications, explicitly demarcated from human speaking. As with many of Philo’s ideas, this distinction is not presented in a systematic form. Bits and pieces are presented in specific exegetical contexts depending on the textual phrasings and possibilities. For example, in On the Decalogue, Philo explains that the deity “speaks not utterances but deeds” (Decalogue 47; LCL 7: 29).⁴³ While this is a dramatic example of a special mode of discourse, Philo does not do much with the idea or draw out any implications (at least in his extant writings). He makes ad hoc use of anything he can find to distinguish divine speech from regular human speech. The phrase “You saw no similitude but only a voice” (Deut 4:12) proves that the deity does not speak like humans but in a visible voice. “Words spoken by God are interpreted by the power of sight residing in the soul, whereas those which are divided up among the various parts of speech appeal to hearing” (Migration of Abraham 49; LCL 4:159). Linguistic models undergird all human/divine distinctions and speaking like a deity is one of the signs that Moses was a god (Litwa 2014).

5 Conclusions Discussing the Deuteronomic statement that the deity’s name dwells in the Temple, Stroumsa writes, “There is here the beginning of a duality in the divinity, as if God’s name was his representative upon earth” (Stroumsa 2005: 186). God’s

 Philo does not make much use of this idea but it is fundamental to later Jewish exegesis (Janowitz 1993).

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name is always a representation of him: the question is what kind of representation.⁴⁴ Histories of how the divine name was understood to represent the deity toggle between two stances. In the first, Jews were the first people from the ancient world to correctly eschew a personal name for the monotheistic deity as not only unnecessary but also a theological embarrassment.⁴⁵ In the second, its obverse, Jewish divine names were so powerful that the Jewish deity who made use of his name was guilty, by modern standards, of engaging in magic.⁴⁶ Neither of these explanations (ineffable/magical) accounts for the intricate ways that Philo’s naming maps the divine presence. Each is a sloppy shorthand that over-simplifies one aspect of a multifaceted linguistic model. Philo’s major route was to modify god’s name with all sorts of clarifications that helped fix aspects of the presence and absence of the divinity in his names one at a time. To the extent that he is successful in turning names into symbolic statements about the deity, he might appear to have dodged some of the contagion and inherent performativity of divine names. A correct understanding of the meaning and use of divine names “simultaneously guards against the worship or reverence of ‘idols’ but permits representations that are themselves exemplars or analogies of ‘semiotic mediators’ grounded in the very nature of divinity (or the cosmos more generally) that have a duality of immanence and transcendence built in” (Leone and Parmentier 2014: S3). Linguistic models are not exact tropes of religious experiences. Runia claims, “Philo, in his exegesis of Mosaic scripture, embarks on the decisive shift from an experience of God that is direct and concrete to an experience of God that is mediated through theoretical reflection on what God’s nature is” (Runia 1988: 90). However, any experience of a deity is mediated, even in stories where someone is said to take a walk with a deity. For Philo every divine name is an intimate representation of some aspect of divinity and also an attempt to gain enough distance to not presume upon divine power. Far from being ineffable, this balancing act demands many, many words.

 The implication of the theology is not that the deity has left only his name in the building. For a critique of the claim that the Deuteronomic Name ideology replaces an immanent theory of divine representation with a transcendent theory see Richter (2002).  For a modern version of this stance, see Stroumsa (2005).  For a modern version of this stance, see Hayman (1989).

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References Baxter, Timothy. 1992. The Cratylus: Plato’s Theory of Naming. Leiden: Brill. Bietenhard, Hans. 1991. Onoma. In G.W. Bromiley, Gerhard Kittel & Ronald E. Pitkin (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5: 242 – 283. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Brown, Roger & Marguerite Ford. 1961. Address in American English. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62. 375 – 385. Budick, Sanford & Wolfgang Iser. 1989. Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Chidester, David. 1992. Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fleming, Luke. 2011. Name Taboos and Rigid Performativity. Anthropological Quarterly 84. 141 – 164. Franke, William. 2007. On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, vols. 1 – 2. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Frede, Michael. 1999. Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy in Later Antiquity. In Polymnia Athanassiadi & Michael Frede (eds.), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, 41 – 67. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hanson, Anthony. 1967. Philo’s Etymologies. Journal of Theological Studies 18. 128 – 139. Hayman, Peter. 1989. Was God a Magician? Sefer-Yesira and Jewish Magic. Journal of Jewish Studies, 40 (2). 225 – 237. Janowitz, Naomi. 1993. Re-creating Genesis: The Metapragmatics of Divine Speech. In John Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Language and Metapragmatics, 393 – 405. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janowitz, Naomi. 2018. Ancient Ideologies of Ineffability and Their Echoes. Signs and Society 6. 45 – 63. Kennedy, George. 1997. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-cultural Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kretzmann, Norman. 1971. Plato on the Correctness of Names. American Philosophical Quarterly 8. 126 – 138. Kripke, Saul. 1972. Naming and Necessity. In Donald Davidson & Gilber Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language, 253 – 355, 763 – 769. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Leone, Massimo & Richard Parmentier. 2014. Representing Transcendence: The Semiosis of Real Presence. Signs and Society 2 (S1): S1–S22. Litwa, David M. 2014. The Deification of Moses in Philo of Alexandria. The Studia Philonica Annual 26. 1 – 27. Louth, Andrew. 2012. Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology. In Amy Hollywood & Patricia Z. Beckman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niehoff, Maren. 2001. Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Parmentier, Richard. 1994. Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Richter, Sandra L. 2002. The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology: lešakkēn šemô šām in the Bible and the Ancient Near East. Berlin & New York: Walter De Gruyter.

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Runia, David. 1988. Naming and Knowing: Themes in Philonic Theology with Special Reference to De mutatione nominum. In Roel van den Broek (ed.), Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman World, 69 – 91. Leiden: Brill. Sedley, David. 1998. The Etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus. Journal of Hellenic Studies 118. 140 – 154. Sedley, David. 2003. Plato’s Cratylus. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Sells, Michael. 1994. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1993. Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function. In John Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 33 – 58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Imogen. 2014. Taking the Tool Analogy Seriously: Forms and Naming in the Cratylus. Cambridge Classical Journal 60. 75 – 99. Stroumsa, Guy. 2005. A Nameless God: Judaeo-Christian and Gnostic “Theologies of the Name.” In Guy Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism, 184 – 199. Leiden: Brill. Treis, Yvonne. 2005. Avoiding their Names, Avoiding their Eyes: How Kambaata Women Respect their In-laws. Anthropological Linguistics 47. 292 – 320. Vasileiadis, Pavlos. 2014. Aspects of Rendering the Sacred Tetragrammton in Greek. Open Theology 1. 56 – 88. Ward, Graham. 2002. In the Daylight Forever? Language and Silence. In Oliver Davies & Denys Turner (eds.), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, 159 – 184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whittaker, John. 1983. Arretos kai akatanomostos. In Horst-Dieter Blume (ed.), Platonismus und Christentum: Festschrift für H. Dorrie, 303 – 306. Münster: Aschendorff. Whittaker, John. 1992. Catachresis and Negative Theology: Philo of Alexandria and Basilides. In Stephen Gersh & Charles Kannengiesser (eds.), Platonism in Late Antiquity, 61 – 82. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Winston, David. 1991. Aspects of Philo’s Linguistic Theory. In David T. Runia, David M. Hay & David Winston (eds.), Heirs of the Septuagint: Philo, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, 109 – 125. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Wolfson, Harry. 1957. Negative Attributes in the Church Fathers and the Gnostic Basilides. Harvard Theological Review 50. 145 – 156.

Ugo Volli

“Anì velo mal’akh”: Are angels in the Torah a sort of medium? 1 Theoretical framework In order to argue that angels are designed by Jewish tradition as communication tools or media, and hence their presence and actions are a kind of mediation, I shall start from the general understanding of concepts such as instruments, means or media in the framework of communication theory. Although this basic level of analysis is often neglected or taken for granted, every kind of communication theory agrees that the main pertinent elements (be they signs, media, texts), should be included in the general category of human instruments or tools. For Heidegger, Every sign is a ‘referral’ or ‘assignment’ (Verweisung), but not every referral is a sign: a hammer ‘refers/is referred’ to hammering and nails but is not usually a sign of/for them. A sign is a special piece of equipment, signalling-equipment, Zeigzeug, and its ‘referral’ or ‘assignment’ is signalling as the hammer’s is hammering: it is serviceable for, its In-order-to is, signalling. (Heidegger 1978 [1927]: 107– 111).

Prieto (1975) explicitly treats signs as a kind of means or tools; for Marshall McLuhan (1964), media are “prostheses” or “extensions” of the human body. Charles Sanders Peirce (1931: 5.400) understands meaning mainly as a tool for producing habits: “what a thing means is simply what habits it involves.” It is worth noting that from an anthropological and paleontological point of view, the “invention of meaning” can be seen as a passage in the development of human technique (Leroi-Gourhan 1971– 73). I cannot deepen here the analysis of this wide relation between communication and devices, which involves the role of technique in the working of the more “spiritual” level of human life. This relation comes from the general idea that communication is a type of action, and no action can be performed without using material or immaterial, biological or mechanical tools. Let’s just shortly consider how the most communication-specific example of these tools, namely the medium, can be characterized. “Medium,” with the offshoot “mediation,” “hypermediacy,” “immediacy” etc. are concepts seldom used in semiotic theory, although widely diffused in other fields of communication studies, and therefore semioticians should not take them for granted. Etymologically, “medium” comes https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-005

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from Latin “medius” (It. “mezzo”, Fr. “moyen” etc.) The most important definitional meanings¹ of this word are: 1. being in the middle, at the center of a space, intermediate or in between; 2. being neutral; 3. half of something; 4. means (etymologically linked to medius), instrument, equipment. The very idea of “mass media” comes from here (meanings 1,2,4). From a linguistic point of view, mediation is a word of action: in communication sciences it means making something or someone a medium or making available to others some content through a medium. Actions can be direct (Peirce’s Secondness, e. g. materially pushing or pulling something) or in most cases in our societies they are indirect or mediated (Peirce’s Thirdness). Symbolic actions are always mediated precisely because signs are means. There is no signification without some kind of mediation—this mediation is the function of signifiers, which are necessary constituents in every sign and every representation. Communication’s messages are always common, put in the middle among communicating people and therefore they are a sort of medium themselves. In communication theory, mediation in the representation of an object is the process by which this object to be communicated (be it abstract or concrete) is structured and presented on a formative interface by some intervening medium. Mediation is therefore a transformation, the shape of which always follows a specific cultural grammar. Immediacy is the pretended erasure of the gap between signifier and signified, the hiding of mediation, such that a representation is (falsely) perceived as the thing itself. Immediacy stresses not the actual (and often hidden) sociological and semiotic structure of the communication, which is always somehow “mediated,” but its perceived effects, which are arranged by the form of the message and act on the receiver of the communication, producing reality effects. But there is also a process of hypermediacy (Bolter and Grusin 2000): the logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and thus tries to somehow stretch —or rupture altogether—the illusion of realistic representation, emphasizing instead the communicative situation.

 I put together here the main items found in https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/me dium, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medium, http://www.dictionary.com/ browse/medium (all the websites quoted in this paper were accessed on 25 March 2019).

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What is the pertinence of these concepts for the study of religion? There are here three different problems. We have to consider mediation and immediacy in these three relations: 1. In the relation God/world (creation-revelation-divine intervention in the world)—or in its canonical description. Is God acting immediately on the world or does He use some “mediation”? 2. In the relation revelation/religion (formation and conservation of the “religious identity”)—or in its canonical description. Is the passage from revelation to religion a mediation? 3. In the relations, believers/religion and/or believers/God, or in their canonical description, is the religion a necessary medium or a dangerous filter? Of course, the relations are structured in different ways by the different religious traditions, if not for the specific content of religious experience, at least because the “canonical relations” built up in any single tradition are historically and socially determined. I will focus on point 1 and precisely on the traditional Jewish case. Does God act immediately on the world or use some “mediation”? Of course, in this context the issue we can explore can only be how a culture thinks and describes divine activity in the world. a) Immanent (mostly polytheistic) gods are narrated as performing direct activities (without need of mediation). They are characterized as worldly actors. Zeus physically kidnaps and rapes Europa, Krishna drives with his hands Arjuna’s war chariot, Odin kills lots of enemies with his spear, etc. These activities are not exceptions for this kind of divinity, but the rule. In these cases, there is no need of mediation, not even of a strategy of immediacy, because the divinity is conceived as present to the world in the flesh, without any representation. Immanent gods can also act in an indirect way, as humans can: for instance Zeus can send Hermes as a messenger to deliver some message. But it is just a possibility, not a rule. b) In a fully monotheistic religion this is not the case. Apart from the creation “works” (defined in Jewish Torah as ‫(מלאכת‬melachot—we will see why this name is important), God is rarely presented as performing direct activities in the Jewish tradition (and later, accordingly, in the Christian and Muslim ones): “God does not make things by contact” (Maimonides, Moreh Nevuchim, I, 47).² There are metaphysical ideas about God supporting and maintaining in existence the

 The English version of Maimonides’ text is available here: https://www.sefaria.org/Guide_for_ the_Perplexed?lang=bi (accessed 11 September 2020).

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world in every moment of time, or actively intervening in any casual process in order to make it work; but these are just theological theories, not narrations of concrete actions of God. In fact, often God’s actions are described just by the result they realize, without describing the action. This happens for the Flood, the confusion of tongues at Babel, the “hardening the heart” of the Pharaoh, Egyptian plagues, etc. We do not know how these effects happen. It may seem that they are direct, although inexplicable, actions; but they are always described as “nissim” (miracles), “niphlaot” (wonders), which are overall defined as “otiot,” which means signs (and often their reason is explained: in order to let people “know that I am the Lord” (Exod 7:5; Ezek 37:13).³ Miracles described by the Bible are mostly a means in a strategy of communication which wants to be understood as such; their form is hypermediated. But in general, God’s actions are thought as “mediated” through orality, writing or “mediating” persons. Let’s consider these cases one by one.

2 Oral language In most cases God’s actions are presented as happening through oral language: orders, promises, advices, bans. Publicly used, orality can be a (mass) medium. Orality is no direct action but communication, a form of mediation: it must be interpreted and made “felicitous” (Austin 1962). God’s actions are thought to be “mediated.” It is usual for Him to perform different kinds of actions through speech acts, beginning with creation. The first quotation of God’s words in the book of Genesis is also the first concrete creative act: “‘vajechi or’ vajechi or” (“‘Let there be light!’ and there was light,” Gen 1:3). The same sort of linguistic/creative act is performed another nine times in the first two chapters of Genesis. Other instances of linguistic actions are the instructions given to prophets and patriarchs (for instance to Abraham in Gen 12:1, to Moses in Exod 3 etc.). In general, following the Torah narration, the law is given to Jewish people through double speech acts such as “And God told Moses: tell the people to…” (Exod 14:15, 25:1, etc. For a discussion see Volli 2013). According to the Jewish tradition, all these speech acts are to be remembered and referred to in the text of the Torah. Language here is already a form of mediation, even if, on the diegetic level, it is just spoken, not written. Is possible to

 For another discussion of these, see Bernard Jackson’s chapter in this volume. Bible quotations, here and in the remainder of the paper, come from the King James Version.

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distinguish between different levels of oral revelations, according to the degree of mediation (as it is showed in the diegetic text). The first one is God’s direct speaking, as it is referred to in the Torah (for instance, Exod 25:1): “Vajomer Hashem [sometimes with the addition of] lemor …” “The Lord said…” often concluded by a kind of signature or seal “Anì Hashem,” meaning “I, the Lord” or “I am the Lord”). For a believing Jew, the Torah was composed by God Himself and dictated to Moses. So, this form of enunciation is a kind of self-quotation. The second kind of divine orality comes in prophetic announcements, where someone witnesses to his interlocutors that what he says is a communication coming by God and this pretension is recorded in a book and accepted by the tradition (for instance Isaiah 1:10; Ezek 1.3, etc. “Davar Hashem”: “The voice of the Lord was delivered to…”). The third one is the theophany called the “daughter’s voice” (bat kol), a voice heard by people who recognize it as a form of impersonal communication coming from heaven, which is referred to mostly by the Talmud (for instance Baba Metzià 59b) and has a lower degree of authority than the former kinds. God’s direct speaking—the first level—is however not witnessed in Jewish tradition anymore after the Torah closes, namely after the death of Moses; prophecy ended with Malachi (Tosefta Sotah 3:3; B. Talmud Yoma 9b; B. Talmud Sanhedrin 11) and the Torah warns that there may be false prophetic announcements (Deuteronomy 13:1– 5; 18: 22), therefore questioning the authenticity of prophecies until they are validated by tradition. A bat kol can rightly be refused (for instance in the story of Akhnai’s oven in B. Talmud Baba Metzià 59b).⁴

3 Writing God is described as directly writing with His finger the Decalogue on the first tables and dictating the whole of Torah. The book is not just a secondary effect of the Revelation, but represents its deep nature (although beside the “written” Torah there is another “oral” one). This is a very influential idea because books are not immediately meaningful but always need to be interpreted. This hermeneutic work is the main function of the “oral Torah” which is the continuation of Jewish religious elaboration after the closing of the biblical canon. Judaism, which arises after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and which still lasts today, is mainly based on this work of interpretation. There is a strong

 For a discussion of this story, see Bernard Jackson’s chapter in this volume.

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opposition between immediate Platonic logocentric ideology, as described in the Phaedrus, and mediated Jewish pan-hermeneutic practice. Interpretation leaves the text transcendent (not wholly graspable); “writing in the soul” through direct, immediate, oral teaching (Phaedrus 276a – 277a) should make it present, “defended by his father” and directly efficacious on the pupil’s mind. Through this written character, Judaism, even more than Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism and Hinduism (all “religions of the book”) realizes itself as a mediated cultural form.

4 Living being Apart from language and orality the most important form of divine communication is constituted by meaningful acts (miracles), whose main feature is being signs, acts made up in order to be recognized as divine: for instance, this is explicitly said about the plagues of Egypt. I will not discuss this aspect further.⁵ But there are other divine media, which have the paradoxical nature of living beings. From the beginning of the Bible, we find people described as able (or even obliged, as Jonah) to hear and to understand divine discourse and to diffuse it: they are called neviim or “prophets” (pro-phemì, “to speak for”). A prophet in Jewish tradition is basically a spokesman, a person chosen by God to speak to people on God’s behalf and convey a message or teaching. His words are “in God’s name” (Volli 2011). Prophets are medium-persons. Any prediction of the future that may occur is only a consequence of this role, not its focus. Prophecy may be contradicted by the facts, precisely because it has been successful. This is a very diffused role in many cultures. Another kind of medium-persons could be angels. Let’s begin from a basic explanation: Many biblical writers assume the existence of beings superior to man in knowledge and power, but subordinate to (and apparently creatures of) the one God. These beings serve as His attendants, like courtiers of an earthly king, and also as His agents to convey His messages to men and to carry out His will. These beings are clearly designated by the English word “angel.” The terminology of biblical Hebrew is not so exact. Malʾakh (‫)ַמְלַאְך‬, the word most often used, means “messenger” (cf. Ugaritic lak “to send”). It is applied frequently to human agents (e. g., Gen. 32:4) and is sometimes used figuratively (e. g., Ps. 104:4). […] Post-biblical Hebrew employs malʾakh only for superhuman messengers, and uses other words for human agents. […] Elsewhere angels are called ʾelohim (usually “god” or “gods”; Gen. 6:2; Job 1:6), more often benè ʾelohim or benè ʾelim (lit. “sons of

 For a discussion of the ten plagues, see Bernard Jackson’s chapter in this volume.

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gods”)—in the general sense of “divine beings.” They are also known as kedoshim (qedoshim; “holy beings”; Ps. 89:8; Job 5:1). Often the angel is called simply “man.” […] The Bible also speaks of winged creatures of angelic character called cherubim and seraphim, who serve a variety of functions.⁶

The word “angel” comes from an Indo-european root that means “messenger” and is possibly related to the Iranic word angaros or “mounted courier” (Watkins 1985 compares it to Sanskrit ajira or “swift”). It was chosen by the authors of the Septuagint as the translation of the Biblical Hebrew ‫(מלאך‬mal’akh), which is also often used to name regular messengers or ambassadors. “In the Hebrew Bible there are 215 occurrences of the word mal’akh in various forms, juxtapositions and contexts. 91 of those instances denote a mundane messenger what is clearly indicated by the narrative framework” (Kosior 2013: 58). Reflection on mediation finds an interesting subject in angels, because they are a metaphysical genus (with many species). They are often represented either as almost human (for shape, language, agency), or as almost divine. They are thus metaphysically “in between” God and mankind; often they are also said to refer divine will to humans and human prayers to God. They are a special kind of “living media” with peculiar conditions of existence.

5 Angels in the Torah Based on these premises, I now focus on angels just in the textual case of the Torah (Pentateuch) and some of its interpretations. Further elaborations in the Jewish tradition and in other religious cultures partly dependent from it are indeed interesting, but they are very rich and complicated, and thus cannot be discussed here. In the Biblical text, the semantics of angels is complex. Often, according to either the context or the classical commentaries–which constitute an interpretation of the tradition from its own point of view, that is, a self-interpretation– we have to understand as angels entities that are not called ‫(מלאך‬mal’akh) but ‫(איש‬man). This happens for instance in Gen 18:2, where Abraham sees “three men” standing before his tent. But soon (v. 4) they are called with an unusual name (adonai) which can mean “My Lords” but is also the usual way of ritually pronouncing the unspeakable name of God; and later (19:1) two of them are finally called “angels” (‫ מלאכים‬mal’akhim).

 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/angels.html.

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A similar semantic maze is later crossed by Jacob. After leaving Laban, his son in law, “Jakob went on his way and the angels of God ( ‫ַמְלֲאֵכי ֱאל ִֹהים‬malekhe elo-him) met him” (Gen 32:3). Immediately (v. 4) he sends messengers (which in the Hebrew text is the same word, ‫ מלאכים‬mel’akhim) to Esau. He makes some preparations for the feared meeting with the brother, then “Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man (‫ )איש‬with him until the breaking of the day” (v. 23); at sunrise the “man” changes Jakob’s name in Israel, with the paraetymological explanation “for thou hast striven with God and with men ( ‫ֲא ָנ ִשׁים‬anashim)” (v. 29). Finally Jacob “called the name of the place Peniel: ‘for I have seen God (‫ )ֱאל ִֹהים‬face to face and my life is preserved’” (v. 31), which in general is absolutely not granted, as God himself will tell Moses (Exod 33:20): “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” The same difficulty of definition is met precisely by Moses at the burning bush: “The angel of the Lord (‫ )ַמְלַאך ְיה ָוה‬appeared to him” (Exod 3:2), but it is “the Lord” himself (‫) ְיה ָוה‬, not His angel who “saw that he turned aside to see,” and again it is “God” (‫)ֱאל ִֹהים‬, not the Lord nor His angel who “called unto him” (v. 4) and spoke to him (v. 5). Yet again, when he asks a question, the answer comes from the Lord (‫( ) ְיה ָוה‬v. 7) and Moses replies “unto God” (‫ָהֱאל ִֹהים‬-‫( )ֶאל‬v. 11).⁷ If one believes that signifiers are not important and that synonymy is just a literary device, all this complicated web of names and references may appear meaningless. That is in fact the more diffused position in the Christian hermeneutics. But this is not the way of thinking in the self-interpretation of the Jewish tradition, where on the contrary all this lexical complexity is the object of interpretations, discussions, and theological implications. Other times in the biblical narration we find only angels. This is the case in the dream of Jacob (Gen 28:12): And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. ‫ עִֹלים ְוי ְֹר ִדים בּוֹ‬,‫ ַמ ִגּי ַע ַה ָשָּׁמ ְיָמה; ְוִה ֵנּה ַמְלֲאֵכי ֱאל ִֹהים‬,‫ ְור ֹאשׁוֹ‬,‫ ְוִה ֵנּה ֻס ָלּם ֻמ ָצּב ַא ְרָצה‬,‫יב ַו ַיֲּחל ֹם‬

After the dream and the awakening, Jacob acknowledges that “the Lord was here and I did not know”: he recognizes God’s (and not angelical) presence in that place. But that happens in the “real” world (actually the diegetic world of first level⁸ in the book of Genesis), while in the dream (that we can recognize as a diegetic world of second level) there are only angels and God is not mentioned at  For an analysis of this alternation of names see Volli (2008).  On the concept of diegesis and its levels, see Genette (2007).

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all. Of course the two supernatural manifestations are linked, but there is no overlap. In other cases we can read of angels speaking in God’s name. This happens in the episode of “the binding of Isaac” (Gen 22): “[15] And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham a second time out of heaven, [16] and said: ‘By Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, [17] that in blessing I will bless thee.’” Or so it seems, because this time the angel (‫ )ַמְלַאְך ְיה ָוה‬speaks “out of the heaven” (Gen 22:11 and following), which is of course God’s position; and at the end of the episode Abraham names the place “Adonai-jireh”, namely the mount where “the Lord is seen”—but what was seen by Abraham, following this narration, was an angel, not God. A similar overlapping of identities is perceived by Hagar and Ishmael in the desert (Gen 16:7 and 21): [16:7] And the angel of the Lord found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness […] 10 And the angel of the Lord said unto her: ‘I will greatly multiply thy seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.’ […] [21:17] And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her: ‘What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. 18 Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast by thy hand; for I will make him a great nation. ’[19] And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.

Now we have to ask who is this “I” speaking in the above-quoted verses 16:10 and 21:18? No angel could make promises like that: we thus understand that the speaker must be God Himself. But the anaphoric reference is crystal clear: the one who is speaking is an angel. What are the identity relations here? Is the angel God? Or are they the same? In order to answer these questions we have first to take into account the most “theoretical” presentation of angels in the Torah, which is placed in a strategic position (Exod 23), among the laws immediately following the Decalogue (Exod 20:1– 17), and hints to a sort of biblical angelology. ‫שֵׁ֤ל ַח ַמְלָאְ֙ך ְלָפ ֶ֔ניָך ִל ְשָׁמ ְרָ֖ך ַבּ ָ֑דּ ֶרְך ְוַלֲהִ֣ביֲאָ֔ך‬ ֹ ‫ כ ִה ֵ֨נּה ָאֹנ ִ֜כי‬Exod :  Behold, I send an angel before .‫ ֶאל־ַה ָמּ֖קוֹם ֲא ֶ֥שׁר ֲהִכֹֽנִתי‬thee, to keep thee by the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. ‫ק֖לוֹ ַאל־ ַתּ ֵ֣מּר ֑בּוֹ ִ֣כּי ֤ל ֹא יִ ָשּׂ֙א‬ ֹ ‫ כא ִה ָ֧שֶּׁמר ִמ ָפָּ֛ניו וּ ְשַׁ֥מע ְבּ‬ Take heed of him, and hearken unto his .‫מי ְבִּק ְר ֽבּוֹ‬ ֖ ִ ‫ ְלִפ ְשֲׁעֶ֔כם ִ֥כּי ְשׁ‬voice; be not rebellious against him; for he will not pardon your transgression; for My name is in him.

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‫ק֖לוֹ ַאל־ ַתּ ֵ֣מּר ֑בּוֹ ִ֣כּי ֤ל ֹא יִ ָשּׂ֙א‬ ֹ ‫ כב ִה ָ֧שֶּׁמר ִמ ָפָּ֛ניו וּ ְשַׁ֥מע ְבּ‬ But if thou shalt indeed hearken unto his ‫מי ְבִּק ְר ֽבּוֹץ‬ ֖ ִ ‫ ְלִפ ְשֲׁעֶ֔כם ִ֥כּי ְשׁ‬voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. ‫ כג ִ ֽכּי־ ֵי ֵ֣לְך ַמְלָאִכ֮י ְלָפ ֶניָך֒ ֶוֱה ִֽביֲאָ֗ך ֶאל־ָֽהֱאמֹ ִר֙י ְו ַ֣הִח ִ֔תּי ְוַה ְפּ ִר ִזּ֙י‬ For Mine angel shall go before thee, and .‫ ְו ַֽה ְכּ ַנֲע ִ֔ני ַהִח ִ֖וּי ְוַה ְיבוּ ִ֑סי ְוִהְכַח ְד ִ ֽתּיו‬bring thee in unto the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; and I will cut them off. ‫ כד ֽל ֹא־ִת ְשׁ ַתֲּח ֶ֤וה ֵלא ֽל ֵֹהיֶה֙ם ְו ֣ל ֹא ָֽתָעְב ֵ֔דם ְו ֥ל ֹא ַתֲע ֶ ֖שׂה‬ Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor .‫בֵתיֶֽהם‬ ֹ ‫ ְכּ ַֽמֲע ֵשׂי ֶ֑הם ִ֤כּי ָה ֵר֙ס ְתּ ָ֣ה ְר ֵ֔סם ְו ַשׁ ֵ֥בּר ְתּ ַשׁ ֵ֖בּר ַמ ֵצּ‬serve them, nor do after their doings; but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and break in pieces their pillars. ‫ כה ַוֲעַב ְד ֶ֗תּם ֵ֚את ְיה ָו֣ה ֱא ֽל ֵֹהי ֶ֔כם וֵּב ַ֥רְך ֶֽאת־ַלְחְמָ֖ך‬ And ye shall serve the LORD your God, and .‫ ְוֶאת־ֵמי ֶ֑מיָך ַוֲהִסר ֹ ִ֥תי ַמֲח ָ֖לה ִמ ִקּ ְר ֶ ֽבָּך‬He will bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. ‫ כו ֥ל ֹא ִתְה ֶ֛יה ְמ ַשׁ ֵכָּ֥לה ַוֲעָק ָ֖רה ְבַּא ְרֶ֑צָך ֶאת־ִמְס ַ֥פּר ָי ֶ ֖מיָך‬ None shall miscarry, nor be barren, in thy ‫ ֲאַמ ֵֽלּא‬land; the number of thy days I will fulfil. ‫מִּת֙י ֶאת־ ָכּל־ָהָ֔עם ֲא ֶ֥שׁר‬ ֹ ‫ כז ֶאת־ֵֽאיָמִת֙י ֲא ַשׁ ַ֣לּח ְלָפ ֶ֔ניָך ְוַה‬ I will send My terror before thee, and will .‫א ְיֶ֛ביָך ֵא ֶ֖ליָך ֽעֹ ֶרף‬ ֹ ‫ב֖א ָבּ ֶ֑הם ְו ָנַת ִ ֧תּי ֶאת־ ָכּל־‬ ֹ ‫ ָתּ‬discomfit all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.

This assertive speech has the highest authority, because the Torah attributes it directly to God. From this, we can understand some general ideas which, following the traditional Jewish biblical exegesis, are implied in all the narratives about angels in the Torah, although in most cases not explicitly repeated. The first point is that angels belong to God, they are “His angels”: the text speaks about ‫ַמְלָאִכי‬mal’achì, where the last vowel in Hebrew is a possessive particle. Angels are not independent, do not have a personal will, they are just at God’s service. Therefore, whenever they appear, they are sent by Him: the text uses the verb ‫שֵׁל ַח‬ ֹ sholeach, which comes from the same root used today (instead of mal’ach) as messenger (‫)שליח‬. This confirms the correctness of the traditional Greek translation with the word άγγελος (angelos), namely messenger. Furthermore, as Rilke (1923) knew, angels are not properly “angelical” figures; on the contrary, they are “terrible” (“My terror” (‫)ֵאיָמִתי‬: “Jeder Engel ist schrecklich”). This happens because “My Name [is] in them” (‫) ְשִׁמי ְבִּק ְרבּוֹ‬, and God’s Name must always be “blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded,” as the most repeated and important piece of Jewish liturgy, the “Kaddish,” affirms.⁹

 Original Hebrew text and English translation can be found for instance here: https://www. chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/545816/jewish/Text-of-the-Mourners-Kaddish.htm.

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Because of these conditions of divine property, terror and presence of the name, angels must be obeyed and “will not pardon your transgression”, so that one cannot “be rebellious against” them. But this power and majesty are for the good, because they lead to a successful life. The main problem now can be posed: what is an angel? In the quotations above, we find two functional relations defining an angel’s activities. The first and weakest one links angels and men (they have the same aspect, sometimes the same common name, ish; moreover in the Bible they speak, give orders, provide guidance, offer foresight for men, often interacting with them). The second and strongest relation is a link between angels and God (an angel appears and God is said to speak; an angel speaks and says “I” in matters reserved to God; the place of angel’s appearance is named after God’s name). Angels never show individuality in the Torah: no angel is given a personal name in the whole Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) until the very last book in chronological order (the only time when angels are given a personal name is in the Book of Daniel, where only Michael and Gabriel are named). They never express personal feelings or opinions (with the exception of the mysterious “man” wrestling with Jacob), and speak only in God’s name. As I mentioned, they have God’s name “in them.” So, are they just another way to call God? This is S.A. Meier’s “Interpolation theory” (Meier 1992; Kosior 2013), which is not satisfactory from the semiotic point of view. According to this theory, the word mal’akh would be a mere addendum preceding the divine name and simultaneously modifying the narrations in order to meet the standards of the “new” Israelite theology of the single and transcendent God. The “default” form would be that of the ancient Near Eastern literary standards presenting a deity as manifesting to humans directly without any intermediary. But, as usual in “philological” biblical theories, this is not an explanation of what a meaningful text asserts but theoretical speculation about the origins, the uses, and the compositions of this text, with some vicious circularity in it. In the Torah there are occasions in which God is said to speak and others when angels are sent to speak or act in His name. For instance, God directly commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but then an angel stops him; God tells Abraham to listen to Sarah and chase away Hagar and Ishmael, and then sends an angel to show them the water they need. There is a clear difference between the divine presence and the divine mediation by the angels. This is clearly visible in Exod 33:

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‫ א ַו ְי ַד ֵ֨בּר ְיה ָו֤ה ֶאל־מֹ ֶשׁ֙ה ֵ֣לְך ֲע ֵ֣לה ִמ ֶ֔זּה ַא ָ֣תּה ְוָהָ֔עם ֲא ֶ֥שׁר‬ And the LORD spoke unto Moses: ’Depart, go ‫ ֶֽהֱעִ֖ליָת ֵמ ֶ ֣א ֶרץ ִמְצ ָ֑ריִם ֶאל־ָהָ֗א ֶרץ ֲא ֶ ֣שׁר ִ֠נ ְשׁ ַבְּע ִתּי ְלַאְב ָר ָ ֨הם‬up hence, thou and the people that thou hast .‫ק֙ב ֵלא ֔מֹר ְל ַז ְרֲעָ֖ך ֶא ְתּ ֶֽנ ָנּה‬ ֹ ‫ ְליְִצָ֤חק ֽוְּל ַיֲע‬brought up out of the land of Egypt, unto the land of which I swore unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying: Unto thy seed will I give it – ‫ ב ְו ָשַׁלְח ִ֥תּי ְלָפ ֶ֖ניָך ַמְל ָ֑אְך ְו ֵֽג ַר ְשׁ ִ ֗תּי ֶאת־ַֽה ְכּ ַנֲע ִנ֙י ָֽהֱאמֹ ִ֔רי ְו ַֽהִח ִתּ֙י‬ and I will send an angel before thee; and I .‫ ְוַה ְפּ ִר ִ֔זּי ַהִח ִ֖וּי ְוַה ְיבוּ ִֽסי‬will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite – ‫ ד ַו ִיּ ְשׁ ַ ֣מע ָהָ֗עם ֶאת־ַה ָדּ ָ֥בר ָה ָ֛רע ַה ֶ֖זּה ַו ִיְּתַא ָ֑בּלוּ ְול ֹא־ ָ ֛שׁתוּ ִ֥אישׁ‬ And when the people heard these evil tid.‫ ֶע ְד֖יוֹ ָע ָֽליו‬ings, they mourned; and no man did put on him his ornaments. ‫מר ֶאל־ ְבּ ֵֽני־יִ ְשׂ ָרֵא֙ל ַא ֶ֣תּם‬ ֹ ֤ ‫ ה ַו ֨יּ ֹאֶמר ְיה ֜ ָוה ֶאל־מֹ ֶ֗שׁה ֱא‬ And the LORD said unto Moses: ‘Say unto the ‫ ַעם־ְק ֵשׁה־ ֔עֹ ֶרף ֶ֧ר ַגע ֶאָ֛חד ֶֽאֱע ֶ֥לה ְבִק ְר ְבָּ֖ך ְוִכ ִלּי ִ֑תיָך ְוַע ָ ֗תּה‬children of Israel: Ye are a stiffnecked people; if .‫ הוֹ ֵ֤רד ֶע ְד ְיָ֙ך ֵֽמָעֶ֔ליָך ְוֵא ְד ָ֖עה ָ֥מה ֶֽאֱע ֶשׂה־ ָֽלְּך‬I go up into the midst of thee for one moment, I shall consume thee; therefore now put off thy ornaments from thee, that I may know what to do unto thee.’ .‫ ו ַו ִֽיְּת ַנ ְצּ֧לוּ ְב ֵֽני־יִ ְשׂ ָרֵ֛אל ֶאת־ֶע ְד ָ֖י ם ֵמ ַ֥הר חוֹ ֵֽרב‬ And the children of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments from mount Horeb onward. […] ‫א ֵ ֤מר ֵאַל֙י ַ֚הַעל‬ ֹ ‫ יב ַו ֨יּ ֹאֶמר מֹ ֶ֜שׁה ֶאל־ ְיה ָ֗וה ְ֠רֵאה ַא ָ ֞תּה‬ And Moses said unto the LORD: ‘See, Thou ‫ ֶאת־ָה ָ֣עם ַה ֶ֔זּה ְוַא ָתּ֙ה ֣ל ֹא ֽהוֹ ַדְע ַ ֔תּ ִני ֵ֥את ֲא ֶשׁר־ ִתּ ְשַׁ֖לח ִע ִ֑מּי‬sayest unto me: Bring up this people; and Thou .‫ ְוַא ָ ֤תּה ָאַ֙מ ְר ָ֙תּ ְי ַדְע ִ ֣תּיָֽך ְב ֵ֔שׁם ְו ַגם־ָמָ֥צאָת ֵ ֖חן ְבֵּעיָֽני‬hast not let me know whom Thou wilt send with me. Yet Thou hast said: I know thee by name, and thou hast also found grace in My sight. ‫א ָמָ֨צאִתי ֵ֜חן ְבֵּעי ֶ֗ניָך הוֹ ִד ֵ֤ע ִני ָנ֙א ֶאת־ ְדּ ָרֶ֔כָך‬ ֩ ‫תּה ִאם־ ָנ‬ ֡ ָ ‫ יג ְוַע‬ Now therefore, I pray Thee, if I have found .‫ ְוֵא ָ֣דֲעָ֔ך ְלַ֥מַען ֶאְמָצא־ ֵ ֖חן ְבֵּעי ֶ֑ניָך וּ ְר ֵ֕אה ִ֥כּי ַע ְמָּ֖ך ַה ֥גּוֹי ַה ֶֽזּה‬grace in Thy sight, show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee, to the end that I may find grace in Thy sight; and consider that this nation is Thy people.’ .‫ יד ַויּ ֹא ַ֑מר ָפּ ַ֥ני ֵי ֵ֖לכוּ ַוֲה ִנ ֥חִֹתי ָֽלְך‬ And He said: ‘My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.’ .‫הְלִ֔כים ַֽאל־ ַתֲּע ֵ֖לנוּ ִמ ֶֽזּה‬ ֹ ‫ טו ַו ֖יּ ֹאֶמר ֵא ָ֑ל יו ִאם־ ֵ֤אין ָפּ ֶ֙ניָ֙ך‬ And he said unto Him: ‘If Thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence. ‫ טז וַּב ֶ֣מּה ׀ יִ ָוּ ַ֣דע ֵא֗פוֹא ִֽכּי־ָמָ֨צאִתי ֵ֤חן ְבֵּעי ֶ֙ניָ֙ך ֲא ִ֣ני ְוַע ֶ֔מָּך ֲה֖לוֹא‬ For wherein now shall it be known that I ‫ ְבֶּלְכ ְתָּ֣ך ִע ָ֑מּנוּ ְו ִנְפ ֵ ֙לינ֙וּ ֲא ִ֣ני ְוַע ְמָּ֔ך ִמ ָ֨כּל־ָהָ֔עם ֲא ֶ ֖שׁר ַעל־ ְפּ ֵ֥ני‬have found grace in Thy sight, I and Thy peo.‫ ָהֲא ָד ָֽמה‬ple? is it not in that Thou goest with us, so that we are distinguished, I and Thy people, from all the people that are upon the face of the earth?’ ‫ יז ַו ֤יּ ֹאֶמר ְיה ָו֙ה ֶאל־מֹ ֶ֔שׁה ַ֣גּם ֶאת־ַה ָדּ ָ֥בר ַה ֶ֛זּה ֲא ֶ֥שׁר ִדּ ַ֖בּ ְר ָתּ‬ And the LORD said unto Moses: ‘I will do .‫ ֶֽאֱע ֶ֑שׂה ִ ֽכּי־ָמ ָ֤צאָת ֵח֙ן ְבֵּעי ַ֔ני ָוֵא ָדֲעָ֖ך ְבּ ֵֽשׁם‬this thing also that thou hast spoken, for thou hast found grace in My sight, and I know thee by name.’

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What is very clear here is a difference, even an opposition between the divine first person, which is described in a very concrete way as “My face” (panai), and the angel that God wants to lead the journey. Angel is not just a name for God’s presence, as Meier maintains. The good point in his theory is that angels are seen without individual reality as God’s “projections” or “prostheses” (following McLuhan’s terminology). They are just means. This is also something that can be seen in the root of their name, which is a meaningful relation in Semitic languages, where meanings of words are always determined by the roots. The only other word in the Torah built with the same root l-’-kh of mal’akh is indeed mel’akhah, usually translated as “action”. This word is used for a) God’s actions in the creation b) the works for building up the Tabernacle c) the activities forbidden during Shabbat The three uses of mel’akhah are closely related: the activities forbidden during Shabbat are determined following those involved in building up the Tabernacle; and the Book of Genesis shows God stopping His creative work when the Shabbat comes. Mel’akhah in Jewish thought is not just any activity, but a finalized act, a work able to change the world. So angels are etymologically presented as agents (or instruments) capable of specially finalized actions. They are means. But since the majority of these actions are communications, they are also and expecially living media, speaking for God and instead of God. Because God is taught as powerful, even if in the Bible He is not always presented as almighty, there is a reason for utilizing them in many situations where the divine power appears to be limited or contradicted by human action, such as in the struggle of Jacob with the angel or in the “sacrifice” of Isaac; or in cases where the divinity does not want to grant men the privilege of his direct presence. They are God’s exemptions (Verzichte in the terminology of Odo Marquard 1986). This happens for instance in the above-quoted stories of Isaac and Ishmael, or in the leading of the Jewish people in the desert, after their mistakes. A medium can bring interlocutors together, making “immediate” their relation, but also separate them, by placing between them a salient interface (this is what Bolter and Grusin 2000 call “hypermediation”). In these cases, angels communicate the will of God, can act as a sort of “megaphone” or “telephone” for Him, but they also introduce or allow a distance, in such a way that the “Divine presence” (in Jewish terms the shekhinah, which sometimes is personalized) is not enacted. Of course, God is taught as present everywhere, but in the Torah we find the notion of a specially focused presence, which is perceived as a gift and a blessing. This why in the quote of Exod 33 we see Moses and the People

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saddened and frightened because the Divine presence has to be substituted by an angel. Most times, however, in the Torah God does not choose to be exonerated, but takes on direct responsibility, especially in the most critical cases. For instance angels are not presented as actors in the Isaac “sacrifice,” nor in the Babel dispersion, nor in the Egyptian firstborns’ death: Exod 12:23: “For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when He seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side-posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer [‫ַה ַּמ ְ ׁשִחית‬, usually called death angel] to come in unto your houses to smite you.”

This direct responsibility is strongly underlined in the passage of the (very late) Passover Haggadah, where the verse is commented with a quote attributed to God: “Anì ve lo mal’akh, Ani ve lo saraf, Ani ve lo shaliach.” (“I, not an angel, I, not a seraph, I, not an envoy, I myself hit the Egyptians.”)

Angels in the Torah are the prototype of the mediator, of the category of mediation. They are opposed in the text to the direct, even anthropomorphized divine presence: again, in the same verses of the Haggadah the Lord is said to take the Jewish people out of Egypt “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”: these are of course metaphors, as for instance Maimonides argues, but make concrete the notion of “presence.” This is the “mediatic” meaning of the angels in the biblical text.

References Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston: MIT Press. Genette, Gerard. 2007. Discours de récit. Paris: Seuil. Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Martin Niemeyer. Translated as Being and Time. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1978. Kosior, Wojciech. 2013. The Angel in the Hebrew Bible from the Statistic and Hermeneutic Perspectives: Some Remarks on the Interpolation Theory. The Polish Journal of Biblical Research 12 (1). 55 – 70. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1971 – 1973. L’homme et la matière: Evolution et techniques. 2 vols. Paris: Albin Michel. Marquard, Odo. 1986. Apologie des Zufälligen. Stuttgart: Reclam.

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McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGrawHill. Meier, Samuel A. 1992. Speaking of Speaking: Marking Direct Discourse in the Hebrew Bible. Leiden: Brill. Peirce, Charles S. 1931. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prieto, Luis. 1975. Pertinence et pratique. Paris: Minuit. Rilke, Rainer M. 1923. Die erste Elegie. http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Rilke,+Rainer +Maria/Gedichte/Duineser+Elegien (accessed September 6, 2020). Volli, Ugo. 2008. Separazione e rivelazione: I nomi del santo in Sefer Shemot. In Nicola Dusi & Gianfranco Marrone (eds.), Destini del sacro: Discorso religiose e semiotica della cultura, 27 – 57. Roma: Meltemi. Volli, Ugo. 2011. Previsione, profezia, senso. In Gian Marco De Maria (ed.), Ieri, oggi, domani: Studi sulla previsione nelle scienze umane, 19 – 37. Rome: Aracne. Volli, Ugo. 2013. Who is the Author of Halakhah? International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 26 (1). 191 – 210. Watkins, Calvert. 1985. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Atsushi Okada

The angel as an intercultural medium 1 The angel and the pagan winged gods This paper seeks to focus on the intercultural or inter-religious quality of angelology. For nearly a century in Japan, the angel trademark of a confectionary maker and the Cupid trademark of a food manufacturer have been familiar as the image of an endearing winged infant (Figure 1). Both images of course originate in the West, and this is perhaps why we Japanese are unable to differentiate between the Christian angel and the pagan Cupid.

Figure 1. Cupid Trademark (left) and Angel Trademark (right).

This is, however, not the only reason. Within Christian art, Cupid, the son of Venus, originally was not infrequently depicted as an angel shooting arrows of love. Augustine of Hippo states in his Confessions (9:2) that “You [Christ] pierced our hearts with your arrows of love”, and this passage is sometimes depicted as a scene of an angel shooting arrows of love at a saint’s chest, in which the three arrows symbolise the holy trinity (Figure 2). Similarly, an angel appears as Amor in Bernini’s famous sculpture, the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. Furthermore, the discussion is not limited to Cupid, as ancient paganism possessed a multitude of similar kinds of gods. For example, there is Eros’ brother Anteros, who is said to be the god of love returned or the avenger of unrequithttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-006

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Figure 2. Zanobi Strozzi, Conversion of St. Augustine, ca. 1450, Firenze, Museo San Marco (f. 1r).

ed love; another of Venus’ attendants is Himeros, the god of impetuous love and alter ego of Cupid, and there are Hypnos, the god of sleep, and Thanatos, the god of death who carries dead souls to the underworld. Hermes is also depicted wearing a winged helmet and sandals, flitting freely as a messenger of Zeus between heaven and earth, and between this world and the other world. The winged goddess of victory, Nike, and the goddess of rainbows, Iris, also served as messengers to the respective goddesses above them, Athena and Hera. In the ancient world, generally speaking, the personification of the soul could also have some similarities with angels (Leone 2012). Particularly amidst the momentum of the Renaissance, angels and winged children that could be mistaken for angels appeared frequently in works of art that linked pagan tradition with Christianity in a unique way. The two angels at the foot of Raphael’s The Sistine Madonna are famous examples of this (Figure 3). However, are these really angels? The countless faces of genuine angels peer through the clouds surrounding the Madonna and child. Thomas Aquinas believed angels were created by condensed water droplets in the air, which was something expressed beautifully by Raphael. Hence, the two putti (figures of naked children) at the foot of the scene are thought to play a role similar to that of the so-called ‘spiritelli’ (little spirits), namely invigorating the scenes depicted in Renaissance religious paintings. Donatello had a talent for this expression, and a similar example can be seen in his Annunciation. In this, he arranged six naked infants almost symmetrically on both sides and at the top of his niche tympanum (Figure 4). The scene

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Figure 3. Raffaello, Sistine Madonna, 1513 – 1514, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

Figure 4. Donatello, Anunciation (detail), ca. 1435, Florence, Basilica di Santa Croce.

also contains winged beings and beings clutching garlands who are gazing towards the foot of the annunciation scene. The idea that these little nymphs, unbeknownst to us, float around in the air encouraging us physically and mentally, while invigorating us and manipulating our emotions, originates in antiquity. In fact, this kind of naked infant motif is known to originate in ancient pagan art (Figure 5). In addition to images such as that of Eros and Anteros, one of the origins of naked infants clutching garlands can be found in the relief carvings on the surface of sarcophagi. This motif was beautifully revived in the ancient style by Jacopo della Quercia in his The Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto and was later used in many Renaissance tombstone engravings. These naked infants were also called ‘amorini’ in the plural diminutive form of the god of love Amor, and assumed the role of celebrating the lives of departed souls, and sending them off in fine style (Dempsey 2001). The intersection of paganism and Christianity concerning this kind of naked infant motif had already occurred in antiquity. It was not only naked infants

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Figure 5. Garland Sarcophagus, 150 – 180, Baltimore, The Walters Art Museum.

bearing garlands that frequently appeared on the front of pagan sarcophagi, but also engravings of winged putti holding circular medallions, and naked infants (‘Bacchoi’) picking grapes for Bacchus, the god of wine. Such motifs also began to appear on Christian sarcophagi from around the 3rd Century. Hence, the casual blending of pagan and Christian imagery was not necessarily restricted to only our contemporaries. Even if not confusion, the fusion of both had already begun by the early Christian period. To give another example, in Barberini Diptych (Barberini Ivory), the emperor at the upper right of centre receives a benediction from the winged goddess of victory, Nike, while above, Christ is arranged on a medallion raised by two angels. This is because Nike and the angels are honouring the emperor as equal winged attendants, and in their support of his authority, can be displayed together without contrast. The image of an angel in the form of the goddess of victory Nike also remains in the Patriarchal Basilica of Aquileia. In this floor mosaic, wearing a tunic, holding a crown of palm branches and laurels, and congratulating the victory and glory is the goddess Nike, who is simultaneously an angel. To the lower right, a chalice of grapes is visible, and to the lower left a basket of bread, which symbolise the flesh and blood of Christ. In this way, the pagan goddess of victory was skilfully metamorphosed into one of Christianity’s angels (Figure 6).

2 The angel and ‘pneuma’ Incidentally, the Latin word ‘spiritus’, from which the word ‘spirit’ is derived, corresponds to the Greek word ‘pneuma.’ ‘Pneuma’ is a fundamental principle that governs not only humans but also the natural world, and it was regarded as existing between matter and non-matter. By working on the physical organs, it was thought to elevate and depress one’s mood. So-called ancient ‘pneumologia’ covered a broad range of knowledges, straddling physiology, psychology, and cosmology (Bucur 2009).

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Figure 6. Angel as Nike, 3rd century, Aquileia, Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta.

It was the evangelists who changed the reading of ‘pneuma’ to ‘holy spirit.’ They also deemed that it was God’s Holy Spirit (‘pneuma’) that made Mary pregnant with Jesus. That said, angels were also likened to ‘pneuma’, and were also sometimes called by that name. For example, in Hebrews (1:7) it is said that “He (God) makes his angels winds (pneuma), and his servants flames of fire.” This was based on the passage from Psalms (104:3 – 4), “you make the clouds your chariot, you ride on the wings of the wind, you make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers”. It is also written in Hebrews 1:14: “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” In other words, angels may be wind, fire, or even spirits. The same kind of examples can also be found in Revelations. Incidentally, if we suppose that ‘pneuma’ can be used to mean ‘holy spirit’ as well as ‘angel,’ then this enables the view that Jesus Christ, who was deemed to have been born of the Holy Spirit of God, could have an existence either equal to or very close to that of an angel. According to Philo of Alexandria, who aimed to bridge Greek Philosophy and Judaism, the Logos of God may take the form of an angel (Decharneux 1994). In his On the Confusion of Tongues (146),¹ God’s first son, Logos, and the three most revered angels are viewed as equal. On this basis, Jesus as the incarnation of Logos overlaps with an angel in this respect as well. In fact, while this may have been forgotten in the contemporary world, such a way of thinking is known to have been partially supported partic-

 For a list of classical texts and translations used, see https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Loeb_ Classical_Library (accessed 11 September 2020).

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ularly in Early Christianity. I would like to reconsider this very interesting theme at the end of this paper. Meanwhile, as we can surmise from the aforementioned texts, Hebrews and Revelations, angels as pneuma have a strong connection to natural elements such as wind, clouds, and fire. Philo of Alexandria also posited the air to be “the abode of bodiless souls (psyche asomaton).” This was based on an episode from Genesis 28 known as ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, and according to Philo’s On Dreams I (133 – 145) this story signifies that immortal and undying souls reside in the air, and that their number is equal to that of the stars. If some of these souls or angels are attracted to the earth and to material forms, there are also those that conversely soar on their light wings towards the ether. Here Philo uses the word ‘psyche,’ but in terms of its angelic disposition, it is not greatly different from ‘pneuma.’ Hence, the images of angels that were strongly linked to natural phenomena had also already appeared many times in the Old Testament. God’s messengers in Exodus 13:21– 22 appear before Moses as a “column of fire” or “column of clouds.” In Psalms 104:3 – 4 too, God is encompassed by a cloud, the wind, or a burning fire. Based on this, in Ezekiel 1:4, God appears encompassed by a “giant cloud” generating “a fierce wind” or by “fire” or “light” radiating all around. These winds, clouds, fires, and lights are nothing but angels who serve God. The angels closest to God, the ‘Seraphims,’ have been described in the following way: “with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew” (Isaiah 6:2), but in Hebrew, ‘‫ ְׂש ָרפ‬Śĕrāp’ originally means ‘burning or roasting,’ and hence relates most closely with the image of light or fire. As to when and how angels were created, the book of Genesis does not actually make this clear. Taking up this question, Augustine in City of God (11:9) regards angels as being more or less equal to light, and states that as God said “let there be light,” angels were unmistakably created simultaneously as beings that possess a portion of God’s eternal light. However, the linguistic origins of the name ‘cherubim,’ indicating the glory and majesty of God that surrounds Him, probably reside in the ancient Assyrian or Akkadian words ‘kĕrûḇ’ or ‘kurib,’ and to mean ‘great and mighty’ or ‘blessed and revered.’ Their form according to Ezekiel (10:21) is as follows: “Each had four faces, each four wings, and underneath their wings something like human hands.” Both the names and the monstrous, heteromorph shape of these halfhuman, half-beast angels, with a human face on the body of a winged bull or lion are said to have first appeared in Mesopotamia and to derive from the protective deities of Mesopotamia, the ‘lamassu’ or ‘shedu.’

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Hence, through the medium of the angelic figure, the images of polytheistic gods were even incorporated into monotheistic Judaism from an early stage. It is known that in ancient Babylonia there was a winged guardian deity called ‘Marduk,’ and that in Zoroastrianism there is a guardian spirit called the ‘Fravaši’ that resides in all things. This also led to the development of an abundance of angelic images in the Islamic world.

3 The angel and ‘stoicheia’ In the apocryphal Book of Jubilees 2:2 of the Old Testament, there are successive examples of ‘angels’ abundant in the natural world: “The angels [of the spirit of fire and the angels] of the spirit of the winds, and the angels of the spirit of the clouds, and of darkness, and of snow and of hail and of hoar frost, and the angels of the voices and of the thunder and of the lightning, and the angels of the spirits of cold and of heat, and of winter and of spring and of autumn and of summer and of all the spirits of his creatures which are in the heavens and on the earth.” Viewed in this way, we can see that angels were originally ascribed a character akin to that of animism, in which spirits reside in all things. Spirits of this kind that reside in all things of the natural world were also known in Greek by the name of ‘stoicheia.’ For example, in 2 Peter 3:10, a vision of the Apocalypse is described as follows: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements (stoicheia) will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.” As mentioned above, in the Old Testament, the natural elements, particulary the winds, clouds, and fires are often represented as angelic images who serve God. ‘Stoicheia’ originally referred to the basic elements that compose the natural world, in other words, fire, air (wind), water, and earth. Hence, these animistic and polytheistic ‘stoicheia’ are called the ‘elemental spirits of the universe’ (stoicheia tou kosmou), and it was probably no coincidence that they were sharply critiqued from early on by Paul the Apostle as a threat to the Christian faith (Colossians 2:8). According to Paul, before we knew ourselves or Christ, we believed in these animistic ‘stoicheia.’ Because we came to know Christ, Paul sternly attacked those who still clung to the former ‘stoicheia.’ Therefore, I think that Paul might have considered ‘stoicheia’ to be near to angels. Conversely, we can surmise from Paul’s letters that in early Christianity, images of angels were apparently still intermingled with or undifferentiated from various pagan deities. Paul undoubtedly tried to draw a clear dividing line between them, but was not necessarily successful in doing so. This is because,

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as can be seen from the imagery mentioned earlier, there was a syncretism of a variety of pagan gods. This is also definitive evidence for just how liberally the image of the angel was developed and spread in the imaginations of the people of the time. In ancient Rome also, there were protective guardians called ‘geniuses’ (these correspond to Greek ‘daemons’). This noun is the linguistic origin of the English word ‘genius,’ as in ‘prodigy’ or ‘gifted,’ and originally referred to the guardian deities that reside in people, places, or things. Today, the term ‘genius loci’ continues to be used for the protective deities of land or the special atmosphere of a particular place. Among them, guardian deities of the home, crossroads, roads, and travel are called ‘Lares,’ which are represented as statues of winged youths decorating the vestibules of houses or depicted on walls. As shown in the murals and bronze statuettes of Pompei, these figures are usually standing lightly on one leg as if dancing a jig, and with both hands are holding aloft horns (‘rhyton’) or plates (‘patera’) indicating fertility. Guardian angels who are the equivalent of ‘geniuses’ can also be found in the New Testament. In Matthew 18:10, an angel appears to protect “lost lambs,” and in Acts 12:15 an “angel appears to protect Peter.” The roles of angels as guardians can also be traced further back to the Old Testament. For example, Abraham states that it was none other than an angel that helped his son Isaac to take a wife (Genesis 24:7). Furthermore, in Psalms (91:11) it is written: “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.” Similarly, the Book of Tobit describes an account in which Tobit’s son Tobias was protected by the archangel Raphael on his long journey to find a rare medicine that happily cures his father’s eye condition. This angel is hence also the guardian of travel. It is unmistakable that at some point these guardian angels originating in Judaism encountered Rome’s pagan guardian deities, the ‘Lares.’ The theme of guardian angels and ‘Tobias and the angel’ was much represented as the central theme in art particularly from the Renaissance to Baroque periods, and guardian angels were invoked in various prayers, such as appeals for health, faith, and education of children. We mentioned earlier that Paul the Apostle attempted to dispel as far as possible the image of the angels as ‘stoicheia’ governing all things, but that he was not fully successful in doing so. If these ‘stoicheia’ operate almost entirely on the four classical elements of nature, then their power must not extend as far as the cosmos. For example, in the Book of Enoch (17– 18), the storyteller Enoch is guided by the angels that appear and reveal a sublime vision of the cosmos and nature. Enoch, on being shown this trick of the cosmos, proudly says “I saw the winds which turn the sky, which cause the orb of the sun and of all the stars to set; and over the earth I saw the winds which support the clouds” (18:6).

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The winds, or in other words, the angels, beautifully control the revolutions of the stars in the sky. In this way, it was thought that angelology essentially interfaced with cosmology. On the theme of the ‘Adoration of the Magi,’ although not mentioned in the Gospels, angels are depicted together with the ‘star’ that guided the three wise men from the Orient to Bethlehem. For example, the shape of an angel flying above the three Magi can be perceived distinctly in a relief of the 8th Century by an unknown sculptor (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Adoration of Magi, ca. 740, Cividale di Friuli, Museo Cristiano.

Figure 8. Angel Rounds the Sky (Breviary of Love), 12th century, London, National Library (Royal 19 C. 1, f 34v).

Despite the Gospels refrain from mentioning a connection, angels and stars have been closely linked in popular imagination. Albeit in a later era, Nicola Pisano’s relief in the pulpit of the Pisa Baptistery inserts an angel between the Virgin, child, and the Magi, and this expresses that the star is replaced with an angel in the story of the journey. It was Dante’s Divine Comedy that put forward this cosmological image of angels moving the heavenly bodies. In this ‘heaven,’ Dante calls angels the ‘motori dei cieli’ (motors of the heavens, Paradiso 29:43) and their movement ‘puro atto’ (pure act, 29:33), and furthermore speaks through Beatrice’s mouth to ex-

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Figure 9. Frederic Watts, All Pervading, 1887 – 1890, Compton, Watts Gallery.

plain the mechanism by which the celestial spheres rotate. According to this explanation Dante gives through Beatrice, the nine celestial bodies corresponded to the order of the nine angels, which was well known at the time, or in other words, the order described in De Coelesti Hierarchia that was said to be the work of Pseudo-Dionysius. However, according to Dante, this procession of the stars that the angels bring about exerts an influence on the human soul. Hence, in Dante’s work the angel is a medium that combines cosmology, physiology, and psychology. In this respect, Dante can also be said to have pre-empted the image of the naked cherub infant—the ‘spiritelli’ or ‘putti’—of the Renaissance that was discussed initially. We communicate with the stars through invisible angels. Moreover, as Giorgio Agamben (2009) well explained, this ranking of angels was not simply a hierarchy of the church’s organisation, but was also said to have a major influence on the structure of secular power. Pseudo-Dionysius’s aim was probably to arrange and rank the angels that Jewish and pagan traditions had incorporated and that had caused confusion and chaos. In fact, while the archangels Michael and Raphael held a high position in Judaism, in De Coelesti Hierarchia they are located closer to humans, in a lowly po-

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sition, only two steps from the bottom. The remaining imagery attests to the existence in the Middle Ages of the idea that angels moved the celestial bodies, although suspected of sorcery and heresy. This is demonstrated, for example, by the 14th-century copies of the collection of poems Le Breviaire d’Amour written in Provence at the end of the 12th century (Figure 8), as well as by the Tapestry of the Astrolabes in Toledo.² The physician and theologian Agrippa von Nettesheim, who was also versed in the magical and occult arts, regarded the zodiacal constellations to be moved by angels. The German abbot Johannes Trithemius, who was apparently also committed to the occult, was said to have experienced visions of a method of communicating over long distances through angels, and his books were prohibited for a long time (this prohibition was finally lifted in the year 1900). This nonsensical idea seems to anticipate in part the contemporary Internet society. As Michel Serres (1993) puts it, the flow of electricity unseen to the eye seems to be a modern version of what we formerly called angels. England’s renowned alchemist John Dee believed an angel was concealed in a crystal ball, and is said to have come up with the idea of interacting with the angel through a crystal ball. The London Science Museum still exhibits what is believed to be this crystal ball. This angel, according to Dee, spoke ‘Enochian,’ a name which no doubt originates from the apocryphal Book of Enoch in which angels and fallen angels play a very active role. This semi-transparent sphere was packed full of past and future events that only angels could know. This connection between angels and crystal balls, as we can see in Frederic Watts’s All Pervading (Figure 9), has been perpetuated right through to the modern period. Furthermore, many of us today are captives to a new ‘Enochian’ that even people in the 16th century could not have imagined; in other words, ‘film.’ The author of Cinema, Gilles Deleuze (1985 – 1991), likened the world that film shows us to constantly leaping beyond time and space to crystal images.

4 The angel and Jesus Christ Finally, I would like to conclude my report by simply touching upon the hidden relationship between angels and Jesus Christ, which I mentioned earlier. Going back to the early Christian period, although Jesus Christ and angels are not necessarily equated, there are passages in which they are regarded as very similar. This is to say that if we suppose the role of the angel is to be a mes-

 On the imagination of angels in the framework of the Heavens’ order, see Gill (2014).

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senger for God, Jesus also can be said to have been sent to earth from heaven to disseminate the word of God, because he assumed the role of delivering God’s message to this world. There are scattered accounts in the New Testament from which it can be inferred, either directly or indirectly, that there was an old established view that likened Jesus as the Messiah to an angel. For example, this appears in Hebrews 1:5 as follows: “he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” In short, it is particularly emphasised here that Jesus takes precedence over angels and has a superior existence to angels. Conversely, this is thought to demonstrate that the Jews sometimes confused angels and Jesus (in terms of their roles at least), or that angel worship and the Christian faith were antagonistic. Otherwise, there would have been no need for the writer of this letter to issue such a warning to the Israelites. Similar accounts can also be seen in 1 Peter 3:22, Romans 8:38 – 39, and 1 Corinthians 6:3, 15:24. What these letters of the early Christian apostles indirectly attest to is that, at the risk of repetition, there was definitely a view at the time in which Christ was likened to an angel, and that the apostles tried one way or another to constrain that view. Although the apostles referred only negatively or indirectly to the idea of Jesus Christ as an angel, several apocrypha express this view more straightforwardly or even affirmatively. For example, according to the Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus said to his disciples ‘Compare me, and tell me whom I am like’, Simon and Peter say to him ‘You are like a just messenger [angelos]’. Furthermore, of particular note is the very interesting apocalyptic literature of the 2nd century, The Shepherd of Hermas. Characteristic above all else is the continual and incessant appearance of various angels throughout the entire volume. Their huge number not only evokes a connection with the various geniuses of ancient Rome, but also is thought to suggest vestiges of angel worship. Found therein, for example, is ‘the Angel of the Prophetic Spirit’ (angelos tou prothetikou pneumatos), and we can also see that angels are equated with pneuma. On the other hand, ‘the Son of God,’ Christ, is called among other things ‘the Glorious Man’ (XI. 6:1), but the archangel Michael is also called ‘the glorious and very tall Angel of the Lord,’ so a clear-cut dividing line is not thought to have been drawn between ‘the Son of God’ and the archangel Michael. Incidentally, in Revelations 12:10 also, Michael is called ‘the authority of his Messiah’ (he exousia tou christou autou). The theologian Adolf von Harnack suggests that the author of The Shepherd of Hermas was possibly an adherent of ‘Adoptionism’ (a heretical theology that claims Jesus was God’s adopted Son). Otherwise, a theory exists that it may have

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been written by an advocate of heretical Binitarianism of the Son and the Holy Ghost, as opposed to the trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost (Gieschen 1998). According to this theory, the Son Jesus and the Holy Ghost are positioned one level lower than God the Father. This is of course irreconcilable with the view that regarded the Father and the Son as ‘Homoouisos’ (όμοούσιος— equal or the same in being), which was officially recognised by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. At any rate, since we can interpret The Shepherd of Hermas as a text that grafted Hellenism and the main body of Roman tradition onto Christianity, here also, Christ—the ‘Son of the Father’ –, angels, and pneuma are portrayed as possessing very similar existences. In the early Christian period, as is indicated for example by Justin Martyr in his Apologia prima (First Apology) or Origen’s De principiis (On First Principles), some Fathers and theologians did not necessarily refute this theory. Citing Isaiah, Origen viewed ‘God’s only Son,’ ‘Logos,’ and ‘Seraphim’ as equal (I: 3.4).³ Incidentally, on the topic of this problem within early Christianity of the affinity of Christ and angels, one work has played a major role in redirecting attention to this issue in the modern period. This was Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas (The Formation of Christian Dogma), which was published by the German theologian Martin Werner in 1941. Therein, Werner presents a bold hypothesis that early Christianity developed out of the angelology of Judaism. The crucial evidence for this is the point that the apocalyptic Messiah ‘human child,’ which appeared for example in Daniel and the Book of Enoch, was regarded as having the existence of an angel. Furthermore, according to Werner, the belief that Christ was an angel kept alive the Arian beliefs that had been condemned as heresy by the Council of Nicaea. The book was also published in English in 1957 and naturally was subject to critique by many theologians. However, some theologians and scholars did support this view. Among them was the leading authority on Islamic Studies, Henri Corbin, who in his work Le paradoxe du monotheisme (1981) highly lauded Werner for his ‘brave’ research that brought to the surface the links between various traditions that had been suppressed, and in addition mentioned the close relationship between Christ and the archangel Michael. Furthermore, at the beginning of the 1990s, there was a sudden increase in the number of works and papers on ‘Angel Christology’ and ‘Angelmorphic  The English version of Origen’s work is available here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct= j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjLmpX6m9vrAhVD_ KQKHQfCAskQFjAAegQIBRAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.documentacatholicaomnia.eu% 2F03d%2F0185 - 0254%2C_Origenes%2C_De_principiis_%5BSchaff%5D%2C_EN.pdf&usg=AOv Vaw1G-yVq1NvNFJHD6KNsN2Dk.

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Christology’ (Stuckenbruck 1995; Carrel 1997; Gieschen 1998; Foster 2005; Peterson and Manzi 2008). Emanuele Coccia, who edited an anthology on angelology with Giorgio Agamben, points out that a tense relationship has existed between Angelology and Messianism, and goes so far to state that the similarity between angels and Christ was not simply historical, but was a structural and logical inevitability (Agamben and Coccia 2009). To my knowledge, there is no iconography that equates angels and Christ straightforwardly, although traditionally, on the theme of the ‘Last Judgement,’ the archangel Michael is ascribed a role second in importance to that of Christ. Similarly, in a famous episode of Genesis 18:1– 15 in which ‘three men’ appear before Abraham and Sarah, the significance of the ‘three men’ has long been interpreted primarily in three ways; namely, that they were the three archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, that they were Jesus (or Logos) and two angels, and that they were the trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Incidentally, the second interpretation is possible because one of the three men is called ‘Lord.’ This theme has been portrayed frequently since the early Christian period. For example, in the Mosaic of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, three angels appear before Abraham, and in the lower part of the scene three men appear who Abraham and Sarah entertain. Therein, only the central angel at the top is encompassed by a ring of light, which is thought to perhaps indicate ‘the Lord’ telling Sarah of the birth of her eldest child. Here too, the images of angels and ‘the Lord’ overlap. In the enamel painting that decorates the front of the pulpit by Nicolas de Verdun, the inscription clearly indicates the allusion to the typology of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation. In Andrei Rublev’s masterpiece Trinity (Figure 10), although Abraham does not appear himself, against the background of the oaks of Mamre from the bible and an awning, three winged angels with almost the same stature and facial features are sitting at Abraham’s table to be entertained. In order from the angel on the left, God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost are symbolised. In short, Jesus is substituted with the form of an angel. This is evidenced by the fact that in the centre of the table drawn in reverse perspective are placed the Holy Grail and the head of a sacrificial lamb, which allude to the cross of the Son of God. The female mystic representative of the Middle Ages, Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179), experienced mysterious visions in which there were overlapping images of the Lord Jesus with an angel. She wrote down the visions herself, which were illuminated by nuns in the popular work Scivias, and therein, in what was said to be the first of her visions, Christ is depicted seated atop a mountain ‘spreading magnificent broad and long wings’ (Figure 11). On the

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other hand, the ‘statue covered in eyes the length of its body’ at the lower left of the scene is also undoubtedly an angelic vision. Seraphim are also frequently depicted as having innumerable eyes upon their six wings, because he sees all.

Figure 10. Andrei Rublev, Holy Trinity, 1408 – 1425, Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery.

Furthermore, in the same author’s Liber Divinorum Operum, a very strange and profound vision appears as the first vision, which has of course also been rendered as an illumination. While this can be interpreted in various ways, worthy of particular note is that the image of Christ and multiple angels seems to overlap with the chimera of ancient Greece. Hildegard was probably familiar to an extent with the respective imagery, and saw them as intermingled within her mystical vision. If we borrow a term from Freud, who discussed the mechanism of dreams, multiple memories of images—of Jesus, God the Father, Seraphim and Cherubim, and the Archangel Michael—are ‘condensed’ (verdichtet) into one within this vision. While soaring between the plentiful images of the related past, this abbess truly exerted her imaginative powers. Further, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is an interesting iconography of St. John the Baptist as an angel of the desert, in reference to the words from Malachi 3:1: “Behold I send my angel before Thee, who shall prepare Thy way before Thee.” In conclusion, angels have always flitted lightly between not only various religions and myths, but also between orthodoxy and heresy, and have gently touched people both physically and mentally. Everyone cultivates their respective angels, is protected by angels, and interacts through angels. In this sense, to follow Henri Corbin (1981), the leading authority on Islamic Studies, angels still today (perhaps even more so) persist in the human imagination by another

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Figure 11. Hildegard von Bingen, The First Vision (from Scivias), 1153.

name (mundus imaginalis), and, to borrow a phrase from the modern Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari (1986), “are necessary.”

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. Il regno e la gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo. Homo Sacer II. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Agamben, Giorgio & Emanuele Coccia (eds.). 2009. Angeli: Ebraismo, Cristianesimo, Islam. Vicenza: Neri Pozza. Alighieri, Dante. 1985. La divina commedia. Edited by Tommaso di Salvo. Milano: Zanichelli. Augustine of Hippo. 1976. Confessions. Translated by Hattori Eijiro into Japanese as Kokuhaku. Tokyo: Iwanami. Augustine of Hippo. City of God. Translated by Hattori Eijiro into Japanese as Kami no Kuni. Tokyo: Iwanami.

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Book of Jubilees. 1981. “Libro dei Giubilei.” In Paolo Sacchi (ed.), Apocrifi dell’Antico Testamento, 1: 213 – 411. Torino: UTET. Bucur, Bogdan Gabriel. 2009. Angelomorphic Pneumatology: Clement of Alexandria and Other Early Christian Witness. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Cacciari, Massimo. 1986. L’Angelo necessario. Adelphi: Milano. Carrel, Peter R. 1997. Jesus and the Angels: Angeology and the Christology of the Apocalypse of John. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbin, Henry. 1981. Le paradoxe du monotheisme. Paris: L’Herne. Decharneux, Baudouin. 1994. L’ange, le devin et le prophete: Chemins de la parole dans l’oeuvre de Philon d’Aexandrie dit Le Juif. Bruxelles: Edition de l’Université de Bruxelles. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985 – 1991. Cinéma. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Dempsey, Charles. 2001. Inventing the Renaissance Putto. London: University of North Carolina Press. Foster, Edgar G. 2005. Angelomorphic Christology and the Exegesis of Psalm 8:5 in Tertullian’s Adversus Praxean. Lanham: University Press of America. Gieschen, Charles A. 1998. Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Gill, Meredith J. 2014. Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gospel of Thomas. 1994. Translated by Arai Sasagu into Japanese as Tomasu niyoru Fukuinsho. Tokyo: Kodansha. Hildegard of Bingen. 1990. Scivias. Translated by Mother Columba Hart & Jane Bishop. New York: Paulist Press. Hildegard of Bingen. 2018. The Book of Divine Works (Liber Divinorum Operum). Translated by Nathaniel M. Campbell. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. Leone, Massimo. 2012. Sémiotique de l’âme. 3 vols. Paris: Presses Académiques de France. Origen. 1978. De principiis Translated by Odaka Takeshi into Japanese as Shogenri nitsuite. Tokyo: Sogensha. Peterson, Eric & Franco Manzi. 2008. Il libro degli angeli: Gli esseri angelici nella Bibbia, nel culto e nella vita cristiana. Rome: Edizioni Liturgiche. Philo of Alexandria. 2005. “La confusion delle lingue.” In Giovanni Reale (ed.), Tutti i trattati del Commentario Allegorico alla Bibbia, 1031 – 1111. Milan: Bompiani. Philo of Alexandria. 2005. “I sogni sono mandati da Dio in due libri (De somniis I-II).” In Giovanni Reale (ed.), Tutti i trattati del Commentario Allegorico alla Bibbia, 1645 – 1849. Milan: Bompiani. Pseudo Dionigi l’Areopagita. 1986. Gerarchia celeste, Teologia mistica, Lettere. Edited by S. Lilla. Rome: Città Nuova. Serres, Michel. 1993. La Légende des Anges. Paris: Flammarion. The Shepherd of Hermas. 1998. Translated by Arai Sasagu into Japanese as Herumasu no Bokusha. Tokyo: Kodansha. Stuckenbruck, Loren T. 1995. Angel Veneration and Christology. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Werner, Martin. 1957 [1941]. The Formation of Christian Dogma: An Historical Study of its Problem. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Costantino Marmo

Medieval theology and the theory of signs 1 Introduction: A roundabout way Dealing with medieval theology one cannot but take into account the theories of sign and text interpretation. One of the main authorities in this field, Augustine of Hippo, devotes an important part of his De doctrina christiana to the analysis of signs and of human institutions where the practices of sign usage and/or interpretation play a pivotal role.¹ His definition and classification of signs would become paradigmatic for the whole medieval culture, but in a roundabout way. Everything starts in the 9th century, when the first debate on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist took place, and ends in the 12th century with a return to the Augustinian notion of the sign, finally accepted by all Christian theologians. The first debate, in particular, appears to be important for the theme of this volume, since one of the parties involved—the one appealing to a non-Augustinian notion of sign—presents the sacrament as an immediate access to Christ’s body and blood.

2 The debates on the Eucharist: A non-Augustinian notion of sign The debates on the Eucharist, between the 9th and 11th centuries, are usually (and rightly) described as focused on the notion of the real presence, and on the role played by the consecration formula in transforming the substance of bread and wine in Christ’s body and blood. These debates see the opposition between, on the one hand, the theologians in favour of the real presence position (like Paschasius Radbertus and Lanfranc of Bec) and, on the other hand, those against it (like Ratramnus of Corbie and Berengar of Tours). What lies behind this antagonism, as I would like to show, is the opposition between a non-Augustinian (or non-traditional) notion of sign and an Augustinian (or traditional) one, the latter holding that a sign is a thing which makes something else come into the inter-

 On Augustine’s semiotics, see Gramigna (2020). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-007

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preter’s mind.² To understand the origin of this controversy we have to go back to some texts issued during the first discussion held between Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie in the first half of the 9th century.³ Radbertus, before becoming abbot of the monastery of Corbie (in Northern France), writes a treatise On the Body and Blood of our Lord (De corpore et sanguine Domini) around the years 831– 833, where he maintains that If we truthfully examine the matter, [the mystic sacrament] is rightly called both the truth and a figure, so that it is a figure or character of truth because it is outwardly sensed. Truth, however, is anything rightly understood or believed inwardly concerning this mystery. Not every figure is a shadow or falsity.⁴

As one can see from this passage, here the notion of figura plays a crucial role. Radbertus thus rejects a purely negative notion of figure (meaning umbra or falsitas) as opposed to veritas and presents the term as equivalent to character, mark, which appears to be a key term in his endeavour, although not fully understood by his contemporary and modern readers. One of his first opponents,⁵ a monk of the same abbey of Corbie, Ratramnus —in his reply to Radbertus’ text—defines again the meanings of both terms, veritas and figura, and tries to show that their opposition is unbridgeable. Ratramnus claims in particular that “that which in the church is received into the mouth of the faithful becomes the body and blood of Christ in a mystery (in mysterio),”⁶ namely figuratively. In the Scriptures there are passages that should be read according to a figurative interpretation, for example in the Gospel of John, Jesus says figuratively that He is the vine and the Apostles are the branches: “All these passages say one thing and hint at another (Haec enim omnia aliud dicunt et aliud innuunt).”⁷ According to Ratramnus, both the rite of eucharistic consecration and these passages work on the basis of the same semiotic device: no

 Augustine (1962: 32): “Signum est res, praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliquid aliud ex se faciens in cogitationem venire.”  See Marmo (2005: 767– 791) for a closer analysis of the debate.  Paschasius Radbertus (1969: 29): “Sed si ueraciter inspiciamus, [mysticum sacramentum] iure simul ueritas et figura dicitur, ut sit figura uel caracter ueritatis quod exterius sentitur, ueritas uero quicquid de hoc mysterio interius recte intellegitur aut creditur. Non enim omnis figura umbra uel falsitas” (Engl. trans. in McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 102).  See Chazelle (2001, and, in a shorter form, 2003), for a presentation of the whole debate.  Ratramnus (1954: V, 44): “Quod in ecclesia ore fidelium sumitur corpus et sanguis, quaerit vestrae magnitudinis excellentia, in misterio fiat, an in veritate” (Engl. trans. in McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 119).  Ratramnus (1954: VII, 44).

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physical transformation can take place, since the words used in the formula have to be taken figuratively; bread and wine remain the same after their consecration but, as well as their names, they acquire a new spiritual meaning. Neither Ratramnus, nor modern scholars fully realized the value of Radbertus’ equation between figura and character. Brian Stock, for instance, commenting on Radbert’s position, claims: There was to Radbert’s mind no incompatibility between the two [i. e. veritas and figura]: the eucharist was the sacramental body and blood of Christ in veritate, no matter what else it signified in figura. The link between experience and reality was provided by the Word, the affirmation of reality, or, more precisely, by the Word as authenticating text, since Radbertus accepted the gospels as a simple transcription of God’s verbal intentions and commands. The distinction between veritas and figura was nothing more than that between the original word and/or text and subsequent commentary. (Stock 1983: 270)

Frankly, I do not really catch the relevance of such a remark, especially considering that the equation between veritas and figura has only a limited/local value, and does not allow one to draw general conclusions about the relationship between the biblical text and its commentary/interpretation. But let’s go back to Radbertus’ text. In chapter IV of his treatise, Radbertus argues that the incarnation, conception and virgin birth are the premises which allow us to conclude that Christ’s flesh and blood in the Eucharist are created from the substances of bread and wine. The interpretation of the words of Scripture (as several passages from the Gospel of John show) is literal and appears to preclude any figurative reading. However, in Radbertus’ eyes, a difficulty arises from the fact that the sacrament of the Eucharist is a mystical rite and therefore it implies at least two levels of meaning: the words of the rite do not just mean things, but (according to the model of figurative speech proposed by Augustine)⁸ these in turn refer to other things, or in other terms they are figures of something else. Radbertus wonders how the sacrament can be both truth and figure, since “every figure is the figure of something, and always has reference to it as a real thing.”⁹ As an example he cites the events of the Old Testament which are both figures and shadows of the events told in the New Testament: here, the term ‘shadow’ (umbra) has a negative connotation, implying a certain degree of falsity as compared to the full truth of words and events displayed in the Gospels. As Rad-

 See Augustine (1962: II.10.15).  Paschasius Radbertus (1969: IV, 28): “Omnis enim figura alicuius rei figura est et semper ad eam refertur, ut sit uera res cuius figura est” (Engl. trans. in McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 101).

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bertus adds, the actions taking place during the Eucharistic rite, as well as the things (bread and wine) used in that context, are figures in themselves. The sacrament will then be truth as far as it transforms bread and wine into real flesh and real blood, but it is also a figure since the priest acts in the role of Christ (reciting the words of the Last Supper) in memory of His Passion.¹⁰ How does it happen then that these two modes of signification, truth and figure—the latter of which always implies in its figurative/typological sense a certain degree of falsity—become compatible in the sacrament? At this point Radbertus plays the card of the character (or caracter, according to his writing). His claim is precisely that the sacrament can be defined as both truth and figure, based on the principle that not every figure implies shadow or falsity. As Radbertus recalls, St. Paul, writing to the Hebrews (1:3) about the dual nature of the Son, human and divine at the same time, refers to Him as a figure of the substance of the Father (according to the tradition of St. Jerome’s Vulgate) or as the character of the Father (according to another translation, current at Ambrose’s time—between 4th and 5th century—and still circulating in the 9th). The relationships between the two natures, human and divine, in the Son (or between the Father and the Son in the Trinity) can therefore be described in terms of the relationship between a character (as a type of sign) and its meaning. To explain in what sense that figure or mark should be understood, Radbertus appeals to a simile: as through characters or the figures of letters we, as small children, first progressed gradually to reading, later to the spiritual senses and understanding of the Scriptures, so also there is a progression from the humanity of Christ to the divinity of the Father, and therefore [the Son] is rightly called the figure or character of His [i. e. the Father’s] substance.¹¹

The figures of the letters are nothing else but the alphabetic symbols or graphemes whose learning allows us to read the Scriptures and come to grasp their multiple meanings. The modern commentators who focused on this step, such as Brian Stock (1983), have been led astray by the simile and could catch neither the technicalities involved in the terminology used here by Radbertus, nor the intertextual articulation that it hides. Radbertus continues the quoted text wondering (and I leave the Latin text untranslated by now):

 Paschasius Radbertus (1969: IV, 28).  Paschasius Radbertus (1969: IV, 29): “Sicut per caracteres uel figuras litterarum infantia nostra prius pertingit gradatim ad lectionem, deinde ad spiritales scripturarum sensus et intelligentiam, sic ex humanitate Christi ad diuinitatem Patris peruenitur et ideo iure figura uel caracter substantiae illius uocatur” (Engl. trans. in McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 102).

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Quid enim aliud sunt figurae litterarum quam caracteres earumdem, ut per eas uis et potestas ac spiritus prolatione oculis demonstretur? ¹²

Celia Chazelle (1992), for example, translates into English the term litterae as “spoken letters or words”, missing completely the point that the litterae are just components of words and cannot be mistaken for words.¹³ Actually, we have to read a passage from another work by Radbertus in order to get a better understanding of what he is talking about. In his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, in fact, the monk focuses on a passage in which Jesus says, “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah” (Matt 12:39), and he comments by proposing a definition of sign as that through which something unknown, hidden or future is signified. Therefore correctly Christ’s Passion is called ‘the sign of Jonah’ not because it anticipates or prefigures something else, but because it is the fulfillment of the sign of Jonah (i. e. its meaning).¹⁴

According to this Christian interpretation, the story of Jonah, at Jonah’s time, announced the passion of Christ, but in the mouth of Jesus the expression ‘sign of Jonah’ meant nothing else but His own passion, an event that is about to happen, the fulfillment of that prophecy. This is a peculiar sense of ‘sign,’ in which the traditional Augustinian ontological distinction between signifier and signified is questioned, and, as Radbertus highlights, this is not a Scriptural oddity, but finds an exact parallel in the field of grammar of his time:

 Paschasius Radbertus (1969: IV, 29).  Here is her complete translation: “For what else are the figures [i. e., written forms] of letters [i. e., spoken letters or words] than their characters, so that through them the strength and power and spirit [of the spoken words or letters] is set before the eyes?” (Chazelle 1992: 17). “What else are the figures of letters than their characters, that through them force and power and utterance of spirit are demonstrated to the eyes?” (McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 102). The technical term for words in grammar is dictio, while littera is always understood as the smallest vocal component of syllables and words.  Paschasius Radbertus (1984: II, 793): “Nam omne signum alicuius rei signum est quo signatur res occulta latens vel futura. Idcirco recte passio Christi signum Ionae dicitur non quod aliud iam praesignet aut praefiguret passio Christi sed quia signi Ione est adimpletio.” Cf. Paschasius Radbertus (1988: 72, CCCM 85). A possible source of this passage could be Augustine, De dialectica (1975: V, 86), where the “res quae latet” (hidden thing) is listed among the meanings of the verbum.

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This species [of sign] is quite famous among grammarians, so that what is called a ‘sign’ is something that does not mean anything beyond itself, but presents in itself the form of the sign that once was anticipated.¹⁵

Character is precisely a technical term of 9th-century grammar, consisting in the drawing of a letter of the alphabet on parchment or wax (a grapheme)—as explained, for instance, by Sedulius Scotus, a 9th-century grammarian —, while littera denotes (in its narrower sense) “the smallest part of the articulate voice” (a phoneme). A character therefore is not a word, as Chazelle (1992) proposed; it is rather the written sign of an element of the second articulation of language, the sign of an elementary vox. Using the term character, Radbertus has not in mind the relationship between impression and impressor, nor that between word and meaning, but rather that between grapheme and phoneme, the minimal units of the expression planes of written and spoken language. Interpreting in his own way the considerations of his contemporary grammarians who commented on Donatus and Priscian, Radbertus indicates in alphabetical characters, because of their relationship with the corresponding sounds, a special type of sign, different from the traditional (and Augustinian) one that refers to something else, namely to something absent and ontologically distinct from the sign itself: the “something else” (aliquid aliud) which comes “in mind” (in cogitatione) in Augustine’s definition of sign. Furthermore, figura, spiritus and potestas (sometimes also called vis) for medieval grammarians are the basic properties of the littera, so that we might respectively translate them as “graphic type” (figura), “aspiration” (spiritus) and “(vocalic, consonantal or semivocalic) value” (potestas or vis). Taking this into account, the above quoted Latin text becomes more comprehensible, and I propose to translate it as follows: What else are the figures of letters [i. e. phonemes] than their characters, so that through them their value and aspiration, which are manifested in pronunciation, are set before the eyes?¹⁶

The figures of letters, namely the graphic shapes or characters of the basic linguistic sounds, make visible what the aspiration and the value (namely their being vowels or consonants) of these elements of spoken language are. In short, Radbertus ascribed to the grammarians the idea that between alphabetic  Paschasius Radbertus (1984: 793): “Quae speciaes apud Gramaticos notissima est ut dicatur signum res quae iam nihil ultra de se signat sed quia signi formam olim praemissam in se repraesentat.”  Paschasius Radbertus (1969: IV, 29): “Quid enim aliud sunt figurae litterarum quam caracteres earumdem, ut per eas uis et potestas ac spiritus prolatione oculis demonstretur?”

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letters and the minimal units of sound of a language there is a one-to-one relationship. The reference to the grammarians is also present in a letter that Radbertus wrote later on (around 856) to a younger colleague or pupil, Fredugardus, and it highlights his interpretation of the grammatical theory of the littera: In Him [the Son as character] nothing is fictional, nothing is devoid of truth, just as we do not say that the marks or figures of the letters are devoid of their value [as consonants or vowels], since metaphorically we can call ‘letters’ these figures.¹⁷

This relationship is so tight as to almost cause to disappear their mutual distinction, similarly to what happens between Father and Son in the Trinity or between human and divine natures in Christ: in all these cases of sign, the unity between the two items is so close as (almost) to cancel the distinction between signifier and signified. In all these cases we might talk of a quasi-identity between signifier and signified that leads Radbertus’ semiotics far beyond the Augustinian one (to which Ratramnus substantially adheres in his criticism).¹⁸

3 The reactions to Radbertus’ position and the second debate (11th century) Radbertus’ novelties did not receive an immediate positive reception, as he had to admit in his letter to Fredugardus.¹⁹ The criticism, however, as is apparent in Ratramnus’ and Eriugena’s reactions, focused on the theological implications of his positions, but missed completely the semiotic point. On the same line, in the 9th century, other important personalities, such as Rhabanus Maurus, opposed this theological novelty; however, after a revival of the debate in the 11th century, Radbertus’ position would be accepted as the orthodox position and would become the foundation for the definition of the dogma of transubstantiation in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Let’s see first some critical points. According to Eriugena, only in a very broad sense of the word can the Eucharist be called a ‘symbol’, that is, as it is figura Christi, the image of a truth that comes to us only when we go beyond the sensible features, in the same way

 Paschasius Radbertus, Epistola ad Fredugardum, in Paschasius Radbertus (1969: 148): “in eo [Filio ut caracter appellatur] nihil fictum fuit, nihil uacuum a ueritate, sicut nec caracteres uel figuras uacuas esse dicimus litterarum a ui et potestate earum, cum easdem figuras tropice litteras uocamus.”  Cf. Marmo (2005) for a discussion and other bibliographical references.  Paschasius Radbertus (1969: 145, 146 – 147, passim).

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that we gather the deep truth of Scripture only by going beyond the littera or its historical-literal sense. Significantly, Eriugena’s criticism is directed against both the theologians who take literally the Scriptures, and those who interpret the sacraments without going beyond their sensible appearances, falling into the trap of similar symbols. ²⁰ In a passage of his commentary on the ps.-Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy, Eriugena (1975) introduces the notion of materialis manuductio (ὑλαία χειραγωγία, in the Dionysian text) and holds that the visible forms of material symbols have not been proposed for the sake of themselves or as subject of intrinsic value (non propter se ipsas factas, nec propter se ipsas appetendas), but only as images of the invisible beauty and instruments of ascent for our souls. In particular, in the Eucharist that every day the priests celebrate, the sensible matter of bread and wine, once consecrated, becomes an image of the spiritual participation in Christ, “whom faithfully we only taste with our intellect, namely we understand” (quem fideliter solo intellectu gustamus, hoc est intelligimus). What can answer the trumpet of Dionysius—Eriugena wonders at this point —to those theologians who intend to hold that the visible Eucharist does not mean anything else beyond itself? While the aforementioned trumpet [i. e. Dionysius] shouts that those visible sacraments are not to be worshiped nor even to be mistaken for the truth, since they are signs of the truth and have not been established for themselves, because in them we do not find the goal of our understanding, but [they have been] rather [established] for the incomprehensible power of the truth that is Christ, in the unity of his divine and human substance, beyond all we perceive with bodily senses, and above all we understand with our intellect.²¹

In a second passage, Eriugena explains that the reason why many sacred images (ἀγάλματα, in Greek) are considered as dissimilar symbols is that those who contemplate them do not stop at their surface, but go beyond, always keeping in

 Following the pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena explains that there are two kinds of symbola: those similar to their meanings (such as the sun as compared to God), and those dissimilar or different from them (such as the worm as compared to Jesus). The former type can be dangerous for uneducated believers because they can mistake the signifier for the signified because of their similarity; the latter types are safer on this respect. On this distinction, see Roques (1962, 1967) and Pépin (1976).  Eriugena (1975: I.3, 17, my transl.): “uisibilem eucharistiam nil aliud significare preter se ipsam uolunt asserere, dum clarissime tuba prefata clamat, non illa sacramenta uisibilia colenda neque pro ueritate amplexanda, quia significatiua ueritatis sunt, neque propter se ipsa inuenta, quoniam in ipsis finis intelligentie non est, sed propter incomprehensibilem ueritatis uirtutem que Christus est in unitate humane diuineque sue substantie, ultra omne quod sensu sentitur corporeo, super omne, quod uirtute percipitur intelligentie.”

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mind that they are figures, or images of the truth, and cannot be mistaken for the truth itself. This is the error in which many people have fallen, since they believe that sensible sacraments do not mean anything higher than themselves, so that they mistake what is false for truth; and they are wrong and lead into error the simplest men, who linger over the images, unable to focus the sharpness of their minds in the mystical sense of those images. About them the Apostle says: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (II Cor. 3,6) Those who believe that there is nothing beyond what they perceive with their senses, are killed by the letter, since they neither are able nor want to reach the spirit, namely the understanding of the letter.²²

As he underlines in a fragment of his Commentary on the Gospel of John, we “eat [Christ’s body] not with our teeth, but spiritually with our mind” (intellectualiter mente, non dente, comedimus).²³ Even if in both Ratramnus’ text and Eriugena’s there is no reference to the notion of character, the opposition to Radbertus’ position is supported by an (at least implicit) Augustinian semiotics, where what is signified is not only ontologically distinct from the sign, but is something attainable only with our mind. The same point is made in the 11th century by Berengar of Tours, during his discussion with Lanfranc of Bec, a discussion that turned into a dispute between heretical and orthodox theologians. In this debate, on the one hand, Berengar of Tours takes the side of Ratramnus and Eriugena (to whom Ratramnus’ treatise is wrongly ascribed); on the other hand, Lanfranc of Pavia (abbot of Bec and then Archbishop of Canterbury, in the wake of William the Conqueror) sides with Radbertus, supported by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that twice forced Berengar to recant his positions.²⁴ Both Lanfranc and Berengar are masters of dialectic, so their debate becomes more and more heated and subtle, involving discussions not only about the physics of substantial transformation (of bread and wine), but also about various linguistic aspects of the consecration formulas. Berengar of Tours, in a letter to a friend and colleague, Adelmannus of Liège (before 1059), argues against the theses of Radbertus, according to whom, after

 Eriugena (1975: II.5, 51– 52, my transl.): “existimantes, sensibilia sacramenta nil altius significare preter seipsa; ac per hoc approbantes falsa pro ueris; et seipsos fallunt et simpliciores se decipiunt, remanentes in figuris, in earum uero mysticum intellectum mentis aciem infigere negligentes. De talibus ait Apostolus: ‘Littera occidit, spiritus autem uiuificat’. Omnis quippe nihil ultra quod sentit existimat esse, littera occiditur, quoniam spiritum, id est ipsius littere intellectum, neque ualet neque uult attingere.”  Eriugena, Commentaire sur l’Évangile de Jean, ed. E. Jeauneau, Paris: Ed. du Cerf (1972: 178).  See Capitani (1966); Montclos (1971); Gibson (1978); on the linguistic and semiotic implications, see Rosier-Catach (1996) (that I will follow here).

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the consecration, bread and wine do not keep their substance, but turn into the historical body of Christ and his blood, which are present, but hidden beneath the visible accidents (or species) of bread and wine; Christ’s body and blood are therefore subject to division, chewing and swallowing. Berengar disagrees with all these claims and argues his positions on physical, linguistic and semiotic grounds. First, Berengar makes appeal to the Aristotelian ontology, maintaining that there cannot possibly exist accidents without substrate, or that a substance cannot be destroyed while its accidents continue to exist,²⁵ and that the body of Christ cannot be created out of nothing at every act of consecration, since He exists from eternity at the right side of His Father. The only possible conversion for bread and wine in the eucharistic rite is their transformation into signs which signify Christ in His integrity: a conversion that is neither material nor sensible, but intellectual or spiritual.²⁶ In the second line of argument, based on linguistic and semiotic considerations, Berengar brings forward remarks on the value of the copula (similar to those that would be discussed in the following century in the commentaries on Priscian and in Abelard’s texts) and on the literal or figurative value to be given to the terms used in the consecration formulas. According to Berengar’s version, the profession of faith (anathema) that he was forced to subscribe at the Council of Rome in 1059, ascribed to him two contradictory propositions which, according to him, would render null and void the act of abjuration in itself: I myself, Berengar, […] am condemning all heresy, and in particular the one […] that tries to argue (1) that bread and wine which are placed on the altar, after the consecration are only sacraments, and (2) that these are not the true body and the true blood of Christ.²⁷

Of the two propositions, the first (“bread and wine … after the consecration are only sacraments”) is rejected as untenable by Berengar: if bread and wine are sacraments and therefore signs, they are signs of something and therefore can not be only sacraments; the second one, reformulated by Berengar as “bread

 See Vijgen (2013: 31– 35).  See, for instance, Berengar of Tours, Purgatoria epistola ad Adelmannum, in Montclos (1971: 534); Berengar (1988: II, 127 and 147); Rosier-Catach (1996: 51).  Berengar (1988: I, 64); cf. Lanfranc of Bec, Scriptum contra Beringeri pravitatem, 2, in Martello (2001: 104): “Ego Berengarius … anathematizo omnem haeresim, praecipue eam … quae astruere conatur panem et vinum, quae in altare ponuntur, post consecrationem solummodo sacramenta esse, et non verum corpus Christi et sanguinem.”

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and wine on the altar are only the true body and blood of Christ,” should represent the orthodox position, but is dismissed by Berengar as biased and false. In both propositions, however, as he emphasizes in reference to a logico-semantic rule, what is assumed is that bread and wine maintain their existence: according to this rule it is not possible that a statement is true if one of its parts (subject or predicate) does not exist (or has no existing referent). If you say “Socrates is,” you mean that Socrates exists, so if you say “Socrates is right,” you take for granted that Socrates exists, otherwise the property in question could not even be ascribed to him. Both propositions therefore (even the second, which corresponds to the most extreme Eucharistic realism) can not help but take for granted the existence of bread and wine (as substances) even after the consecration. Furthermore, Berengar examines in a similar way the classical formula of consecration (Hoc est corpus meum): the demonstrative pronoun hoc has to be construed as equivalent to the phrase hic panis, and this noun should not be taken figuratively (as claimed by Lanfranc) but in a proper sense; on the contrary, what should rather be understood metaphorically is the predicate corpus, as well as the predicate of a proposition like “Christ is the cornerstone” is to be taken figuratively. The semiotic arguments focus on the explicit resumption of the Augustinian definition of sign, and of Ratramnus’ position that Christ’s body and blood is present in figura and not in veritate, namely that the sacrament is a sign, an image, a similitude of Christ, who is not physically present, but spiritually attainable by every believer through that sign. Berengar compares the Eucharist to Baptism and argues that, as in the second case the water does not turn into anything substantially different, but becomes a sign of Christ’s death, that is, it takes on a spiritual meaning, so in the Eucharist bread and wine are not substantially transformed, but only converted into signs, acquiring a relation to Christ’s body and blood. In support of this argument, Berengar collects a dossier of Augustinian quotations, including the definition of sign given in Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana (II.1.1).²⁸ As pointed out by Irène Rosier-Catach (1996: 52), in this definition, according to Berengar, every word is important: “the sensible nature of the sign, the idea that, from what it is (ex se), something else is produced (this implies that the sign cannot be the body of Christ), and finally that all this is accomplished for the mind (in cogitatione).” Berengar comments as follows on Augustine’s definition of sign:

 See above, n. 2

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He does not say: (a sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, as a consequence of itself causes something else to come into) your hand, your mouth, your teeth, or your stomach, but (into) your mind.²⁹

The body of Christ is not a sacrament, but rather the res sacramenti, his invisible meaning, intellectually or spiritually attainable. Berengar also emphasizes the relational nature of the sign/sacrament: it has a sensible pole, i. e. bread and wine, which exist as such after its consecration, and is essentially distinct from its meaning, namely Christ’s body and blood. In his replies to Lanfranc, he highlights the ontological distinction between sign and signified: These terms [namely those used by the authors to talk about this sacrament] fall under the category of relation. And no related thing (= term of a relation) can be identical to its correlate.³⁰

If Ratramnus and John Eriugena, as said above, were not fully aware of the semiotic novelty of Radbertus’ position, both the Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Lanfranc of Bec—the major sponsors of Berengar’s condemnation—show a higher degree of awareness together with Peter the Venerable and the author of the Summa Zwettlensis, in the 12th century.³¹ For instance, in a booklet against simony, Humbert of Silva Candida opposes the sacraments of the heretics to those of the Catholics and makes appeal to a notion of sign exactly corresponding to that invoked by Radbertus in his treatise. According to him, the sacraments are signs so that they are also things (signified). They signify what they are and have in themselves … they are signs so that they are essentially true (signified) things.³²

This identity between sign and meaning, signum and res, which is incorporated in Radbertus’ theories, justifies the opposition of Cardinal Humbert against those

 Berengar, Purgatoria epistola, in Montclos (1971: 532): “non ait: (signum est res praeter specqiem quam ingerit sensibus, aliquid aliud ex se faciens) in manum, in os, in dentem, in ventrem, sed in cogitationem.”  Berengar, Purgatoria epistola, in Montclos (1971: 532): “Haec autem vocabula ad aliquid sunt. Nulla vero, quae ad aliquid referuntur, possunt esse id quod sunt ea ad quae referuntur.”  Petrus Venerabilis 1854: 812CD – 813A. Cf. Summa Zwettlensis, IV, 180 ff., in Häring (1977: 173 ff). Texts are quoted in Marmo (2007).  Humbertus de Silva Candida (1891: 188 – 189): “ita signa sunt ut sint etiam res. Nam quod sunt et in se habent, significant … sic signa sunt ut res quoque essentialiter et vere sint.” Here res is not simply a thing, but should be translated as “thing of the sign,” i. e. as its meaning, or the signified thing.

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who considered the sacraments given by the heretics as valid and not to be performed again;³³ it also justifies the retractation imposed on Berengar at the Council of Rome in 1059. It should be no surprise, at this point, to find in Berengar a literal revival of the Augustinian definition of sign, which was still subterranean in Ratramnus’ treatise. All reference to this definition, as I said, is to be found in two passages of the writings of Berengar, in his letter to Adelmannus and in his Rescriptum contra Synodum, a lost work but extensively quoted by Lanfranc in his reply to it. Lanfranc refutes each and every point of Berengar’s arguments, and also quotes the passage in question, giving back part of the context in which it was written by Berengar. Let’s see the quote in full: Berengar says: “Therefore Augustine, in his book On the City of God, (says): the sacrament is a sacred sign. And he defines the sign in his book On the Christian Doctrine: a sign is a thing that, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, as a consequence of itself causes something else to come into our mind.”³⁴

Lanfranc’s reply is rather disappointing, at least from my point of view: while admitting that the sacrament is a sacred sign, he claims that Berengar did not understand the context of the De Civitate (X.5) where Augustine proposed his definition of sacrament: To tell the truth, Saint Augustine, in his book On the City of God, did not define the sacrament as sacred sign as plainly as you hold. In that context, he did not say anything about Christ’s body and blood, since he was dealing with the sacrificial rites of the Hebrews.³⁵

There is no mention in this passage of the arguments that are present in the letter to Adelmannus, based precisely on the distinction between sign and signified thing, and no reply to them. Lanfranc appears to have no objection to Berengar’s  Since the 3rd century, there were discussions about the validity of the sacraments imparted by heretics; answering negatively to this question implied the necessity of repeating the sacrament, as was the case for Humbert of Silva Candida.  Lanfrancus Cathmensis, Scriptum contra Beringeri pravitatem, 5, in Martello (2001: 121): “Bereng. ‘Unde beatus Augustinus, in libro De civitate Dei: Sacramentum est sacrum signum. Signum definit in libro De doctrina Christiana: Signum est res, praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire.’”  Scriptum, 5, in Martello (2001: 121): “Verumtamen beatus Augustinus in libro De civitate Dei non ita abrupte, ut tu dicis, sacramentum sacrum esse signum definivit. Nihil vero eo in loco de corpore et sanguine Domini loquebatur, sed tractans de ritu Judaicorum sacrificiorum.” It is expedient to recall here that Hebrew rites at the Temple, as described in the Old Testament, were usually considered figurae (i.e. types) of the sacraments of the New Law.

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use of Augustine’s definition of the sign. As a matter of fact, in this context Lanfranc points out that what the sign produces in cogitatione is something distinctly different from the sign itself: We also believe that the sacrament, about which we are discussing, is a sacred sign … And that thanks to this sign, over and above the impression it makes on the eyes of those who see it, something else and completely different from it comes into the minds of those who understand it.³⁶

In the discussion that follows, however, there seems to emerge an awareness of the identity between sign and signified thing implied by the theory of the real presence. Answering other arguments or quotations of auctoritates by Berengar—quotations that emphasize the opposition between what in the sacrament is visible and what is invisible—Lanfranc makes a point that will have a large following in 12th-century developments of Eucharistic theology: the meaning of the sacramental sign is not simple, unique, but multiple (potius que illa sint) or, rather, dual. The same body, present and covered by the bread’s appearances (species panis) after the consecration, is called the sacrament (or mark) of the body of Christ: the body itself then is the sacrament of the body, and the blood the sacrament of the blood. What is brought forward, for the first time— as far as I know—, is the idea that Christ’s body and blood, concealed under the appearances of bread and wine, are themselves signs of Christ’s death on the cross and of the blood pouring out of Christ’s side.³⁷ A little further on he confirms that: The flesh and the blood, that we assume every day to ask for divine mercy upon our sins, are called Christ’s body and blood, not only because they are identical in essence, differing however in their qualities, but also following the way we use to call what signifies with the same name of what is signified. And nobody will be surprised if the same flesh and the same blood are the sacrament of themselves, taken in a different way, though.³⁸

 Scriptum, 5, in Martello (2001: 121): “ Et nos sacramentum, de quo agimus, sacrum esse signum credimus … Quo signo, praeter speciem quae se oculis intuentium ingerit, longe aliud valdeque diversum in cogitationem salubriter intelligentium venit.”  Scriptum, 5, in Martello (2001: 123): “Carne et sanguine, utroque invisibili, intelligibili, spirituali, significatur Redemptoris corpus visibile, palpabile, manifeste plenum gratia omnium virtutum et divina maiestate. Quorum alterum quidem dum frangitur, et in populi salutem dividitur; alterum vero effusum de calice ab ore fidelium sumitur, mors eius in cruce, et sanguinis eius de latere emanatio figuratur.”  Scriptum, 5, in Martello (2001: 124): “Caro ergo et sanguis, quibus ad impetrandam pro peccatis nostris Dei misericordiam quotidie alimur, Christi corpus ac sanguis vocantur, non solum quia essentialiter idem sunt, qualitatibus plurimum discrepantes, verum etiam eo locutionis modo quo

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It is exactly at this level that the identity between sign and signified thing suggested by Radbertus emerges. The sacrament no longer consists in the consecrated bread and wine—as Berengar holds instead —, but rather in what they hide under the appearances of bread and wine. When Berengar, next to the word signum, lists other terms used by the Fathers to speak about the sacraments, such as a species, figura, similitudo and mysterium,³⁹ arguing that these words are relative terms, Lanfranc has no philosophical reply, but prefers to contextualize these terms. If, in other passages of his work, Lanfranc had opposed Berengar’s appeal to human reason in order to understand divine mysteries,⁴⁰ in this case he holds that the Scriptures or the auctores appealed to those terms to emphasize different features of the sacrament: thus the terms species, figura and similitudo sometimes refer to bread and wine before consecration;⁴¹ sometimes they are used with the meaning of truth;⁴² sometimes the terms signum, mysterium and sacramentum are used to indicate the passion of Christ.⁴³ Lanfranc’s position on Augustine’s definition of the sign appears to be much clearer now: for him, it is a non-problematic and necessary complement to the definition of sacrament. However, since Lanfranc seems to be well aware of the value ascribed to this definition by Berengar and of the semiotic implications of Radbertus’ theory, he intervenes at the level of what is signified: he turns into signs the Eucharistic body and blood, which are obviously identical to Christ’s historical body, to His resurrected body and the body raised in heaven. The effect is that of completely neutralizing Berengar’s interpretation, together with minimizing any possible conflict between Augustine’s definition of sign and Radbertus’ interpretation of the Eucharist. Lanfranc’s strategy would be very effective and would have, particularly in Peter Lombard, some decisive theoretical developments, as I’m going to show by way of conclusion.

res significans significatae rei solet vocabulo nuncupari. Nec iuste quisquam movebitur, si eadem caro, idemque sanguis sui ipsorum sacramenta existant secundum aliud atque aliud accepta.” Also quoted by Rosier-Catach (1996: 53, n. 58); cf. Martello (2001: 42).  “Quod tu verum Christi corpus esse asseris, in sacris litteris appellatur species, similitudo, figura, signum, mysterium, sacramentum. Haec autem vocabula ad aliquid sunt. Nulla vero, quae ad aliquid referuntur, possunt esse id quod sunt ea ad quae referuntur.” This objection by Berengar can be read in Lanfranc, Scriptum, 8, in Martello (2001: 141– 3).  See Scriptum, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, respectively in Martello (2001: 116, 120, 128, 141, 147).  Scriptum, 8, in Martello (2001: 142).  Scriptum, 8, in Martello (2001: 143).  Scriptum, 8, in Martello (2001: 144).

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4 Some conclusions: oportet et haereses esse In the first half of the 12th century, the Augustinian dossier, thanks to its adoption by Ivo of Chartres and Abelard’s Sic et non, is constantly included in the sections of theology or canon law works devoted to the Eucharist. Following Lanfranc, however, a neutral interpretation of the definition of sign is taken for granted by the majority of the theologians so as to prevent every possible use in an anti-realist function. Particularly important is the quotation of Augustine’s definition and classification of signs by Peter Lombard at the very beginning of his fourth book of Sentences, that was to become in the 13th century the standard textbook for teaching theology at the Studia of the mendicant orders or at the University, in both Paris and Oxford. Although he derives the distinction between sacramentum and res sacramentis from his sources (such as the Summa sententiarum), Peter Lombard proposes a reformulation of the distinction that is very interesting from my point of view. The species as a sacramentum tantum is the Augustinian sign (that makes us think of something else); the res is twofold: one is the body and the blood of Christ that is contained and signified (contenta et significata), the other is the unity of the Church in Christ (its Head) that is signified but not contained.⁴⁴ The idea of content that emerges in this context and its association to meaning seems to clarify and, in some way, to complete the process begun by Radbertus, with his reflections on the relationship between graphemes and phonemes, also suggesting a research path that from Peter Lombard leads to contemporary semiotics and to its commonly adopted notion of ‘content.’ Some conclusions can be drawn from what precedes. First, the debates on transubstantiation show that the identification of the sign with the thing signified, in the Eucharist, as proposed by Radbert, appears to eliminate the gap between human and divine spheres, supporting a pure immediacy that is, however, only achieved under specific ritual circumstances. Secondly, as the editor of Ratramnus’ treatise and some more recent commentator underlined,⁴⁵ these earlier debates also had a direct influence on what happened in modernity in the interpretation of the sacraments, as Protestants such as Ulrich Zwingli and Thomas Cranmer rejected transubstantiation, adopting a figurative interpretation of the

 Petrus Lombardus (1981: IV, d. 8, c. 7, 1, 284– 5): “ De re sacramenti, quae est duplex. Huius autem sacramenti gemina est res: una scilicet contenta et significata, altera significata et non contenta. Res contenta et significata est caro Christi quam de virgine traxit, et sanguis quem pro nobis fudit … Haec est duplex caro Christi.”  Cf. Bakhuizen van den Brink (1954); Otten (2000).

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sacraments (that was later on labeled as ‘symbolic’) and often also any form of ritual mediation between humans and God. Finally, it might be stressed that, from the standpoint of the history of semiotics, the role played by Berengar is crucial in explicitly introducing into the debate on sacraments the Augustinian definition of sign and in obliging all his opponents to discuss it in order to give a sound theory of sacraments. Thus, we are led to acknowledge, together with St. Paul, that “it was necessary to have some heretics” (oportet et haereses esse), after all,⁴⁶ at least from the point of view of the history of semiotics.

References Augustine of Hippo. 1962. De doctrina Christiana, II.1.1. Edited by I. Martin. Turnhout: Brepols. Augustine of Hippo. 1975. De dialectica. Edited by J. Pinborg. In B. Darrell Jackson (ed.), Augustine, De dialectica, Translation with Introduction and Notes. Dordrecht: Reidel. Berengar of Tours. 1988. Rescriptum contra Lanfrannum. Edited by R.B.C. Huygens. Turnhout: Brepols. Bakhuizen van den Brink, Jan N. 1954. Introduction. In Ratramnus of Corbie, De corpore et sanguine Domini: Texte original et notice bibliographique. Edited by Jan N. Bakhuizen van den Brink. Amsterdam-London: North Holland. Capitani, Ovidio. 1966. Studi su Berengario di Tours. Lecce: Milella. Chazelle, Celia. 1992. Figure, Character, and the Glorified Body in the Carolingian Eucharistic Controversy. Traditio 47. 1 – 36. Chazelle, Celia. 2001. The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chazelle, Celia. 2003. Exegesis in the Ninth-Century Eucharist Controversy. In Celia Chazelle & Burton Van Name Edwards (eds.), The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, 167 – 187. Turnhout: Brepols. Eriugena, Johannes. 1975. Expositiones in ierarchiam coelestem. Edited by J. Barbet. Turnhout: Brepols. Eriugena, Johannes. 1972. Commentaire sur l’Évangile de Jean. Edited by E. Jeauneau. Paris: Ed. du Cerf. Gibson, Margaret. 1978. Lanfranc of Bec. Oxford: Clarendon. Gramigna, Remo. 2020. Augustine and the Study of Signs and Signification. Berlin: De Gruyter. Grundmann, Herbert. 1963. Oportet et haereses esse: Das Problem der Ketzerei im Spiegel der mittelalterlichen Bibelexegese. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 45. 129 – 164. Häring, Nikolaus M. 1977. Die Zwettler Summe: Einleitung und Text. Münster: Aschendorff. Humbertus Cardinalis de Silva Candida. 1891. Libri III adversus simoniacos. In F. Thaner (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Libelli de lite, vol. 1. Hannover: Hahn.

 1 Cor 11: 19. Cf. Grundmann (1963).

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Marmo, Costantino. 2005. Il ‘simbolismo’ altomedievale: Tra controversie eucaristiche e conflitti di potere. In Comunicare e significare nell’Alto Medioevo, Atti della LII Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 15 – 20 aprile 2004, 765 – 819. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo. Marmo, Costantino. 2007. Segno e immagini nella teologia di Pietro Lombardo. In Pietro Lombardo, Atti del convegno internazionale, Todi, 8 – 10 ottobre 2006, 51 – 88. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo. Martello, Concetto. 2001. Lanfranco contro Berengario nel “Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini”: Introduzione, testo, traduzione e note. Catania: Università di Catania. McCracken, George & Allen Cabaniss. 1957. Early Medieval Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Montclos, Jean de. 1971. Lanfranc et Bérenger: La controverse eucharistique du XIe siècle. Leuven: Spicilegium sacrum lovaniense. Otten, Willemien. 2000. Between Augustinian Sign and Carolingian Reality: The Presence of Ambrose and Augustine in the Eucharistic Debate Between Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie. Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis 80 (2). 137 – 156. Paschasius Radbertus. 1969. De corpore et sanguine Domini, IV.2. Edited by B. Paulus. Turnhout, Brepols. Paschasius Radbertus. 1984. Expositio in Matheo libri XII. Edited by B. Paulus. Turnhout: Brepols. Paschasius Radbertus. 1988. Expositio in Lamentationes Hieremiae, I, 22. Edited by B. Paulus. Turnhout, Brepols. Pépin, Jean. 1976. Aspects théoriques du symbolisme dans la tradition dionysienne: Antécédents et nouveautés. In Simboli e simbologia nell’Alto Medioevo, Atti della XXII Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 3 – 9 aprile 1975, 33 – 79. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo. Petrus Lombardus. 1981. Sententiae in 4 libris distinctae. Vol. 2, Liber 3 et 4. Grottaferrata (Romae): Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas. Petrus Venerabilis. 1854. Epistola sive Tractatus adversos Petrobrusianos hereticos. In J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Latinae cursus completus, vol. 189. Paris: Migne. Ratramnus of Corbie. 1954. De corpore et sanguine Domini. Texte original et notice bibliographique. Edited by J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink. Amsterdam-London: North-Holland Publishing Co. Roques, René. 1962. Structures théologiques de la Gnose à Richard de Saint-Victor. Paris: PUF. Roques, René. 1967. Tératologie et théologie chez Jean Scot Erigène. In Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu, maître en théologie, 419 – 437. Paris: Vrin. Reprinted in Roques, René. 1975. Libres sentiers vers l’érigénisme, 13 – 43. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. Rosier-Catach, Irène. 1996. Langage et signe dans la discussion eucharistique. In Sylvain Auroux, Simone Delesalle & Henri Meschonnic (eds.), Histoire et grammaire du sens : Hommage à Jean-Claude Chevalier, 42 – 58. Paris: Colin. Stock, Brian. 1983. The Implication of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vijgen, Jörgen. 2013. The Status of Eucharistic Accidents “sine subiecto”: An Historical Survey up to Thomas Aquinas and Selected Reactions. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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Transcending the body: The semiotics of an out-of-body experience reported by Mechthild of Magdeburg Introduction Out-of-body experiences (from now on “OBE”) have become a subject of neuroscience in recent times (Smith and Messier 2014; Braithwaite et al. 2013; Olive and Berthoz 2012; Braithwaite and Dent 2011; Braithwaite et al. 2011; Wilkins et al. 2011; Blanke and Dieguez 2009; Terhune 2009; Blanke and Arzy 2005; Blanke and Mohr 2005; Blanke et al. 2004; Blanke et al. 2002). This kind of investigation focuses on the physiological substratum of experience. However, as meaningful events, OBEs are a product of socio-cultural communication. Whereas physical and organic activities in the brain belong to the necessary environment of mental processes, and mental activities belong to the necessary environment of socio-cultural communication, the latter constitutes patterns of meaningful experience—in contrast to mere physiological perception. Of course, brain and mind are not tabula rasa entities. They are self-organized, but are stimulated by socio-culturally constituted patterns of meaning. It is a matter of socio-cultural attribution and thus of communication, whether an OBE is regarded as a harmless hallucination, as a chemically evoked reaction (Griffiths et al. 2011), as a symptom of a neurological illness (Greyson et al. 2014), or as an indicator for a true religious experience (Kroll and Bachrach 2005: 182– 202). There is no direct contact between physical, organic, mental and social processes. These spheres of reality are emergent and have an Eigenstate; i. e., none of them can be reduced to another one (Emmeche et al. 2000), they are mutually environments for each other. The continuum of energy and matter is interrupted by establishing boundaries between the mentioned spheres of reality during evolution. Boundaries enable organic, psychic, and social systems to internally build complex structures in order to generate and process specific information. Physical, organic, mental and social processes are mediated through semiosis,

Note: I am thankful to Robert Yelle and Jenny Ponzo for critically reading an earlier version of the manuscript and for helpful comments, hints, and suggestions. The paper also benefited from intense discussions with Magnus Schlette and Lilith Apostel whom I warmly thank for many insights. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-008

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particularly through metaphorical signs. Thus, religion, including religious experience, as a special kind of social communication emerges by metaphorically connecting to its psychic, organic, and physical environment. According to a common definition of metaphor,¹ religion uses parts of its external environment as ‘source domains’ that are mapped with religion as the ‘target domain.’ Scientific reconstruction shows that religious experience, although considered as an immediate phenomenon within religious performance, is established and mediated through metaphorical signs. In general, metaphors are needed to make a mental state expressible as a meaningful entity (Cacciari 1998); metaphors constitute cognition in general (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Hofstadter and Sander 2013), and religious cognition in particular (Slingerland 2004). Mystical experiences have a neurophysiological substratum (d’Aquili and Newberg 1993), but they have to be communicated by metaphors (Phillips 1988). Bodily- as well as organically-, and thus physically- as well as physiologically-based perceptions are an important resource for constituting metaphors in order to constitute and articulate mental experiences. The Mind-as-Body Metaphor is very probably motivated by correlations between our external experience and our internal emotional and cognitive states, but the correlations alone will not explain the observed patterns of polysemy and semantic change. […] We would also like to explain the fact that the mappings are unidirectional: bodily experience is a source of vocabulary for our psychological state but not the other way around. The correlations are bidirectional and partial, but the mapping observed in semantic change and in synchronic metaphorical language is both unidirectional and more general than the correlations. Its unidirectionality alone would suggest the possibility that it is metaphorical in nature. (Sweetser 1990: 30)

Thus, the concept ‘embodiment’ of psychic processes means the direction in which bodily states and processes (in their physical and organic dimension) are—according to a common definition of metaphor (Lakoff 1986: 294)—the ‘source domain’ for building metaphors in order to constitute and articulate mental states as the ‘target domain’. This means that the mental system selects relevant data from its bodily (organic and physical) environment and uses it to make sense in order to express itself.² Semantic correlations between body

 Lakoff (1986: 294): “a metaphor is a structural mapping from one domain of subject matter (the source domain) to another (the target domain).”  This understanding of ‘embodiment’ stands in sharp contrast to the concept as it usually is understood, e. g., by Lakoff and Johnson (1999). For a critical evaluation of the concept ‘embodiment’ in the sense that cognition and feelings are embodied in the physical and physiological

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and mind are indicators for analogies between them drawn from the side of mental cognition and social communication. However, the fact that bodily states and processes are a resource used unidirectionally for building metaphors in order to constitute meaningful mental states and to communicate them is a clear hint that mind and body—although both consist of material and energetic states and processes—are not identical. OBEs may, but need not be part of religion. From a sociological perspective inspired by systems theory, religion is a societal communicative system that copes with otherwise undetermined contingency by means of the distinction immanent/transcendent (Luhmann 2013). The religious system is self-referential and differentiated from psychic, organic and physical processes as well as from other societal systems and at the same time interacts with its environment system-internally. Just as consciousness is a special kind of complex arrangement of interacting neurons and is dependent on, but distinguished from other neural processes that are responsible for physiological activities (Tononi 2012), religion is a process that combines specific elements of socio-cultural communication and transforms them into system-internal information. Religion differentiates itself from its societal environment via the code immanent/transcendent. Thus, it is able to proceed as the societal function of ultimately coping with otherwise undetermined contingency (Luhmann 2013). Religion constitutes itself via the attribution of something as being religious (Taves 2009—including respective family resemblances; Kleine 2013). What happens in individual psyches (i. e., in perceptual and mental processes) could not form as religion, if it would not be addressed as religion, i. e., communicated as religion. As a socio-cultural fact, religion in general and religious experience in particular proceed through communication (Luhmann 1998; Krech 2017). Religious experience can never be accessed directly (Sharf 1998), but only as the result of a prior attribution of religiosity to a mental perception; in other words, as “modes of communicating what the verbal marker ‘inner experience’ points to, that is, the ways in which mystics have presented their teachings about God’s action in the transformation of consciousness, whether they put it in autobiographical or in more objective forms” (McGinn 2001: 156). Action also has to be observed and identified as religion in order to be religious action; and a physical object is not relevant for religion unless a religious meaning is ascribed to it. Since religion proceeds as communication, it has the mental, organic and physical spheres as its environment—just as is the case with the biosphere, where each organic entity

body see Goschler (2005). She stresses the aspect that bodily experiences and concepts of the body are socio-culturally constituted (Goschler 2005: 48).

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has an external environment upon which it is dependent and which it has to interact with, but from which it is also different in order be able to qualify as an organism. The same holds true for religion. If there would be no psyches, which can perceive and articulate themselves, and no organic body including the brain as the physiological condition for psychic processes, and no physical environment, there would be no socio-cultural reality and thus no religion as a part of it. Psychic, organic and physical processes are an environmental prerequisite for religious communication, but they do not belong to religion as a special system of meaning itself. The relation between external prerequisites and the religious system itself equals the relation between cause and effect to a certain extent: a cause has an effect, but an effect is not identical with its cause. Religion can only system-internally refer to its environment. For example, a text which deals with religious topics needs a physical (and, dependent on the medium, a chemical) environment—a stone, papyrus, paper as well as writing instruments, etc.—, and it has to have readers (i. e. psychic systems) who deal with the text—namely recite, interpret, translate, comment on it, etc. A text is dependent on these environmental conditions, but also has a medial existence of its own. The same holds true for other media such as pictures, reliefs and further material objects (e. g., a square stone that is designated as an altar) which, from a semiotic perspective, can all be considered as texts. The environment of a given religion is relevant for the study of religion, only if religion itself refers to it, i. e., attributes special meaning to it by means of the religious code immanent/transcendent. For example, a text can give religious meaning to its physical presence (for instance in the shape of a dhāraṇī that has to be carried in an amulet in order to function as a piece of religious text, or, the physical copy of a Bible to be kissed). If scholars deal with the environment of religion without any empirical evidence of relevance for religion, namely, the meaning-making dimension by means of the code immanent/transcendent that alone constitutes something as religious, they might identify important conditions for and effects of religion, but do not seem to be interested in religion itself. The fact that religious communication has to rely on the senses as the ‘door’ for psychic and physiological perceptions and articulations is somewhat trivial. Nevertheless, the question of how religion makes sense of the senses is not.

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1 The case of Mechthild of Magdeburg Mechthild of Magdeburg³ is known for reporting special religious experiences, even OBEs. Her book Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead) (from now on “FLG”) is an assortment of mystical visions, letters, reflections, prayers, and advice. In II.18 the text describes the way of how the soul can “touch” (berret) the “freedom of God” (gottes vrîheit) and refers to senseperception:

Figure 12. The interfolding of sense-perception, body and psyche by religious meaning.

 Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1207– ca. 1282) was a Christian medieval mystic. She was born in a noble Saxon family. It is reported that she had her first vision of the Holy Spirit at the age of twelve. In 1230 Mechthild of Magdeburg left her home and became a Beguine probably at Magdeburg, Saxonia. There she seemed to have exercised a position of authority in a Beguine community. The Beguines are Christian lay religious orders.

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Table. Mechtild von Magdeburg’s vision Middle High German version⁴ (Mechthild von Magdeburg : )

English version (Mechthild von Magdeburg : )

Wie die sele berret gottes vrîheit in aht dingen

How the soul interprets God’s wooing in eight things

Herre, min fsse sint geuerwet mit dem blte diner waren lsunge, min vedren sint verebent mit diner edeln erwelunge, min munt ist gerihtet mit dinem heligen geiste, min ŏgen sint geklret in dinem frigen liehte, min hŏbet ist geslehtet mit diner getrwen beschirmunge, min wandlunge ist lustlich von diner milten gabe, min flug ist gesnellet mit diner unrůwigen lust, min irdensch sinken kunt von diner einunge mines lichamen. Je grsser lsunge du mir gist, je langer ich in dir můs sweben.

Lord, my feet are stained with the blood of Your true act of redemption, my feathers have been smoothed by Your noble favour, my mouth has been formed by Your Holy Spirit, my eyes transfigured by Your fiery light, my head is made sleek by Your faithful protection, my movement is delightful because of Your generous gift, my flight is made swift by Your restless desire, my sinking back to earth is because of Your union with my body. The more You free me, the longer I may hover in You.

The final words of the quoted passage constitute a sequence that can be brought into the following structure (Figure 12): The experience which is communicated is min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) (1). It is interpreted by the cognitive concept of diner einunge mines lichamen (Your union with my body) (2). This concept is a first reference to religious meaning and triggers the OBE (3). The OBE is signified by lsunge (redemption or release) (4) from the body as the medium of the OBE. The medium lsunge (redemption or release) refers to the concept of du (You [= God]) (5) that is a second reference to religious meaning. The concept of du (You [= God]) triggers the relation between ich (I [= the perception of the lyrical subject])⁵ (6) and in dir můs sweben (may hover in You [= God]) (7) as the experience of an OBE. Thus, “hovering in God” is the communicated sensual perspective from which the entire passage including the experience of “sinking back to earth” gets its religious significance. The passage is shaped by two semantic fields that are used for building metaphors.⁶ Gravity is one of them. From the perspective of religious sense making, ‘up’ is the ‘positive’ (transcendent) value, while ‘down’ is the ‘negative’ (immanent) value (for the case of Jewish mysticism see Idel 2005; regarding Daoism see Eskildsen 2007). In religious communication, both directions are religiously

 The original written in Middle Low German is lost.  Regarding the lyrical subject in beguine mysticism see Newman (1995: 143 – 153).  For a collection of the metaphors used in the text FLG see Lüers (1926).

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valued; e. g., hell is, although not necessarily, often considered to be ‘down’ (Bernstein 1993: 60, 146; Bremmer 2014; Stausberg 2009; Le Goff 1990). “Vertical orientation is […] commonly used in metaphors that describe religious concepts. Jesus and God are considered the ‘most high,’ whereas the antithesis of God, Satan, is considered to be a ‘lowly’ being. Such metaphors likely develop through the historical belief that god resides high in the heavens, whereas Satan resides deep in the underworld” (Meier et al. 2014: 51). Thus, religion—as a special coordination system for giving meaning to physical space—connects to ‘normal,’ i. e. non-religious, meaning such as attributions of social status like “high status is up” or political attribution like “power is up” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 16)⁷ and transforms it into religious meaning. min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) goes ‘down’, and lsunge (redemption or release) from the body goes ‘up’. Both directions are mediated by sweben (hovering) in the case of the text FLG. Sensual perception of space with the communicative sign ‘body’ as its medium hovers between heaven and earth (and even ‘deeper’: hell). ‘Hovering’ is the bodily equivalent of the metaphor of fluidity that the text often uses and the spatial metaphor of the unio mystica. Erotic experience is the other semantic field for building metaphors in the text FLG. Eroticism is a common metaphorical tool for mystical communication (Bataille 1986: 221– 251). Mechthild of Magdeburg explains that “God could no longer contain himself” (Mechthild von Magdeburg 2003: I.22), hence He created humanity in the overflow of desire. The human soul—thus also Mechthild’s soul —is the bride, and the lyrical subject “is produced in part by the vicissitudes of erotic experience” (Newman 1995: 143). One of the strongest erotic expressions is: “I am in you, and you are in me, we could not be closer, for we two have flowed into one” (Mechthild von Magdeburg 2003: III.5). The metaphors of fluidity bear the connotations of seminal and vaginal fluids that intermingle during the act of sexual intercourse. While other mystical authors (such as Bernhard of Clairvaux) interpret the bodily-sensual metaphors allegorically and stress spiritual sensual See also Connerton (1989: 74): “The direction upwards, against gravity, establishes the postural base in our experience of lived space for the dichotomous sense to which we attach values, such as those expressed in the oppositions between high and low, rise and decline, climbing and falling, superior and inferior, looking up to and looking down upon. It is through the essentially embodied nature of our social existence, and through the incorporated practices based upon these embodyings, that these oppositional terms provide us with metaphors by which we think and live. Culturally specific postural performances provide us with a mnemonics of the body.” And William Stokoe (2001: 42) writes: “Meanings like ‘up’ and ‘down’ have been associated with human vision and movement for a very long time, thus they have become conventionally as well as naturally linked to their meanings. (They are both an index and a symbol.)” See also Schwartz (1981). I owe the last reference to Robert Yelle.

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ity, the text FLG accentuates the features of bodily unification (Seelhorst 2003: 93). However, the mystical unification with God bears analogies with sexual intercourse among human beings, but the two are not identical (Keul 1999: 96). The text FLG draws analogies to everyday communication and transforms them into religious experience—whatever happens in the brain of the author and the readers. Both, the consciousness and the social circumstances of mystical communication function as mutual filters that select various perceptions in order to fit with accepted or at least acceptable socio-cultural patterns (Dinzelbacher 2001).⁸

2 Semiotic analysis According to Charles Sanders Peirce (1994), three aspects of semiosis and three corresponding types of signs (among other types) are to be considered: ‒ The sign S that designates an object.⁹ The kind of sign, which stresses the aspect of the sign itself in relation to its object, is called icon. ‒ The object O that the sign points at, which is both internal and external to semiosis; that is why Peirce speaks of an immediate and a dynamic object: “[…] we have to distinguish the Immediate Object, which is the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign, from the Dynamical Object, which is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its Representation” (Peirce 1994: 4.536). The kind of sign which stresses the aspect of hinting at an object, is called index. ‒ The interpretant I that mediates between the sign S and the object O in the shape of conventional concepts. The kind of sign which stresses the aspect of the interpretant in relation to the object is called symbol.

 It would be an interesting investigation to deal with the question why erotic metaphors are so common in the history of religions. Since religion is essentially dependent on using ‘source domains’ from its environment to build metaphors and thus constituting religious sense, eroticism, next to death and kinship, is a ‘natural’ and early candidate for a ‘source domain.’ The contributions in Machacek and Wilcox (2003) provide various examples from different religious traditions for the metaphorical usage of eroticism for constituting religious sense.  “Writers who suppose that Peirce held the sign to be a triad or a triadic relation, rather than one relatum of a triadic relation, must then invent a third part or third relatum, in addition to the sign’s object and its interpretant. This they usually call a ‘sign vehicle’. They then identify a sign either as vehicle plus object plus interpretant or as the relation that binds the three. But there is no basis for this in any Peircean text. The ‘sign vehicle’ is the sign, as Peirce conceived of signs, and the object and interpretant are other things, distinct from the sign” (Short 2007: 19).

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Semiosis always consists of the triadic relation between S, O, and I as the elementary semiotic mechanism. In turn, semiosis constitutes the semiosphere. The semiosphere is sub-differentiated into the organic, mental, and socio-cultural semiosphere. The latter is differentiated into sub-systems such as politics, economics, law, science, religion, arts, education, health and social aid system, etc. that—like the entire socio-cultural semiosphere and the other semiospheres—are autopoietic, self-referential and based on their own code.¹⁰ Self-referentiality means that the mediating interpretation of the relation between sign and object is an inherent part of semiosis. Peirce has coined the term ‘interpretant’ to avoid the misunderstanding that a subject external to the signification process interprets the relation between sign and object. Peirce “advisedly speaks of ‘interpretant’ and not of (human) interpreters” (Baltzer 1994: 360; my translation). Human beings also consist of signs, namely of organic and mental semiosis, and are socio-culturally addressed through signs, for example as “Mary” or “Peter” or “the man in Blue Jeans” or “my mother,” etc. In fact, human beings as entities consisting of mental, organic, and physical states and processes are never interpretants in socio-cultural semiosis. They come semiotically into existence only as an other-reference of semiosis, namely if a “person” as a sign is an aim of ascription in social communication (for instance: “Why did you do this?” or: “What did Peter mean when saying this?”). Thus, the sign aspect ‘interpretant’ has to be treated in a broad sense: “Whatever process determines reference qualifies as an interpretant” (Deacon 1997: 63). The three aspects of semiosis always refer to each other during semiosis; they never have an independent existence. Thus, the sign has a triadic structure: it “stands for an object in some respect to some interpretant” (Parmentier 1994: 16). However, “the terms interpretant, sign and object are a triad whose defini-

 The concept of the semiosphere has been introduced by Juri Lotman in 1982; see the English reprint in Lotman (2005). However, the concept seems to be too broad and does not seem to take the differentiation of evolutionary levels and semiotic systems into account. According to Lotman, semiotic systems are “immersed” within the “semiotic space” and can only work through interaction with the semiotic space. “The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space of the culture in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere. The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture” (Lotman 1990: 125). In other words: “semiosphere is a sphere of semiosis and an experience thereof; and as such, it is a prerequisite for any single act of communication to be interpreted as one” (Kotov and Kull 2011: 180). However, the concept of the semiosphere is interesting insofar as it takes self-reference of semiotic processes analogous to organic processes into account (Lotman 1990: 125; see also Nöth 2006). The concept of the socio-cultural semiosphere used here is understood in accordance with a theory of societal differentiation that is informed by systems theory (Luhmann 2012– 2013).

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tions are circular. Each of the three is defined in terms of the other two” (Savan 1988: 43). With regards to the specification of signs, “[n]o particular objects are intrinsically icons, indices, or symbols. They are interpreted to be so, depending on what is produced in response. In simple terms, the differences between iconic, indexical, and symbolic relationships derive from regarding things either with respect to their form, their correlations with other things, or their involvement in systems of conventional relationships. […] These modes of reference aren’t mutually exclusive alternatives; though at any one time only one of these modes may be prominent, the same signs can be icons, indices, and symbols depending on the interpretive process. But the relationships between icons, indices, and symbols are not merely a matter of alternative interpretations. They are to some extent internally related to one another” (Deacon 1997: 71). Semiosis consists of a threefold relation: of a signification relation between S and O, a meaning relation between O and I, and a pragmatic relation between I and S (Walther 1979: 113 – 116). At the same time, an ordering relation exists between I and O as well as between O and S, whereas S and I are connected through an exchange relation. In addition, there are three founding relations: S founds the relation between I and O, I founds the relation between S and O, and O founds the relation between S and I. All in all, the triadic unity between S, O, and I consists of nine relations, as shown by Ditterich (1990: 91– 103) and Toth (2008: 28 – 36) with reference to polycontextural logic developed by Gotthard Günther (1976) (Figure 13).

Figure 13. The nine relations between the sign S, the object O, and the interpretant I.

However, the triadic relation between S, O, and I has to be specified as soon as semiosis proceeds systemically. The specification is dependent on the intrasystem position in which a semiotic unit of S, O, and I is situated. In principle, there must be a path from every element of the system to every other element of the system; this is an essential criterion every system has to meet (Backlund 2000:

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448). Furthermore, “a system is the difference between system and environment” (Luhmann 2006: 38). Thus, the environment that is relevant for the system is exclusively represented within the system. The socio-cultural semiotic system does not have direct access to its amorphic surrounding (Umgebung) outside the system.¹¹ Taking these criteria into consideration, the passage of the text FLG under investigation can be brought into the following model of a synchronous state of a socio-cultural semiotic system (Figure 14):

Figure 14. The OBE of Mechthild of Magdeburg as a semiotic system in a certain synchronous state.

Since any specific semiosis needs to start from exceeding a sign (Leone 2014: S50), min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) is in the position of S1 with the  The concept of environment (Umwelt) as belonging to the system has been introduced by Jakob J. von Uexküll. He also distinguishes between system-internal environment and system-external surrounding (Umgebung) that is irrelevant for the system and thus amorphic; see Uexküll (2014).

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quality of iconicity; i. e., min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) expresses an immediate experience in which S, O, and I seem to be one and the same. In principle, S1 consists of a triadic relation between S, O, and I. It, however, focuses on the sign aspect during the sequential process of the semiotic system. In the existing system, where there is a path from every element of the system to every other element, min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) can also focus on the interpretant aspect in order to mediate the relation between dine einunge mines lichamen (Your union with my body) as a sign and ich (I [= the lyrical subject]) as an object. Or, it qualifies as an object to which the OBE hints at and that is interpreted by du (You [= God]). Focusing on one of the three semiotic aspects holds true for every sign that is part of the socio-cultural semiotic system; this is due to the unidirectional way of building metaphors from body states as a source domain via mental process to social communication, as mentioned above. Min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) in the position of S1 triggers dine einunge mines lichamen (Your union with my body) in the position of I1; in turn, I1 provides min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) with religious meaning (in contrast to, e. g., a physical body state after stumbling). Dine einunge mines lichamen (Your union with my body) then triggers the OBE in the position of O1 and also provides it with religious meaning. O1 is the place, where the socio-cultural semiotic system—controlled by the two interpretants—selects relevant data from its physical and organic environment and transforms it into religious meaning. In turn, the OBE evokes lsunge (redemption or release) from the body in the position of S2. In other words: lsunge (redemption or release) is a sign for the OBE as the object O1, namely an index that draws a correlation between lsunge (redemption or release) and the OBE. Lsunge (redemption or release) then triggers du (You [= God]) in the position of the interpretant I2. In turn, du (You [= God]) provides lsunge (redemption or release) with religious meaning. Finally, du (You [= God]) in the position of I2 determines ich (I [= the lyrical subject]) as the object in the position O2. O2 is the place, where the socio-cultural semiotic system—controlled by one of the two interpretants in each case—selects relevant data from its psychic environment, i. e. from the psychic systems of the recipients of the text, and transforms it into religious meaning. The intrasystem output is in dir sweben (hovering in You [= God]) in the position of S3 as a symbol. In the semiotic state modelled above (Figure 14), sinken (sinking) and sweben (hovering) lose the indexical aspect of everyday language referring to physical processes, and the iconic aspect of a present quality, namely that of tying and loosening, is stressed instead, whereas lsunge (redemption or release) focuses on the indexical aspect of a bodily experience (that is, in turn, as well semioticized).

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It is important to consider that semiotic representation in the positions of O1 and O2 does not mean a direct reference to the surrounding outside the semiotic system, but signifies the intrasystem observation of the environment. The sociocultural semiotic system—controlled by the two interpretants—selects data from its surrounding at the position of the sets O1 and O2 as the two input locations of the semiotic system and transforms it into religious meaning with the signs S1, S2, and S3 as the intrasystem outputs. Semiotic reference in the position of O1 as part of the ecosystem is sensitive to the system’s physical and organic environment and exchanges data between the system and its environment. Like organisms, semiotic systems do not passively adapt to conditions in their environment, but actively construct and modify observed (i. e. distinguished) environmental conditions outside the system that may influence other environmental sources of selection (regarding organisms see Lewontin 2000). In contrast, reference in the position of O2 is strictly code-driven; this means that the system in the position of O2 selects only the kind of data of its psychic environment that is relevant for processing information in the semiotic system. In an analogy to cell metabolism, the iconic semiotic function I1 → O2 → S1 and the symbolic semiotic functions I2 → O2 → S3 perform a ‘metabolism’ that transforms psychic data into socio-cultural information, while in the functions S1 → I1, S1 → I2 and S3 → I2 the semiotic code is replicated. This is in accordance with the observation of Anthony Wilden (1980: 47) that “there are always two possible interpretants (Peirce’s term) of the sign, one referring to the code and the other to the context of the message. The interpretant referring to the code is linked to it by similarity (metaphor), and the interpretant referring to the message is linked to it by contiguity (metonymy).” The relation between min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) (S1), the OBE (O1) and dine einunge mines lichamen (Your union with my body) (I1) constitutes the initial metaphor based on the code, while the relation between lsunge (redemption or release) (S2), the OBE (O1), and du (You [= God]) (I2) processes information on the basis of metonymic contiguity. Thus, processing information consists of two semiotic steps, namely O1 → S2 → I2 and I2 → O2 → S3. This is in accordance with Gregory Bateson’s understanding of information as “a difference which makes a difference” (1987: 276, 321 et passim).

3 Mechthild’s OBE as religious communication Mechthild’s text FLG is usually labeled as mystical. I cannot go into detail regarding mystical communication, but just want to stress that it is a kind of linguistic realization of the basic assumption of negative theology, namely that the

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transcendent God is ineffable (Seelhorst 2003: 50). Moreover, it is one of the clearest examples of religion’s main task to cope with the paradox of describing transcendence, which is indescribable in principle, with immanent means. The distinction of transcendence and immanence is not unique to religion, but is constitutional for semiosis in general. This is not just the case in the sense of the Christian-Western temporal and spatial symbolization of transcendence. The distinction between immanence and transcendence is at work in a universal, modal theoretical and epistemological sense, notably by indicating something, which is not in the here and now of everyday consciousness, and also something which is not experienced as a genuine part of the self. This corresponds more or less to what philosophical anthropology (especially Helmuth Plessner 1981), the socio-phenomenologically oriented sociology (Schütz 1932: 109; Berger and Luckmann 1966; Luckmann 1967; Soeffner 1991; 2010) and a pragmatic theory of religion (Joas 2008) understand by the term transcendence. Based on this understanding, many types of transcendence exist: in addition to religion, there is also history, sociality (namely, the awareness of an alter ego), visions of ideal orders such as utopias, future, dreams, surprising experiences and events, artistic and aesthetic experiences, etc. If one does not distinguish between the principle of transcendence as such and its religious form, then everything outside of the direct experience of the here and now would be religious and all cats would be grey by night. I suggest therefore to distinguish the type of relationship between immanence and transcendence that we call religion from other types as follows: Religion has to cope with the problem of how one can describe the transcendence that cannot be represented in everyday experience with immanent means: in other words: how one can transform the unavailable into the available or the unspeakable into the utterable. This is of course a paradox and as such cannot be sustained long term. Accordingly, religion would have to completely evaporate, with the result that—at least as a social fact—it would no longer exist. Religion must, therefore, represent transcendence with immanent signs and in this way keep it in social communication. Accordingly, the necessarily figurative character of religious communication arises. It is founded, essentially, in the fact that the transcendent (the absent—in whatever form it may take) that religious communication is based on, itself cannot be communicated and therefore must be described using immanent (known, familiar, present) means (Leone 2014). In religious communication, circumstances, which are considered new and different (for instance, subjective experiences, which cannot be communicated with established schemes of experience) are made communicable by referring back to the familiar, so by translating the unfamiliar/unknown into something familiar/known by means of the religious code immanent/transcendent in order to ultimately cope with otherwise undetermined contingency in differ-

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ence to other ways of dealing with contingency (for instance, law, insurance, political rule, etc.). In accordance with the assumption that the religious code in nuce comprises all that is necessary for religious communication (as is the case with the genome in organic evolution), the binary distinction together with its mediating unity must be found in the religious code. Taking the distinctions between self-reference (system) and other-reference (environment) as well as the code distinction between immanence and transcendence into consideration, including their selfreferential iconic unity, their other-referential indexical relation, and the self-referential symbolic mediation of their unity and relation, Mechthild’s OBE can be modeled as a religious semiotic system in a certain synchronous state as follows (Figure 15):

Figure 15. Mechthild’s OBE as a religious semiotic system in a certain synchronous state.

Religious communication—like any communication—consists of an interplay between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, as introduced to semiotics by Charles

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Morris (1938). At the syntactic level, religious communication proceeds on the basis of both the distinction and unity of immanence and transcendence. Min irdensch sinken (my earthly sinking) is situated in the position of self-referential immanence (S1), because it is a communicative signification of a feeling that reflects an immediate bodily emotion.¹² Dine einunge mines lichamen (Your union with my body) is placed in the position of self-referential transcendence (I1), because the phrase refers to God as a transcendent entity. The concept einunge (union; the ‘unio mystica’) semantically reflects the iconic unity of S1, I1, and O1. Lsunge (physical meaning: separation; religious meaning: redemption) stands in the position of the indexical relation of immanence and transcendence, because it refers to the physical process of separation and likewise to the religious concept of redemption. Du (You [= God]) is placed in the position of other-referential transcendence, because it refers to an actual capacity of God (Je grsser lsunge du mir gist [the more You grant me redemption]). Ich (I [= the lyric subject]) is situated in the position of other-referential immanence, because the lyric subject stands for mental processes of readers of the text. Ich in dir můs sweben (I may hover in You [= God]) stands in the position of the selfreferential symbolic mediation of immanence and transcendence, because the phrase refers to hovering as a physical state and likewise as a religious experience. ‘Hovering’ semantically reflects the semiotic task of the symbol S3, namely to mediate between the system (self-similarity) and its internally represented environment (relational representation). It is—again—to be noted that there is no direct connection between O1 as the physical and organic environment of the semiotic system, i. e. the body state, physiological processes, perceptions, and emotions of the author and the lyric subject, i. e. the reader, respectively, and O2 as the environment consisting of the author’s and the lyric subject’s, i. e. the reader’s, mental processes with feelings, intuition, and thoughts. Both kinds of environment are mediated through communicatively activated semiosis. While the semiotic position of O2 (i. e. selected data from the mental environment) is the immediate object, i. e. the sign as it is represented within semiosis, the semiotic position of O1, where data from the organic and physical environment is selected and the OBE is situated, is the dynamic object. O1 is dynamic, because it is sensitive to its environment and can be signified both iconically

 The distinction between emotions and feelings is adopted from Damasio and Carvalho (2013: 145): feelings are “[t]he mental experiences that accompany body states. Action programmes (drives and emotions) can elicit feelings. Experiences related to exteroceptive senses (vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell) commonly cause emotions and ensuing feelings but in general are not felt in and of themselves. This definition also excludes the use of ‘feeling’ in the sense of ‘thinking’ or ‘intuiting’.” In the iconic state, feelings are identified with emotions.

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by S1 and indexically by S2. Thus, the signification of O1 is an “iconic index.”¹³ Iconicity and indexicality of the OBE are symbolically mediated by the sign S3. At the semantic level, figurative language regulates the connection between religious communication and its environment in the shape of psychic processes on the one hand and organic as well as physical processes on the other hand. The two semantic fields of gravity and eroticism correspond with each other. While the erotic metaphor expresses the union between the lyrical subject and God, the metaphor of gravity and hovering as its opposite expresses the direction of the unification process. The semiotically assigned body (as the indexical sign for physical and physiological processes) of the lyrical subject (as the semiotic position where semiosis selects relevant data from its mental environment) is the medium for experiencing transcendence articulated by sinking, redemption, and hovering. It is again to be noted that the unidirectional way of building metaphors for mental processes on the basis of bodily states and processes is essential for the mind-as-body metaphor (Sweetser 1990: 30). Otherwise, sinking and hovering in the case of the passage of the text FLG would not be a metaphor in a strict linguistic sense, and, more importantly, imagination would have to stick to physical laws; i. e., the body could not be described as being able to hover in God. The unidirectional way that the metaphors of sinking, redemption, and hovering in God take is the condition for the religious meaning of transcending the body. And this, in turn, is a condition for the embodiment of the religious concept of the unification with God; i. e., the semiotically addressed body becomes a narrative device that exposes a tension between the physical and the religious without prioritizing one over the other (Ayanna 2013). Religious communication ‘folds in’¹⁴ mental states and physical processes and provides them with religious meaning through the two interpretants. Thus, the semantic level corresponds with the syntactic arrangement described above. It is again to be noted that there is no direct connection between O1 as the physical and organic environment and O2 as the mental environment of the religious semiotic system. This means that bodily states, physiological processes, perceptions, and emotions of the author and the lyric subject, i. e. the reader or reciter, respectively, and O2 as the environment consisting of the author’s and the lyric subject’s, i. e. the reader’s or reciter’s, mental processes with feelings, intuition, and thoughts are mediated through communicatively activated religious semiosis.  The term “iconic index” has been introduced by Michael Silverstein (2004: 627) in order to designate “the literal form of ritual text.” An “iconic index” is “a picture made real in the here-and-now.” I owe this reference to Robert Yelle.  I use ‘folding’ as an epistemic metaphor in the sense of Deleuze (1993). The graphs shown in Figure 12 and 15 visualize the process of folding.

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At the pragmatic level, body and text are related to each other in a specific manner—not only, but also in the European Middle Ages. Body means for texts the connection to the situation at present; for the rhetoric of texts, the significance of performative speech acts; and for the content of texts, the description of gestures, attitudes, and bodily shaped actions. On the other hand, text means for bodies the development of manuscript related practices, loud or silent, collective or individual reading, and the diffusion of scriptural principles during the production, distribution and reception of texts (Kiening 2003: 13). The relation between text and body enables the semiotic arrangement of the three sign aspects sketched above: The indexical aspect is stressed by the metonymic reference to the body; the iconic aspect is accentuated through the experience as is metaphorically present in the text; and the symbolic aspect is articulated by the religious concept of hovering in God. In the case of the text FLG, body and text as two distinguished media become one medium through semiotically structured religious communication. Thus, the text FLG is not a result of antecedent experience and oral communication, but written under the condition of a scriptural concept (Stridde 2009: 142– 146). Its content is self-referential. It would be difficult to demonstrate evidence for hovering in God in oral face-to-face communication (except for someone who has witnessed someone hovering in God and tells it third person; or, someone tells someone else that he or she has been hovering in God; however, evidence for the absent event has to be generated in these cases all the more). Communicating extraordinary religious experience orally has to work with signs that are, in regards to semantics, more indirect than is the case with written communication. In charismatic communication, for example, glossolalia and gestural entrancement (eye rolling, cramping, etc.) can become indicators of extraordinary religious experience (Krech 2015). The text FLG is based on the distinction and relation between textuality and orality. Whereas oral communication would need at least two persons participating in the communication, the text FLG addresses God as You, but actually is written as a monologue. The monologue has also to distinguish between the grammatical units of subject and object, but conceptualizes them as becoming an undifferentiated unity (unio mystica) (Stridde 2009: 297). At the same time, the text FLG hides its written character and its function as a medium by means of the monologue and thus makes it authentic and performable (Herberichs 2009: 278) as well as immersive (Nemes 2012). The text FLG even blurs the distinction between the lyrical subject and God by stating: “This book should be received with joy, for the words are spoken by God Himself” (Mechthild von Magdeburg 2003: Prologue, 25). Thus, the reader is the eye witness of Mechthild’s testimony (Herberichs 2009: 282) and might at the same time, while reading or reciting and identifying with the

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lyrical subject, become the subject of the unification process. The lyrical subject becomes a cover free of any context; it is a ‘cover’, into which the reader might ‘slip’ easily (Linden 2011: 379) and thus, maybe by reading the text out loud, transform from a spectator to a participant (Nemes 2012: 47). The text FLG “gives rise to questions like: is it the bride of Christ speaking, or is it her divine beloved? Whose fließende Licht is it?” (Keller 2000: 46). The lack of clarity is the condition for the text describing the unification process and an expression of the fundamental paradox of denoting transcendence that is unavailable in principle and thus has to be mediated by immanent signs. Texts in the European Middle Ages—such as the text FLG—are performed communication through reading and reciting and thus “an entanglement of representation and presence” (Kiening 2003: 13), just as is the case with performative speech acts such as “hereby, I swear”. In addition, the specific character of religious language enables religious communication to articulate “many ways of belonging to the world before [and after; VK] we oppose ourselves to things understood as ‘objects’ that stand before a ‘subject’” (Ricœur 1995: 222). The same holds true for mystical communication: During performance, the unio mystica overcomes the duality between subject and object, between the lyrical subject including the reader or reciter on the one hand and God on the other. The experience of the unio mystica is the result of the process of writing and reading in female mysticism including the text FLG—in contrast to, for example, Eckhart. While the text FLG in general and the passage under investigation in particular constitute the unio mystica as a process (“the more…, the longer…”), Eckhart adopts the key concept “becoming nothing” (Zu-Nichts-Werden) from female mysticism, but understands this state as a prerequisite for gaining knowledge of God beyond any experience (Haug 2008: 29). Among other authors of mystical texts, Mechthild of Magdeburg “pioneered the use of the language of indistinction” in Western Christianity (McGinn 2012: 205) for describing the process of the unio mystica. However, the unio mystica is a fluid and precarious state. This is already reflected in the title of the text FLG and also in various passages (Franklin 1978). Therefore, the three semiotic aspects of sign, object, and interpretant as well as the sign types of icon, index, and symbol cannot be fixed at the semantic and syntactic level. The words of the passage under investigation acquire a stable position and a certain meaning only due to the interplay between syntax and semantics mediated by pragmatic performance. In other words: Whether the text works or not, is a question of pragmatic performance through reading or reciting. The text FLG is an example of essentially textually performed mysticism. It functions as religious communication through its circular and recursive structure. Thus, it is no surprise that the text FLG often has been received as a genuine religious piece (Nemes 2015).

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In summary, the analysis shows that the immediacy of religious experience during performing religious communication is both constituted and mediated in a twofold manner. First, it is constituted and mediated through textual communication. Second, the immediacy of religious experience is constituted and mediated within the text itself through semiosis. Metaphorical signs are needed to communicatively constitute religious experience in general and an OBE in particular. Religious communication can only refer to mental and organic as well as bodily states and link them through metaphorical and metonymic signs. While metaphorical signs generate religious information, metonymic signs process and mediate it. Religious thinking can—and, of course, scientific analysis has to—deliberate the metaphorical nature of religious signs. However, within religious communication that is performed immediately and during communicated religious experience the signs are not to be understood metaphorically (the text FLG does not say and mean: “… the longer I metaphorically may hover in You”). Religious reality is constituted through metaphorical signs, but it has a literal and metonymic impact during religious performance. The ambiguity of performance, on the one hand, and of processing information through reflection, on the other hand, belongs to the characteristics of “iconic indices” (Silverstein 2004: 627) and especially of metaphorical signs: “The metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies both ‘is not’ and ‘is like’” (Ricœur 1978: 6). This ambiguity is the condition for processing religious information on the basis of the religious code.

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Mohamed Bernoussi

The supremacy of the Qur’anic sign and its impacts on the Arabic Muslim culture To Abdelkébir Khatibi and his very few real readers.

1 Introduction In my paper, I would like to tackle an unresolved issue, concerning the status of the Qur’anic sign and its impacts on the Arab-Muslim Culture. To deal with this issue, I refer to Abdelkbir Khatibi, who relates the superiority of the Arab-Muslim Culture to the original supremacy of one text, the Qur’an, over all potential texts. He explains this supremacy in a remarkably semiotic manner by saying that “One of the secrets of the Qur’an is to have transformed the letter as a sign into a supersignificant rhetorical argument, and to have cracked the very sign of its message, of its enunciation, in such a way that for the believer’s listening, the meaning remains forever suspended, distant and wandering” (Khatibi 1974: 180). As a basis, I refer to Khatibi’s citation (1974) about the supremacy of the sign to explain the concept of Al I’jaaz (inimitability) confounded, since its creation, with the Qur’an. I will also show how this notion has been institutionalized throughout centuries (Al Tabari 310 of Hegira / 922; Al Jorjani 471 of Hegira / 1078) in order to make a reinforced and absolute concept of textuality and ’Ilm (Absolute Knowledge). One of the immediate consequences of Al I’jaaz is to eradicate textuality and the materiality of the Qur’anic sign to put an end, in a quasidefinitive manner, and by the same occasion, to any attempt at intertextuality (excluding that of Taha Hussein in the last century). The impacts of the immateriality of the Qur’anic Sign on the Arab-Muslim culture are enormous, and deserve to be approached with extreme seriousness, as I will do in the second part, through concrete and precise examples originating from Moroccan culture. This task will be an opportunity to make the semiotics of the religious text and the semiotics of culture able to engage in a dialogue.

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2 The making of the supremacy or the first institution of Al I’jaaz In the dictionary Lissan Al ARAB (Ibn Mandour 1955), I’jaaz is defined first as a loss of rigour, a kind of weakness and in other cases as a kind of sexual impotence (al Ajjir). In other contexts, the word Al I’jaaz signifies exclusivity, being a pioneer. Mu’jiza signifies the proof or the miracle given by a prophet. ‘Ajouz signifies what is beyond the back or lower back. Tajaaza signifies camels mating. In other cases it signifies precocity. In the whole article, we notice that all significations of the word Al I’jaaz are given equally without any hierarchy. We also notice that the author reserves a little sentence for the question of Qur’anic I’jaaz as it has now become a synonym of the supremacy of the Qur’an. When I deal with the origins of the institution of I’jaaz, I always recall the anecdote usually mentioned with malice by Umberto Eco (1994), about the Muslim lieutenant who ordered the burning of Alexandria’s library either because its books contradicted the Qur’an or because they repeated the same thing and were therefore useless. This story allows me to present briefly¹ the special status of the Qur’an granted from the first century of Hegira: the Qur’an is a revealed text; it is considered a text which is able to solve any kind of problems, anywhere and anytime. The Hadith, which means the prophet’s speech and pieces of advice that were learnt and taught by his followers and by those who came after, completes the Qur’an either to clarify some of its content or to solve certain ambiguities. The Qur’an then acquires a double legal and legislative power. Since the second century of Hegira, the action of the traditionalists aimed at reinforcing that power and making it eternal. Houari Touati explains: Insofar as they promoted the birth of a new field of knowledge, the traditionalists have developed a gnoseological theory where there is no science ‘Ilm’ except for that of religion and no sciences of religion except for that of the traditional ones. Considered a traditional knowledge, this ‘Ilm’ is based on Hadith, that is talks attributed to the prophet. It had early made Sunna, which forms the Islamic tradition, an authoritarian principle with a dogmatic status that placed it at the same level of The Quran while it gave it the right of abrogation. However, instead of assuming that action, traditionalists are sheltered behind the past and prestigious doctors to talk in their names. (Touati: 2010: 28)

 For a detailed survey on the discussions about the status of Qur’an, see Shah (2019).

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As Caliph Omar claimed in the first century: “Who wants to know should first believe.” Knowledge is closely linked to belief. Adonis has given us an excellent synthesis about the intellectual climate of this time: Knowledge is religious or nothing. It is exactly what Al Shafii expresses when he says: “the Speaker who is starting from the Book and the Sunna is the truth, the other is delirious.” Ibn Taimia expresses the same things in other terms: “All that differs from the Book and the Sunna is absolutely false.” Religion is the origin of the right knowledge. It is in Religion that knowledge found its rules, method and purpose. Religion, then, is not only the basis for knowing metaphysics, but also the basis for knowing the world. (Adonis 2002: 1/74)

These passages quoted by Adonis not only show the strong and sustained action of the Orthodox exegeses to put religion at the center of knowledge but also aim at substituting the sacred text for that same knowledge and the entire library.

3 Al Jahiz and Al Tabari or I’jaaz in the second, fourth and fifth centuries Parallel to the action of orthodox exegeses of the Qur’an, philosophers and scholastics gave precious contributions. Let’s remember that the second century of Hegira falls within the birth and the development of the most rationalist approach to the Arab-Muslim culture, called Al Mu’atazilah. The figure of Jahiz is very emblematic of that movement, even if he criticizes them several times.

3.1 Al Jahiz Al Jahiz was born in Bassorah in 776; he was the son of a slave; he used to sell fish in the public market in the daytime and rent a copyist’s shop at night for reading. He became a famous scholar, and was an active witness of many reigns and changes of the young and already powerful Dar Al Islam or House of Islam. He was a disciple of Al Naddam, the leader of the Mu’tazilite movement, and a witness to its dissolution under the reign of al Moutawakkil. Al Jahiz was a great traveler, an encyclopedic intellectual, and an activist. His activities during the ‘Mu’tazilite Movement’ allowed him to discover and master the Greek corpus, essentially Aristotle, whom he admired and criticized. He studied the Persian culture thanks to Ibn Al Mouqaffa’ and other Occidental cultures, such as the Christian and the Hebraic.

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Al Jahiz developed his theory of I’jaaz in two famous epistles: “On proofs of prophecy” and “On the creation of the Qur’an.” He confirmed that the Qur’an is among the strong proofs of the prophecy of Muhammad; he also confirmed the fact that no one can produce a book equal to the Qur’an because, as he claimed, “If a man from Arabs reads only a Sura to one of their preachers or rhetoricians, short or long, they realize, in regard to its dispositio and elocutio, its words and nature, how they are unable to make the same. And even if he defies the most eloquent of Arabs, his incapacity will be clear” (Al Jahiz n.d.: 176). This supremacy of the Qur’an is closely linked to the supremacy of both Arab poetry and Arab language. Arab language is an exception. It is, like God, inaccessible to Man (see Adonis 2002: 2/48). Al Jahiz specified, however, that the Qur’an defies people to present an equal text but God had exempted people from doing that. This theory is called “Asserfa.” It will have no development later. But in the ninth epistle, Al Jahiz clarifies his thoughts about I’jaaz and the Qur’an. He recognizes the I’jaaz but stresses that it is a text. To justify this, he says: And if they say: in fact, a thing cannot be created except in a metaphorical manner, because it is God who created it, adopted it and had the choice in doing that. And the creation of a thing signifies: to have the choice to leave it and to create another one, because things are bodies that cannot act. And the Qur’an is the contrary of that, a body and a sound, with dispositio and an elocutio, and an autonomous creation, free from any other thing, heard in the air, visible on the paper, fragmentable and communicable, linkable or not, […] and all the bodies it can support are in fact created and it is not a metaphor as the linguists claim. (Al Jahiz 2000: 4/221)

Curiously, these ideas of Al Jahiz will have no development or discussion in the future. Al Jahiz’s attitude is situated between the tradition which defends the I’jaaz of the Qur’an and a semiotic trend which recognizes that the form of the Qur’an is the form of any text. In other words, Al Jahiz does not envisage the Qur’an outside the process of reading, manipulating and communicating. He does not envisage it outside organs of sense, channels or supports. But at the same time, Al Jahiz does not develop the consequences of his very audacious assertions. Al Jahiz incarnates a moderate rationalist approach to the question of Al I’jaaz, which will be progressively abandoned in favor of the rhetorical one, as we will see in the following pages.

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3.2 Al Tabari (310 of Hegira/922 CE) Al Tabari was born in Aamil (in Tabaristaan). He was a disciple of the famous Al Bukhari (author of the Summa on Prophet’s talks, Al Sahih or the Authentificated) and has left us a monumental range of works about the Qur’an’s exegesis, history and Islamic jurisprudence. Among these works there is his Summa on the Qur’an interpretation (Jaami’ Al bayane fi ta’wiili aai al Qur’an) in thirty volumes written in 310 Hegira/ 922 CE. For Al Tabari, the Qur’an remains unattainable because its interpretation has three fundamental dimensions: the first one is that it remains unattainable because only God knows what it means; the second is that it remains specific to the prophet and it is partially expressed through his Hadiths (talks), and, finally, the third one is reserved to exegeses and to linguists who deeply know the tradition.

3.3 Al Jorjani (471 of Hegira/1078 CE) Al Jorjani belongs to the Abassid’s fifth century, essentially characterized by the beginning of the Tatar and Turkmen’s invasion and the Crusades. The book of Al Jorjani, Dalail Al I’jaaz (The Proofs of I’jaaz), is considered an event in the studies of rhetoric and Al I’jaaz. Al Jorjani began his book by making the apology of the Science of Signification (I’lm Al Maani), which allows everyone who practices it to discover secrets of life, to better grasp both moral and material things, and finally to get power. In Al Jorjani, the Science of Signification requires an in-depth study of Arabic poetry, which constitutes the origins of Al I’jaaz of the Qur’an. Many arguments have been developed in order to attest the importance of Arabic poetry. For the modern reader, the intentio auctoris does not appear clearly: Why did the author begin a book on rhetoric and I’jaaz by arguments on Arabic poetry? What is the link between Arabic poetry and the Qur’an, particularly when we know that Islam in the beginning condemned poetry? In fact, the entire book can be classified as a manual of rhetoric defending its legitimacy by frequent quotations from Arabic poetry, the Qur’an and Hadith. Arabic Poetry is considered for Arab people to be a holy heritage. This heritage can’t be criticized or studied in a scientific manner. Let’s remember how in the 1960s, Taha Hussein’s attempt to study intertextual aspects of that literature was severely condemned by the whole of society, which argued that looking in PreIslamic poetry for external sources of the Qur’an implies doubting its origins and, in a certain manner, preparing the way for applying similar analyses to it.

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In fact, the defense of Pre-Islamic poetry is, in an indirect way, a defense of the Qur’an. This is why, for Al Jorjani as for his predecessors and followers, the Sciences of Signification are closely linked to Pre-Islamic poetry and to the Qur’an. The aim of the author is to present a kind of closed encyclopedia closely linked to the Science of Signification, but, at the same time, free from all the rules and constraints of the very Science of Signification. The final aim is to deny history or any kind of evolution.² How does Al Jorjani proceed with this? Al Jorjani gives stylistic criteria about I’jaaz: harmony of compositio (content) and dispositio (form). He quotes many Pre-Islamic verses and claims their perfection in certain respects without arguing or explaining in what this perfection consists. It seems here that for Al Jorjani, I’jaaz is taken for granted and does not need, in any case, an analysis or explanation of its foundations. That verse is perfect because it reveals a perfect compositio or because it reveals a perfect dispositio. That is all. I’jaaz then is replaced by another concept, Fassaaha (or eloquence). Here again, the author does not give precise criteria about Fassaaha; according to him, it signifies simply the use of the right word in the right place. When he quotes, for example, a passage of the Qur’an such as: “And it was said, ‘O earth, swallow your water, and O sky, withhold [your rain]’. And the water subsided, and the matter was accomplished, and the ship came to rest on the [mountain of] Judiyy. And it was said, ‘Away with the wrongdoing people’”, he explains that the passage is perfect because it reveals I’jaaz, and then he uses metaphors for explaining how the brilliant lightning of sentences and words strikes the reader. Al Jorjani continues addressing the reader, “if you have any doubt about that, replace the current word by any other and you will see immediately that it does not work.” Meanwhile, Al Jorjani quotes Pre-Islamic poetry in order to claim the supremacy of the Qur’an. For people who do not know the Arab-Muslim culture, this kind of bond seems too weak, but since Jahiz it had been initialized to institute the supremacy of both Pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’an. Adonis described this phenomenon in these terms: Every acquired science is a minor science, compared to the science realized by nature. And Arab science, which is poetry, is realized by nature. It is the instinct of Arabs as Al Jahiz expresses. The nature and the instinct remarked in any people are signs of their perfect-

 We find the same phenomena in the Arabic language considered as a perfect language. The etymology or the evolution of words does not exist, simply because it is a perfect language, the language of the Qur’an, which is created by God, not by human beings (Al Jorjani 2002 [1667]).

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ness, i. e. their superiority. These were realized in Arab people; that is why they are distinguished from all the other nations thanks to poetry, the supreme proof of eloquence. And from the moment poetry is considered to be the nature and the instinct of Arabs, this means that it is also the canon and the essence of their personality. We understand, then, how poetry becomes the miracle of Arabs, a thing that the other nations cannot imitate because they are unable to do the same. We also understand that when the Qur’an defied ante-Islamic poetry it defied the biggest Arab symbol. This is why Arabs had not found anything to compare the Qur’an to, apart from poetry. (Adonis, 2002: 2/43).

Even if the title of Al Jorjani’s book is The proofs of I’jaaz according to the sciences of meaning, we find neither explicit analysis of rhetorical phenomena, nor systematic explanations of the criteria of eloquence. According to the author, the signs of a good style remain primarily in putting meaning before form, and in the absence of cacophony. And when, for example the author treats a subject such as metaphor or presupposition, he expresses a particular concept of these phenomena. According to him, when we read a verse in the Qur’an such as “Say, ‘If mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qur’an, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other assistants’” (Al Israae 17– 88), that means that the claim is real. Here the semiotic is closely linked to the ontological. Signs are not only things but produce things. They produce beliefs and give rise to behaviors that transform reality. The assertion of that sentence does not need arguments or proofs; it constitutes itself an argument and a proof.

4 The modern institution of Al I’jaaz or the birth of the scientific I’jaaz Before analyzing the modern discourse of I’jaaz, it is important here to briefly relate its history. Let’s mention, first, that the book of Al Jorjani was reedited in the beginning of the last century by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Mohamed Abdou. The Nahda’s movement, which claimed a return to traditions, placed the book on I’jaaz in the first place. Defending I’jaaz meant defending the identity of the Muslim nation. It is in the late 1980s that the I’jaaz became an organized and active movement under the auspices of Saudi Arabia. Al Zandani was the founder and the first president of the International Organization of I’jaaz. In 1987, the First Congress of that Organization took place at Islamabad and revealed the principal purpose, namely the claim of a new science: the science of I’jaaz which is hence-

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forth linked, from that moment, to experimental sciences. But in what way is it linked? According to Al Zandani, the verse that reads “Say that it was revealed by the One who knows the secret of skies and earth,” means that all the secrets of the universe are known by God and are revealed, in a certain manner, in the Qur’an. This is largely sufficient to attest the supremacy of that text over all the others. We witness, here, not only an over-interpretation of the text, but also a use or manipulation of it, instead of an interpretation. Let’s remember that from a semiotic point of view, there is a fundamental difference between using a text and interpreting it. Recall what this difference represents according to Eco (1990: 57): To critically interpret a text means to read it in order to discover, along with our reactions to it, something about its nature. To use a text means to start from it in order to get something else, even accepting the risk of misinterpreting it from the semantic point of view.

We also notice that the quoted verse does not exceed twenty words or one or two sentences. In this kind of manipulation, size matters: the shorter the sentence is, the larger is the margin of the interpreter or the manipulator. Another process is to use sentences that are full of possible interpretations and that do not engage the present: “We will show them a part of our sign” is interpreted here by Al Zandani as the total contents of experimental signs. This means that this sentence is to be interpreted as a total language, a total encyclopedia, which contains in it all present and future human discoveries and which must in no case be interpreted according to the criteria of human language. In fact, this kind of manipulation of the Qur’anic text is founded on principles elaborated at the first congress of scientific I’jaaz held in 1987 at Islamabad by Al Zandani and others. We can summarize them as follows: ‒ The science of God is all; it is without limits, while human sciences are limited. ‒ The holy texts own definitive proofs, which are definitive certainties. ‒ There will be no opposition between definitive religious proofs and experimental scientific proofs. In cases where the latter is opposed to the former, the experimental sciences’ proofs should be cancelled. ‒ The need of correcting the way adopted by experimental sciences accords an exaggerated importance to reason. Those who defended reason unconditionally do so because their holy text was perverted contrary to the Qur’an, which is not.

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These principles and the activism of the international organization of I’jaaz have produced a lot of literature and a lot of interventions under many forms. We will give some examples before analyzing the semiosis of that modern discourse of I’jaaz. The first example concerns a short verse: “created from a gushing water, which comes out from between the loins and the ribs” (surah Al Tariq verses 6 and 7). The author of Jaami al bayane fi ta’wiili ayi al Qur’an points out that the current discoveries of genetics are all concentrated in this verse. The author elaborates on the idea in this way: he exposes with meticulous details all the steps of human reproduction and at every step he quotes the same expression “loins and ribs.” For him, it is not at all important to respect the significations of loins and ribs in the dictionary, nor to ask himself whether the expression “loins and ribs” has any reference to the fetus, etc. The point for him is to repeat what he claimed from the beginning with a perlocutionary force (Austin 1962: 101) and with great conviction. At every new step of the reproduction, the signifier “loins and ribs” obtains a new signification, and this ad infinitum. Here the pragmatic dimension rewrites the elementary principles of logos and of logic. The second example concerns the verse 47 of sourate Addariat: “and it is we who have built the sky with our (creative) power and we who are expanding it.” The process is the same; the author exposes the detailed steps of the discovery of Hawking or any other physicist, and repeats at each step of the discovery either the sentence “we have built” or the other one “and we are expanding it.” Each of these sentences should at every step concentrate and signify the whole content of the scientist’s demonstration. The affirmation of the author and his belief constitute the only link between the steps of the related scientific demonstration and the same verse repeated incessantly. The text of I’jaaz seems here to be what Eco (1990) calls “ideas without color,” a kind of transparent form supplied with content according to the intention of the interpreter. In other examples, I’jaaz seems to be a pretext to other things that have no reference to Qur’anic interpretation or any other textual and poetic consideration. I’jaaz becomes, starting from some examples, a political philosophy claiming that this text had the power of unifying three billion people and it is not finished because the same text can transform the world again into a unique culture, a unique language, and a unique race. This enthusiastic discourse clearly reveals its totalitarian intentions, but usually does not forget to stress that the same text claims love, tolerance, and diversity. As we have seen, I’jaaz discourse proceeds by general and vague associations. All things can be identified and associated on the basis of any common point, e. g. Expanding earth theory and the statement “we are expanding,” etc.

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In their multiple analogies, reconciliations or links, exegeses make no distinction between the similar and the identical. This kind of identity, which founds the ideal of I’jaaz discourse, is based on weak bonds. This way of interpreting reminds us of the hermetic tradition (Eco 1990). But contrary to hermetic tradition, I’jaaz semiosis does not explain that identity in regard to any doctrine of signatures (signatura rerum), according to which there exist natural associations or even a “Great Chain of Being” between the book of scripture and the book of nature. Rather the explanation depends on the claim of the supremacy of the Qur’anic sign. According to I’jaaz exponents, Expanding earth theory and the statement “We are expanding,” for example, do not belong to different and limited semiotic system of signs, but to a suprasemiotic system which is unlimited. The syllogism works as follows: the signification of God’s text is unlimited, because it works on two dimensions: the apparent one and the secret one, which is not accessible to everybody, but only to a happy few. Finally, I’jaaz semiosis appears like a squared discourse, i. e. one that is reflexive or self-referential: the discourse of I’jaaz on I’jaaz. Now the confusion between similar and identical, the weak bonds, and the squared discourse are all aspects of hermetic tradition and hermetic semiosis. I’jaaz discourse possesses all of these aspects. But it seems that when doing that, it proceeds to a rewriting of the very hermetic or gnostic traditions. Contrary to gnostic tradition,³ which claims that God has lost control of the created world, the discourse of I’jaaz claims a total control of the world.

5 The impact of the inimitability of the Qur’anic sign on the Arab-Muslim culture, or towards a dialogue between semiotics of culture and semiotics of religion The supremacy of the Qur’an as a total book had a deep impact on Arab-Muslim culture. I will focus here on the case of Moroccan culture. Politicians were very attentive to that reality. The different dynasties that governed Morocco after the Arab conquest got all their political legitimacy from religion and the Qur’an,

 The expression gnostic tradition is used here in the sense developped by Eco (1994: chapter 2.1).

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which were considered either as a culture or as a civilization.⁴ As we said, this gave rise to a predisposition for the marginalization of other cultures in Morocco. The impact of Arab-Muslim culture on politics caused other repercussions that continue until now. Among these, we find the impact on historiography. Arab-History in general, and Moroccan history in particular, are often narrated in a biased way. Historiography tends to glorify too much the Arab-Muslim culture, and to repress or mutilate the history of other cultures. The historiographical account is therefore distorted by the consensus of the majority at the expense of the individuals belonging to micro-cultures. The libraries of these forgotten cultures need to be reconstructed. Firstly, we need to reconstruct the Amazigh (Berber) library either in Tifinagh or Arabic; we also need to reconstruct the Jewish-Moroccan library either in Moroccan Hebrew, named Nesqulam, or in Hebrew. Books and the political economy of reading in Morocco remain much influenced by the books subsidized by the Saudis rather than by other countries. Until now, there are no real libraries in the cities. The only ones are those located in the cultural complex built by the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs. Those, which are principally belonging to foreign delegations, are less important and limited. I would like to give now two more precise examples of the impact of the inimitability of the Qur’anic sign on Moroccan culture. The first one regards the total book or the final book and the interdiction of images. In fact, while promoting the total book, exegeses had not only put the other books in second position but also marginalized any other system of representation. Visual language has been prohibited. This has a deep impact on the way Arabs and Moroccans consider images and on their way of seeing. Let’s describe that singular situation: during several centuries, Moroccan people could not produce a picture or an image about themselves or about their own life or environment. This situation had given rise to other ways of figuration, which flourish, such as calligraphy or arabesque. On the other hand, the only one who was allowed to create images/pictures was the foreigner. During several centuries, the foreigner, who was at first a traveler or diplomat and later a colonialist, pictured/represented figuratively Moroccan people or the environment through engraving, paint and, eventually, photography. During several centuries, the western way of seeing was the only way to see Moroc-

 The definition of the words culture and civilization is a complex one in Moroccan and Arab Muslim culture, see chapter one about that topic in Bernoussi (2018). See also Bernoussi (2008, 2010, 2012, 2014).

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cans. It constitutes the sole visual reference for posterity and for the collective memory. What is more important is that the western way of seeing ended by becoming part of Moroccan visual memory and identity without being questioned, analyzed or studied. Recently, visual semiotics has shown us that visual discourse, like linguistic discourse, has its own rhetoric, its own figures, and its own strategies of manipulating the reception of the visual message. Umberto Eco (1999) in this specific case uses the expression of stimuli of perception. According to Eco, the stimulus of perception prevents the subjective vision: when a subject receives the stimulus, he accepts someone else’s vision instead of his own. The interdiction of images constitutes a crucial element in Moroccan culture; an element that is difficult and complex to evaluate, because for a long time the Moroccan culture has accepted that someone else sees in its place and has assimilated this foreign way of seeing without questioning, or criticizing.⁵ The second example concerns I’jaaz and mass culture, but before that, let’s recall here some statements of the semiotics of culture. Jurij Lotman (1999) used to put these two conditions for any phenomenon becoming part of a culture: repetition and transmission. According to Lotman and the scholars of the school of Tartu, semiotics of culture is the science that studies the functional correlations between different systems of signs. Commenting this definition, Franciscu Sedda (2006: 47) qualifies semiotics of culture as a “poetics of everyday life.” I quote here Lotman, Sedda and Eco because the evolution of I’jaaz in mass culture calls for the cooperation between semiotics of religion and semiotics of culture. In the preceding pages, we have seen how I’jaaz discourse was elaborated by scholars or philosophers and how—to some extent—it has been reserved for a cultivated or specialist public. Actually, we can listen to the radio or watch TV or web broadcasts about I’jaaz addressed to the large public. Moreover, we witness the spread of TV stations, FM radio stations, websites, etc. specially devoted to the Qur’an and to I’jaaz. This topic becomes part of mass culture and permeates everyday life, in shops, cafés, taxis, campuses, etc. I’jaaz has become part of mass culture, i. e. a part of everyday life. This success is apparently due to religious and political decisions, but it is also optimized by mass culture. We know since Gramsci’s Letteratura e vita nazionale (1950) and Umberto Eco’s Apocalypse postponed (1994) how mass culture offers simple forms easy to consume, with contents promoting the idea of the superman and an “absolute ideal of passiveness.” When we remember all that

 The question of the interdiction of images in Islam is a complex one. See Bernoussi (2015).

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about mass culture, we know how easy the spreading of I’jaaz in mass culture was. In everyday life exchanges, it is very easy for many people to quote one or two verses from the Qur’an in order to defend their point of view. I’jaaz has become a powerful argument. This textual habitus is very frequent in popular classes and is spreading in political and academic circles. Normally, participating in a discussion is a kind of adventure. In a debate as in everyday life, it implies argumentation and possessing good information; in short, it means reading, learning, etc., which are very demanding in terms of time, effort, and money; with the ideology of scientific I’jaaz, or the unique quotation, it becomes easy to participate in conversations and impose one’s point of view, without being contradicted by the interlocutor. In a society, such as the Moroccan one, marked both by a “fierce sense of equality” and “brinkmanship” (Geertz 2003; Crapanzano 1980), that temptation is important. It will be very fruitful to study the role of Qur’anic quotations in family relationships, gender, or professional life. In other contexts, less marked by power relationships, I’jaaz discussions allow the participants to agree with each other quickly and without pain. It enhances the receptiveness of agreeing with the others—of the same community— and finally, to realize a kind of secure and low-cost exchange. It makes possible an ideal of love, communion and—of course—total passiveness.

6 Conclusion In the specific case, where I’jaaz ideology becomes the culture, semiotics of religion and semiotics of culture are invited to synergize their rules and purposes. Another question raised by I’jaaz concerns its implications: when that ideology claims that Qur’an has already spoken about current scientific discoveries, doesn’t it take the risk of transforming the Qur’an into a scientific book, i. e. a book that is only relatively true, since scientific theories are usually discussed and updated? Aren’t we facing in that specific case a kind of self-contradiction? The spread of I’jaaz ideology, due as we have seen to the efficiency of Mass Culture, offers contents that originate from high culture (Al Jahiz, Al Jorjani and the others), but is manufactured in such a way that it may be consumed with less effort, less consciousness, and less criticism. The discourse of I’jaaz consecrates the Qur’an as a total book, without enunciation, without intertexuality, a book that exists outside time and space. But even if I’jaaz ideology succeeds in realizing this goal of ideological hegemony,

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it can’t stop readers from producing other texts and, finally, from enriching the text of the Qur’an itself by adding “real” interpretations.

References Al Jahiz, Abou Ottmane Amr Bnou Bahr. 2000 [868]. Rassail al Jahiz. 4 vols. Edited by Mohamed Oyoune Assoude. Beyrut: Dar Alkoutoub Alilmia. Al Jorjani, Abdul Kaahir. 2002 [1667]. Dalaail al Iijaaz fi I’lm al Maani (The Proofs of Iijaaz and the Sciences of Meaning). Cairo: Assada. Adonis, Ali Ibrahim Said. 2002. Al Taabit wal Mutahawill (The Fixed and the Moved). Beyrut: Dar Al Saki. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson & Marina Sbisá. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2008. Le corps comme non signe dans la culture arabo-musulmane. Semiotica 170. 295 – 303. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2010. Notes pour une sémiotique de la culture marocaine. Lexia 5 – 6. 368 – 383. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2012. Moulay Abquader, sidi H-med et les autres. Versus 114. 93 – 109. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2014. La Révolution des zinges et des karamiates. In Mohamed Bernoussi (ed.), Sémiotique et société: Nouvelles approches, nouveaux défis. Actes du III congrès de l’Association Marocaine de Sémiotique. Meknès: Infoprint. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2015. Tu ne représenteras point: De quelques conséquences de figurer par procuration. Lexia 21 – 22. 125 – 144. Bernoussi, Mohamed. 2018. Introduction à l’interculturel. Meknès: Capital. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eco, Umberto. 1990. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1994. Apocalypse Postponed. Edited by Robert Lulely. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1999. Kant and The Platypus. Edited by Alastair McEwen. San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt. Geertz, Clifford. 2003. Le souk de Sefrou, sur l’économie du bazar. Paris: Bouchene. Gramsci, Antonio. 1950. Literatura e vita nazionale. Torino: Einaudi. Ibn Mandour, Mohamed. 1955 [1408]. Lisaan Al Arab (The Language of Arabs). Beyrut: Dar Sadir. Khatibi, Abdelkébir. 1974. La Blessure du nom propre. Paris: Denoël. Lotman, Jurij. 1999. La Sémiosphère. Limoges: Pulim. Sedda, Franciscu (ed.). 2006. Introduzione: Imperfette traduzioni. In Jurij Lotman, Tesi per una semiotica della cultura, 7 – 68. Rome: Meltemi. Shah, Mustafa. 2019. The Word of God: The Epistemology of Language in Classical Islamic Theological Thought. In Robert A. Yelle, Courtney Handman & Christopher I. Lehrich (eds.), Language and Religion, 158 – 192. Boston & Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Touati, Houari. 2010. Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Annette Wilke

Arguments for immediacy and mediation in classical Advaita-Vedānta 1 Introduction This article investigates the Advaita-Vedānta, the famous school of Veda hermeneutics introduced by the philosopher and renunciate Śaṅkara in the 7th or 8th century CE. He singled out the Upaniṣads, the final part of the Veda (“Vedānta”),¹ as the very end and consummation of the Veda in a spiritual sense, for they dealt with knowledge (jñāna) of the Brahman and the true Self (Ātman) and not with ritual action (karma) like the larger former part of the Veda. According to Śaṅkara, action binds, whereas knowledge alone liberates, because it destroys the ignorance about one’s true nature. In Śaṅkara’s interpretation, the great teaching of the Upaniṣads was non-dual (a-dvaita) oneness of self, universe and godhead, the all-pervading absolute spirit (Brahman), and condensed in “great sayings” (mahāvākya) like tat tvam asi, “that you are.” Śaṅkara’s Advaita-Vedānta suggested a very concise and integrative reading of the Upaniṣads, and was not easily by-passed already in the pre-modern past (Stephan 2005: 918), but attained tremendous semiotic expansion in British India, as it left the elite brahmanic circles and attained extended meaning. In a highly entangled history to which many voices contributed—German romantic philosophers, orientalists, philologists, theosophists, and also Indian intellectuals and reformers—the Advaita-Vedānta was a major factor in the construction of the “Mystic East” (King 1999; Wilke 2015). One can speak of a global discourse which made of it the Vedanta and the Indian philosophy (despite the existence of other Vedāntic and philosophical schools), and in more or less popularized form, the prime definition of Hinduism (a summary term that itself had evolved only in the late 19th century) and the peak of mysticism in India and beyond. The starting point of this article is mysticism, in that it is of particular interest for the subject “mediation and immediacy.” The non-dual vision of the Advaita-Vedānta was a prime model of “Eastern mysticism” (from Rudolf Otto 1926 to Peter Berger 1992: 171– 203). It also played an important role in the the The Upaniṣads themselves are called ‘Vedānta’ (“end of the Veda”) as well as their exegesis and systematization by Śaṅkara and others. Usually it is the latter, being one of the six schools of Indian philosophy, that is referred to as ‘Vedānta.’ It is based on three major sources: the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavadgītā and the Brahmasūtras. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-010

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orization of unmediated “mystical peak experiences” in modern debates about mysticism. It is well known that such perennialist views of immediacy (propounded e. g. by Aldous Huxley 1944 and 1954; Stace 1961: 27– 31, 62, 110, 132 f.) have been vehemently opposed by those who claimed that mystical experience was always culturally and socially mediated and immediacy a sheer illusion (Katz 1978, 1983; Penner 1983). This paper explores the insiders’ discourse, which offers an alternative to this debate and claims instead complex interactional dynamics of immediacy and mediation. I do not deal with modern reform Vedānta, but restrict my discussion to classical, ‘traditional’ Advaita-Vedānta, where we find the most extensive reflections on immediacy and mediation and their necessary interconnection. As I will show, this discourse also includes rational arguments for the interconnectedness of immediacy and ineffability— two well-known concepts in the European history of mysticism that are often related to the supposed irrationality or transrationality of mysticism. In AdvaitaVedānta we find apophaticism or ineffableness, in a different key, one not at all cut off from epistemic evaluation, discursive analysis and linguistic compatibility.

2 Classical Advaita-Vedānta The absolute reality of the Advaita-Vedānta is the Brahman of the canonical Upaniṣads. Brahman is defined as pure Being-Knowledge-Limitlessness (satyamjñānam-anantam; Taittirīya Up. 2.1) or by the better-known formula ExistenceConsciousness-Bliss (sat-cit-ānanda). This very nature is viewed as the underlying material cause of all that exists. Brahman is the all-pervading Soul, the Ātman or Self of the universe and the core of the human individual who is the major referent of the term Ātman. The Advaitins understand the Ātman as transindividual. Indeed, the Upaniṣads already often treat Ātman and Brahman interchangeably, for instance, in statements like “This universe is nothing but the Brahman” (Muṇḍaka Up., cf. Tapovan 2015: 13) and “Everything is the Ātman alone; all these are but expressions of the Ātman” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up.; Chāndogya Up., cited in Tapovan 2015). The Upaniṣads combine such affirmative statements with pronounced apophaticism which seems to imply that no means of mediation exist. They repeatedly state that the ultimate reality is completely ineffable: “Brahman is beyond sound, touch, form and taste” (Kaṭha Up.)²; “nei-

 See for this and other statements and quotes Swami Tapovan (2015: 11– 20), who gives many more examples of negative and affirmative statements.

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ther this nor that” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up.); the mind cannot comprehend it (Kena Up.), words cannot reach it (Taittirīya Up.). And yet—and this is most crucial for the Advaita-Vedānta—, it is also said: The knower of Brahman becomes Brahman. It is such statements along with the mahāvākyas (“great sayings”) like tat tvam asi, “that you are,” aham brahma asmi, “I am the Brahman,” or prajñānam brahma, “supreme knowledge is Brahman” which form the basic material for the Advaita-Vedāntic core doctrine of strict non-duality of the godhead—the Brahman or supreme self—and the individual self. The essential teaching is that absolute identity exists between the ultimate reality, the all-pervading spirit, and the human soul or self. Apophaticism and immediacy turn out to be two sides of the same coin in this discourse. The neti neti formula (“not this, nor that”), according to Śaṅkara’s commentary (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 2.3.6), actually wants to teach the true, transcendental nature of the individual self which is at once the self of all that exists. The original text lends itself to such an affirmative interpretation. The same Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad that states neti neti narrates in the next chapter the following dialogue between student and teacher: “Explain to me the Brahman that is immediate and direct (sākṣād-aparokṣād brahma)—the self that is within all.” […] “This is your self that is within all.” [the teacher Yājñavalkya replies] (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. 3.4.1, transl. Madhavananda 1975: 324– 325)³

This mahāvākya-like passage makes clear how much Upaniṣadic core statements rest directly or indirectly on premises of innate immediacy, but also how much they are framed and elucidated by oral teaching. Both are also typical for the Advaita-Vedāntic guru-śiṣya-paramparā, the flow of transmission from teacher to disciple, and the idea that the Vedānta is an independent means of knowledge and a teaching method leading to an unbroken, direct vision of seeing one’s own self in everything. The claim of innate immediacy is found in all the original sources—the Upaniṣads, Śaṅkara’s commentaries and Advaita-Vedānta treatises. They talk invariably of “direct unmediated knowledge” (sākṣād, aparokṣa jñāna, brahma-sākṣāṭkāra) or (although less frequently) “direct experience” (aparokṣānubhūti)⁴, and also of the ineffability and impossibility of mediation (not reached by words and thoughts). At the same time, however, this immediacy is grounded in mediations, that is, in features and processes of semiosis, reckoned to be ab-

 Yad eva sākṣād-aparokṣād-brahma ya ātmā sarvāntaraḥ taṃ me vyācakṣveti […] eṣa ta ātmā sarvāntaraḥ.  See also Chakraborty (2015: 88 – 89).

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solutely necessary: most prominently the Vedic-Upaniṣadic revelation of non-duality, the “word” as unique “means of knowledge” (śabda-pramāṇa), and moreover a qualified teacher (guru, ācārya) who is both a well versed scholar (śrotriya) and himself deeply rooted in experiential non-dual knowledge of Brahman (brahmaniṣṭha). In keeping with the sacred texts, the teacher must know how to communicate the non-communicatable and how language is being used to go beyond language, while the recipient must purify the mind to become a clear mirror able to reflect the “self-luminous” pure, unlimited consciousness, which is, according to the Advaita-Vedānta, not only one’s own true self, but also the self of all beings. This reflection happens, say the later treatises, in an “unbroken, limitless thought form” (akhaṇḍākaravṛtti) which mirrors the immediacy of limitless consciousness, the true self or subject, which can never be objectified. The arguments for immediacy and mediation are more closely looked at in the following chapters, and it must be kept in mind that other religious schools and philosophical traditions solved the problem differently. Far beyond mere intellectual comprehension, there are radical and farreaching consequences connected with true self-knowledge, the BrahmanĀtman identity and the search of it through performance and praxis. One is supposed to have a burning desire for liberation, and to be equipped with a set of moral standards; one should dedicate one’s total life to what is taught as the supreme truth and strive to realize it by constant listening, reflecting and contemplating on it (Tapovan 2015: 15). Once the immediacy of Brahman inhering in everything is actually understood and related to one’s own self, there is total transformation. The claim is nothing less than that the person who sees his own self as the Self in all will be no more affected by sorrows and desires (Tapovan 2015: 16). He is a jīvanmukta, “one who is free while living here and now,” having reached the state of perfection which is consummated in infinite beatitude. Śaṅkara also terms it “disembodied” or “bodiless knowledge” in his Brahmasūtra commentary 1.4. In treatises, liberation-in-life (jīvanmukti) is described as a state of inner satisfaction, peace and limitless blissfulness whatever one is doing and in any situation, irrespective of success or failure, heat or cold, pleasure or pain.⁵ This can happen only, however, when one is liberated from false

 Similarly Tapovan (2015: 16), referring to Taittirīya Up. On the knowledge-bliss nature of Brahman and the self and its consummation as a sign of liberation see also Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 3.9.28,7. Śaṅkara comments, since supreme bliss is Brahman/Ātman’s very nature, it is directly experienced at all times. However, overlooking all his commentaries the term ‘bliss’ (ānanda) is sparingly used; the prime term is cit (consciousness, awareness) along with terms of “self-luminosity” (svayaṃ-jyotiḥ; svataḥ-prakāśa), pure existence/being(ness) (sat, satyam)

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identification with the limited body-mind-sense complex, the finite body, the ever changing mind, and the attachment to I and mine. One can then dwell forever in one’s own infinite self-luminous Self, the continuum of pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss, and the inner vision of universal oneness. As I will show, Śaṅkara and his later school(s) devote a lot of hermeneutic effort and analytical reflection to the major postulate of the unity of individual and absolute self to make it rationally lucid. A major backbone is a theory which may be called a rational epistemology of immediacy, as it is based on argumentation and analytical investigation into the nature of consciousness. However, it is equally fundamental for the Advaita-Vedānta, being a Mīmāṃsā school of Veda exegesis, to view the Veda as a unique and autonomous “verbal means of knowledge” (śabda-pramāṇa) that reveals something otherwise unknown and unattainable. The Upaniṣadic “great sayings” are regarded as producing a direct, immediate knowledge that was not there before—revealing not only the nature of the supreme godhead Brahman, but also an unknown truth about oneself. Therefore, the epistemology of immediacy is connected with linguistic and hermeneutic reflections on mediation and didactic methods. Belief in the soteriological role of the Vedic word inspired deep reflections about language’s capacity to transcend itself. Classical Advaita-Vedānta developed a theory of communication of the non-verbal, in which a linguistic theory of indication or secondary signification plays a major role. The Advaita-Vedānta has always been a very scholarly, even highly scholastic tradition with a good amount of analytical rigor. Of course, it is always a rationality and logic in keeping with the Vedic word and inspired by it (Halbfass 1991: 123 – 146), but it typically claims that revelation must stand on reason and lend itself to rational analysis (Halbfass 1991; Hiriyanna 1994: 180 – 182).

2.1 Arguments for immediacy: The self-luminosity of consciousness The core teaching of Brahman-Ātman identity affords not only investigation into the Brahman, but involves invariably also an investigation into one’s self. As Munmun Chakroborty (2015: 83) argues, “[t]he immensity of Advaita is embedded in analyzing the nature of consciousness in great depths.” Within this discourse, “the attraction is not the mere phenomenal conscious experience; rather,

and limitlessness (nityam, anantam), and tropes like “reveling in one’s self” (ātmarati, ātmakrīda) and “having done what is to be done” (kṛtakṛtyaḥ).

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it is the transcendental Consciousness that is regarded by the Advaitins as the very basis of all experience” (ibid). According to Advaita-Vedānta, a thorough investigation of mind and consciousness by various methods (prakriyās, nyāyas), self-inquiry and contemplation, must invariably lead to the self-revealed nature of consciousness, or to use Śaṅkara’s favorite terms, to the self-effulgence and self-luminosity (svataḥ-prakāśa; svayaṃ-jyotis) of consciousness.⁶ Śaṅkara’s central point is that the I communicates itself in a pre-reflexive manner; it is self-evident, “self-luminous” consciousness, also called “self” (ātman) or “inner self.” The light of pure consciousness turns out to be the very essence of the mind. This essence is objectless awareness, the transcendental nature of the empirical self, which is always “self-revealed,” svataḥ-pramāṇa. It is immediately given in the pure ‘I am’ that can never be negated. A person may doubt his senses, mental states and the world that surrounds him, but never his own being. No one can claim “I am not”; the very attempt to prove one’s non-existence would only prove existence, as Śaṅkara argues in his Brahmasūtra commentary 1.1.1. The term ‘I’ always implies existence and consciousness. Whereas emotions and thoughts can be objects of reflection, consciousness itself can never be objectified. Whereas emotions and thoughts are constantly changing, the underlying consciousness remains unchanging and ever present even without thoughts. The Advaita-Vedāntins draw from this their central thesis that the self-revealed or transcendental consciousness is precisely the same in all humans and forms the very locus of oneness with the Brahman. As Chakraborty (2015: 83) rightly observes, the notion of consciousness in Advaita-Vedānta, “is not just bound within the domain of empirical or individual consciousness; it also explicitly leads us to the concept of transcendental Consciousness or Brahman, the reality of which has been admitted as the foundation of every individual consciousness”—and ultimately, “the very basis for the being of the entire world. Consciousness is the only prerequisite by which one can affirm or discard the existence of any entity” (ibid.). This dimension of the I, the transcendental consciousness, is the true import of the term “self,” the Ātman, without which no cognition can take place. The self is like the light which illumines all the objects and itself at once. Whereas the self is the very basis of all object knowledge, it can never be objectified itself as an object of cognition. It is rather the basis of its own revelation. Thus, this principle of self-revelation or self-luminosity refers to a kind of knowledge differ These terms and synonymous formulas (like svataḥ-siddhiḥ, “self-accomplished,” etc.) are frequently used in both parts of the Upadeśa Sāhasrī (“US”) and summarize its essential teaching: see US, Gadyabandha 2.79; 2.91, 93, 105, 107, and Padyabandha 10.3; 11.11; 17.69; 18.26, 98, 101, 200, 220. See also Śaṅkara’s Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 4.3.7.

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ent from any other, namely an immediate, pre-reflexive and non-dual knowledge without the knower-known difference. This is, according to the Advaita-Vedāntins, the only “immediate, direct knowledge,” aparokṣa-jñāna, that exists, and it exists in precisely the same manner in everybody. In contrast, any possible object knowledge, including being aware of our thoughts and feelings, is parokṣa, “mediate” (Upadeśa-Sāhasrī 17.39; 18.199 – 200; see also Chakraborty 2015: 89; Kumari 2015: 69). Mind and intellect, according to Advaita-Vedānta, belong to the realm of object and matter. They are defined as mere reflections (cidābhāsa), receiving their luminosity and ability to function only from the presence and proximity of consciousness, their very essence. Śaṅkara points out in his Upadeśa-Sāhasrī (“US”) that it is a very subtle distinction about which even wise and intelligent people are confused, as the normal state of affairs is mutual superimposition of the permanent Ātman on the impermanent I, and of the impermanent mind, intelligence, and feelings on the permanent, never changing, transcendental, pure consciousness. This immediate, pre-reflexive I or pure “self-shining” consciousness-existence, underlies every self-reflection and cognition—and in the final analysis even everything that exists, whereas with reference to itself it is pure self-awareness without any properties or change. This is why it totally differs from mind which is full of properties and ever changing. Mind and thoughts fall under nāma-rūpa, “name and form,” which are always multiple and diverse, whereas the Ātman/Brahman is always singular and devoid of change. Therefore, not only Brahman is ineffable, but each human being has an ineffable core. This core of the soul or true self is as ineffable as the Brahman.⁷ It is the same absolute truth—experientially manifest in an Existence-KnowledgeBliss continuum—which cannot be defined in terms of dimensional or other qualities. No class, no attribute, no relation, no action belongs to it. It is without properties, without qualities, without form, and “therefore, it can never be an object of not only perception but even of emotions or of thoughts” (Tapovan 2015: 11). And yet, it can be known immediately due to its self-luminous non-dual nature, in which no knower-known-knowledge gap exists. The metaphor of light attributed to this essence seeks to indicate that light does not depend on anything else to illuminate itself. Like the sunlight that is not affected by the objects and activities it lights up, so the light of consciousness remains a mere sākṣin (“witness”) in relation to objects, and with reference to itself limitless Consciousness-Being, emotionally experienced as blissful fullness. There is only need of recognition of this ever-present self-established es-

 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 3.9.26.

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sence, but no need of a mental activity due to its pre-reflexivity. The later, postŚaṅkaran Advaita-Vedānta, however, felt the necessity to admit some kind of subtle cognition distinct from any other form of reflexivity. A number of eminent works like Sadānanda’s Vedānta-Sāra (probably mid-15th cent.), Dharmarāja Adhvarin’s Vedānta-Paribhāṣā or the Vedānta-Saṅgraha of Rāmarāya Kavi (l875 – 1914), speak of akhaṇḍa-ākāra-vṛtti, a specific thought form or mental mode, which assumes the unbroken and unlimited form of consciousness. Whereas in object knowledge there are always two operations at work—the attention given to the object (vṛtti-vyāpti) and the cognition “this is this” (phala-vyāpti) –, in this mental mode there is no need of the second operation. Both operations merge into one. Vṛtti-vyāpti is simply removing ignorance, and thus helping the true limitless nature of the self to shine forth (Mishra 2015: 396). Thus, what I have termed rational epistemology of immediacy has to do with a particular theory of consciousness. Immediacy is naturally given due to the self-shining nature of (transcendental) consciousness inherent in everybody. This nature assures the possibility of an immediate cognition of non-dual oneness and bliss, a sensation described as unbroken, non-relational and undivided (akhaṇḍa) and as very direct and immediate (sākṣāt, aparokṣa jñāna). Or the other way round: every other knowledge (i. e. our usual object knowledge or “consciousness of,” including the knowledge of our body, thoughts and feelings) is parokṣa, “indirect,” dependent, and finite. Akhaṇḍa, “unbroken,” refers to utmost immediacy, in which no subject-object-difference exists.

2.2 Arguments for mediation: Śabda Pramāṇa—Lakṣaṇa/ā— Guru 2.2.1 Śabda Pramāṇa Despite the strong arguments for immediacy and the assertion that words cannot reach there, in the literature under consideration there is also a claim for an indispensable mediation, starting with the need of the Upaniṣads as śabda-pramāṇa, verbal testimony or more literally “verbal means of knowledge.” For the thinkers of Advaita-Vedānta the Brahman-Ātman identity and final liberation is simply inconceivable without the revelation. It would be too far-out to believe one’s own soul to be the soul of the universe. So, one must be informed; mediation is needed. Both Mīmāṃsā schools of Veda exegesis—the Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā devoted to the “ritual section” and the Advaita-Vedānta or Uttara-Mīmāṃsā based on the Upaniṣads, the “knowledge section”—see the Veda word as central revelation which tells things that are otherwise not known, be it heaven (as fruit

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of sacrifice) or Brahman-Ātman unity and final liberation that cuts asunder all sorrows and rebirths (as fruit of non-dual knowledge). There is need of the mahāvākyas like tat tvam asi, “that you are,” to get the liberating knowledge “I am the Brahman” and realize one’s own self in everything. Śaṅkara holds that the mahāvākyas are able to trigger immediate (aparokṣa), direct (sākṣāt) and unbroken (akhaṇḍa) knowledge and experience of this unity. It is common to both Mīmāṃsā schools that the fundamental soteriological work is provided by the original text itself, and even the Advaita-Vedāntins’ final goal, the immediate knowledge and experience of what is “free of language,” results from the Veda—the language par excellence. The Pūrva-Mīmāṃsakas concerned with ritual commandments, investigated thoroughly the nature of language and were not interested in introspection and metaphysics. They developed genuine insights about grammar and linguistics comparable to modern Western language theories. The Uttara-Mīmāṃsakas of the Advaita-Vedānta, on the other hand, were primarily exploring the nature of the speaker and listener, i. e. the basic nature of their consciousness and self, which is, in conformity with the Upaniṣads, pure being, consciousness, and infinite bliss. For these Uttaras, being only interested in interior processes and transcendental objects like Brahman and Ātman, the language problem is different than for the Pūrvas, as it is impossible to point physically at the Brahman or Ātman as one can point at a cow. The particular problem they have to face is one of communicating what is non-verbal,⁸ a problem that emerged directly in understanding and teaching the content of basic passages of the Upaniṣads which speak of the transphenomenal, pre-reflexive Ātman and its being identical with the all-pervading Brahman. The problem is solved by a theory of the communication of the non-verbal, backed by the Mīmāṃsaka Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s thesis that communication, not denomination, is the prime thing (Wilke and Moebus 2011: 597). It is solved more specifically by a didactic method and linguistic theory of indication (lakṣaṇa/ ā) which allows one to make metaphysical sense of words and transmit experience-based knowledge of a trans-phenomenal reality.

2.2.2 Lakṣaṇa/ā Śaṅkara is very much aware of the basic problem. He summarizes the dilemma in his Upadeśa-Sāhasrī as follows:

 See Śaṅkara’s US, Padyabandha 15.39, 18.28, 18.30, 19.24, and for the whole argument Wilke and Moebus 2011: 589 – 615.

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Those who [see that] the self (ātman) is only one, free from suffering and never changing, must also [accept prima facie] that there is no word for it and that ultimately it cannot be known.”⁹

Although the term ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge’ is used a lot in the Advaita-Vedānta to indicate non-dual experience and a knowledge beyond the knower-knownknowledge difference, Śaṅkara feels the need to question the term knowledge and other colloquial terms in the light of Upaniṣadic negations such as neti neti. Their commonplace understanding such as “I know myself, I am fat and lazy” certainly does not refer to the Ātman the Upaniṣads speak of. On the other hand, if ‘knowing’ in colloquial usage were completely inapplicable, then the Veda would no longer be a source of knowledge and it would also contradict everybody’s spontaneous I-knowledge that can never say “I am not.” There are no conventional words for metaphysical terms and entities like transcendental consciousness. Ātman is not an object and can never be objectified, for the self can only be accessed by spontaneous direct insight into its unlimited nature. Even ‘knowing’ does not fit, since knowing—as a reflexive act—is a (temporal) process which aims to produce the result of ‘knowledge’ and presupposes the agency of the intellect, i. e. a ‘knower’ separate from knowledge (US, Padyabandha 18.50 – 66). Therefore, language is not at all designed in such a way as to be capable of describing the transcendental self. It is much better suited to describe the object world and the empirical self. There are traditions which solve the problem of the incommunicability of such transcendental contents, using concepts like ‘mystery’ or practices like silence. But the Advaita-Vedānta is decidedly a teaching tradition with a rational foundation. In order to transmit its transcendental contents didactically, it developed a theory of communicating the non-verbal closely linked to a linguistic theory of secondary signification. The problem of communicating metaphysical concepts only becomes soluble through the concept of lakṣaṇa/ā, which means that words can have a secondary signifying function or an implied sense which is intimately linked to the primary meaning, but transcends it. Words and sentences can function as an “indexical sign” or “indication” (lakṣaṇa) and communicate their real sense or actual referents only when the context is carefully considered and the implied meaning is understood. Lakṣaṇa comes from the verbal root lakṣ, “to aim at.” It refers to a linguistic theory about the possibilities of language not only to express, propose and denominate, but also to indicate and suggest. The linguistic theory of lakṣaṇa provides the key to explain how śabda-pramāṇa actually works.  US, Padyabandha 18.57; transl. Wilke and Moebus 2011: 591.

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Lakṣaṇa plays a foundational role in the tat tvam asi interpretation.¹⁰ Besides sticking to the Mīmāṃsakas’ six hermeneutic rules, such as determining the proper beginning and end of a teaching, mahāvākyas like tat tvam asi, “that you are,” must be examined as lakṣaṇa-vākyas to solve the contradiction which the primary meaning confronts us with and to relieve the Veda from making senseless and contradictory statements. In normal parlance “That” (tat) refers to something removed in time and place, here the omniscient god (īśvara, saguṇa-brahman, or a personal universal god and creator) who is all-knowing, omnipotent, omniscient and infinite, whereas “you” addresses the student Śvetaketu, Uddālaka’s son, an individual who is as limited and finite as all humans are. And yet, there is the appositional copula “are” establishing a unity between the two. It is crucial for Śaṅkara that the terms tat (“that”) and tvam (“you”) must have the same referent (US 18.170 – 176, Chāndogya Up. Bhāṣya 6.16.3). The copula asi (“are”—“is”) indicates that there must be a convergence of “you” and “that” to make sense of the sentence tat tvam asi. For Śaṅkara tat tvam asi cannot be a theological statement, as there is a contradiction between an omniscient god and a limited individual which seems to be unsurmountable. Śaṅkara also excludes a metaphorical usage,¹¹ which would communicate—similar to the sentence “he is a lion”—something like “you are similar to that” or “although essentially different, you have something divine in you.” Moreover, an instruction for upāsana must be excluded, referring to meditative and visualizing practices in which one has to imagine oneself or something as something else. According to Śaṅkara, there is the need to see the statement as genuine identity, a simple statement of fact, if the Vedic revelation is given the credit it deserves. If the contextual environment in the Chāndogya Up. (the unity of chap. 6) is taken into account, it must refer to pure existence (sat) itself (“you as existent being are that” and not “you as a Brahmin by birth are that”).¹²

 The tat tvam asi hermeneutics are elaborately dealt with in US, Padyabandha 18 and 12.1– 19 (where mostly verbal forms like lakṣayeyuḥ or lakṣayet are used, for instance in 18.29 and 18.80); see also Śaṅkara’s commentary on Chāndogya Up. 6.8.7 ff. (which presents the same interpretation, but without using the technical term). The full lakṣaṇa theory in the context of tat tvam asi hermeneutics was developed later (post-Śaṅkara) in texts like Sadānanda’s Vedāntasāra.  See for the following Śaṅkara’s Chāndogya Up. Bhāṣya 6.16.3.  Śaṅkara reads Chāndogya Up. 6.8 – 16, in which tat tvam asi appears nine times, as a conceptual whole. To determine relevant text units for the meaning of single phrases is vital to the Advaita-Vedānta hermeneutics. Similarly, the teaching by repetitions and similes is important, a strategy for which Chāndogya Up. 6.8 – 16 was the first-hand model.

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The knowledge which is transmitted to the addressee is, “I am that (Brahman, the all-pervading existence, the Self of the whole world).” The repetitive teaching of the tat tvam asi in the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Up. is about this understanding, but such identity can only be grasped immediately if the sentence is read in the lakṣaṇa or implied sense. If this is done, the words tat (“that”) and tvam (“you”) shed light on each other. Because of the appositional copula asi (“are,” i. e. “is”) that links tat and tvam together, “you” cannot mean the everyday I, the time-bound, physical and insufficient individual, but leads to the implied sense, the “inner self” (pratyag-ātman), the spontaneously perceived self-evident, “self-luminous” awareness (svayaṃvedya-svapramāṇa-svayaṃ-jyotir dṛśtiḥ).¹³ This real understanding can occur because in tvam the pre-reflexive I and its non-negatable being-existent is always included, although one is normally not aware of this. Resorting to transcendental consciousness, tat and tvam are stripped of their opposing qualities. They receive a common denominator which is not only in perfect tune with the asi, but also with the entire context of Chāndogya Up. 6 (sat, is-ness, being). The lakṣaṇa hermeneutics encompasses a precise analysis of both tvam and tat. In the chain of teachers and pupils, not only was the sense of statements of identity transmitted, but also the didactic means of their communication and methodical investigation were passed on to succeeding generations. One key method to discern the true sense of tvam is, for instance, the logical deduction by applying the anvaya-vyatireka method.¹⁴ This method makes it possible to perceive the unchanging (anvaya, “going through”) in what is contingent (vyatireka) and consequently serves to differentiate the permanent self from the transient self and remove the erroneous I-notions. The method is applied, for instance, in the analysis of the three states of waking, dream and dreamless sleep. Only consciousness turns out to be invariably present, unnegatable and pervading all three states. Even in deep sleep, some form of consciousness must be present, since otherwise one could not be aware of “I have slept,”  An almost identical statement can be found in US, Padyabandha 18.200. The chapter 18 deals extensively with the tat tvam asi and its correct understanding. The foundational scriptural authority for the self-effulgent light of tvam which corresponds with tat is found in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. 4.3.7 and Śaṅkara’s extensive commentary.  The method of anvaya-vyatireka (continuity-and-discontinuity; “going through and leaving”) is mentioned several times in the US (e. g. Padyabandha 18.96 – 97, 170 – 180, 189) and also applied in Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmyasiddhi (Halbfass 1991:162– 180). It goes originally back to grammar (denoting here root form and flections). It is the most important of the various Advaita-Vedāntic methods to clarify the meaning of tvam (what is (true) self and what is not self): the nonessential elements may leave, but what is essential will stay (Halbfass 1991: 167– 168; Narasimhan 1990: 215 – 230, particularly 219).

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i. e. “I have slept well” (US, Gadyabandha 2.91– 93). It is precisely the dreamless deep sleep that illumines—according to the Advaita-Vedānta—the true nature of tvam as non-differentiated, pure objectless consciousness to which bliss belongs intrinsically. The “you” can only mean this inner self which is permanent, “selfevident” and “self luminous,” and converges in this dimension with the tat (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss). This tvam is absolutely compatible, as it involves the semantic field of painlessness, freedom from fear, blissful self-sufficiency, emancipation from caste, cessation of the I-notion, agency and ownership, and above all the immediacy of self-luminosity. For this kind of self-recognition to take place, one part of the “I” must be sublated, namely the “this” part which can be objectivized (e. g. “this is my body,” “my mind,” my feeling pleasure and pain, the sense of doing and enjoying), whereas the consciousness-part is retained and focused. This means that without giving up its own meaning, the term ‘I’ or ‘self’ conveys a special meaning, namely an implied meaning or lakṣaṇa (US, Padyabandha 18.71). The later tradition, such as Sadānanda’s Vedāntasāra 4.148 – 154, systematized this idea and used the terms jahad-ajahad- lakṣaṇa /ā or bhāga-tyāga- lakṣaṇa /ā, which state that one part (bhāga) must be given up (tyāga) to arrive at right self-knowledge and make the statement of identity immediately work, as the incompatible elements are dropped. Śaṅkara insists not only on identity and immediacy (if the listeners’ mind is pure and attuned), but also on existential change. He observes in his Upadeśa-Sāhasrī that once satisfied by the “sweet food” of self-recognition and non-dual experience, nobody, except a fool, will want to eat poison, even when suffering from hunger (US, Padyabandha 18.230). To arrive at non-duality, it is essential to inquire also into the tat, “that.” Creatorship and omniscience are accepted. They belong to Saguṇa-Brahman, the Brahman “with properties,” also called Īśvara, “the Lord” or the totality of causal mind (Māṇḍukya Up. 5 – 6) containing the seeds of creation (Hacker 1950: 264, 273 f.). The Lord governs the cosmic law (dharma) and distributes the fruits of action (karma). Ultimately, however, these attributes and functions are judged as accidental modalities or “limiting adjuncts” (upādhi) that are superimposed by humans onto the Brahman without attributes. The Vedic revelation, according to Śaṅkara, creates deliberate superimpositions and negations (adhyāropa-apavāda), such as “with hands and feet everywhere” and “without hands he grasps, without feet he goes” to lead the mind to the all-pervasive ultimate reality. In this vein, Śaṅkara ultimately does not accept the Taittirīya Upaniṣad’s characterization of the cosmic (Saguṇa) Brahman as that reality from which everything comes, by which everything is sustained, and into which everything goes back, as an ultimate definition of the Brahman. In the final analysis, only the formula satyam-jñānam-anantam (“pure state of being, knowledge/conscious

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awareness, infinity”) of the Taittirīya Up. 2.1 is accepted as a valid and factual statement about Brahman’s essential nature. There are many commentaries and subcommentaries on this issue, as these three terms must also be carefully examined for their lakṣaṇa content. Being in grammatical apposition, they must have an intrinsic mutual relationship. Their lakṣaṇa analysis reveals that each term is needed to understand the other’s meaning. The existent or reality as such (satyam) cannot be inert matter, but must be conscious awareness (jñānam) that has no beginning and end (anantam). The knowledge-aspect (jñānam), in turn, can have no activities, no parts, no refraction, no division and modalities (knowledge, knower, known) due to the appositional limitlessness or infinite existence (anantam). Infinity itself cannot be something lifeless, because the terms satyam and jñānam are present. According to the commentators, anantam is mainly there for negation, i. e. to make clear that satyam and jñānam must be understood as unlimited existence and unlimited knowledge. Each of the three words needs the combination with the others to communicate that which is beyond the words. Thus, shedding light on each other, their lakṣaṇa content is arrived at, a content which at the same time is the tertium comparationis in which tat and tvam converge. Because of their special combination, the words of the revelation develop through semantic implication the ability to transcend apparently insurmountable conditions of thinking. Upaniṣadic statements of non-dual reality are seen by the Advaita-Vedānta as statements of truth which can trigger immediate subjective knowledge and liberation from an existence of suffering, because they are about one’s own identity. The major argument is, to summarize the previous discussion: To understand the identity expressed by the formula tat tvam asi, tvam cannot mean this or that person limited by time, space etc. (e. g. the Śvetaketu addressed by tvam cannot mean the son of Uddālaka Aruni), and likewise tat cannot refer to God (īsvara) as omniscient divinity. As the copula “are” (asi) is there, there must be a common feature transcending the differences. This common factor is the individual’s pure consciousness; tvam must mean unlimited transcendental consciousness stripped of individuality. This is the only place where non-dual identity exists. To arrive at it, part of the usual meaning of the referent Śvetaketu must be given up (namely his limited and finite individuality), while part is retained, namely pure consciousness, each individual’s essential nature which can never be denied and objectified and which is experienced as the infinity of pure existent-being and also as limitless fullness, once the body identification has dropped.

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2.2.3 Guru The theory of indication explains rationally why śabda or word can have soteriological power and why immediate knowledge of the unknowable and noncommunicatable can take place. This verbal mediation, however, does not happen by just reading the Upaniṣad. “Reading” (pāṭha) in the wider context of Indian culture traditionally never refers to silent reading, but to “reciting.” Texts are sonic events. They are recited, memorized, sung, performed, dramatized and staged, and also preached in face-to-face communication. Classical Advaita-Vedānta is no exception to this rule, although the focus is solely on semantic content and a large lore of written commentaries, sub-commentaries and treatises exists. The Veda word is first of all the spoken and the sounding word. Already the Upaniṣads are often in form of a fictive teacher-student-dialogue. In its selfunderstanding the Vedānta has always been a teaching tradition and the commentary—even when written down—is part of the face-to-face communication from teacher to student in which the commentary is elaborated and elucidated. It is taken for granted that mere book knowledge is far from liberation. Already the Upaniṣads stress the point of a living master.¹⁵ The words must be taught, embodied and enlivened by an authentic and realized, “enlightened”¹⁶ master (ācārya, guru) who knows what he is speaking about. He has to wield the word so that it becomes an immediate means of knowledge and know the method of communicating the non-communicable. In India, classical AdvaitaVedānta is strictly speaking not a philosophical system (although it belongs of course to the six classical schools of philosophy), but a teaching method—and this method (consisting of various methodical techniques and investigations, such as the deep sleep analysis) is transmitted like the non-dual knowledge itself in the guru-śiṣya-paramparā, the flow from teacher to student. Moreover, Advaita-Vedāntic treatises spend a lot of words on the fit and qualified student (adhikārin) who is full of moral values, sense control, discrimination and detachment, and most of all craving ardently for liberation. Only for him the message works immediately. Similarly, the teacher must be highly qualified, virtuous, largehearted and compassionate. Most of all he should be both a śrotriya, i. e. a scholar well-versed in the sacred literature, and a brahmaniṣṭha, “firmly rooted in the

 Explicitly, for instance, the Muṇḍaka Up. 3 and the Chāndogya Up. at the end of the tat tvam asi-section.  The term is used today, but not part of the original terminology, which knows a lot of structural equals. See Wilke (2016: 297– 330).

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Brahman” he is teaching.¹⁷ So one could say that the teacher mediates between mediation and immediacy. As a śrotriya he embodies by his voice the mediation par excellence, i. e. the Veda “word” (śabda) as unique “means of knowledge” (pramāṇa), and as a brahmaniṣṭha, i. e. ideally a jīvanmukta, he is also an embodiment of immediacy or direct experience. For Indians, “freedom while living” is certainly not only fiction, eulogy or fancy, but a fact that can be found in dead and living masters. The master-disciple-transmission (guru-śiṣya-paramparā) has the goal to make the disciple himself an accomplished master. Important in this process is nidhidhyāsana, “contemplation” or “meditation,” the third major Advaita-Vedāntic practice besides “listening” (śravana) and “reflecting” (manana), which is particularly designed to interiorize the message and make it one’s own and a living reality.¹⁸

3 Immediacy-mediation—mediate immediacy and immediate mediation The discussion on immediacy and mediation has shown that immediacy appears in the Advaita-Vedānta coupled with various distinct forms of mediation: first, the Vedic word, particularly the “great sayings” of unity, as unique means of knowledge, second, the qualified teacher, and third a particular, “unbroken” thought-form. In keeping with the sacred texts, the teacher must know how to communicate the non-communicatable and how language may be used to go beyond language; while on the student’s side, there is necessity to purify the mind to become a clear mirror able to reflect the “self-luminous” pure, unlimited consciousness, which is, according to the Advaita-Vedānta, not only one’s own true self, but also the self of all beings. This reflection happens, say the treatises, in an “unbroken, limitless thought form” which mediates the immediacy of limitless consciousness, the true self or subject which can never be objectified. On

 The two terms already appear in the Muṇḍaka Up. 3—with slightly different connotations. Today, brahmaniṣṭha is sometimes translated as “steadfast in the contemplation of Brahman” which, however, is less literal than the translation suggested above.  The three-fold sādhana—śravana (listenig), manana (reflecting), nidhidhyāsana (contemplating)—was fully developed only post Śaṅkara who stresses in his Brahmasūtra commentary 1.1.4 that meditation brings nothing new in addition to what has been heard (i. e. the words of the Upaniṣads transmitted by a living master), but may be helpful for purification.

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all three levels of mediation, and particularly here, we find not only mediated immediacy, but also immediate mediation. Thus, immediacy and mediation are dealt with in a highly reflexive manner, although the message is said to be pre-reflexive and non-verbal. This message is also of great practical relevance, since liberation while living (jīvanmukti) is the final goal. Immediacy, mediation and the concurrence of both are reflected in the Advaita-Vedānta on all the levels: epistemology, language, pragmatics and performance. It is remarkable that this classical discourse builds on a number of seemingly opposing elements which get dissolved and merged into one by connecting links: a) On the one hand, we find extreme apophaticism (not reachable by the mind) and on the other a rational epistemology of immediacy. Here, the connecting links are the self-luminosity (svataḥ prakāśa, svayaṃ jyotiḥ) of consciousness (the ever pure svabhāva, “own nature,” untainted by thought) and the apophaticism of the human soul/ self. b) On the one hand, there is extreme language criticism based on the inability of language to reach transcendental entities, but we find, moreover, a doctrine of verbal knowledge and a sophisticated linguistic theory of how language is able to transcend itself. Here, the connecting link is lakṣaṇa /ā, “indication,” or more precisely bhāga-tyāga-lakṣaṇa /ā, rejecting a part of the literal meaning (the finite individual features, one’s identity with the body-mind complex and ego-centricity) while retaining the other (self-shining ‘pure’ consciousness beyond individual qualities). c) On the one hand immediate non-dual experience and on the other indispensable mediators are propounded. These are: 1) the Veda word as a valid means of knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa, telling about things otherwise not known), 2) the living word of the guru (who insures right understanding of the import of the Upaniṣadic words by a special teaching methodology using different prakriyās (methods) like the investigation into the three states (waking, dream, and deep-sleep) and various “nyāyas” (like anvaya-vyatireka or adhyāropa-apavāda etc.), and 3) a certain state of mind of the apt student: purity and an unbroken thought form of infinity (akhaṇḍa-ākāra-vṛitti; vṛtti-vyāpti, but not phala-vyāpti). d) On the one hand we find the claim of disembodied knowledge and on the other its embodiment in the ideal guru and the jīvanmukta, the liberated one while living in this very world and body. In this pragmatic, performative and praxis dimension there is shift from the identification with the body-mind-complex to the identification with the inner space of pure being, consciousness and infinite bliss, which, according to the Advaita-Vedānta, is the very essence and core of each individual and the very locus of non-dual experience and immedi-

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acy due to its “self-shining” nature. A sign of full realization is an “unbroken” unitary vision: seeing one’s self in everything and everything as one’s own self and abiding at all times in contentment and bliss, irrelevant of pleasure and pain, success and failure, heat or cold. So-called mystical experience is not connoted here with fleeting moments, but with constant presence throughout all transactions. Characteristically, the Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka (verse 30) states regarding this stage of perfection: “Wherever the mind is going, there is Samādhi.” Śaṅkara’s “disembodied knowledge” refers to such a person who has died for the ordinary vision of the world. Śaṅkara praises renunciation as the most suitable life-style for this knowledge¹⁹, but he is not dogmatic about it. More basic is the presupposition of akāmahatatva, “not being destroyed by desires,” and “reveling in one’s own self,” seeing nothing but the self in everything.²⁰ So, there are basically three primary forms of mediation discussed in the classical Advaita-Vedānta (Veda word, guru, a mental modification), but we must add a number of secondary forms of mediation which are equally important in actual practice. To these belong Veda orthodoxy, Brahmin birth,²¹ love of reason, rationality and introspection, the recitation of the texts (original and commentaries), the knowledge of Sanskrit, and a renunciate’s life²² or at least a virtuous, disciplined and withdrawn contemplative life—and not to forget: male gender despite the universal message. The Advaitic message actually does not allow for all these social restrictions.²³ The thinkers of modern reform Advaita-Vedānta—such as Swami Vivekananda (1862– 1902) and Swami Chinmayananda (1916 – 1993)—resorted to this potential by drawing far-reaching conclusions. They deliberately nullified all traditional social restrictions²⁴ and preached the Vedānta to everybody, irrelevant of caste, creed, gender, nationality, and even religion. It is fair to ask, what happened to the classical semiotics of immediacy and mediation in the modern democratization of Advaita-Vedāntic wisdom where the

 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 4.4.22, transl. Madhvananda 1975: 525, 527 f., 529.  Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 4.4.22, transl. Madhvananda 1975: 526; similarly Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. Bhāṣya 3.5.1 and 4.3.33.  Usually also Brahmin birth is presupposed, but there seem to be exceptions to this rule— from Śaṅkara’s disciple Totaka to the contemporary master Swami Tapovan.  Śaṅkara speaks even of a “parivrājika,” an itinerant mendicant. Monks belonging to the Śaṅkara tradition usually belong to the highest Brahmanic order, called “Paramahaṃsa.”  This was already acknowledged in the past, for instance, in the famous hymn Manīṣāpañcakam ascribed to Śaṅkara, and in the Cāṇḍāla legend prefacing it (Gussner 1973: 221– 232).  This deliberation is very pronounced in Swami Chinmayananda who heavily criticized brahmanical actors for withholding the precious knowledge from common folk. See, for instance, Chinmayananda’s introduction to the Iśāvāsya Up. (1963: 3 – 5).

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original contexts, such as Sanskrit and Vedic learning and monastic life, were no more presupposed and where the major teaching becomes the inherent godliness as birthright of everybody, as Swami Vivekananda (1893, reprint 2007) put it. It seems that in India—despite heavy semiotic transformations, where a scholastic and highly formalized teaching tradition turned into a “subjective science of selfperfection” (Chinmayananda 1963: 1– 23; 2007)—at least one traditional element of mediation remained: the teacher as living embodiment of immanent transcendence and his spoken word and charisma, which ensure greater immediacy, authenticity and authority than the written letter. When the Advaita-Vedānta became an urban public religion in India, there was a strong tendency to concentrate the immediacy discourse around the Guru as absolute authority and icon of immediate experience which he owns himself and which he can miraculously pass on. There occurred many more semiotic transformations after the elite tradition became public and global. The Advaita-Vedānta played a very crucial role, for instance, in Aldous Huxley’s extremely influential theory of perennial mysticism (King 1999: 162– 163) which provided “a sort of charter for sixties mysticism” (Ellwood 1994: 43). This Indian tradition (which Huxley probably became familiar with through his relations to Vivekananda’s Californian Vedanta society) underscored his argument for the perennialism and naturalness of mystical peak experiences, not only as found in all the great world religions, but also as induced by psychedelics. The Advaita-Vedānta gave Huxley a language and conceptual grid to understand his own drug experience as pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss (saccidānanda) (Huxley 1994 [1954]: 8).

References Primary Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra. [N.d.]. Vedānta-Paribhāṣā. Translated by Swami Madhavananda. Belur Math: Ramakrishna Mission. Rāmarāya. 2012. Vedānta Saṅgraha of Rāmarāya Kavi. Essentials of Vedānta. Edited and translated by R. Balasubramanian & S. Revathy. Veliyanand: Chinmaya International Foundation. Sadānanda. 1962. Vedānta-Sāra. A work on Vedanta Philosophy by Sadananda. Edited and translated by M. Hiryanna. Poona: Oriental Book Agency. Śaṅkara. 1992 [1915]. Works of Śaṅkarācārya in Original Sanskrit. 3 vols. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Śaṅkara. 1949. Upadeśasāhasrī von Meister Śaṅkara [Gadyabandha]. Edited and translated by into German by Paul Hacker. Bonn: Röhrscheid. Śaṅkara. 1973. Śaṅkara’s Upadeśasāhasrī [Padyabandha]. Edited by Sengaku Mayeda. Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press.

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Śaṅkara. 1975. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad with the commentary of Śaṅkarācārya. Translated by Swami Madhavananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Śaṅkara. 1976. Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka. An Inquiry into the Nature of the ‘Seer’ and the ‘Seen.’ Translated by Swami Nikhilananda. Mysore: Ramakrishna Ashrama. Śaṅkara. 1977. Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya of Śaṅkarācārya. Translated by Swami Gambhirananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Śaṅkara. 1983. Chāndogya Upaniṣad with the commentary of Śrī Śaṅkarācārya. Translated by Swami Gambhirananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama.

Secondary Berger, Peter. 1992 [1979]. The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. New York: Anchor Press. Chakraborty, Munmun. 2015. The Notion of Reflexivity in Advaita: A Critical Evaluation. In Sandhya Sundar & Dilip Kumar Rana (eds.), Advaitāmṛtam, 83 – 92. Velyanad: Chinmaya International Foundation. Chinmayananda, Swami. 1963 [1955]. Discourses on Isavasya Upanishad. Madras: Chinmaya Publication Trust. Chinmayananda, Swami. 2007 [1975]. The Art of Man-Making: Talks on the Bhagavad Geeta. Mumbai: Central Chinmaya Mission Trust. Ellwood, Robert. 1994. The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from the Modern to the Postmodern. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gussner, Robert E. 1973. Hymns of Praise: A Textual-Critical Analysis of Selected Vedantic Stotras Attributed to Sankara with Reference to the Question of Authenticity. PhD dissertation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hacker, Paul. 1950. Eigentümlichkeiten der Lehre und Terminologie Śaṃkaras: Avidyā, Nāmarūpa, Māyā, Īśvara. Zeitschrift der Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 100. 246 – 286. Halbfass, Wilhelm. 1991. Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought. Albany: SUNY Press. Hiriyanna, Mysore. 1994. Outlines of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Huxley, Aldous. 1994 [1954]. The Doors of Perception. London: Flamingo. Huxley, Aldous. 2004 [1944]. Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper & Collins. Katz, Steven T. 1978. Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism. In Steven T. Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, 22 – 74. London: Sheldon Press. Katz, Steven T. (ed.). 1983. Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East. London: Routledge. Kumari, Shanta. 2015. Reality, World and Souls. In Sandhya Sundar & Dilip Kumar Rana (eds.), Advaitāmṛtam, 63 – 70. Velyanad: Chinmaya International Foundation. Mishra, Godabarisha. 2015. Akhaṇḍārtha and Akhaṇḍākāravṛtti. In Sandhya Sundar & Dilip Kumar Rana (eds.), Advaitāmṛtam, 383 – 400. Velyanad: Chinmaya International Foundation. Narasimhan, Padma. 1990. Swami Dayananda Saraswati (The Traditional Teacher of Brahma Vidyā). Madras: T.T. Maps & Publications.

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Otto, Rudolf. 1926. West-Östliche Mystik. Gotha: Klotz. Penner, Hans. 1983. The Mystical Illusion. In Steven T. Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Religious Traditions, 89 – 116. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stace, Walter Terence. 1961. Mysticism and Philosophy. London: Macmillan. Stephan, Peter. 2005. Vedānta. In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 4, vol. 8, 918. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Tapovan, Swami. 2015. The Glory of Brahma-vidyā. In Sandhya Sundar & Dilip Kumar Rana (eds.), Advaitāmṛtam, 11 – 20, Velyanad: Chinmaya International Foundation. Vivekananda, Swami. 2007. Chicago Addresses. Kolkatta: Advaita Ashrama. Wilke, Annette. 2015. Impacts and Exponents of Advaita-vedānta in the Western World: An Interactional Perspective. In Sandhya Sundar & Dilip Kumar Rana (eds.), Advaitāmṛtam, 313 – 344. Velyanad: Chinmaya International Foundation. Wilke, Annette. 2016. Variationen zum Thema ‘Erleuchtung’ im Hinduismus: Termini befreiten Wissens und Lichtsymbolik im Advaita-Vedānta und Śaiva-Tantra. In Almut Renger (ed.), Erleuchtung: Kultur- und Religionsgeschichte eines Begriffs, 297 – 330. Freiburg: Herder. Wilke, Annette & Oliver Moebus. 2011. Sound and Communication: An Aesthetic Cultural History of Sanskrit Hinduism. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.

Part II: Contemporary movements

Jenny Ponzo

Religious-artistic epiphanies in 20th-century literature: Joyce, Claudel, Weil, C.S. Lewis, Rebora, and Papini For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. Wisdom 13:5

1 Introduction The term epiphany has known a broad diffusion in literary studies (Ashton 1987; Bidney 1997), especially after the publication of Joyce’s works.¹ According to Joyce, “epiphany” is a moment of sudden illumination, when the poet, through his imagination, contemplates the true being of the world, in all its beauty and splendor. Joyce was inspired by a theological source which had a significant influence on 20th-century culture, namely Thomas Aquinas. In particular, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explicitly refers to Thomas’s aesthetic theory when the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, reflects on “beauty in the wider sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition” (Joyce 1960: 213). According to Dedalus, when the artist firstly conceives the aesthetic image of an object, he feels its “supreme quality,” i. e. the “scholastic quidditas, the whatness”: The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like

Note: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757314). A preliminary and partial version of the analysis of the works by Claudel, Weil and Lewis was published in Italian in the e-book Semiotica e santità. Prospettive interdisciplinari, ed. Jenny Ponzo and Franesco Galofaro. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18ukajodFWhNPQGX5agSCJ-nH9pGAwJXl/view?usp=sharing.  In particular Stephen Hero, a previous version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), published in 1944, and Epiphanies, written by 1904 and published in 1956. See Ziolkowski (2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-011

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to that cardiac condition which the Italian psychologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart. Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence. (Joyce 1960: 213)

Moments of illumination analogous to what Joyce—and many after him—call “epiphany” are often experienced in religious conversion and constitute its peak experience.² Ziolkowski (2014: 1) affirms that epiphany is a term with “a mystical theological aura, having been broadly secularized.” In this paper, I will show that a deep connection exists between “secularized” and “religious” epiphanies, and that the border between the two is actually a fine line. I will show in particular how art, and more specifically literature, on the one hand plays a mediating role in 20th-century accounts of conversion to Christianity and, on the other hand, it mediates the apparently immediate experience of epiphany, intended as a sudden revelation or knowledge of a glimpse of divine truth. Indeed, in 20th-century literature it is possible to identify a circular movement between artistic expression and religion: a number of writers describe both paths from poetry or, more generally, from aesthetic experience to religious epiphany, and paths from religious epiphany to literature. Based on works by 20thcentury authors, such as Paul Claudel, Simone Weil, C.S. Lewis, Giovanni Papini, and Clemente Rebora, I will explore, firstly, the relationship between aestheticartistic experience and religious conversion, and, secondly, the writers’ theorization of a direct relationship between the poetic faculty and divine inspiration and grace. Finally, I will point out the main recurring features of the semiotic ideology (i. e. the set of ideas concerning language and meaning) underlying the analyzed works.

2 From artistic to religious experience: Epiphany and conversion In Christian autobiographical stories of conversion across time, it is possible to identify several recurring mediating factors that foster conversion by opening the protagonist’s heart and showing him/her the right path towards spiritual perfection. One of these factors is the example of pious or saintly people, for instance Saint Anthony for Augustine of Hippo (Confessions, book VIII), or the good nun

 James (1902) mentions experiences of sudden illumination several times in his work (see in particular Lecture X, on cases of sudden conversion).

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for Teresa of Avila (The Book of Her Life, chapter III). Another factor is the reading of books. The importance of books in generating epiphanies is well demonstrated by Ziolkowski (2014). Here, I will devote some attention to what kinds of books trigger religious epiphanies and conversion in the 20th century. I will show that fictional literature and poetry, i. e. profane texts with a strong imaginative and aesthetic component, are attributed a positive function in conversion; they are almost equated to theological, hagiographic, and sacred literature and language. I will present three examples: Paul Claudel, Simone Weil, and C.S. Lewis.

2.1 Paul Claudel: Aesthetic experience, conversion, and poetry Paul Claudel (1868 – 1955), the French dramatist and poet, describes his conversion to Catholicism in a text entitled “Ma conversion”, first published in 1913. Claudel writes that he had lost his faith in his youth, and that the first glimpse of the truth, his very first conception of the supernatural derived from reading the books of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. As a consequence, the reading having for Claudel a “capital importance” (Claudel 1999: 454) is not a theological or religious book, but a work of poetry. Moreover, Rimbaud was a “poète maudit,” a libertine and transgressive poet, far from the traditional and pious model of a saint. At the age of 18, Claudel attends the Vespers on the Christmas Eve in NotreDame cathedral in Paris, where he experiences an epiphany, a sudden illumination: There were children from the choir-school dressed in white [ …singing] what I later discovered to be the Magnificat. I myself was standing in the crowd near the second pillar at the entrance to the choir on the right of the sacristy. It was then that the event took place which revolutionized my whole life. Suddenly my heart was touched and I BELIEVED. I believed with such power, with such force of my whole being […] that nothing since […] has been able to shake or even to touch my faith. I was overcome with a sudden and overwhelming sense of the innocence and the eternal infancy of God—an inexpressible revelation. (Claudel 1999: 454)

Four aesthetic components have a primary importance in this experience: 1) Notre-Dame’s architecture;³ 2) the empathy with the crowd, i. e. the sense of  On the symbolic meaning of Notre-Dame’s pillars in Claudel’s account, see Leone (2004: chapter 3).

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being surrounded by a mass of people attending the same ritual; 3) the visual and chromatic element of the children in white; 4) and, most of all, the chants, which seem to be the most powerful factor triggering Claudel’s epiphany. From that moment, Claudel feels questioned by God not only as a man, but also as an artist. The development of his religious identity is strictly connected to the development of his artistic personality: A new person, making the most terrifying demands on the young man and the artist that I was, had revealed himself […] the awakening of the soul and the poetic faculty took place in me at the same time […]. (Claudel 1999: 455 – 56)

After the epiphanic episode, Claudel gains a better understanding of religion both by reading theological works and by experiencing the dramatic, poetic, and aesthetic character of Catholic rituals, as the words I highlight in italic show: I spent every Sunday at Notre-Dame […] there the sacred drama unfolded before me with a splendor which surpassed anything I had imagined—not in the poor language of devotional works, but in the deepest and most glorious poetry, the most solemn gestures that have ever been entrusted to human beings. I never tired of the spectacle of the mass […]. The reading of the offices of the dead and the offices of Christmas, the ceremonies of Holy Week, the sublime chant of the Exultet—beside which the loftiest and most ecstatic moments of Sophocles and Pindar seemed weak—overcame me with a sense of awe, joy, gratitude, repentance and adoration. Little by little, […] the idea that art and poetry were divine things made its way into my heart […] (Claudel 1999: 456)

Later on, the reading of another “poète maudit”, Charles Baudelaire, who converted in his last years, marks a further advancement in Claudel’s conversion process: I read Baudelaire’s Oeuvres posthumes, and I saw that the poet whom I preferred to all other French poets had found the Faith in his last years and had suffered the same anguish and the same remorse as myself. One afternoon I summoned up my courage and went into a confessional […] (Claudel 1999: 457)

Once more, the example of a nonconformist poet replaces the traditional example of a saint in fostering conversion. The concept of the correspondence between divine grace and poetic inspiration is also expressed in Claudel’s poetic work. The ode “La Muse qui est la Grâce” (1913), for example, is structured as a dialogue between the poet and the Muse, who little by little identifies herself with the Grace and wants to have the poet fully for herself, despite his resistance, his attachment to earthly life, and his claim for his artistic freedom. Salvation is a central theme in Claudel, and it comes from two converging sources: the poetic

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and the religious source. In this view, poetry and faith form an indissoluble unity. In the “Lettre à l’Abbé Brémond sur l’inspiration poétique,”⁴ Claudel affirms that poetic language is led by God’s hand and it uses words so as to present the image of the “pure thing.” The “pure thing” is the thing in its whole sense; it is a partial, intelligible, and delectable image of God. As a consequence, according to Claudel, poetry is equal to prayer, because it singles out the pure essence of God’s creation and bears testimony to God. But poetry is also inferior to prayer, because poetry is limited to material things, while human beings must tend to God only, and, Claudel says, although all the paths to reach God are fine, the most direct is the best. Poetry is therefore a medium to arrive to God, and its function is close to that of prayer.

2.2 Simone Weil: The continuum between sacred and poetic language In 1942, one year before her death, Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) sent her last letter to a Catholic priest her friend. In this letter, Weil describes the gradual birth of her faith. She firmly denies any role to human mediators, but claims instead that she had “three contacts which Catholicism that really counted” (Weil 1999: 502). The first happens in a Portuguese village, where she attends a procession⁵ for the patron saint. As for Claudel, the epiphany is triggered by an aesthetic experience. Weil is stricken by the landscape and most of all by the chants: It was the evening and there was a full moon over the sea. The wives of the fishermen were, in procession, making a tour of all the ships, carrying candles and singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-rending sadness. Nothing can give any idea of it. I have never heard anything so poignant […] There the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves […] (Weil 1999: 502– 503)

The second experience happens in Assisi, where the architectural beauty of the Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli deeply moves Simone, who falls down on her knees: There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stron-

 First published in 1927, then collected in Claudel (1944).  On procession as a literary motif, see Ponzo (2017).

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ger than I compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees. (Weil 1999: 503)

The third experience happens in Solesmes, in France. During a liturgical service of the Holy Week, thanks again to the beauty of the chants and of the words, Simone Weil reaches a sudden understanding of God’s love: I was suffering from splitting headaches […] I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, […] and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. (Weil 1999: 503)

Weil then narrates how she discovers the poem Love by Herbert Spencer, and how this poem has for her the same function of a prayer or a mantra: I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that […] Christ himself came down and took possession of me. (Weil 1999: 503)

The recitation of a poem triggers a mystical experience lived as the authentic personal encounter with the Christ: the power of the poem is equal to that of the sacred language of liturgy and prayer. Vice versa, before the completion of her conversion process, Weil says that she had never prayed in her whole life: she had “occasionally recited the Salve Regina, but only as a beautiful poem” (Weil 1999: 505). The boundary between poetry and prayer is therefore blurred. Indeed, the initial stimulus that leads Weil to start praying consists in the beauty of the words of the Our Father: I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek. […] The infinite sweetness of this Greek text so took hold of me that for several days I could not stop myself from saying it over all the time. Since that time I have made a practice of saying it through with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep, in the minutest degree, I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. Sometimes it comes about that I say it again out of sheer pleasure […]. The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for, although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thought from my body and transport it to a place outside the space. […] Sometimes, also, during the recitation […], Christ is present with me in person, but his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me. (Weil 1999: 505)

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The Our Father works exactly like Spencer’s poem, just at a higher degree, since it causes a more intense mystical experience. The words’ aesthetic quality, more than their content, which is not mentioned or commented on in Weil’s account, seems to determine the prayer’s power. Like in Claudel, poetic language has less value than sacred language, but it has nevertheless a close relationship with the sacred. Weil explains: “we owe an allegiance to religious truth which is quite different from the admiration we accord to a beautiful poem; it is something far more categorical” (Weil 1999: 504). In this view, therefore, there is not a radical opposition between sacral and poetic language, but rather a continuum.

2.3 C.S. Lewis: Joy as the index of religious truth “Surprised by Joy” is the autobiographical account of C.S. Lewis’s conversion, published in 1955. Before his conversion, Lewis (1898 – 1963) spent his youth searching for what he called “Joy.” Joy is similar to aesthetic pleasure: “It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” (Lewis 1955: 72). The young Lewis experiences joy for example when he starts longing for “Northerness”. One day, Lewis casually reads the words “Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods” (Lewis 1955: 72) in a periodical. These very words trigger an epiphany: Pure “Northerness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer […] and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago […]. And […] there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that […] I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared around […] like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew that to “have it again” was the supreme and only important object of desire. (Lewis 1955: 73)

This description contains features that recur in countless accounts of conversion, such as we can find, for example, in William James (1902): the sense of sudden revelation, of recovering some knowledge lost a long time ago, of returning from exile. This, however, is not a religious conversion: firstly, this experience is aesthetic in essence. Secondly, it does not involve belief: Lewis repeatedly and clearly states that his imaginary world does not imply belief at all (Lewis 1955: 59, 82). This experience is nevertheless similar to religion, as Lewis explains:

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Northerness […] was not itself a new religion, for it contained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet […] there was in it something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object it was. (Lewis 1955: 76 – 77)

Lewis affirms that this ability of adoring an object in itself is later transferred from the imaginary Norse gods to the real Christian God. Since that epiphanic moment, Lewis finds Joy in Nordic mythological poems and novels, in Wagner’s music and opera. Joy is however spoiled by Lewis’s tendency to search for the experience itself, for the thrill, and to focus on this state of mind instead than on its object. For Lewis, this “error” is another thing that aesthetic or artistic experience and religious experience have in common: It is not blasphemous to compare the error which I was making with that error which the angel at the Sepulchre rebuked when he said to the women, “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here […]” The comparison is of course between something of infinite moment and something very small: like the Sun and the Sun’s reflection in a dewdrop. Indeed, in my view, very like it, for I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. “Reflect” is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image. (Lewis 1955: 167)

Lewis adds that the life of the imagination can be the beginning of spiritual life, but only if God causes it to be so. In the course of his quest, Lewis gains new insights from friends and teachers, and from books, including fictional books. For example, he understands what “holiness” is by reading a fantasy novel by George MacDonald. After having searched for joy in many different objects, for instance in sensual love and in occultism, Lewis understands that joy must not be an end in itself, but that it just points to some “external” object exceeding the self. Joy represents the moment of “clearest consciousness of our fragmentary and phantasmal nature” and our longing for the reunion with the Absolute. In the end, Lewis understands that Joy, alias the aesthetic experience, is not important in itself, but only as a pointer to religious truth: [Joy] has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. I cannot, indeed, complain, like Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away. […] the old stab, the old bitter-sweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life […]. But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never that kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. […] When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. […] But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, […] we

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shall not stop and stare, […] though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. (Lewis 1955: 238)

3 From religious to artistic experience: Poetry and grace As we have seen, Claudel considers poetry as a gift deriving from divine grace, to the point that the religious and the poetic faculties are inseparable. The idea that poetry derives from divine grace is expressed by many other 20th-century writers, for example by Clemente Rebora (1885 – 1957) and Giovanni Papini (1881– 1956).

3.1 Clemente Rebora: Poetry as analogy The “Thoughts” of the Italian poet and Catholic priest Clemente Rebora (1957) contain reflections about the religious value of poetry: To make poetry has become for me, more than ever, a concrete way to love God and my brothers. Charitas lucis, refrigerium crucis. […] Every real poet (and they are very few)—and also every artist, or simply author, because we actually should reserve the qualification of Artist to the Divine Creator—is unitotal, even though the number of his works is restricted; he has his own, non-communicable, personal genius installed into the perennial and unanimous element of the culture and civilization of his time […] Poetry […] means to discover and establish conveniences [sic] and references and concordances between Heaven and earth and in us and between us […] Poetry […] intended in a total way, i. e. in a Catholic way, is the beauty that makes the infinite Goodness clear, as an arcane reverberation […] (Rebora 1957: 9 – 10, my translation)

Rebora’s perspective makes of poetry a sort of religious practice, which seems based on the theological concept of analogy. As Boulnois (2005: 27) explains, analogy indicates in theology “the gap between human knowledge of God and God himself.” It entails “respect for the absolute transcendence of God, who is ineffable and unknowable, and the preservation of a minimal intelligible pertinence in the discourse of faith.” Thus, “Knowledge of God needs the analogical method: that is, the movement upward from works to the Principle.” The theological concept of analogy can work as an effective interpretative key to gain a deeper understanding of the discourse of all the writers considered herein. In particular, the view of poetry as the mirror of the revelation and as the imperfect

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representation of a perfect and transcendent reality owes a considerable debt to the metaphysical thought characterizing neo-Thomism, or neo-scholasticism (Molinaro 1990). Neo-scholastic philosophy, inspired by the theology of Thomas Aquinas, was promoted by the Church in the late 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century as an antidote to the risks of “modernist” thought. NeoThomism knew a broad diffusion in 20th-century Catholic thought, to the point of being echoed in literature, as Joyce’s explicit reference to Aquinas shows (see above). Although the other authors’ more general and implicit concept of analogy between creation and creator cannot be simplistically attributed to a direct influence of the neo-scholastics, it is possible nevertheless to affirm that this kind of “analogic” thought was a common and diffused worldview. In Rebora’s perspective the creative component of the poetic work presupposes a parallel between the figure of the artist-creator and the deity as the supreme and perfect model of the creator. Moreover, in Rebora’s work, art is associated to the theme of sanctity, in the sense that poetry becomes a way to reach spiritual salvation (Forner 2007; Lollo 1967). The religious role of the poets is also stressed by Papini.

3.2 Giovanni Papini: The poet as a messenger of the Revelation Il giudizio universale by Giovanni Papini (1957) represents the poets as a category of human beings enjoying a privileged relationship with the divine. This monumental work is set during the Final Judgment. After a prologue that describes the end of the world and the beginning of the Judgment, each of the 329 chapters are devoted to a character, either invented or historical, who speaks his/her soul to an angel. The work also includes collective “choirs” of several categories of characters. The “choir of the poets” begins as follows: We sing a chant of prayer to You, to You who were the first and most powerful of the poets, To You who created for the joy of men the hymn of the sky, the poem of the earth, the drama of life, To You, instructor of the inspired, who gave us the miracle of language, the discovering of beauty, and the revelation of mysteries only to few elected. Do not forget, in the infinite glory of Your love, these sons of yours who saw the glare of Your light through a tear, who in the breath of the breeze understood the breath of Your breast. (Papini 1966: 1021, my translation)

Poets are “assumed” in God’s grace, and they help innumerable “blind” human beings to see the “ineffable splendor of the universe”:

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Those who only saw the stars as the helmsmen’s signals, who only saw the fields as crops to reap, who only saw horses and sheep as beasts to burden or to milk […], thanks to us learnt to see the beauty in the starry skies and in the flowering countries, the airy majesty of the mountains and the woodland beauty of the trees, that reflection of divine origin that shines in the animals and in the innocents’ gazes. If the world, with all its mysteries and splendors, is the first of Your revelations, our poetry was, sometimes, the first disclosure of Your revelation. (Papini 1966: 1023, my translation).

In what we called the “analogic” worldview, which sees the created world as a proof of the existence and as a portrait of the Creator, the arts assume a particular importance, because their prerogative is precisely to catch and point at the relationship between creation and creator, thus being privileged vehicles of a religious message. This idea is common to numerous authors with a Catholic background. For example, James Joyce, who received a Jesuit education, likened artistic creation to the mystery of transubstantiation in the Catholic mass, where the bread of everyday life is changed into something transcendent, and he envisaged himself as a “priest of the eternal imagination” (Kearney 2013: 415). Thus, we close our circle: for contemporary Christian authors poetry and poetic experience can constitute the first step to conversion and to religion (as we have seen for Claudel, Weil, and Lewis); at the same time, poetry is conceived as a product of grace and poetic inspiration as a divine gift.

4 Conclusions: Outline of a Christian semiotic ideology in contemporary literature In religious accounts of conversion before the 20th century, the books having the power to trigger religious epiphanies are most often books with a theological or hagiographic character. One of the most influential works prompting this kind of religious experience is Augustine’s Confessions, which is referenced in a number of autobiographical and literary texts (Courcelle 1963), such as Teresa of Avila’s Life and Petrarch’s Ascent to Mont Ventoux (Petrarch 1999). Petrarch used to carry a copy of the Confessions everywhere he went, including on the Mont Ventoux, where the reading of a passage of Augustine’s book triggered an epiphanic moment of religious consciousness, in 1341. The positive effect of reading pious literature was often contrasted with the deleterious effects of reading fictional and profane literature. For example, in her Life, written after 1567, Teresa of Avila describes the bad influence of chivalric novels:

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[Because of chivalry books] I started to grow cold in my desires and to fail in everything else. I didn’t think it was wrong to waste many hours of the day and night in such a useless practice […]. I began to dress in finery and to desire to please and look pretty […] (Teresa of Avila 1999: 293 – 294)

Thus, chivalric literature is not only useless, but also harmful, because it leads one to commit sins of vanity. On the contrary, reading Augustine’s Confessions is for Teresa a totally different experience, apparently determined by God himself: At this time they gave me The Confessions of St. Augustine. It seems the Lord ordained this, because I had not tried to procure a copy, nor had I ever seen one. […] As I began to read the Confessions, it seemed to me I saw myself in them. […] When I […] read how he heard that voice in the garden, it only seemed to me […] that it was I the Lord called. (Teresa of Avila 1999: 296)

Similarly, Augustine himself, in his Confessions (book 1) deems vain the study of the Aeneid: I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life […] (Augustine of Hippo 1961: 33)

The same book IV of the Aeneid, narrating the tragic affair between Aeneas and Dido, is described as one of the main temptations leading the young protagonist Amaury to perdition in Volupté, Sainte-Beuve’s largely autobiographical novel published in 1834. As these examples show, in stories of conversion prior to the 20th century it is possible to draw a clear distinction between a “virtuous,” “pious” or even “sacred” literature leading to conversion and to God, and a literature with a false, imaginary, and vain content, which leads to sin. In 20th-century stories of conversion, however, the barrier between these two kinds of literature becomes much more permeable. Fictional literature and poetry, i. e. texts with a strong imaginative and aesthetic component, are seen to have a positive function: they are accorded a much higher power in triggering religious epiphanies and in fostering conversion. The aesthetic component of religious experience is emphasized and dignified, it is perceived as a divine gift, expressed and reproduced in artworks and poetry. This bijective relationship between arts and religious experience constitutes a specific instance that reinforces the more general argument for the mediation of mystical experience advanced in recent currents of religious studies. In partic-

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ular, Steven Katz (2013: 5) claims that “mystical experience(s) reveal a necessary relationship between the prior education of the mystic and their mystical goal […]. All experience is processed through, organized by, and makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological ways. The notion of unmediated, that is, pure, experience seems at best empty if not self-contradictory.” While Katz (2013: 16 – 20) acknowledges the importance of verbal language as the main mediator, the analysis presented herein rather points out the importance of artistic works, both verbal and non-verbal, and of the aesthetic quality of systems of signs (from music to gesture, from architecture to poetry) in fostering and mediating religious experience, and how the contemporary Christian sensibility opens the range of textual genres that it allows to be considered as vehicles of a genuine religious experience. In conclusion, from our short analysis of 20th-century stories of conversion by Christian authors we can deduce some recurring features composing a specific semiotic ideology:⁶ 1. Texts having a strong poetic function—in Jakobson’s (1960) sense—are attributed a great power. They can trigger religious epiphanies. 2. There is a hierarchical distinction between prayer and poetry, but not an opposition. The same is true for the relationship between fictional and non-fictional texts. 3. Works of art and literature are considered analogic “images” of a superior reality. This idea seems to owe a debt to neo-scholastic thought, as well as to neo-Platonism and idealism. 4. The reverse happens as well: there is a propensity to positively evaluate and emphasize the aesthetic component of religious experience and of religious language. Liturgy, prayer, and rituals are performed, appreciated, and evaluated as art. 5. Form, the poetic-aesthetic component of religious language, is attributed a value which is equal, or even superior, to that attributed to content. 6. Poetic inspiration is sometimes associated with divine Grace.

 A semiotic ideology can be defined as a set of “basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world. It determines, for instance, what people will consider the role that intentions play in the signification to be, what kinds of possible agents (humans only? Animals? Spirits?) exist to which acts of signification might be imputed, whether signs are arbitrary or necessarily linked to their objects, and so forth” (Keane 2003: 419). See also Kroskrity (2000); Lambek (2013); Silverstein (1979).

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The Catholic Church has recognized the pedagogical role of art at least since the Council of Trent⁷ and has confirmed it during the Second Vatican Council (1962– 1965). In documents such as Gaudium et Spes (1965) and Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), the Church states that literature and the arts have to reveal human nature and elevate human life; that they are among the noblest human activities; and that they are “sacred” when their goal is to portray God’s beauty and to turn the mind toward God.⁸ Claudel, Weil, C.S. Lewis, Rebora, and Papini wrote well before the Second Vatican Council. The conciliar Church, therefore, does not set a trend, but rather seems to ratify an existing trend. Furthermore, this tendency is not confined to Catholicism at all: C.S. Lewis was a Protestant, while Simone Weil, despite being close to Catholicism, always refused official affiliation. The semiotic ideology outlined herein confers a dignity and importance to art and literature such as they probably never enjoyed in the past. In the 20th century, literature, i. e. the product of imagination and poetry, works as a stairway leading to Heaven: it is described as the privileged medium that triggers the epiphanic encounter between the deity and human beings. And this power is attributed especially to its language, to its poetic form, and to its aesthetic character. The kind of thought expressed by the Christian authors considered herein provides a striking alternative to the nihilist tendency often associated with the culture of a century that proclaimed the death of God and the end of literature (e. g. Kernan 1992; Vahanian 1961; McCullough 2008). On the one hand, writers and artists are considered elected individuals; in Papini’s work, for example, poets are the only ones, together with saints, to be allowed to see glimpses of divine truth and beauty. On the other hand, God is represented as an active presence in human life and as a perfect being that can be discovered at least in part and intuitively through art, through the literary “enchantment of the heart.”

 De invocatione, veneratione et reliquiis sanctorum, et sacris imaginibus (1563).  “Literature and the arts are also, in their own way, of great importance to the life of the Church. They strive to make known the proper nature of man […] revealing man’s place in history and in the world; […] foreshadowing a better life for him. Thus they are able to elevate human life” (Gaudium et Spes 1965: n. 62). “The fine arts are considered to rank among the noblest activities of man’s genius, and this applies especially to religious art and to its highest achievement, which is sacred art. These arts […] are oriented toward the infinite beauty of God which they attempt in some way to portray […] they are directed […] to the single aim of turning men’s minds devoutly toward God” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 1963: n. 122).

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References Ashton, Nichols. 1987. The Poetics of Epiphany: 19th-Century Origin of the Modern Literary Moment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Augustine of Hippo. 1961. Confessions. Traslated from Latin by R.S. Pine-Coffin. London & New York: Penguin. Bidney, Martin. 1997. Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoj, Pater, and Barrett Browning. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Boulnois, Olivier. 2005. Analogy. In Jean-Yves Lacoste (ed.), Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, vol. 1, 27 – 30. New York: Routledge. Claudel, Paul. 1913. La Muse qui est la Grȃce. In Paul Claudel, Cinq grandes odes suivies d’un processional pour saluer le siècle nouveau. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française. https://archive.org/stream/cinqgrandesodes00clau/cinqgrandesodes00clau_djvu.txt (accessed 6 November 2019). Claudel, Paul. 1944. Lettre à l’Abbé Brémond sur l’inspiration poétique. In Paul Claudel, Positions et propositions, 91 – 100. Paris: Gallimard. Claudel, Paul. 1999. My Conversion. In Amy Mandelker & Elizabeth Powers (eds.), Pilgrim Souls: An Anthology of Spiritual Autobiographies, 452 – 457. New York: Simon & Schuster. Courcelle, Pierre. 1963. Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et postérité. Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes. Forner, Fabio. 2007. Santità. In Remo Ceserani, Mario Domenichelli & Pino Fasano (eds.), Dizionario dei temi letterari, 2156 – 2161. Turin: UTET. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Thomas Sebeok (ed.). Style in Language, 350 – 377. New York: Wiley. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Joyce, James. 1944. Stephen Hero. Norfolk: New Directions. Joyce, James. 1956. Epiphanies. Buffalo: Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo. Joyce, James. 1960 [1916]. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Katz, Steven. 2013. General Editor’s Introduction. In Steven Katz (ed.), Comparative Mysticism: An Anthology of Original Sources, 3 – 22. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keane, Webb. 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication 23. 409 – 425. Kearney, Richard. 2013. Eucharistic Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce. In Gerard Hanratty & Fran O’Rourcke (eds.), Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerard Hanratty. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Kernan, Alvin. 1992. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kroskrity, Paul (ed.). 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Lambek, Michael. 2013. Varieties of Semiotic Ideology in the Interpretation of Religion. In Janice Boddy & Michael Lambek (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, 137 – 153. London: Wiley – Blackwell. Leone, Massimo. 2004. Religious Conversion: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts. London & New York: Routledge. Lewis, Clive S. 1955. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Geoffrey Bles.

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Lollo, Renata. 1967. La scelta tremenda: Santità e poesia nell’itinerario spirituale di Clemente Rebora. Milano: IPL. McCullough, Lissa. 2008. Death of God Reprise: Alizer, Taylor, Vattimo, Caputo, Vahanian. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9 (3). 97 – 109. Molinaro, Aniceto. 1990. La neoscolastica italiana. Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica. 436 – 454. Paul VI. 1963. Sacrosanctum Concilium. www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_ council/index_it.htm (accessed 09 May 2019). Paul VI. 1965. Gaudium et Spes. www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/ index_it.htm (accessed 09 May 2019). Papini, Giovanni. 1966 [1957]. Giudizio Universale. Milano: Mondadori. Petrarch, Francesco. 1999. Ascent to Mont Ventoux. In Amy Mandelker & Elizabeth Powers (eds.), Pilgrim Souls: An Anthology of Spiritual Autobiographies, 399 – 407. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ponzo, Jenny. 2017. Procession as a Literary Motif: The Intersection of Religious and National Symbolism in Italian Narrative (19th – 20th Centuries). Journal of Religion in Europe 10. 107 – 146. Rebora, Clemente. 1957. Pensieri. In Clemente Rebora, Canti dell’infermità, 9 – 10. Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro. Sainte-Beuve, Charles A. 1834. Volupté. Paris: Béziat. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In Paul Clyne, William Hanks & Carol Hofbauer (eds.), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, 193 – 247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Teresa of Avila. 1999. From the Book of Her Life. In Amy Mandelker & Elizabeth Powers (eds.), Pilgrim Souls: An Anthology of Spiritual Autobiographies, 290 – 303. New York: Simon & Schuster. Vahanian, Gabriel. 1961. The Death of God: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era. New York: George Braziller. Weil, Simone. 1999. A Spiritual Autobiography. In Amy Mandelker & Elizabeth Powers (eds.), Pilgrim Souls: An Anthology of Spiritual Autobiographies, 498 – 512. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ziolkowski, Theodore. 2014. “Tolle Lege”: Epiphanies of the Book. The Modern Language Review 109 (1). 1 – 14.

Fred Cummins

On vain repetitions: The enactment of collective subjectivities through speaking in unison 1 Language and communication Both informal and academic approaches to the study of “language” lean very heavily upon the metaphor of message passing. Each turn in a linguistic exchange is characterised by the encoding of an abstract thought into some physical vehicle, be it articulatory movements, sounds, written texts, signs, or emojis, which are then transferred from sender to receiver, where they are decoded to arrive back at the conceptual content. The roles of sender and receiver are quite distinct, and they may admit of spatial displacement without interfering with the business of message passing. The formal discipline of linguistics, since its structuralist beginnings at the start of the 20th century, and through its rebirth as generative linguistics in mid-century, has concerned itself primarily with the study of the code, both at the level of sounds (phonology) and meaningful units (syntax). The unspoken background to this picture is one of singular minds, descendants of the cogito of Descartes, epistemologically privileged, independent of, and separable from, their containing worlds. Scientific psychology has taken it upon itself to delineate the assumed mechanics of such minds, and the union of generative grammar and cognitive psychology in the 1960s, fuelled by the richly productive metaphors of computation and information processing, has given rise to an orthodoxy that subsumes vast amounts of work, and public funding, across many academic fields. Against this background, the copious collective repetition of known texts spoken in unison as found in every church and temple, as prayer or as liturgy, must appear somewhat odd. Under such circumstances, the separate roles of speaker and listener no longer exist, for everybody is both. The conceit of message passing also fails, as the texts are known to everybody, have been curated and protected often over centuries, and their news content is, essentially, nil. Unlike conversational discourse, each utterance of the familiar phrase does nothing to dynamically alter a negotiation, to shift the common ground of discourse, or to sway an addressee with rhetorical force. To further alter the picture, everybody who partakes in such activity must be physically present in person. Participation in ritual and rite appears to demand presence. It almost seems as if there is a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-012

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second kind of language, bereft of almost all the salient characteristics of linguistic communication, yet employing the same vocal channel. The origin of the injunction of Matthew 6:7, “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking” may be read as criticising either the repetition (but see Matthew 26:44, where Jesus repeats a prayer three times) or the apparent failure to generate meaning. The original term battalogein is obscure. Either way, an awful lot of the obvious characteristics of prayer and of ritual seem to raise interesting questions. Who is talking to whom, and why, with what effect? Nor are such vain repetitions confined to any one bunch of gentiles. The use of prayer beads in all Abrahamic traditions finds echo in Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist practices employing japamālā, testifying to the global reach of such odd vocal behaviour. Approaching this rich conundrum as a linguist and cognitive scientist, it seems natural to broaden the scope of inquiry somewhat. There are very many other occasions in which multiple people come together to partake in unison speaking, repeating known texts over and over. In a series of publications, I have suggested using the term “joint speech” to address situations in which several people say the same thing at the same time (Cummins 2018, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, etc.). The simplicity of the empirical definition allows us to employ it to pick out several highly valued forms of human behaviour. Once we frame our observations using joint speech as a guide, the principal domains that leap out are ritualised prayer, but also practices of political protest, and the boisterous enaction of group identity found in chants within many sporting traditions. Prayer, protest and sports do not exhaust the occasions in which joint speech is found, but they serve well to illustrate its ubiquity, and many of the shared characteristics that attend such behaviour, irrespective of the domain. Notable properties of joint speech include not only the use of texts authored elsewhere, copious repetition, and the requirement of co-presence. We also find the frequent musicalisation of the voice, often abetted by the attendant use of synchronised gestures. The fist pumping of the protester, bouncing of the sports fan, or the head nodding of the reciter of the rosary all contribute to an exaggeration of the musical elements of the voice: strong syllables are made more prominent, phrase timing becomes more regular, and intonation patterns become more melody-like. Work songs provide another example of the elaboration of such embodied and coordinative elements to joint utterance (Gioia 2006). An examination of joint speech practices reveals a continuum between the speech-like sounds found when swearing a collective oath, and the plainsong of liturgical chant, with no clear dividing line between speech and music (Cummins 2013a). There is obviously something worthy of empirical study here. We have the means to uncontroversially identify instances of joint speech, which are found

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in situations of heightened subjective significance to participants, embedded in practices accorded a great deal of societal importance, and occurring, as far as this researcher can tell, in all human societies, and most plausibly long predating the advent of writing or any form of technology of mediation. The speech so produced has demonstrable idiosyncratic characteristics (Cummins 2014) and is entirely amenable to study. Yet a search of the scientific literature comes up almost empty handed. Whether we call it joint speech, unison speech, choral speech, or synchronous speech, there are no more than a handful of works on the subject, and essentially none that have thematised this vocal behaviour directly. Rappaport’s account of the importance of collective unison speaking and the associated gestures in religious rituals stands out as an anthropological contribution (Rappaport 1999), but there is essentially no scientific tradition here, and no exploration of the empirical behaviour as it extends across these several domains. It is not impossible, or even particularly difficult, to study joint speech using relatively conventional means, within existing traditions. Thus, the phonetician will find that having laboratory subjects speak in synchrony with one another is easy to achieve, produces a remarkable degree of synchrony, and serves to eliminate a huge amount of temporal variability in the speech so produced, with no more intervention than the request to speak in time with one another (Cummins 2009, 2004, 2003). The movement scientist will find a unique form of synchronisation differentiated from all other behaviours in which people do the same thing at the same time. In joint speech, there is no necessary reliance on a musical beat (e. g. when swearing a collective oath), and there is no scaffolding of the behaviour by inertial, gravitational, or elastic properties (as, e.g., in rowing, trampolining, dancing or marching) (Cummins 2011). The neuroscientist will find that cortical activity when speaking in unison with a live person is markedly different from that found when speaking either alone, or even with a recording of a person (Jasmin et al. 2016). This finding is all the more surprising as it obtains even when the subjects are not aware of any difference between experimental conditions in which recordings are employed and in which live speakers are used. The pattern of activity observed suggests that when speaking in unison with a live person, one’s own voice is no longer obviously distinct from the voice of another. Thus in the live case, there is evidence of a blurring of the boundary between self and other—a phenomenon we might suggest is well known to those who sing in choirs, or who take part in liturgies with a great deal of unison chant. There is thus something of a conundrum here. Joint speech is clearly of great importance to those who do it, everybody does it, everybody has always done it, yet it is a behaviour rendered invisible and incomprehensible by the linguistic

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and psychological orthodoxy that understands the essence of language to be message passing between discrete and unobservable minds. Yet if we simply thematise joint speaking, there are rich empirical fruits to be harvested. Why does this behaviour seem to elude contemporary science? In what follows, I will try to suggest how recent developments within cognitive science may facilitate the development of a vocabulary that will allow joint speech to be recognised, described and understood.

2 Uttering The empirical study of language since the late 19th century has sought to abstract away from the messy business of the here-and-now in which tongues and jaws cause the air to vibrate in complex ways, to the timeless properties of a self-contained abstract system that displays a great deal of internal regularity in patterns that are thereby dubbed “linguistic”. Within structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between langue and parole (Saussure 1916). The former was the system whose regularities were to be elucidated by scientists. The latter was what speakers actually did. The regularities of langue obtain irrespective of medium, finding expression indifferently in speech (suitably considered), in writing, in signing, or in any other medium of transmission. The peculiarities of parole do not admit of such treatment, resisting partitioning into discrete categories, and context-independent features. The major shift that occurred in the 1960’s saw the emergence of a cognitivist theory of mind that was conceptually entangled with a generative theory of language. Noam Chomsky, in laying the foundations of this kind of linguistics, distinguished between competence which reflected the learned and systematic capacities of a language user, from performance which was the raw data, conventionally understood as being rather too messy to admit of systematicity (Chomsky 1965). Once more, those aspects of language were valorised that could be lifted out of the context in which they occurred, and that could find equivalent expression in any medium of transmission. But when we study language, we seek to understand a capacity that allowed for a radical transformation of our species over the last several hundred thousand years. The dates are imprecise, because we do not know when language as we know it emerged, or what intermediate steps might have happened. However we can be quite confident that the emergence of writing happened a mere five to six thousand years ago, and widespread literacy has only arrived, to most of humanity, within the last 500 years. This is no time at all from an evolutionary perspective, but writing has fundamentally changed humanity (Ong

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1982). Language in oral cultures has many properties not found in a literate setting, although characteristics of orality are retained, for example in joint speech practices, even within highly literate cultures. Writing also makes commonplace the idea of a text that can stand by itself, untethered to its moment of authorship, and without being necessarily tied to a specific individual. The focus of academic linguistics has been on an abstract system untied to its material substratum, and disconnected from the context of authorship. It has missed the context-bound, ethically charged use of the voice in uttering, which is surely of greater relevance in understanding how humanity was so radically transformed. For the act of giving voice, or uttering, is surely absolutely central to language from any historical perspective. Utterances are fleeting. Each utterance is inextricably tied both to the utterer, who bears responsibility for the utterance, and to a context, in which each utterance links back to the one immediately preceding, shifting the common ground of the discourse, and creating the conditions for subsequent contributions. Until the introduction of disembodied voices with the near simultaneous invention of telephony and sound recording (1876 and 1877, respectively), utterances addressed to another required co-presence. Joint speech is rather different in this respect, as illustrated in Figure 16. On the left of the figure, we find an abstract representation of the common ground that arises in conversational interaction. Each utterance modifies the common ground, and alters the trajectory of all future contributions. In the middle, we see a situation more akin to liturgy, where there is a greater degree of common ground. Here, individual contributions affect the subsequent trajectory less, but there may still be some back and forth, encoded in the formal generalized assent of an “Amen” or more fluidly in the dialogical interactions between a passionate preacher and a responsive congregation. This kind of call and response situation is common in situations of protest or political assembly too. On the right we see the kind of chorusing found when all present recite a known text in unison. All is now common ground, and there is no dialogical creativity from individuals. This is representative of the solemn recitation of a Credo, but also of the intimate familiar ritual of singing Happy Birthday. In Connor (2000) a rich account is provided of voices issuing from places where no voices are expected. The path is traced from the Delphic oracle, through the manifestations of demonic possession in the middle ages, to the popular ventriloquist act that has, not coincidentally, spawned a sub-genre of horror movie. For voices that come from odd places seem to have a necessary association with a speaking subject. When a voice is heard, there is an obligatory projection of a subject, even if that subject must be understood as living in a crack in the rocks, or the belly of a teenager. The precise origin of the voice in the story of the Witch of Endor (Samuel 28:3 – 25) has tied theologians in

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Figure 16. Hypothetical continuum from (left) conversational dialogue, through (middle) liturgy, to (right) unison speech. The abstract notion of common ground is shown in green.

knots at least since Origen of Alexandria. In tracing this rich history, Connor never loses site of the necessary connection between the speech uttered, and the utterer thereof. In the collective voicing found in joint speech, we are clearly also dealing with a subject, but the subject is collective. When the people demand the fall of the regime, the aspiration is not merely the sum of a lot of individual aspirations. It is brought forth, or enacted, by the activity of chanting. When soccer fans proclaim “M-U-F-C OK!”, they are making a collective identity as Manchester United fans manifest. The urgency of political protest, the swagger of a football chant, or the solemnity of the Credo all speak of collective intentions, desires, beliefs. They cannot be unpicked into so many individuals. And herein lies the problem for the human sciences as currently constituted. Not only is there no recognition of collective subjects, there is an entrenched insistence that agency, intentionality, and subjectivity lie at one and only one level in the natural world, that of the individual human person.

3 The subject of cognitive science The science that arose with the innovations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton had profound consequences for our understanding of the Cosmos and our place within it. Change and motion within the mechanical universe they described was captured with great precision by simple equations, given some very specific idealisations. Bodies in motion remain in motion in a perfect vacuum only. In any realistic world, they come to rest due to dissipative forces. The third law of motion describes the application of force to a body as a symmetrical relation in which an equal and opposite force is exerted back. This mechanical

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view of the world works wonderfully in a vacuum. It does not work so well on Earth, and it does not account for agentive, volitional movement at all. Physics has gone its own way since the 1600’s, but the framework of physics does not now have, nor ever had, any account of agency, of volition, or of the actions of the animate. The sciences were not formed all at once. All the important moves in the philosophy of mind, and especially the development of the notion of a private world, were developed in a period in which science necessarily danced around the Christian notion of the soul that informed not only science, but law, civil society, and the natural order more generally. I mean here not only the seminal notion of the cogito (Descartes 2013 [1641]), but also the grounding of the notion of experience in the ongoing activity of the senses (Hume 2016 [1748]) and the unseemly contortions required to tie these two together (Kant 1998 [1781], and other works). The unstable ground reached through this development is one of an inanimate world inhabited by singularly minded beings, whose contact with said world is mediated, always, through their own structure and form. Commonality of experience appears to be inexpressible within this vocabulary, and the wellknown spectre of solipsism has never yet been banished from this account. This intellectual development long preceded the development of a science of biology, and the serious attempt to relate experience to physiology, e. g. through the study of brains. Unsurprisingly, the soul and the brain came to be more or less identified with each other through the unifying concept of the mind, or more fashionably today, the cognitive system (Reed 1997). The legacy of this development has given rise to an odd orthodoxy that views itself as continuous with science in its commitments to observables, objectivity, and truth, but that relies on a complex understanding of the relation between the individual and the group, and also between the subject and the world, that have their origins in Christian theology and in Western accommodations between churches and the institutions of power. This orthodox view of the person underlies linguistics (as encoded message passing), cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. As long as the phenomena scrutinised by scientists are expressible within this framework, much science of a conventional nature can be done. It would appear, however, that there are lots of aspects to our being, including entirely public practices such as joint speech, that cannot be understood within this framework.

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4 Alternative frameworks Joint speech is not the only, or even the principal, way in which reliance upon a Cartesian subject, expressed within a mechanical worldview, runs into trouble. All progress in science is contested. There have been many critiques of this or that aspect of the cognitivist orthodoxy (as we might term it). As far back as 1896, Dewey lamented the crystallisation of the notion of a minded individual as an input-output system, whose behaviour was to be understood as driven by external stimuli, giving rise to behaviour that had more in common with a series of jerks than with the actions of a person (Dewey 1896). Gestalt psychologists likewise resisted the reductionist account of perception based on construction from sensory input (Smith 1988). The perceptual psychology of James Gibson tried to found an ecological psychology by more closely understanding the relations obtaining between a subject and relevant aspects of the world, without jumping to internalism (Gibson 2014). More recent attempts to define alternative frameworks without shaking the scientific tree too much include the influential notion of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998), the emphasis on the role of the body, rather than just the brain (Wilson 2002), the singular importance of context without which no behaviour is comprehensible (Aydede and Robbins 2009), and the recent turn to “enaction” which will be considered a bit more fully here, with specific reference to the issue of joint speech (Stewart et al. 2011). Collectively these murmurings at the margins have yet to coalesce into a force strong enough to seriously threaten the cognitivist account. They have sometimes been prematurely lumped together into a larger framework called “4E approaches to cognition”, where the 4 E’s are Extended, Embedded, Embodied and Enactive, though everyone in the field seems content to add to and alter that list at will. There is work to be done in creating the necessary foundations for moving beyond the Cartesian notion of soul reified now as mind.

5 The button press and the handshake In a short contribution of this nature, it is not possible to adequately explore issues as large as those thrown up by the familiar practice of speaking in unison. The territory is rich. Rather, I will try to sketch a very broad kind of distinction which each of the above traditions makes use of, but rarely if ever explicitly. The distinction I have in mind can be best expressed as a contrast between two underlying pictures of how we (for some version of “we”) act upon the

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world (for some version of “world”). It is to be hoped that this way of framing the unspoken commitments of various explanatory accounts of human behaviour might help in moving beyond a single positivist account grounded in a specific and contingent theology, and with a specific and contingent relation to the statements of authority. In the first view, which I will call the button press, the world is considered to be inert and lacking in agency; agentive volitional action originates with the singular subject. This is not only the view underlying contemporary cognitive psychology, it has been the principal manner in which the account of agency has been nurtured within society generally, and it corresponds roughly to the scientific realist position. The commitments of this view have not only informed the natural sciences; they underlie post-enlightenment Protestant thinking upon which the logic of Western nation states have been crafted. Within this account, the world simply exists, and the agent bears responsibility for her actions. The prototypical inquiry conducted in this mode does, in fact, use a button press to obtain information about the subject. From this, inferences about reaction times, category judgements, and the like are made, but the principle datum is as slight as a button press. This view of the subject∼world relation is well suited to a narrow materialist view, or to a strongly positivist kind of science. The second view is the handshake, drawing on insights from complex systems sciences and constructivist approaches. Where the button press started with a subject and a world and sought from there to uncover their connection, the handshake approach starts with the relation, and taking that as primary, may work back to identify, tenuously, the entities participating in the relationship. In a handshake, the two interacting hands are not decomposable into two distinct animated objects, each controlled separately. The two hands are dynamically entangled, and inextricable, one from the other. When we approach human experience and behaviour in this manner, we need to undo many of our presuppositions about both subjects and worlds, as neither subject nor world here can be transferred into the button press account. A historical genealogy of this contrast could extend back to the opposition between Parmenides, for whom entities simply exist, chronologically ordered from the recesses of the past to the vistas of the future (with no account of the present, or now), and a Heraclitian view in which entities become discernible as they arise and dissipate in the flux of the present. These two stances are thus very old, but have never been resolved within a Western, or any other, cosmology. It is not too surprising then that the introduction of a strong theoretical position that comes from a Heraclitean point of view should appear in a book that self-consciously tried to inject some Buddhist cosmology into a Western scientific discourse. This was The

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Embodied Mind (Varela et al. 1991), which has spawned a philosophical school known as enaction (Stewart et al. 2011).

Figure 17. Left: Sense-making: The relation of a dynamically individuated self-sustaining entity with its environment. Right: Participatory sense-making.

The Embodied Mind introduced a kind of relational ontology into its scientific picture, whereby entities that are discriminable as agents are self-organised dynamical systems that have the property of being distinguishable from a background in the domain in which they arise. One might consider a single cell and its chemical relations with its surround, or a person with their many kinds of embedding in many kinds of domain, or a nation state with its embedding in a world of international trade and conflict. These all rely on the recognition of a system (cell, person, state) that exists within a domain (chemicals in a dish, the many domains of the person, the domain of international trade and law), and that continues to exist by maintaining its own structural integrity through regulated processes of exchange with its environment. The system will here eventually play the role of subject and the environment the role of world, but neither end of the relation can be said to have any independent existence. Rather, they arise as distinguishable poles in the self-sustaining activity of the system as it is observed by another. This is a constructivist, not a positivist, ontology, so that entities cannot be brought to court independently of the conditions that birth, sustain, and ultimately destroy them. The role of the observer is important to avoid slipping into an objectivist vocabulary. In the Buddhist-inspired language of The Embodied Mind, one might say that subject and world are brought forth through the self-creating, self-sustaining activities of the system. This basic systems-theoretical view is illustrated on the left of Figure 17, where the closed nature of the loop represents the discriminability of the system from background, and the bidirectional arrow indicates regulated exchange with the environment. Those familiar with the Buddhist notion of dependent origination, or codependent arising (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda) will have encountered the notion of this kind of complementary definition before. The “handshake” lies in the relation of system to world, neither of which is decomposable from the conjoint picture.

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The self-sustaining activities that allow the system to persevere introduce a cautious way to approach agency. We call these activities sense-making. By attributing the agentive origin to the system, rather than the world, we commit ourselves, for a specific discussion, to an apportioning of agency in one way rather than another. A different observer, attending to different indices of the relationship of a system to its world, might decide to attribute agency in a different manner. In the emerging picture, then, it is the dynamic activity of a transient system on its world that gives rise to the subject∼world complementary pair. In enacting its identity, a system gives rise to, or enacts, both subject and world, in a suitably qualified sense. The right-hand side of Figure 17 introduces an important outgrowth of this basic picture that incorporates the sense-making activities of others (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). If one system engages in reciprocal exchange with other such systems (or with similar systems) then the co-arising of system and world becomes linked for both systems. For very many kinds of systems, including all organisms, the most important kinds of exchanges with their environment are precisely those with conspecifics, or with similar entities. Once the vocabulary of sense-making has been established, it is an obvious extension to suggest that collective sense-making should give rise to (largely) shared worlds. This extension of the basic picture has been termed participatory sense-making. As with the basic picture of a single system and environment, this account starts with the individuation of one or more entities on the basis of observed change over time. Collective worlds are thus also enacted. The enactive picture is necessarily cautious about making strong statements about one kind of system or another (Cummins and De Jesus 2016). Sometimes, the concerns of conventional psychology seem to assert themselves, and one might be misled to think that the system here is a mind, or a person, without further qualification. Identification of the system with a person is particularly problematic, because persons are highly multi-dimensional constructs that demand nuanced and different treatment as our discussion veers from, e. g. discussion of somatic health, through considerations of economics, responsibility, experience, law, and beyond. This very plurality of the person suggests that we need many ways of approaching consensus without overly strong positivistic insistence on one theory-bound description over another.

6 Learning from joint speech We can now return to the different kinds of ways in which our vocal activity sustains our co-being, as shown in Figure 16. The back-and-forth of conversation can

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now be seen as participatory sense-making, understood as an activity that gives rise to a shared world (common ground), whose lineaments can only be discerned transiently. Consensus reached today may dissolve upon our next encounter. The examples of liturgical structure (middle) and the recitation of the Credo (right) illustrate processes that give rise to a greater degree of common ground. Why? Because these are rituals that are repeated again and again, in which the participants come together to establish common ground, from which they may address the world with a common ideology or perspective. The vocabulary of enaction is not sufficiently well developed to unseat the established orthodoxy of the Cartesian subject with a strongly “protestant” kind of autonomy. Attribution of agency and autonomy is made here carefully, and extends to the dynamically unfolding processes of sense-making that arise in various kinds of activity. However, it does provide a vocabulary in which the slightly odd goings on of very many people speaking in unity might appear comprehensible. At the very least it might set the stage for consideration here of the kinds of collective subjects brought into being through the consensual activities of their participants. This would finally move the discussion on, beyond the appearance of “vain repetitions.”

References Aydede, Murat & Philip Robbins. 2009. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2014 [1965]. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, vol. 11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, Andy & David Chalmers. 1998. The Extended Mind. Analysis 58 (1). 7 – 19. Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press Oxford. Cummins, Fred. 2003. Practice and Performance in Speech Produced Synchronously. Journal of Phonetics 31 (2). 139 – 148. Cummins, Fred. 2004. Synchronization Among Speakers Reduces Macroscopic Temporal Variability. In Kenneth Forbus, Dedre Gentner & Terry Regier (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 304 – 309. Mahwah: Cognitive Science Society. Cummins, Fred. 2009. Rhythm as Entrainment: The Case of Synchronous Speech. Journal of Phonetics 37 (1). 16 – 28. Cummins, Fred. 2011. Periodic and Aperiodic Synchronization in Skilled Action. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3248675/ (accessed 7 November 2019). Cummins, Fred. (2013a). Joint Speech: The Missing Link Between Speech and Music? Percepta —Revista de Cognição Musical 1 (1). 17 – 32.

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Cummins, Fred. 2013b. Towards an Enactive Account of Action: Speaking and Joint Speaking as Exemplary Domains. Adaptive Behavior 13 (3). 178 – 186. Cummins, Fred. 2014. The Remarkable Unremarkableness of Joint Speech. In Susanne Fuchs, Martine Grice, Anne Hermes, Leonardo Lancia & Doris Mücke (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar on Speech Production, 73 – 77. Cologne: University of Cologne. http://www.issp2014.uni-koeln.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/Proceedings_ISSP _revised.pdf (accessed 7 November 2019). Cummins, Fred. 2018. The Ground From Which We Speak: Joint Speech and the Collective Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Cummins, Fred & and Paulo De Jesus. 2016. The Loneliness of the Enactive Cell: Towards a Bio-enactive Framework. Adaptive Behavior 24. 149 – 159. De Jaegher, Hanne & Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2007. Participatory Sense-making. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (4). 485 – 507. Descartes, René. 2013 [1641]. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John. 1896. The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. Psychological Review 3 (4). 357 – 370. Gibson, James J. 2014. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. New York & London: Psychology Press. Gioia, Ted. 2006. Work Songs. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Hume, David. 2016 [1748]. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In Steven Cahn (ed.), Seven Masterpieces of Philosophy, 191 – 284. New York: Routledge. Jasmin, Kyle M., Carolyn McGettigan, Zarina K. Agnew, Nadine Lavan, Oliver Josephs, Fred Cummins & Sophie K. Scott. 2016. Cohesion and joint speech: Right Hemisphere Contributions to Synchronized Vocal Production. The Journal of Neuroscience 36 (17). 4669 – 4680. Kant, Immanuel. 1998 [1781]. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen & Co. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reed, Edward S. (1997). From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James. New Haven: Yale University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 2011 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. Columbia University Press. Smith, Barry. 1988. Foundations of Gestalt Theory. Vienna & Munich: Philosophia Verlag. Stewart, John, Olivier Gapenne & Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2011. Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Varela, Francisco, Evan Rosch & Eleanor Thompson. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, Margaret. 2002. Six Views of Embodied Cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9 (4). 625 – 636.

Enzo Pace

The other Buddha: Leaving monasteries, fighting the enemy 1 Introduction This contribution deals with a new Sinhala Buddhist movement, the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS, the Buddhist Power Force), founded in Sri Lanka in 2012 by two monks three years after the end of a civil war (1983 – 2009)¹ that has torn the post-colonial Sinhalese State apart. The interest in this case study lies in the emergence in contemporary Buddhism of a movement that has some fundamentalist traits. In addition to Sri Lanka, there is a similar Buddhist movement in Myanmar, led by the monk Ashin Wirathu (Steinberg 2010; Schober 2011; Turner 2011; Costantine 2012; Dollinger-Smith 2014; Preston 2015). What these movements have in common is the social construction of the image of the other as the enemy. In the Sinhala case, the Tamils are the main enemy, but since the de-

 The 25-year armed conflict between a Tamil insurrectionist movement claiming independence for the Northern and Eastern provinces of the island and the Sinhalese Government cost an estimated 80,000 – 100,000 lives, according to UN reports. Up against the much stronger national army, the Tamil forces—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) organized suicide-bombing attacks, recruited at least 3,200 child soldiers (according to the Human Rights Watch [HRW] report: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2014/srilanka1104 accessed 13 May 2019), and exiled many people from the villages inhabited by Muslims. For their part, the Sri Lankan Army implemented a violent repression that became increasingly brutal against civilians too, especially towards the end of the conflict. When the final battle for Kilinochchi (the most important Tamil town in the north) was launched on 19 February 2009, HRW reported that the Sri Lankan soldiers slaughtered civilians in indiscriminate artillery attacks. In response the next day, on February 20, a Tamil brigade conducted a suicide mission, attacking the Army Headquarters in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo from the air. The list of atrocities committed by both sides is long and shocking for the cruelty and violence involved. In May 2009, under international pressure, President Rajapaksa appointed a Reconciliation Commission that produced a final report, which was criticized by the UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability for its many shortcomings in providing detailed information and clearly denouncing the parties responsible for the massacres that occurred during the conflict. In March 2014, the UN Human Rights Commission drafted a resolution to promote reconciliation, accountability and the protection of human rights in Sri Lanka, and asked its High Commissioner (Navi Pillay) to undertake a comprehensive investigation into the violations of human rights during the war. The Sri Lankan government refused to cooperate and rejected the UN investigators’ visa applications (Johnson 2005; Swamy 2002; Pace 2003). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-013

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feat of the Tamil Tiger Army in April 2009, the Muslims are becoming a new target. Even though this case study refers to the story of a collective movement of Buddhist inspiration, I regard it as a (social) laboratory test concerning the tension between immediacy and mediation. The exacerbation of this tension can lead subjects of similar movements to overcome the threshold of violence towards the other, which embodies, from time to time, the enemy of one’s religious faith. Violence can be symbolic and physical or only symbolic. It can express itself with different degrees of intensity: with words that may, but do not necessarily, become stones. Physical aggression can be preceded by the stigmatization of the other described as the quintessence of evil. In the language used, for example by the Burma monk Wirathu the Muslim Rohingya minority of Myanmar is described as a group of wild individuals, like animals which, therefore, can be treated as such and hunted from the lands where they live. For many years, all over the world monk-warriors have occupied the social and political scene, which, in the name of the ineffable or of absolute transcendence, transform sacred symbols and texts into communicative actions to reach explicitly political goals. These figures have arisen in various religions: not only in Islam, but also in Judaism or Christianity, as well as in those complex belief systems which, in short, we call Hinduism and Buddhism. This is not just a curious coincidence. If this happens, there must be a connection—and this is the hypothesis that I argued some years ago (Pace 1989)—between the crisis of legitimacy of the national states—especially born on the ashes of historical colonialism—and the onset of collective movements that make political opposition using religious communication codes. These movements dream of a sacralization of a political creature (Nation-State) that to them appears fragile, without a religious basis, an impious² structure of government, without any transcendent foundation because it claims neutrality towards religion or purports to be not too legitimized by God or a supernatural law. The BBS is precisely one of the many movements of religious inspiration that are organizing the defense of the sacred roots of national identity. In their mundus imaginalis (Corbin 1980) they see the state as a human superstructure (too human, sometimes for them) that must reflect the immediacy of the Dharma, if it wants to be legitimized. Therefore, in this specific case, as we shall see, the leaders and militants of the Buddhist movement stage in the public arena sacred representations of the ritual drama faced by a nation that can no longer recognize the fullness of the Dharma. In this sense, the signs and languages used

 In the language of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish movements (Pace 2007).

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in social and political protests are means that, from their point of view, serve to strongly reaffirm the absoluteness of immediacy of Dharma.

2 The social construction of the enemy To understand the context that has favored the formation of this radical Buddhist movement, we must bear in mind the long season of violence that characterized the history of Sri Lanka, soon after national independence. Twenty-four years of civil war have, in fact, contributed to the social production of collective stereotypes, in particular polarizing the opposition between Sinhalese-Buddhists (the majority), on one hand, and Tamil-Hindus or Christians (the minorities), on the other. This schematic social representation is a forced and therefore violent simplification of reality, since the borders between the two ethnic groups are much more fluid. Nevertheless, the logic of war is based on the opposition between friend and foe, and war is the mother of all the great social stereotypes. In addition, during the civil war in Sri Lanka, the Muslim minority was targeted both by Sinhalese Buddhists and by the Tamils, as both were asking them to take sides on either side. The effect was that Muslims started to claim their own cultural identity in the name of Islam, setting aside the ethnic differences (between Sinhalese and Tamils of Muslim faith) that existed in the community. A similar effect happened during the Balkan war (1990 – 95) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, when local populations of Muslim tradition also claimed their own religious identity against the Serbs and Croats. They justified the necessity to separate because of the religious difference: Orthodox Serbs on the one hand, Catholic Croats on the other. The BBS’s social construction works along three lines: (a) The identification of a text par excellence from among the large corpus of texts of the Buddhist school of Theravāda (lit.: The Elder Monks), and electing it as the sacred text, to be regarded also as the source of an inerrant narrative of the history of Sinhala Buddhism, a mythopoiesis of the pure identity of the people that became a nation; (b) the mobilization of symbols, signs and rituals pertaining to the monastic tradition as moral resources for a collective action in the political and social spheres, and the consequent transformation of rituals into public performances to be held also in the political arena; (c) the identification of the other (Tamil, Muslim or Christian) as a potential threat, a dangerous source of contamination and corruption of the moral virtues of Buddhism, considered as the foundations of the social bond, the legitimacy of

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political power, and the ultimate source of the organic solidarity of the Nation (De Silva 1988). The three elements converge to delineate the BBS as a fundamentalist movement. The interpretation of a sacred text monopolized by the monks is functional to the claim of the pure national identity of the Sinhalese people, so the religious discourse is immediately connected with the political struggle or polemos. The inerrancy of the sacred text is the primary code by means of which the BBS monks aim to develop a model of society and the ultimate principle of legitimacy of the State. In addition, the sacred texts of the Pali canon are for the elite of Buddhist monasticism the matrix of the Sinhalese language. Therefore, the sacredness of the Dharma Island (blessed by the Buddha and which holds one of his relics—the canine tooth preserved in the monastery of Kandy) is reinforced by the sacredness of the language that most of the Sinhalese people speak. Assuming the notion of religion as communication or communicative action (Pace 2011), I would like to analyze the re-invention of a repertoire of symbols and signs belonging to Theravāda Sinhala Buddhism by a new, well-educated generation of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka with a view to reasserting the centrality of the monks’ sacred mediation in the nation-building process. In this sense, the leaders of the fundamentalist movement are successfully outsourcing religious rituals from the monastic communities (sangha) to the public squares in revolt. There is a common ground where fundamentalist movements, irrespective of their historical, cultural and socio-political differences, behave in the same way in the process of delineating the image of the other. The communication strategy (and agency) focuses on the image of the other as an enemy, based on three arguments:

Figure 18. Religious prerequisites for the construction of the other as an enemy.

By exploring these four semantic units of the narrative, I would like to reframe Tambiah’s (1976, 1992) theory of the fetishization of Buddhism, particularly in modern-day Sri Lanka. According to Tambiah and other scholars (B. Smith 1966, 1973; Ling 1973; Bechert 1978), this term describes the transformation of

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a system of belief with open boundaries—the Buddha Dharma—into a closed one. From the historical standpoint, Buddhism is a differentiated system of belief that allows for the free movement of beliefs and practices with intensely creative languages, rituals, images, signs and symbols or, simply, with a prodigious production of an excess of meanings that are broader than the texts, symbols, and rituals encoded by the various Buddhist schools. In a nutshell, the fetishization of Buddhism that has occurred in recent times is like the process of biblification and scripturalism characterizing Evangelical fundamentalism (Marty and Appleby 1991: vol. 1, p. 15). The traditional status of the monk began to change in the 19th century. The monks became specialists in the sacred who monopolized the interpretation of some of the texts belonging to the non-canonical Theravāda tradition, coming up with a religion-cum-nationalist ideology consistent with the idea of an ethical State, i. e. a Buddhist State. Insofar as this religious-nationalist ideology has become the language of the ruling class building the new, post-colonial State, Tambiah (1992) sees a dramatic confrontation underway between two kinds of Buddhism in Sri Lanka: one compassionate and ethically oriented towards universal values, the other with a dark and potentially violent side that betrays the former’s goals. The religious violence expressed by a group of monks and, more recently, echoed more radically by BBS represents a socio-logical consequence of the political reification (or biblification) of the Buddha Dharma. To discuss this crucial issue, the first part of the paper provides a brief account of the historical background of the present conflicts, focusing on the socalled Buddhist modernism. The second part turns to analyzing the socio-cultural profile of the religious collective movement arising within the sangha (Buddhist monasteries), and the emergence a new generation of monks who have tried to transform the traditional ascetic ideal-type of monk into a novel figure: a social worker with a peculiar political vocation, serving as a severe custodian and superior mediator of the country’s national identity. The last part illustrates the signs and symbols, rituals and spiritual practices reinvented by these new militant monks functionally oriented towards social and political action, who use them as symbolic resources for mobilizing people against the enemies of the national identity (the Tamil up until 2009, and then Muslims).

3 Back to the future: The return of the kings It is important to clarify that the communication strategy adopted by some neoBuddhist movements in Sri Lanka is partially the result of a complex historical process that began in 1796 with the lengthy period of British colonial rule. The

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British arrived after a period of colonization first by the Portuguese (1505 – 1630), and then by the Dutch (1658 – 1796), meaning that the country experienced a long and intensive contact with various European cultures. Sri Lanka was the ancient kingdom³ of Sēlām, so named when it was conquered by the Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan ethnic group from Northern India that began to invade the island in the 6th century BCE. The island was renamed Ceylon by the British, who established large tea plantations and imported many workers from Southern India, most of them Tamil. Independence for modern Sri Lanka was a gradual process that started in 1948, when it became a Dominion within the Commonwealth, and was only completed in 1972. The process leading to Sri Lanka’s independence was therefore a peaceful political movement led by politicians and activists such as Stephen Senanayake (1884– 1952), Fredrick Richard Senanayake (1882– 1926), James Peiris (1856 – 1930), Ponnambalam Ramanathan (1851– 1930, Solicitor-General and a Tamil politician), Anagarika Dharmapala (1864 – 1933, a leading figure of 20thcentury Buddhism), Ponnambalam Arunachalam (1853 – 1924, a Tamil political activist) and many others (Seneviratne 1999: 25 – 55). The list includes leaders belonging to various cultures and religions (Hindu, Buddhist and Christian), and with different ideological orientations, but united by the ideal of independence for their country. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party came to power in 1956. It was founded by Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike in 1951, and it has been one of the two largest parties in the Sri Lankan political arena ever since. The new government immediately set about changing the country’s political structure. With the Sinhala Only Bill, it made Sinhalese the sole official language, and Buddhism the pillar of the young nation’s cultural identity. Solomon Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1959,⁴ and his widow was elected prime minister. The opposing political pole was occupied by the more conservative United National Party (UNP). From 1958 onwards, the country’s political system suc-

 The first legendary king was Vijaya, mentioned in the Pali Chronicles, which include the book Mahavamsa (the Great Chronicle); he ruled the island from the Lanka fortress from 543 BCE onwards. The Sinhala alphabet, a descendent of the Brahmi script, began to appear in Prakrit inscriptions during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. Both the alphabet and the language have changed considerably since. The earliest surviving literature in Sinhala dates from the 9th century CE. The Sinhala alphabet is also used to write Pali and Sanskrit in Sri Lanka.  He died on September 26 (aged 60), shot by a Buddhist monk, Talduwe Somarama, member of a temple of Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara seven miles from Colombo. Although the prominent monks of this monastery attributed Bandaranaike’s failure to aggressively pursue the nationalist reforms as the motive to eliminate him, the real reason appeared to be the Prime Minister’s refusal to award business deals, in particular a shipping contract, to a company floated by the Chief Priest, Mapitigama Buddharakkitha Thero.

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ceeded in establishing a viable parliamentary democracy based on a two-party alternance. From a constitutional standpoint, Sri Lanka experimented successfully—alone among its South and South-East Asian neighbors—with a republican democracy and a unitary state under semi-presidential rule. The most dramatic crisis developed in 1980, when the Tamil minority—excluded from the political establishment and discriminated against by society (including the refusal to acknowledge Tamil as the second official language of the State)—laid claim to the political autonomy of the provinces inhabited by the Tamil people, particularly in the Northern part of the island. Despite the mediation of the government in New Delhi in 1987, which obtained the recognition of the Tamil language and some other minor demands, the conflict was exacerbated by the arrival of Indian military forces in the Northern provinces. Protesting against this decision, the insurrectionist group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) occupied the Jaffna peninsula in the North. Meanwhile, another group—the People’s Liberation Front—organized riots and terrorist attacks in the South during the years from 1987 to 1989. This was the starting point of a long, cruel civil war, that ended in 2009 with the victory of the national army over the Tamil organizations.⁵

4 The socio-political role of Buddhism in the nation-building process In the 1970s, a new social actor appeared on the religious-political scene in Sri Lanka in the form of the Buddhist monks. This new generation of monks provided the Sinhalese citizens with a set of social norms based on religious principles. Throughout their education, these monks were brought up as citizens who would put the Dharma (Buddha thought) into practice by assisting the laity with worldly problems, providing advice and leadership on matters of social welfare and economic developments in rural areas (Tambiah 1992: 406 – 503). The Buddhist sangha, the religious order of monks, had historically been a pillar of the State ever since the 5th century BCE. The monasteries scattered all over the island (there was one in every village) were not mere centers where monastic communities meditated and studied; as in the Catholic or Muslim traditions, they formed micro-social cells that provided the rural people with education and assistance. According to Seneviratne (1999: 17):  The war ended in May 2009, but ethnic divisions remain entrenched and human rights abuses are widespread.

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The monk/village nexus was local in the pre-colonial era, but as colonial rule advances, a supra-local Sangha came into being, enabled by colonial technologies, especially the print media … The supra-locality of the Sangha does not make it a power. It only confers on the Sangha a ceremonial and symbolic status. It can only be a handmaid of power. This is well understood by perceptive members of the culture who call the Sangha a tool of politics (despalana atakolu).

The strong social symbiosis between Buddhist monasteries and the life of the villages before and during colonial times explains at least three important functions of Buddhist Dharma in Sri Lanka. I briefly illustrate these three domains in Figure 19, under the label proposed by Seneviratne (1999: 18) of societal liberalism:

Figure 19. The three social functions of Sinhalese Buddhism.

Compared with Hinduism, Sinhalese Buddhism seems more tolerant and liberal about caste and the role of women. It is worth recalling the rejection of traditional Hindu practices like bride burning, female infanticide, the use of amniocentesis to abort female fetuses; and the establishment of a female religious order, despite the official denial that women could be ordained. In the past, Buddhist monks had supported the process of legitimization for Ashoka’s State on the one hand, while on the other they promoted a relatively liberal set of values amongst the people, and not only at the royal court. As the moral authority of Buddhism grew over the centuries, the sangha became an economically rich and independent institution—just like the Safavid empire created by the ayatollah in 17th-century Iran. The sangha was the social hub where the monks were cast in the role of the political intelligentsia with the power (according to the monastic chronicles) to make and unmake kings. In the Sinhala tradition, one of the most important chronicles that the monks adopted as their fundamental text is the Mahavamsa. This book was composed in the late 5th or early 6th century CE, by the Ven. Mahanama Thera. The

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book is divided into 36 chapters and tells the story, in the form of an epic poem, of the kings of Sri Lanka from the first, Prince Vijaya (543 BCE), to the last, Mahasena Anuradhapura (277– 304 CE). It is not a canonical text. Indeed, there are two other, less important chronicles: the Dipavamsa (Island Chronicle), compiled in the 4th century, and the Culavamsa (Lesser Chronicle), covering the period from the 4th century to the British occupation of Sri Lanka in 1815. The authors of both books were Sinhala monks. The Mahavamsa acquired a crucial ideological relevance in the modern Buddhist sangha: monks used it to support the indissoluble link between religion, language and land. It became a sacred text. In the land blessed by Buddhism, the sacred text—Mahavamsa—was the first exercise and elaboration of the Sinhala language conducted by the monks. The island of Sri Lanka is thus regarded as the Dharma-dipa (the island of Dharma), and the monks as the guardians and mediators of its sacred territorial boundaries and of the moral unity of its people. In modern language, this means that the monks claim to be the defenders of the national identity. An extra-political authority, the sangha, is where the authorized (religious and political) language has continued to be produced. This mythopoetic reconstruction by the monks has distorted and partially concealed the history of kingship in ancient Ceylon because at least three kings (including the first, Vijaya) were Tamil (A. Smith 1986). It is therefore hardly surprising that the historical reconstruction of the Sinhalese people as descending entirely from a noble lineage of all-Buddhist kings aroused strong reactions among Tamil intellectuals during British rule (Bechert 1974; Spencer 1990),⁶ and especially during the difficult and dramatic process of Sinhalese nation-building that culminated in civil war. The monks’ new role came into being in the post-colonial era. It is the outcome of a process of modernization of Sinhala Buddhism⁷ started already in colonial times, when Christianity became a sort of competitive model for the renaissance of the local Buddhism. In other words, the mimetic effect of the settlers’ religion, spread by the missionaries, encouraged a new generation of monks to imitate the organizational model of the Christian churches (and whether they did so deliberately or unwittingly is of little importance), and particularly their inner-worldly attitude to the promotion of their religious message. In trying to understand the secret of the success and cultural hegemony of the Christian settlers in Sinhalese society, the Buddhist monks realized that their role was crucial to the defense of the people’s culture identity, which was being polluted by  In 1939 there were many violent exchanges between Tamil and Sinhala activists, promptly repressed by the British colonial government.  Called “Buddhist Modernism” by Seneviratne (1999: 71) or “Protestant Buddhism” by Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1990: 54) and Holt (1991: 307– 312).

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foreign ideas. The Buddhist renaissance coincided precisely with the effort to merge ethnicity with religion, the Sinhala people’s religious identity with their political identification. From then on, it became easier to sustain the cognitive equation that being Sinhalese means being Buddhist, and vice versa. There is nothing new in this approach. In other settings, it explains the success of movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after 1929, or the social construction of the Polish people’s national identity based on Catholicism, and there are many other cases (Smith 1986). A similar process occurred in Tibet after it was occupied by China, where the Tantra and Lamaitic Buddhism became a force of resistance and a political resource for coping with the Chinese repression of the Tibetans’ dreams of political autonomy.⁸ The founder of Buddhist modernism was Anagarika Dharmapala (1864 – 1933). His name became internationally familiar when he took part in the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Chicago in 1893. A journalist for the American newspaper, St. Louis Observer, reported that: With black curly locks thrown from his broad brow, his clean, clear eyes fixed upon the audience, his long, brown fingers emphasizing the utterances of his vibrant voice, he looked the very image of a propagandist, and one trembled to know that such a figure stood at the head of the movement to consolidate all disciples of Buddha and to spread the light of Asia throughout the world.⁹

This comment seems interesting to me because it underscores Dharmapala’s talent as a performer capable of communicating by reinforcing his words with his body posture, hand gestures, tone of voice, dress, and the power of expression in his eyes: in short, a person with the charisma of a communicator. I consider this aspect, somewhat neglected by the scholars, a key point in explaining the evolution of Buddhist Modernism up to the most radical group of monks formed in 2012. Dharmapala argued for the transformation of traditional Buddhist monks into caretakers and social workers (Seneviratne 1999: 27), like the Christian priest ministering to his flock. Dharmapala’s mimetic reconstruction of the monk mod-

 There has recently been news of McDonald’s being allowed by the Chinese government to open a mega-store in Lhasa, the holy city of Tantric Buddhism, a sure sign not only of the mcdonaldization of the world, according to Ritzer (1993), but also of the dramatic cultural defeat of the long cultural-political campaign conducted all over the world by Tenzin Gyatso, the last Tibetan Lama, who has been so popular in the West.  Quoted in The Island, Friday April 29th, 2016, online (http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_ cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=35209 accessed 13 May 2019).

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eled on the Christian priest was intentional, in spite of his severe criticism of Christianity, and of monotheistic religions in general.¹⁰ On this topic he wrote: The pagan beliefs of monotheism and diabolic polytheism are responsible for the vulgar practices of killing animals, stealing, prostitution, licentiousness, lying and drunkenness […] The diabolism of vicious paganism introduced by the British administrators are now declining and slowly dying away […] (reported in Guruge 1965: 482)

The symbolism of Dharmapala’s speeches is founded essentially on the opposition between the corrupt religion (i. e. Christianity imported by foreign colonizers) that pollutes the pure-hearted, merciful, tolerant, true and intact religion, namely Sinhala Buddhism. Coming back to the Mahavamsa, the spiritual leader of Buddhist Modernism could therefore say that Buddhism was the country’s national religion, and that it could still serve in modern times in the role of spiritual self-government in relation to the political establishment. This means that politics needs religious foundations. Reviving society and liberating it from the foreign culture entails a huge investment in teaching the virtues of Buddhism to people everywhere, from the tiny rural village to the prestigious city college. The puritan values of discipline, hard work, compassion, moderation, and so on, were conceived by Dharmapala as a priority of the monks’ modern activity as social workers. Their duty and vocation became to serve as soldiers and defenders of the Buddha Dharma—as reinterpreted and reinvented by Dharmapala, of course. His program initially focused on restoring the Sinhala language and asserting Buddhism as the language and religion of the state/nation. His work was continued by a group of well-educated monks who had been engaging in their social and religious mission in the rural villages since 1911. Acting as social workers, the monks reversed the tradition established in Theravāda Buddhism, whereby the laypeople had to support the monks economically. Dharmapala encouraged the monks to leave the monasteries and take an active part in promoting social welfare and economic growth in rural areas.¹¹ This implied converting the notion of nirvana into an active inner-worldly asceticism, not only for the monks but for

 Similar tones can be found in the writings of Sayyed Qutb, a radicalized member of the Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1929 by Hasan al-Bana (Choueiri 1990).  It is worth mentioning the action promoted respectively by three monks: Kalukondayave Pannesekhara (influenced by Calvin regarding the idea of the work ethic); Hinatiyana Dhammaloka (who tried to spread Buddhist values from the urban elites to rural areas); and Hendiyagala Silaratana (who promoted the religious emancipation of women). See Hasbullah and Morisson (2004).

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ordinary people too. The promise of a good rebirth was causally connected with moral and social action in this world. According to Seneviratne (1990: 85): Given Dharmapala’s emphasis on a good life to be built in this world based on Buddhist morality, and his repeated references to Buddhist texts that contain exhortations towards a healthy and successful organization of lay life, it is not surprising that the young and educated monks who were inspired by him would seek out particular canonical texts that are relevant for this purpose.

The birth of this new religious order of monks engaging in the social and political sphere coincided with the beginning of the Sinhalese nation-building process (1946 – 50). The most prominent actor was Walpola Rahula (1907– 1997). His most important book is The Heritage of the Bhikkhu (1946). He inspired the publication of the Declaration of the Vidyalankara Pirivena written by another monk, Yakkaduve Pragnasara.¹² Briefly, this document represents the coherent implementation of the ideas developed by Dharmapala and Rahula for the nationalist agenda. The Declaration provoked negative reactions from the political elite closer to the socialist party, but the candidate in the early election campaign of 1956 who was to become the first President of Sri Lanka—Bandaranaike—made it clear that he intended to take the Buddhist manifesto into account. Two years after his election, he awarded academic status to two Buddhist monastic colleges (pirivena), Vidyalankara and Vidyodaya, a decision taken as part of a scheme to replace English with the Sinhala language in public affairs and in education. This meant acknowledging that all the monasteries had competent teachers— the monks—capable of educating a new generation of expert in the Sinhala language. In short, all these actions contributed to defining the monks’ role as coleaders in the country’s regeneration, and as a moral pole in its politics. The efforts made to define a new ideal-type of monk did not mean that every monk adhered to the model of spiritual leader shaped by Dharmapala and Rahula. Many monks took no part in any social activities, preferring to follow the traditional path of the renunciant, living in the monastery, observing the severe rules of study and contemplation. However, a minority of them accepted the call to become social workers with enthusiasm, and one of the unexpected effects of this choice was a gradual secularization of their religious activity. Quoting Seneviratne (1999: 337): The opening up of modern secular education has brought into being a class of modern secular-educated monks whose worldview is drastically different from that of the rural monk

 Vidyalankara is one of the largest monastic colleges in Sri Lanka, located in Peliyagoda and founded in 1873 by the Ven. Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thero.

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unexposed to that education […]. Their secular education has led them to the newly brewed Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.

The monastic elite supported the post-colonial politicians committed to a Sinhala-only policy that soon led to strong conflicts and divisions within the country, fueling ethnic riots and civil war. It is important to mention that not all politicians agreed with the ideological campaign launched by the modernist monks. Under the rule of President Premadasa (1989 – 1993) at least, the political establishment reacted negatively to the Sinhala-only campaign supported by the Sarvodaya Shramadana, regarded by researchers as a fundamentalist movement, and by the government as a political actor endangering national unity (Bond 1998). Beginning in the late 1950s, a lay Buddhist association spread through the rural villages thanks to its charitable work for the poor peasantry. The movement was incubated in an important Buddhist college (Nalanda, in Colombo). The term sarvodaya means “progress for all” and has been referred to Gandhi, while the word shramadana means “gift of labour” (reflecting the idea of a compassionate and voluntary action). Under its leader, Ahangamage Tudor Aryaratne, the movement is active in more than 15,000 villages, providing funds from a financial reserve bank of 1.6 billion rupees. Because of its roots in the popular strata of Sinhalese society, it seems to me more integralist than fundamentalist as a movement, more like the Italian right-wing evangelical group Comunione e Liberazione (Abbruzzese 1991), despite the recurrent nationalist-religious rhetoric of its leader and militants, based on the myth of the Island of Righteousness (Dharmadipa), i. e. Sri Lanka, where the people were happy, secure and prosperous, and followed in the footsteps of the Buddha and the Sinhalese Kings. The most relevant effect of the Sinhala-only policy was the social mimesis by non-Sinhala minorities (particularly the Tamil and Muslim). They began to shape their own ideas of what it meant to be Tamils or Muslims living in a predominantly Sinhala area, and they started rethinking their own identities. Moving from religious assumptions to political commitment, the emergence of a quest for Muslim identity also spread among the Muslims who spoke Sinhala as well as Tamil—meaning that the term ‘Muslim’ no longer denotes an ethnic boundary and category (De Silva and Kinglesy 1986; Tambiah 1986). In other words, minority groups are shaping their identity by contrast with the majority one (the Buddhist), underlining by comparison their differences.

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5 The socio-religious demography of Sri Lanka Before focusing on Islam in Sri Lanka, I would like to briefly outline the religious demographics of the country’s 20.48 million inhabitants. The figures emerging from the latest census in 2011– 12 are in Figure 20.

Figure 20. Religious demographics in Sri Lanka: 1) Buddhism (70.2 %); 2) Hinduism (12.6 %); 3) Islam (9.0 %); 4) Christianity (7.5 %). The Census of Population and Housing of Sri Lanka 2011. www.statistics.gov.lk (accessed 13 May 2019).

The map of the geographical distribution of the various religions shows that the Hindu (Tamil) are concentrated in the Northern, Eastern and Central Provinces, meanwhile Muslim communities in Eastern and Southern areas and Christian Churches along the Western coast. Despite this concentration of the various religions in some areas, the religious boundaries are more porous than the map suggests because of the country’s complex ethnic differentiation, which often does not coincide with people’s religion. In other words, the main distinction between the Sinhalese and the Tamil people in terms of language and culture does not fully reflect their Buddhist or Hindu religion: most Tamil people are Hindu, but there are Christian and Muslim Tamil too. Given the sharp ethnic division that shapes the island of Sri Lanka, one of the most dramatic effects, among many others, of the violent confrontation between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) during 24 years of civil war was the clash within the Catholic Church between Sinhalese and Tamil

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Catholics (Stirrat 1998: 147– 166). In the northern part of the island, moreover, Muslim people living in the area who were native speakers of the Tamil language were persecuted and exiled by the LTTE in 1990: about 95,000 people were obliged to leave their homes as part of an awful ethnic cleansing action. It was only recently, after the war came to an end, that one of the leaders of the defeated LTTE Army apologized, and only a few Muslim people have returned home. A final comment on the presence of Christians: most of them are Catholic (6.5 %), and the rest are Anglican (0.9 %). The Christianization of Sri Lanka began with the arrival of the Portuguese settlers in the early 1500s. The Dutch later brought Protestantism and it was only in 1818, under British rule, that the Anglican Church was established. It is worth noting that a considerable number of Buddhists and Hindus converted to Anglicanism (nominally at least) for pragmatic reasons (Bartholomeusz 1998: 134– 135). This means that Christianity—and the Anglican version in particular—was transplanted without any attempt at indigenization or cultural mediation with the previous religious mentality of the people. Up until the 1880s, the only effort made by the Anglican clergy (but the same could be said of the Catholic priests) to adapt the Christian doctrine to the Buddhist environment was through music—i. e. through the liturgy, a religious language par excellence that can merge diverse communication codes. Where does Islam stand on this complex ethnic and religious stage? To briefly outline the main features of the presence of Islam in Sri Lanka, it is worth mentioning first that it has had a place in the history of Sri Lanka since the 7th century CE. Secondly, it has been shaped by the different origins of the various Muslim communities. Thirdly, it reflects the main ethnic divisions mentioned earlier: there were and still are Muslims who speak Sinhalese and others who speak Tamil. Islam arrived with 7th-century Arab traders and took root when these men married native women. These traders controlled much of the market on the Indian Ocean, contributing to the accumulation of fortunes, and giving the island a place on the transnational markets. They cultivated good relations with the local people and the kings of ancient Sri Lanka. The situation changed dramatically when the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century. They persecuted the Muslim communities, attacking them where their presence was strongest (in the island’s Eastern Province), for two reasons: one practical goal was to eliminate a competitor from the lucrative commerce on the Indian Ocean; the other was because the Muslims, called Moors by the Portuguese, were seen as the enemy of European civilization. It is noteworthy that Senarat (the Sinhalese/Buddhist king of Kandy, from 1604 to 1635) gave asylum to many Muslims in the central highlands. The fact that the king was interested in hosting good merchants is like the Most Serene Republic of Venice’s decision to give refuge to the Jews in

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exile from Spain and Portugal. The protection offered by Senarat and other kings of Sri Lanka enabled its Muslim community to survive. The growth of the Muslim community took place during the Dutch and later British occupations, when many Muslims from Java and Malaysia came to Sri Lanka as soldiers, skippers, sailors, and so on. The latest waves of Muslims migrating to Sri Lanka, in the 19th and 20th centuries, arrived from India, and particularly from what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh; they introduced Shafi’ì and Hanafi Muslim schools, and new Sufi brotherhoods like the tariqa Shadhiliya. ¹³ In conclusion, quoting Victor de Munck (1998: 113): Sri Lankan Muslims are divided as to what constitutes an official Muslim identity. On the one hand, there has been a strong South Asian Sufi tradition that retains its vigor, particularly among the urban poor and Muslim peasantry. On the other hand, Sri Lankan Muslims also identify themselves with the Arab world and seek to remember and affirm these connections in part through adherence to Islamic orthodoxy. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism among Sri Lankan Muslims is linked to Muslim exclusion from the totalizing conception of what it means to be a Sri Lankan. Muslim elite organize jamatis (meetings) to promote an Islamic identity that supersedes nation-state boundaries. At the same time, more traditional Sufi designs for Muslim identity are being undermined by leaders of Islamic orthodox movements.

As in other cases of ethnic conflict or socio-religious and political clashes in various parts of the contemporary world (Pace 2004), social mimesis has thus worked perfectly in Sri Lanka too. When Sinhalese religious nationalism emerged, urging stronger links between the Buddhist religion and the country’s national identity, other minorities felt obliged to delineate their identities in separate, even antagonistic forms. This happened to the Muslims too.

 Founded by Abu Hasan ̒Ali al-Shadhili (1196 Tangeri – 1258 Humaithara, Egypt). Initially spreading from Morocco to Egypt, it was later disseminated by missionaries in India. Today it has branches in 72 countries. Miguel Asin Palacio, the most prominent student of the influence of Islamic echatology on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, argued that Shadiliyya spirituality was influential on St. John of the Cross, the well-known Spanish mystic of the 16th century (Palacios 1981).

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6 The sacred grammar of reality and the new media Considering the socio-religious and political background of modern Sri Lanka, I would like to argue that the fundamentalist discourse produced by the BBS concerning the enemy of the religious and national identity of the Sinhalese people relies on two strategies: a. it puts an end to the relatively free production of meanings attributable to a set of religious symbols and signs; and b. it transforms rituals into public performances, forging representations in which people are urged to perceive certain meanings and accept them as natural and inevitable. This transformation has been facilitated by the new media, which tend to reduce the social complexity into a dichotomy of in/group vs. out/group. The new tools of communication (internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) are interactive. Therefore, they work well as a public arena in which people feel they are directly involved, making decisions, expressing opinions, and manifesting indignation and social anger: powerful tools for venting social anger on the scapegoat. The BBS competes in Sri Lanka’s religious and political market with other religious subjects investing socio-linguistic resources into public space. When BBS activists radicalize the assumption that it is only in the sacred texts of Sinhala Buddhism that they can find the roots of the Sinhalese language, their discursive strategy becomes more effective in social terms if they can use public performances (extra-ritual spaces) to demonstrate that the sacred grammar of the Sinhalese language is part of a coherent theory of reality (Whorf 1956; Kress and Hodge 1979; Hodge and Kress 1988; Eagleton 1991). Ritual is a means of communication (Pace 2011) and it can be converted into an act of communication in which BBS monks can produce dominant signifiers (in semiotic terms), that is to say a sealed world of words and gestures that lay claim to an imagined collective identity and a specular image of an enemy threatening said identity. It is useful to recall the notion of over-coding brought up by Umberto Eco (1976), a process that presupposes a basic primary code. In our case study, the basic code is a sacred text (Mahavamsa) from which monks

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are drawing secondary meanings to attach to their social action, presenting them as an extension of their ritual action.¹⁴ To illustrate the above considerations, I analyze first the main content (images, slogans and texts) of the BBS movement’s web page,¹⁵ and then images of public events as presented by the newspapers and other media. My intent is to show how the BBS communicates using a repertoire of signs and messages drawn from the symbolic capital of Buddhism to sketch the image of the enemy, i. e. Islam in the case in point. The flag of Sri Lanka, also called the Lion flag, shows a yellow lion wielding a sword in its right forepaw against a dark red background, with four yellow Bo leaves in each corner. The flag is complete with a yellow border and two vertical stripes in green and saffron on the left. The lion is the symbol of bravery (as in the Sikh tradition); the four Bo leaves stand for the four Buddhist virtues; the stripes represent the two principal minorities (saffron for the Tamils, green for the Muslims), while the maroon is the color of the Sinhala majority. The yellow outer border represents the unity of the nation. When we compare the colors of the national flag with the BBS logo, green is noticeably absent. Apart from the maroon (symbolizing national unity), the other colors are: white (the peace of mind achieved by profound meditation), bright red (signifying the calling and submission to the Dharma), yellow (the Bo tree), and saffron (for the Hindu minority). Scrolling through the home page and looking at the structure of the communication, the first element that stands out is the play of colors, with orange, red, yellow and blue on the one hand, black on the other. The first four are associated with the monastic garb and symbols of Buddhist tradition, the fifth with Islam. In Sri Lanka, the issue of halal animal slaughtering methods has been a flash point: led by monks, members of the BBS were urged to take direct action and boycott Muslim businesses. They also railed against the size of Muslim families. A second feature of the website worth highlighting is the repetition of gestures and expressions of the faces of the monks leading the movement. Their raised index fingers reinforce the facial expressions of those sternly pointing out, cautioning against, and stigmatizing the enemy, i. e. Islam. In one image, the General Secretary of the BBS is commenting on the Qur’an and arguing that Islam has an intrinsically violent nature. He raises his index

 Ritual is the pillar of the religious system, according to a fundamental lecture by Durkheim (Rosati 2009).  www.bodubalasena.org (accessed 13 May 2019).

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Figure 21. Banning shari’a and halal in the web page of BBS.

Figure 22. The power of the index finger.

finger to stress the Buddhist power force, the meaning of the movement’s name: Bodu Bala Sena. A third element is the narrative of the charismatic leader pitched in battle against Islam. We see images drawn from the web or YouTube showing militant demonstrations in various parts of Sri Lanka: from the capital to the towns where the Muslim minority is concentrated, or where there are mosques, old and new; from slaughterhouses where halal meat is produced to shops run by Muslim traders. In this case, the set of images provides evidence of the process whereby a ritual is converted into a performance of relevance to both the religious and the political fields. By overlapping religious signs with the political language of protest or riots, the BBS can step over the line and use violence (Collins 2008) (both symbolic and physical) against their enemy, who thus becomes a public enemy, not just the sign of an eschatological battle between the force of Dharma and the forces of the devil. Combining together the above three elements, we gain an idea of the communicative action promoted by the BBS. The movement’s leader and militants can mobilize symbolic resources drawn from Buddhist tradition, and funnel this symbolic investment into a direct social and political protest. The riots or marches they organize are the product of a sort of over-coding process (Eco

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1976: 133 – 136): a secondary (political) message is carried within a message generated by a functional interpretation of a primary basic code, emphasized by the new media. They provide a simplified imagination of reality. Moreover, the public spaces occupied by the protesters become an externalization of the monks’ religious activities within the walls of the monasteries. The squares and streets become a stage where the “mobility of semantic space makes codes change transiently and processually” (Eco 1976: 129), meaning that religious signs and symbols, as well as ritual gestures, become the paraphernalia of events that exhibit them and turn them into weapons in a political struggle. The political struggle becomes an effective tool used by the Buddhist monks to claim that the policy has a soul. Their political mediation embodies the eternal virtues of the Buddha. It is a dramatic way to defend the sacred boundaries of the island of the Dharma, and ensure the Sri Lankan national identity. All those who do not share this ideology pose a threat; they are dangerous polluters of the purity of the Sinhalese-Buddhist people. Among other examples, there is the battle conducted by the BBS against Muslim halal animal slaughtering methods.

Figure 23. Heads of cows taken by BBS militants who stormed against halal butchers (Dematagoda, March 1, 2013).

The image above (Figure 23) was posted on the movement’s web page and used to trigger a raid on halal meat shops and slaughterhouses. Buddhist monks abstain from eating beef more for symbolic reasons of purity than in compliance with a real taboo as in the Hindu tradition. In the radical Sinhala-Buddhist monks’ collective imagination and public rhetoric, purity has to do with defending the sacred integrity of Sri Lanka, the island of Dharma. Buddhist monks are usually vegetarians, but this was not a prerequisite for militants joining the first nationalist groups, before the foundation of the BBS. Right from the start, in 2012, the BBS targeted the Muslims’ religious diet, criticizing not only their consumption of beef, but also the way the animals were slaughtered (Stewart 2014, 2015). According to Badone Jones (2015), the BBS supporters see cattle slaughter as evidence of Muslim cruelty, as proof of their deliberate in-

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fliction of pain on the animals. The BBS web page repeatedly reports messages such as: “Two bulls have been killed by hanging them in a Bo tree. Is everyone blind to the insults against Buddhists?” This is clearly an example of over-coding: a secondary message (we are criticizing the Muslims’ cruel treatment of animals) is attached to the one generated by the basic symbolic code (the Bo, or Bodhi, tree is the sacred fig tree under which Siddhartha Gautama is said to have attained his awakening, or nirvana). The campaign launched by the BBS against cattle slaughter had some political effects. In November 2015, the former Sri Lankan government minister Mervyn Silva inaugurated a signature campaign (supported by the BBS) calling for a ban on halal animal slaughtering methods: the blood of the animals killed by Muslims became a symbol of their contamination of the land of Dharma. It is worth making the point that a similar process is underway regarding the female body. As Friedland (2002) puts it, “nationalism is a way to mark the land, to defend or redefine a nation’s boundaries […] then we might interpret religious nationalism’s obsessive control of women’s bodies as a parallel figuration, the policy of a bodily frontier.” The embodiment of a nation is a deeply gendered process. Controlling the purity of women’s bodies is a way to preserve the nation against the risk of contamination. The methods range from disapproving intermarriage to repressing lesbian associations, from cursing fashions imported from the West to forbidding promiscuity in public places (Deegalle 2013; Abeyesekara 2001). The BBS movement is drawing the sacred boundaries of the nation with its religious compass, cleansing it of all impurities deemed hazardous to the Sinhalese identity. The territory of Sri Lanka has transmigrated into the Land of Dharma, like the body of Buddha. According to Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition, when Buddha died in 543, his body was cremated, but his left canine tooth (Sri Dalada Maligawa) was retrieved from the funeral pyre by his disciple Khema and, after countless setbacks, the relic was carried to Sri Lanka in the 4th century by a princess who hid it in her hair. The relic came to be considered as a symbol of the living Buddha and, at the same time, the sign of a sacred land, blessed by Buddha, the island of Dharma.

7 Conclusion The case study I have summed up represents empirical evidence of Tambiah’s hypothesis on ritual involution (Tambiah 1979: 153; 1976). According to the sociologist, ritual has a duplex dimension: on one hand, it is a means of communication that works as a repetitive formal narrative of the cosmological and metaphysical

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order and/or the salvation history of humankind; on the other, it provides social rules and constraints on participants, creating, affirming and legitimizing the social position and power of the persons involved in the performance. When a system of symbols and signs that characterized a ritual are pushed out of its traditional and sacred boundaries (conventionality, rigidity, fusion and repetition), the ritual action becomes a social device at the service of political mobilization. In the BBS’s case, the monk becomes a social worker and a political actor. We are facing an overelaboration and over-prolongation of the ritual action (Tambiah 1979: 153). Therefore, the first transformation of the role of the monks, promoted by Dharmapala, prepared the second step, that is well represented by the BBS monks. They continue to play the role of social mediators, but in a new way. Indeed, according to Dharmapala’s reform, a monk should act as a social worker in the village, caring for the basic needs and the spiritual welfare of the poor people. Their vocation was the liberation of people from social oppression, and promoting Buddhist virtues among the people. Paraphrasing the Gramscian notion of the hegemonic role plaid by the intellectuals (Gramsci 1975: 1550 – 51), monks acted similarly to the organic intellectuals of the peasantry and the working class. The monks who join the BBS reaffirm their traditional role of mediators but use new media to mediate. Therefore, they adapt the message to the communication code of the new media, reducing social complexity into a battle of images between pure and impure, friend and foe. In that sense, they are acting as mediators of the mediation. The immediacy of the traditional Buddhist message depends on the efficacy of modern means of communication. The religious and political action of the BBS, at the same time, is reinforced when the enemy’s face appears next, immediately portrayed by Muslims living in the Island of Dharma, particularly since the Twin Towers attack. In the political struggle by BBS militants, Buddhism becomes a strong religion (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2002) that is fighting against a supposed enemy in the flesh. The highway of the spirit that monks traditionally travel along renouncing the things of this world, is abandoned in favor of the narrow and winding paths of the politics of ethno-national identity.

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Part III: Religious legal systems

Bernard S. Jackson

Mediation and immediacy in the Jewish legal tradition 1 Introduction: Some internal biblical semiotic observations There is evidence that the authors of the Bible (if we may be permitted to speak thus) were sensitive to semiotic issues. Indeed, the very term semiotics comes from a Greek term, semeia, ‘signs,’ prominent in the (Jewish, 3rd century BCE) Septuagint translation of the Hebrew otot (plural of ot).¹ Most commonly, the word occurs in conjunction with mofsim (plural of mofes), ‘wonders,’ is prominent in the story of the proof to the Israelites of Moses’ mission during the Exodus,² and is also applied to the ten plagues.³ However, it also occurs in the law of the false prophet, from which it appears that the capacity to perform an ot or a mofes is a necessary condition of the status of a prophet (even a false prophet⁴), and thus the capacity to mediate the word of God. Moses himself is regarded as such a prophet, and his qualification regarding otot umofsim, ‘signs and wonders,’ is stressed in his epitaph (Deut 34:10 – 12).⁵ Maybe the Egyptians did not need ten plagues; maybe it was Moses who needed them, in order to qualify as the mediator of the Ten Commandments (literally, Words). This is a possible, if not entirely satisfactory solution to the ethical problem that the plagues occurred because God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”  Helfmeyer (1977: 168).  Exod 3:12, 4:9, 17, 28, 30 (this last without mofsim).  Exod 7:3, 9 (where Pharaoh appears more interested in the probatory value of the mofes), 10:1, 2; 11:9, 10 (mofes), 12:13 (the blood on the doorposts of the Israelite houses as a sign to the angel of death to pass over that household); 13:9, 16. A different term for wonder, phele, is used in the Song of the Sea: Exod 15:11.  Deut 13:2– 3, LXX semeion. I have argued that any charge concocted against Jesus by the Jewish authorities is far more likely to have been false prophecy than blasphemy: Jackson (2008: 50 – 53; 1992a; 1992b). It is significant that the Gospels appear to record no rejection by the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ performance of miraculous healings.  Deut 34 “(10) And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, (11) none like him for all the signs and the wonders [otot umofsim] which the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, (12) and for all the mighty power and all the great and terrible deeds which Moses wrought in the sight of all Israel.” All biblical quotations are from the RSV unless otherwise indicated. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-014

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Sometimes, strange semiotic phenomena are described without comment. Thus the people gathered at Sinai “saw [ro’im] the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn” (Exod 20:18).⁶ This has been viewed as an instance of synaesthesia.⁷ Modern neuroscience does not find this totally inexplicable: the functions of these various sense organs appear to be to direct the neural impulse to a particular sector of the brain, and it is that location which is determinative of the sense produced. Sekuler and Blake have argued: Suppose you were able to reroute the nerve from your eye, sending it to the part of your brain that normally receives input from your ear. Suppose that while you were at it, you also rerouted the nerve from your ear, sending it to that part of your brain that normally gets visual information. Now imagine that with this revised nervous system, you are caught in a thunderstorm. You should hear a flash of lightening and then see a clash of thunder.⁸

I may add that sight appears to have a special potency in biblical epistemology: one of the Hebrew words for “prophet” is ro’eh, correctly translated in some old translations as “seer.” Dreams are themselves a form of visual perception, and their interpretation is often viewed as a human mediation of a divine revelation. But note the sophistication of the account of Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams (Gen 41:25 – 32): first Pharaoh dreams about the seven thin cows consuming the seven fat ones, then (this is a separate dream: we are told, “And Pharaoh awoke. And he fell asleep and dreamed a second time”) he dreams about the seven thin ears of corn swallowing up the seven fat ears (Gen 41:1– 7). Joseph is ultimately summoned to interpret them. He commences by saying (Gen 41:25): “The dream of Pharaoh is one; God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do.” Two quite different dreams, presented explicitly as forms of divine revelation, with a single, very specific message. Why were two dreams required? Joseph addresses the question directly: “And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God (ki nakhon hadavar me’im ha’elohim), and God will shortly bring it to pass” (Gen 41:32). The effect of the doubling is a meta-message, a message about the status and pragmatic force of the message: it is firmly determined, and to be implemented immediately. I have sug-

 Translators, as in the RSV, commonly try to avoid the issue by translating the verb as “perceive.” But the literal meaning is “saw.” See further Jackson (1994: 313 – 315 and 322– 324 on Solomon’s judgment, discussed below).  See Burnside (2019: 107 n. 16 and 113).  Sekuler and Blake (1990: 12), quoted by Jackson (1994: 327, n. 90), an article which also discusses the apparent primacy of visual perception in biblical culture and elsewhere. See also Jackson (2000: 64– 65).

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gested that this may be significant for the reiteration of the law in Deuteronomy (Jackson 2000: 209 – 213).

2 A diachronic dimension in the mediation or immediacy of law: The “monistic” and “dualistic” models of divine law I have argued that we may distinguish two different conceptions of the relationship between human law and divine justice, which I have called “monistic” and “dualistic” (Jackson 2010: 223). The former sees the human role in divine justice as an integral part of divine justice (Deut 1:13 – 17⁹), while the latter sees it as a delegated form of divine justice with a degree of autonomy of its own. On the spectrum of immediacy/mediation, the “monistic” model tends towards immediacy, the “dualistic” towards mediation. There appears to be a diachronic dimension to the relationship between these models. Thus, the Bible itself claims that such laws as are given in the pre-Mosaic era are given directly to the subject of the law: God to Adam and Eve (Gen 2:16 – 17); the covenant with Noah (Gen 9); and this continues, now in a communal and not just family setting, with the Ten Commandments (Exod 20). But there is then an immediate popular reaction: the people’s immediate experience of revelation was just too terrifying, Moses must henceforth be mediator of divine law (Exod 20:15 – 18). The narratives of desert adjudication,¹⁰ in most of which a decision in a difficult case is followed by the formal pronouncement of a rule for the future,¹¹ involve oracular consultation by Moses, who then communicates the decision to the parties.¹²

 Moses’ recapitulation of the judicial reform of Exod. 18 (but here without crediting it to Jethro), including, in the last verse, the justification: “for the judgment is God’s” (ki hamishpat lelohim hu).  See Jackson (2006a: 425 – 30) on the cases of the blasphemer (Lev. 24:11– 23), the unclean men who thus missed out on the Passover (Num 9:6– 14), the sabbath-breaker (Num 15:32– 36), and the two cases involving the inheritance of the daughters of Zelophehad (Num 27:1– 11 and 36:1– 12).  Our modern distinction between legislation and adjudication is less pronounced in the Hebrew Bible.  A form of “institutional divine justice”: see further sec.3.3 and esp. n.25, infra.

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In terms of the adjudication of law, this same diachronic progression is also found. At first, God judges and executes judgment directly, as with Cain.¹³ But mediation of a sort appears in the narrative of Sodom. Abraham (Gen 18:25 – 32) is able to intercede on behalf of the Sodomites and even bargain down the conditions of their condemnation. [23] Then Abraham drew near, and said, “Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked? [24] Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? [25] Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” [26] And the LORD said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” [27] Abraham answered, “Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. [28] Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Wilt thou destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” [29] Again he spoke to him, and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” [30] Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” [31] He said, “Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” [32] Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.”

Is this a debate only about numbers? Through much of the Bible (and especially in Deuteronomy) collective (often inter-generational) responsibility is associated with divine justice, individual responsibility with human justice.¹⁴ Abraham’s opening gambit, in v.23, might appear to assume an individual model: irrespective of numbers, the innocent should not be punished along with the guilty. In the very next verse, however, he changes tack: collective responsibility but tempered by a doctrine of vicarious merit. Then we get the bargaining over figures. Abraham may think he is on to a good thing, especially when he succeeds in bar Gen 4. Who else, we might ask, was available and willing to do it? Adam? Those mystifying creatures who suddenly appear in the narrative as potential assassins of the fugitive Cain? A rabbinic midrash attributes the utimate demise of Cain to Lamech, a descendant of Cain, in the context of an extraordinary hunting accident, so interpreting the boast of Lamech in Gen 4:23. See “Lamech,” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0012_0_11781.html (accessed 19 December 2018).  Contrast Deut 5:8 – 9 (the Decalogue) with Deut 24:16.

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gaining God down to only ten innocents. But is the reader to assume that God did not know all along how many innocents would (or would not) be found in Sodom? And if so, how do we interpret the interaction? Abraham seeks to mediate (here, intercede) within God’s direct divine justice. This must presuppose a friendly,¹⁵ even intimate relationship with the deity: we find no parallels in negotiations with human kings. Yet Abraham is, apparently, deceived if he thinks there is a chance that this will produce a positive outcome. At best, the positive outcome may be that he has passed a humanitarian test – and one which (according to biblical narrative time, at least) may point towards Ezekiel’s brave attempt to rewrite divine justice in terms of individual responsibility (Ezek 18).

3 Four forms of divine justice 3.1 Direct divine justice God does justice by direct intervention, without involving any human agency. We encounter this (through mediated accounts¹⁶) not only in “international” matters (Israel’s relations with the nations, which the dualistic approach tends to regard as a purely theological matter, quite separate from divine justice as administered by humans) but also in everyday matters within the community, when, for whatever reason, humans are not available to partake in the process. This survives – indeed, gains in importance because of the demise of the “charismatic” and “institutional” forms of divine justice – in rabbinic sources, including the law of torts: It was taught: R. Joshua said: There are four acts for which the offender is exempt from the judgments of Man but liable to the judgments of Heaven. They are these: To break down a fence in front of a neighbour’s animal [so that it gets out and does damage]; to bend over a neighbour’s standing corn in front of a fire; to hire false witnesses to give evidence; and to know of evidence in favour of another and not to testify on his behalf. (B.K. 55b)¹⁷

 Burnside (2019: 111 and n. 38) notes that according to Exod 33:11, YHWH spoke to Moses “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend (re’ehu).” This last term is more commonly translated “neighbour,” but in this context the assumption of amicable neighbourly relations is not unwarranted.  See further the final section of this paper.  See further Jackson (1974), arguing that there are particular biblical sources, and not merely a general principle of causation in tort, which account for the choice of cases. The Talmudic texts are fully available in several websites, e. g.: http://www.halakhah.com/; https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud; https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/babylonian-talmud-full-text.

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Elsewhere, in the criminal law, we encounter the “snake of the Rabbis,” viewed by the Rabbis as an instrument of divine justice, for example to remedy the lack of two eyewitnesses to a homicide.¹⁸

3.2 Charismatic divine justice Even after the giving of the law, it takes a long time before we hear of judges “applying the law” in the sense of referring to a written text. Before that we encounter charismatic forms of justice, where God inspires the human judge to make a decision in accordance with divine justice, as in the charge of the 9th century BCE Judaean king Jehoshaphat to his judges (2 Chron 19:4– 7¹⁹): [4] Jehoshaphat dwelt at Jerusalem; and he went out again among the people, from Beer‐sheba to the hill country of Ephraim, and brought them back to the LORD, the God of their fathers. [5] He appointed judges in the land in all the fortified cities of Judah, city by city, [6] and said to the judges, “Consider what you do, for you judge not for man but for the LORD; he is with you in giving judgment (ve’imakhem bidvar mishpat). [7] Now then, let the fear of the LORD be upon you; take heed what you do, for there is no perversion of justice with the LORD our God, or partiality, or taking bribes.”

We may compare the terms in which God promises that he will put words into Moses’ mouth in Exod 4:12: “and I will be with (im) your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” Yet Jehoshaphat was, according to the same source, aware of the existence of written torah: in 2 Chron 17:7– 9, he sent a commission of princes, levites and priests to teach in the cities of Judah, taking with them “a book of the torah of yhwh”. Written torah was thus used for popular teaching (in conformity with the generally understood etymology of torah as “teaching” or “instruction” rather than “law”). The majority of charges to judges in the Hebrew Bible do not refer them to written sources of law, but rather command them, more generally, to do justice, and avoid corruption and partiality (e. g. Deut 16:18 – 20): You shall appoint judges and officers in all your towns (lit. “gates”) which the LORD your God gives you, according to your tribes; and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment (mishpat tsedek). You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show partiality; and you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the

 Tosefta Sanhedrin 8:3: see further Jackson (2010: 231– 232).  On the historicity of the Jehoshaphat tradition, see Jackson (2007; 2006a: 412 n. 138).

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cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow (tsedek tsedek tirdof), that you may live and inherit the land which the LORD your God gives you.

Clearly, this reflects the monistic model. A more famous example is that of Solomon’s judgment²⁰ (1 Kings 3:16 – 28). [16] Then two harlots came to the king, and stood before him. [17] The one woman said, “Oh, my lord, this woman and I dwell in the same house; and I gave birth to a child while she was in the house. [18] Then on the third day after I was delivered, this woman also gave birth; and we were alone; there was no one else with us in the house, only we two were in the house. [19] And this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on it. [20] And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while your maidservant slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead son in my bosom. [21] When I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, it was dead; but when I looked at it closely in the morning, behold, it was not the child that I had borne.” [22] But the other woman said, “No, the living child is mine, and the dead child is yours.” The first said, “No, the dead child is yours, and the living child is mine.” Thus they spoke before the king. [23] Then the king said, “The one says, ‘This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead’; and the other says, “No; but your son is dead, and my son is the living one.’” [24] And the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So a sword was brought before the king. [25] And the king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.”²¹ [26] Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it.” But the other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” [27] Then the king answered and said, “Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means slay it; she is its mother.” [28] And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived [lit. “saw”: ra’uw] that the wisdom of God was in him, to render justice.

The case is presented as one where normal human evidence is lacking: it is simply one woman’s word against the other. Biblical law presents a number of such cases, where recourse is had to one form or another of divine adjudication.²² The procedure adopted by the king is widely regarded as a psychological ordeal, cal-

 See further Jackson (2006b: 228 – 231).  Anticipating a mishnaic rule regarding disputed (lost) property. Mishnah Baba Metsia 1:1 rules that if two people are grasping a garment and one says, “I found it,” and the other says, “I found it,” they divide it.  See Jackson (2006a: 395 – 406) on Exod 22:7– 8 (oracle), Joshua 7:14– 18 (oracle), Exod 22:10 (oath); see also the use of an ordeal in Num 5:11– 31, discussed in sec.3 below.

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culated to prompt the real mother to reveal her identity by ceding her claim rather than see the child killed. Whether this was strictly necessary is not obvious: the claimant claims that her child was only three days old; the age of the other is not revealed, but may be assumed to have been older. Did this not provide a means for identifying which mother was telling the truth? There is, moreover, one aspect of the case in which Solomon manifestly fails to follow the legal principles stated in the biblical law codes, according to which even accidental homicide entailed penal consequences.²³ Solomon appears to exercise what may have been a royal discretion of pardon to exempt the woman who accidentally killed her own child from any further legal consequences.²⁴ Yet the point of particular interest in the present context is the conclusion of the account, that when all Israel heard of the judgment they stood in awe of the king, because they “saw” (ra’uw) that the wisdom of God was in him. Indeed, we read in Proverbs (ascribed to Solomon) that “Inspired decisions are on the lips of a king” (Prov 16:10). It appears then that the charismatic inspiration conferred by Jehoshaphat on his judges was a delegation of a capacity (both the semiotic modalities of pouvoir faire and a savoir faire) attributed to the king himself. The narrator assumes that this is common knowledge; hence, even when the people “hear” of the decision, they “see” (understand) both that it must be correct and that it is to be attributed to a charismatic power enjoyed by the king.

3.3 Institutional divine justice Here God directly intervenes within human adjudicatory processes, through institutions like the oracle or ordeal, or, less immediately, by sanctioning a false oath taken in his name. In the five narratives of desert adjudication, concerned with difficulties in the law rather than fact determination, a divine procedure appears to be used: most appear to involve (first instance) oracular determination.²⁵  Deut 19:5 – 6: “… as when a man goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and his hand swings the axe to cut down a tree, and the head slips from the handle and strikes his neighbor so that he dies — he may flee to one of these cities and save his life; lest the avenger of blood in hot anger pursue the manslayer and overtake him, because the way is long, and wound him mortally, though the man did not deserve to die, since he was not at enmity with his neighbor in time past.”  Perhaps prompted in part by the consideration that, the child’s father being unknown, there was no “avenger of the blood” to demand a sanction.  Explicitly, from the use of the verb qarav (“draw near”) in Num 27:5 and lefaresh lahem al piy yhwh (“to explain to them according to the mouth of the YHWH”) in Lev 24:12. The use of lo farash (not explained) in Num 15:34 f., followed directly by God’s (remedial) speech, may be taken

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For example, the case of the daughters of Zelopheḥad (Num 27) gives daughters a right to inheritance (only) in the absence of sons. Elsewhere, such institutional means of rendering a divine decision are applied to difficulties in fact determination: the case of theft of booty from the sack of Jericho by Akhan in Josh 7, and the famous ordeal of bitter waters in the case of the woman suspected of adultery (Num 5:11– 31). But why, in this latter case, is the woman suspected? The text goes out of its way to stress that there is no evidence against her: “it is hidden from the eyes of her husband, and she is undetected though she has defiled herself, and there is no witness against her, since she was not taken in the act.” Nevertheless, the “the spirit of jealousy” overtakes the husband, who then takes her to the priest for administration of the ordeal. The latter involves making the woman physically imbibe a curse, through washing a written form of it in the “bitter waters” she is required to drink. The curse, to which she is required to accede verbally, is that “this water that brings the curse pass into your bowels and make your body swell and your thigh fall away.” It is very likely that the husband’s jealousy was prompted by a pregnancy which he denied as his, and that the effect of the curse is a (talionic) miscarriage. I may add that talionic justice is far more characteristic of divine than human justice in the Hebrew Bible.

3.4 Delegated divine justice Here God does enact laws and authorises human judges to apply them in accordance with human understanding. The several other descriptions we find in the Bible of the judicial role all omit, until the time of Ezra in the post-exilic period, any mention of their use of written rule-books. As noted above in the particular charge given by Jehoshaphat and the charge to judges generally in Deut 16:18 – 20, they record only that the judges are to do justice and avoid partiality/corruption.²⁶ Ezra, on the other hand, is mandated (by the Persian king) to appoint judges who will judge on the basis of laws, rather than a (divinely inspired) sense of justice: “And you, Ezra, according to the wisdom of your God which is in your hand, appoint magistrates and judges who may judge all the people in the

to have the same implication. Num 36:5 also tells us that Moses ruled al piy yhwh, cf. Lev 24:12. See further Jackson (2006a: 425 – 30).  See Exod 23:3, 6 – 8, discussed in Jackson (2006a: 403 – 406); and sources discussed in Jackson (2006a: 411– 425), esp. Deut 16:18 – 20, quoted in section 3b above and discussed in Jackson (2006a: 416 – 17); Deut 17:8 – 13, discussed in Jackson (2006a: 420 – 22); and Exod 18:21, discussed in Jackson (2006a: 422– 25).

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province beyond the River, all such as know the laws of your God; and those who do not know them, you shall teach” (Ezra 7:25). Moreover, Ezra is said to have organised a formal, public reading of the law from a written source (Neh 8):²⁷ [1] And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate; and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the LORD had given to Israel. [2] And Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month. [3] And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. […] [7] Also Jesh’ua, Bani, Sherebi’ah, Jamin, Akkub, Shab’bethai, Hodi’ah, Ma-asei’ah, Keli’ta, Azari’ah, Jo’zabad, Hanan, Pelai’ah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. [8] And they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly; and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

Here (at last) we encounter the dualistic model: legal adjudication is to be mediated to human judges through a written text (something known to the judiciary since it is “in your hand”: Ezra 7:25), but that written law is also made known to the people as a whole (including, no doubt, the local judiciary) through the didactic use of the text (as also attributed by a similarly late source to Jehoshaphat).

4 The tension in early rabbinic literature 4.1 The status of the divine voice (bat kol) Yet once biblical law was canonised, so that the law consisted in its ipsissima verba, the problem still remained. What sources should the Rabbis use for its interpretation (and, indeed, supplementation on matters not covered by the canonical texts)? The authority for such supplementation was found in the doctrine of the “dual torah”: what was given to Moses on Mount Sinai was not only the written text, but also its interpretation (broadly understood).²⁸ But how to know what the oral law contained? Here, the old tensions remained. Indeed, the famous story of the “oven of Okhnai” opposes a very direct form of divine

 See further Jackson (2000: 141– 43).  See Urbach (1979: 286 – 314); there was little precision or agreement on where the oral law was to be found.

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immediacy with mediation through an institutionalised form of rabbinic authority: It has been taught: On that day R. Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but they did not accept them. Said he to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let this carobtree prove it!’ Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place – others affirm, four hundred cubits. ‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree,’ they retorted. Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!’ Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards – ‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water,’ they rejoined. Again he urged: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it,’ whereupon the walls inclined to fall. … Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’ Whereupon a Heavenly Voice (bat qol) cried out: ‘Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halachah agrees with him!’ But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘It is not in heaven’ (Deut 30:12). What did he mean by this? – Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline (Exod 23:2). R. Nathan met Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour? – He laughed [with joy], he replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’ (Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metsia 59b²⁹)

Not only is proof by miracles here rejected; so too is the intervention of a heavenly voice.³⁰ Rather, the majority opinion of the Rabbis is to be preferred, a conclusion supported by a biblical proof-text, notwithstanding that the interpretation of the latter is far from self-evident.³¹ But elsewhere in the Talmud, a bat qol intervenes, without objection, on another issue of authority (Erubin 13b): R. Abba stated in the name of Samuel: For three years there was a dispute between Beth (the House of) Shammai and Beth Hillel, the former asserting, ‘The halakhah is in agreement with our views’ and the latter contending, ‘The halakhah is in agreement with our views.’ Then a bat qol (heavenly voice) issued announcing, ‘These and these [the utterances of both] are the words of the living God, but the halakhah is in agreement with the rulings of Beth Hillel.’ Since, however, ‘both are the words of the living God’ what was it that entitled Beth Hillel to have the halakhah fixed in agreement with their rulings?—Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of Beth Shammai, and were even so [humble] as to mention the action of Beth Shammai before theirs.

 For literature, see Jackson (2012: 203 n.16) and links in n.17 supra.  The phone ek tou ouranou of the New Testament.  The three words aḥarei rabim lehatot“ (“after the majority to incline”) are taken out of context (a legitimate interpretive device, for the Rabbis, given their understanding of the nature of divine language). See further http://www.m7000.com/articles/Rabbi.htm (accessed 19 December 2018).

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The passage is remarkable in a number of respects. First, it accepts the legitimacy of intervention by a “heavenly voice” (thus, direct divine revelation as a source of law), despite the fact that such intervention is explicitly rejected in Baba Metsia 59b, discussed above. Second, it appears to claim that contradictory positions may simultaneously represent “the words of the living God,” since both are “the words of the living God,” and such words are by definition true – contrary to conventional human conceptions of the nature of truth (and objectivity). Human beings are not expected to be able to understand how both may simultaneously be true – how, in other words, the law of contradiction may be transcended – but another “true word,” that of the divine voice, the bat kol, has assured us that this must be the case, and so it must be.³²

4.2 The status of the language of the biblical text This prompts discussion of the very nature of the biblical language. The tradition itself endorses two seemingly opposite conceptions: on the one hand, the Hebrew of the Torah is lashon hakodesh,³³ the holy language, the language of the divinity, which predates human culture³⁴ and has depths, levels,³⁵ and forms of signification (such as its numerical connotations, generating exegesis by gematria ³⁶) which go well beyond human language and which allow for addressing simultaneously different audiences at different levels of sophistication. Moreover, the drafting of Torah – even without imputing to it any mystical levels of meaning – is held out to be perfect: there are no contradictions and nothing superfluous. Any apparent redundancy is the vehicle of added value meaning, and the coherence of the text is such that analogies may be drawn by linking together the most disparate of sources. Its style is never arbitrary, nor is any aspect of its discourse structure: material found in collocation is put there for a purpose, however disparate its subject-matter. The use of analogy to interpret the Torah makes full use of purely literary, and not only substantive, connections (Jackson

 See further Jackson (2012: 203 – 04; 2013a: 90 – 91).  See also Jackson (2012: 202; 2013a: 91).  On the role of Torah in the creation of the world, see Mishnah Avot 1:4; cf. Philo, de opif. mundi 20, 25, 36 (divine logos, identified with Torah in de migrat. 130): see further Harvey (1973), Jackson, “Constructing a Theory of Halakhah,” at 13, downloadable from http://je wishlawassociation.org/resources.htm (accessed 19 December 2019).  On the distinction between peshat and derash, see Loewe (1965); Rabinowitz (1973) and older literature there cited; Kamin (1986) (Hebrew, English summary); Halivni (1991: 52– 88).  Though not generally used for halakhic purposes.

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1991, 2001). Yet against this, there is an opposed hermeneutic principle: “The Torah is written in the language of man.”³⁷ This does not mean that it was written by human hands, but rather that it was written in a manner intelligible to human beings, using the conventions of human language. I shall not seek here to resolve the tension between these two opposed conceptions of the nature of the language of Torah. Suffice it to say that each is deployed, on occasion, in support of particular exegetical outcomes: outcomes requiring sophisticated literary exegesis on the one hand, outcomes validated by the “plain sense” (peshat) on the other.

4.3 Residues of charismatic adjudicative authority in the Talmud While the halakhah in postbiblical times moved strongly towards the rational model,³⁸ traces of recourse to charismatic authority survived. Hanina Ben-Menahem has studied some thirty cases recorded in the Babylonian Talmud where it is said that the rabbinic judge decided the case “not in accordance with the Halakhah.”³⁹ The halakhah is regarded as a minimum standard, and the judges are expected to go beyond it, wherever possible, in pursuit of justice. Thus, the Talmud quotes R. Yoḥanan as saying (Baba Metsia 30b): “Jerusalem was destroyed only because they gave judgements there in accordance with Torah law …” Were they then to have judged in accordance with untrained arbitrators? – But say thus: because they based their judgements [strictly] upon Torah law, and did not go beyond the requirements of the law (lifnim mishurat hadin).

 The approach of R. Ishmael (as against that of R. Akiba): Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 64b, and elsewhere. See Elon (1994: I, 371– 374).  And thus away from a monistic and towards a dualistic model.  See Ben-Menahem (1991). See also, more broadly, Ben-Menahem (1996), concluding, at 434 f., that “we are justified in doubting the sufficiency of the modern, Western concept of law for the purposes of describing the halakhah.”

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5 A problem in modern Jewish law 5.1 The problem of the agunah (“chained wife”) and the Jewish “rules of recognition” In the course of a five-year research project I directed at Manchester⁴⁰ on the vexed, practical problem of the “chained wife” (agunah) whose husband refuses to co-operate with the court in granting his wife a divorce (a get), thereby preventing her remarriage, and rendering any subsequent relationship she may enter adulterous and the children thereof “illegitimate” (mamzerim), we discovered that what modern legal philosophers call the “rules of recognition” of the legal system remain subject to significant controversy. Thus: i. The rule of majority decision itself ⁴¹, often regarded as the most basic “secondary rule” in Jewish law, is subject to a major controversy: does it apply only to the authorities of the current generation or does it extend to cross-generational disputes, where the participants had no opportunity for dialogue?⁴² ii. An alternative to seeking a cross-generational majority is the rule that, as amongst post-talmudic authorities, later opinions are followed in preference to earlier ones (hilkheta kebatra’ei), on the assumption that the later authorities took the earlier ones into account. But this is qualified in the case where earlier sources are discovered, of which the later authorities were unaware.⁴³ That leaves the contemporary judge with discretion not to follow the later authority on the grounds that the latter’s decision might have been different had he been aware of this (later discovered) earlier authority. The criteria for this discretion are stated in some detail in the 20th-century Enzyklopedia Talmudit. One of my colleagues in the Agunah Research Unit analysed its formulation, and found eight different areas of ambiguity in it.⁴⁴ iii. Uncertainties also exist in such areas as the status of newly-discovered MS sources,⁴⁵ and in iv. The status and identification of the “leading authorities of the day” (gedolay hador).

 http://www.manchesterjewishstudies.org/agunah-research-unit/ with downloadable publications from its Publications page (accessed 19 December 2018). See also Jackson (2015: 50 – 52).  Baba Metsia 59b (the “Oven of Okhnai,” discussed in section 4.1, above).  See further Abel (2008).  Shulḥan Arukh Ḥoshen Mishpat 25:3 and Rema. See Jackson (2011: 61– 62).  Abel (2008: 8 – 10); Jackson (2011: 62– 63).  Jackson (2011: 64– 67).

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Indeed, doubts as to what is authoritative in the system are so extensive that a (creative) doctrine of doubts has developed, granting authority to be lenient in various types of case given the existence of different levels of doubt: a single doubt relating to an issue of rabbinic status is sufficient to justify exercising leniency; a single doubt relating to an issue of biblical status is not sufficient to justify exercising leniency, but a double doubt is sufficient.⁴⁶

5.2 Objectivity, Truth and Trust Yet reliance on these rules regarding doubt is discretionary. In the absence of any universally accepted central rabbinic authority, different rabbinic courts will exercise that discretion in different ways. Some may even deny that the discretion exists. Is there an objectively correct answer to this question? Despite the continuing endorsement by some influential rabbinic voices of a positivist-inspired objectivity,⁴⁷ the better answer—and one, I would maintain, itself supported by Jewish tradition—is that the halakhah is based at least as much on the concept of trust as on that of truth.⁴⁸ The issue ultimately becomes not one of truth but rather one of trust. The title of Rabbi is the result of a form of ordination called semikhah—a term originally designating the laying on of hands in a line commencing with the ordination of Joshua by Moses (and thus transmitting a special quality of divine charisma, given Moses’ immediate experience of revealed law on Mount Sinai), but retained for the rabbinic qualification despite the commonly acknowledged fact that the line was broken around the 4th century CE. We should not, moreover, assume a universal conception of “truth”. Steven Schwarzschild writes:⁴⁹ “In Judaism truth is primarily an ethical notion: it describes not what is but what ought to be,” citing the association of truth with ethical notions in the Bible⁵⁰ and rabbinic literature.⁵¹ Hermann Cohen designates the normative unity of cognition and ethics as “the fundamental law of

 Jackson (2015: 52; 2011: 52; 44– 63).  E. g. Rabbi J. David Bleich.  Whether the attribute of “truth” may be attached to legal propositions is discussed, in the secular context, by Pintore (2000 [1996]).  Schwarzschild (1973: 1414). See further Jackson (2012: 201– 02).  Peace (Zech 8:16), righteousness (Mal 2:6 ff.), grace (Gen 24:27, 49), justice (Zech 7:9), and even salvation (Pss 25:4 ff.).  Mishnah Avot 1:18, “The world rests on three things — truth, justice, and peace.”

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truth.”⁵² And Martin Buber is said to identify faith (emunah ⁵³) with truth (emet), here conceived as interpersonal trust.⁵⁴ And such conceptions derive support from classical rabbinic sources. Thus, we have seen that the Talmudic passage where a bat qol affirms apparently contradictory opinions of rival schools (Erubin 13b) concludes: What was it that entitled Beth Hillel to have the halakhah fixed in agreement with their rulings?—Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of Beth Shammai, and were even so [humble] as to mention the action of Beth Shammai before theirs.

This indicates a “pragmatic” (in the linguistic sense) criterion for the “pragmatic” (i. e. practical) resolution of the conflict: the School of Hillel merit greater trust because of their superior (in Habermasian terms) conversational ethics. The tension between truth and trust is also reflected in a story told of the relations between two leading 19th-century rabbinic authorities: R. Hayyim of Brisk had a query regarding a practical matter. He decided to turn to the leading authority of these times, R. Isaac Elhanan of Kovno [Kaunas]. He wrote: “These are the facts and this is the question; I beg you to reply in a single line—‘fit’ or ‘unfit,’ ‘Guilty’ or ‘not Guilty’, without giving your reasons.” When R. Hayyim was asked why he had done so, he replied “… decisions of R. Isaac Elhanan are binding because he is the Posek of our generation, and he will let me know his decision. But in scholarship and analysis my ways are different from his and if he gave his reasons I might see a flaw in it and have doubts about his decision. So, it is better if I do not know his reasons.”⁵⁵

R. Hayyim was prepared to trust the decision of R. Isaac Elhanan even though he might disagree with his reasoning. Unlike many modern positivists, he does not see legal decisions as nothing more than the outcome of explicit legal reasoning.⁵⁶ Here, deference was paid to personal status or reputation, in preference

 Cohen (1904: ch. 1).  The attribute of emunah is frequently attributed to God in Jewish liturgy. In context, it clearly refers to human perception of God’s trustworthiness, rather than to human adherence to any abstract truth-claim. Does this sell out any “hard” conception of truth? In the theological context, the believer may very reasonably say: “My belief that X is true is based on my faith in the truthfulness/trustworthiness of my source of information (God), which is far more reliable than any attempt I might make at independent confirmation.”  Schwarzschild (1973: 1415). See Buber (1951: 7– 12). On Buber’s non-referential conception of truth, and its relation to the I-Thou relationship, see Levinas (1967: 141– 44).  See Elon (1980: 89 – 90 n.52). In Jackson (2012: 206 – 07), I associate this with a “procedural” approach to truth.  See sec. 6 below.

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to argumentation, to attributes of the énonciateur rather than the content of the énoncé.

6 Truth and Trust in Secular Law 6.1 Solomon’s judgment as discussed in modern secular jurisprudence Is modern secular law immune from such problems? In seeking to incorporate an account of intuition within his theory of justification, Neil MacCormick invites us to endorse a dualist model (and to apply it to Solomon’s judgment): on the one hand rationality (the application of his favoured syllogistic model⁵⁷); on the other, a form of emotivism, now seemingly incorporated into the justificatory process, albeit operating only as some type of safety net, when there is a sense that something has gone wrong with the application of (the favoured) rationality. But anomalous cases will appear in which it will not seem right to hold in favour of the normative consequence that the rule ostensibly provides for. We will ask if the rule admits of some other interpretation than that which points to a result that makes us uneasy, or if all the facts before us are really appropriately classified as falling within the predicates that specify the rule’s operative facts. Our sense of rightness will lead us to problematize the rule’s applicability to the case in hand and thus to remove it from the category of ‘rulecases’, treating it as a case of first impression that needs intuitive judgement directed at its very own particulars. Every judge, after all, to be up to the job, will have to be possessed of some small share of Solomon’s wisdom.⁵⁸

Yet later, he insists on justifying any such intuitive decision in anomalous cases in universalist terms (in order to attribute to it the status of an objective rather a subjective judgment):

 “Justification of claims and decisions will contain and focus on a syllogistic element, showing what rule is being applied, and how,” quoted by Jackson (2006b: 224 n.3) from a pre-publication text of MacCormick’s Rhetoric and The Rule of Law (MacCormick 2009) circulated for discussion at an Edinburgh Seminar marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of his Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (MacCormick 1978). His earlier work is discussed from a semiotic viewpoint in Jackson (1985: 167– 91), and for the debate over the role of syllogistic reasoning in legal justification (whether involving sense, reference or denotation), see Jackson (1996: 245 – 55).  From the pre-publication paper cited in n.57. Solomon’s judgment is further discussed by MacCormick at 2009: 79 – 83.

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If the relationship of just this sort is operation-justifying in any case, it has to be so in all cases, however infrequent we hope and pray such cases will turn out to be. The ‘because’ of justification is a universal nexus, in this sense: for a given act to be right because of a given feature, or set of features, of a situation, materially the same act must be right in all situations in which materially the same feature or features are present. (MacCormick, pre-publication text)

In short, we must find the reason for the particularist decision and be prepared to apply that reason in all such future cases (in the Common Law, no doubt, defining the latter in terms of the ratio decidendi of the initial decision). This dualist model is to be applauded at least to this extent: it clearly recognises a distinction between the psychology of decision-making and the rationality of justification.⁵⁹ Intuition, ultimately, is confined to the former sphere. Its existence, even its importance, is recognised, but it plays no role in the process of justification.

6.2 Rationality or intuition in the 1889 New York case of Riggs v. Palmer The semiotic approach I have sought to apply to law would differ. This may be illustrated from a critique of a central example used by Ronald Dworkin in arguing for the existence within the legal system of (non-binding) legal principles.⁶⁰ In the New York case of Riggs v. Palmer,⁶¹ the beneficiary of a will had in fact murdered the testator (his grandfather). The relevant New York statute had set out the criteria of a valid will (criteria of form and mental capacity), and were entirely clear. A strict positivist approach would have been to grant the estate to the grandson (as indeed the first instance judge decided), and leave it to the legislature to change the law (even retrospectively), since statutes (at least in Common Law countries) seek to be comprehensive, in that general terms apply in their full meaning unless exceptions are specifically stated.⁶² The ap-

 Most positivist jurisprudence, on the other hand, naively conflates the two, assuming that the public justification of decisions reflects the actual, psychological processes of decision-making. See further, Jackson (1996: 233 – 36, and chap. 9 generally for an alternative semiotic analysis).  Jackson (2013b: 613 – 14).  115 N.Y. 506, 22 N.E. 188 (1889). See Dworkin (1977: 23, 28 – 30); on this, see Jackson (1996: 199 – 200, 208, 241– 42; 2013b: 613 – 14).  Despite the (rarely applied) “golden rule” of common law statutory interpretation, that one does not apply the literal meaning if it would lead to “absurdity.”

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peal court here argued, however, that there existed within the law (despite not being stated in the statute) a principle that a man should not profit from his wrong, and denied the grandson the estate. This showed, Dworkin argued, both that law is not a system of rules only, and that the principles it incorporates include moral principles. But the application of principles, on Dworkin’s own argument, is discretionary, and thus not even “a man should not profit from his wrong” will be applied in every case where a man has profited from his wrong. So how do we understand the appeal court’s decision? I have argued that we need to do so in narrative terms: the typical narrative image of testamentary succession is one of (relative) family harmony, accompanied by a positive tacit social evaluation.⁶³ The narrative of inter-generational patricide is so far removed from this, accompanied as it is by evaluations of repugnancy, that we recoil from viewing it as sufficiently similar to the typical image to justify application of the same rule of testamentary succession.

6.3 A semiotic approach The case illustrates also the distinction between moral feeling (which may be the basis of intuitive judgment) and moral argument (required for discursive justification). It does not take a Dworkinian Hercules (a “lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen”⁶⁴) to judge that there is something wrong in a grandson inheriting the estate of the grandfather he has murdered, though it may take such a lawyer to justify that conclusion as the best possible solution in terms of the overall sources of an existing legal system. Intuitive judgments (however we may view their sources) operate on the private, psychological level; discursive justification operates on the public level, directed to a particular audience, and makes sense (from a semiotic viewpoint) in terms of the narrativisation of the pragmatics⁶⁵ of that particular audience. Intuitive judgments belong to “common sense” (the sense, in any particular culture, which we share in common); legal justification to the “artificial reason of the Law” (Sir Edward Coke⁶⁶) whose function, in part, is to constitute lawyers as a semiotic group apart.

 On such “tacit social evaluations,” see Jackson (1988: 2, 111, 116; 1995: 152– 53).  Dworkin (1977: 105).  For which, see Jackson (1988: 33 – 36, 161– 74; 2015: 53; 1995: 158 – 61, and more generally 141– 67 for my version of the basic theoretical concepts and claims of Greimassian semiotics).  See Bickenbach (1990: 23) for the full quotation, from Prohibitions del Roy (1607) 12 Co. Rep. 63.

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7 Semiotic epistemology and theology For Greimassian semiotics, “is” and “ought” are simply different modalities applied to behaviour patterns (whose sense is constructed in narrative terms). When we affirm the modality of “is,” we are making a truth claim; when we affirm the modality of “ought” we are making a validity claim (just as when we go to an art gallery and affirm the beauty of a painting, we are making an aesthetic claim). When we affirm that something is “divine,” we are similarly attributing a linguistically-constructed “modality” to it. Is the secular/religious distinction, we may ask, ontological or itself a social construction of sense? Greimassian semiotics is purely descriptive; its position on sense and reference (the latter being the concern of pragmatics rather than semantics) means that it cannot validate truth claims with linguistic resources. This, necessarily, has profound implications for theology. But while semiotics cannot validate truth claims with linguistic resources, it cannot invalidate them either. The introduction of this volume claims that we (at least, as scholars) have no direct access to immediate religious experience, and have to rely on mediated accounts. This is not either to deny or affirm the reality of religious experience. But it poses a greater challenge: can those who have such experience themselves make sense of how this occurs, or does that very attempt compromise the “ineffability” which is often claimed to be an essential part of that experience? How, then, is the notion of divine justice constructed? Divine justice is a metaphor. It commences from something that is known, something about human behaviour. It is then attributed to the divine, but that very attribution involves (in the modern jargon) “added value,” reflecting the power etc. understood to reside within the divine. When, in due course, the metaphor of divine behaviour itself becomes a model for humanity (in the form of delegated divine justice), aspects of that “added value” remain. In the Jewish context, a weakly institutionalised form of human law is attributed to God; its power is thereby enhanced; and once such divine justice becomes a model for human law, the strength of the human institution is itself thereby increased. But there remain pragmatic issues to which answers are not readily available: who constructs God as a subject and attributes truth-claims to such constructions? And what purposes are served by the narratives of immediacy, on the one hand, mediation on the other? We may, however, conclude by noting that immediacy and mediation are not the only modes of divine communication reflected in Jewish literature. Absence

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also plays a significant role. Biblical sources speak of God hiding his face.⁶⁷ Even Moses was denied sight of God’s face, even though he was allowed to sense the passing of God’s presence.⁶⁸ The hiding of God’s face has become a major theme in Jewish Holocaust Theology.⁶⁹ For contemporary Jewish law, and certainly in the contentious issues of divorce and conversion, one fears that the face of God is truly hidden.

References Abel, Yehudah. 2008. Halakhah—Majority, Seniority, Finality and Consensus. Working Papers of the Agunah Research Unit 7. http://www.manchesterjewishstudies.org/publications/ (accessed 4 November 2019). Ben-Menahem, Hanina. 1991. Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law. Chur & New York: Harwood Academic Publishers. Ben-Menahem, Hanina. 1996. The Judicial Process and the Nature of Jewish Law. In Neil Hecht & Bernard S. Jackson, Daniela Piattelli, Stephen M. Passamaneck & Alfredo Rabello (eds.), An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, 421 – 437. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bickenbach, Jerome E. 1990. The ‘Artificial Reason’ of the Law. Informal Logic 12 (1). 23 – 32. Buber, Martin. 1951. Two Types of Faith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burnside, Jonathan. 2019. The Hidden Face of the Law-Giver: Revelation and Concealment in the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. In Michael Avioz, Yael Shemesh & Omar Minker (eds.), Ben Porat Yosef: Studies in the Bible and Its World, 103 – 120. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Cohen, Hermann. 1904. Ethik des reinen Willens. Berlin: B. Cassirer. Dworkin, Ronald. 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. London: Duckworth. Elon, Menachem. 1980. More about Research into Jewish Law. In Bernard S. Jackson (ed.), Modern Research in Jewish Law, 66 – 111. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Elon, Menachem. 1994. Jewish Law: History. Sources, Principles. Jerusalem & Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.

 Deut 31:18; Ps 44:23 – 27, esp.25: “Why dost thou hide thy face? Why dost thou forget our affliction and oppression?”  Exod 33:26 – 27: “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” For a full and highly suggestive semiotic discussion of this whole theme in biblical sources, see Burnside (2019).  Langton (2011: 43, on Eliezer Berkovits). For a feminist interpretation, see Raphael (2003): the feminine presence of God (shekhinah) can be traced in the acts of loving kindness among female camp inmates (including their facial expressions. See further Langton (2011: 49 – 51). Rubenstein (1970: 185 – 186), perhaps building on the kabbalistic notion that God contracted (tsimtsum) to make room for the world, argued that God after the Holocaust should be conceived of as “holy nothingness” (Langton 2011: 58 n.38).

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Halivni, David W. 1991. Peshat and Derash. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Helfmeyer, F.J. 1977. ‫’ אות‬oth”, in G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 1: 167 – 88. Translated by J. T. Willis. Revised edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Harvey, Warren Z. 1973. Torah. In Encyclopedia Judaica, 15: 1236. Jerusalem: Keter. Jackson, Bernard S. 1974. The Fence-Breaker and the actio de pastu pecoris in Early Jewish Law. Journal of Jewish Studies 25. 123 – 136. Reprinted in Jackson, Bernard S. 1975. Essays in Jewish and Comparative Legal History, 250 – 267. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Jackson, Bernard S. 1985. Semiotics and Legal Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jackson, Bernard S. 1988. Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence. Merseyside: Deborah Charles Publications. Jackson, Bernard S. 1991. Analogy in Legal Science: Some Comparative Observations. In Patrick Nerhot (ed.), Legal Knowledge and Analogy, 145 – 165. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Jackson, Bernard S. 1992a. The Trials of Jesus and Jeremiah. Brigham Young University Studies 32 (4). 63 – 77. Jackson, Bernard S. 1992b. The Prophet and the Law in Early Judaism and the New Testament. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 4 (2). 123 – 166. Reprinted in Stephen Passamaneck & Mordecai Finley (eds.), The Paris Conference Volume, 67 – 112. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994. Jackson, Bernard S. 1994. Envisaging Law. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique VII (21). 311 – 334. Jackson, Bernard S. 1995. Making Sense in Law: Linguistic, Psychological and Semiotic Perspectives. Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications. Jackson, Bernard S. 1996. Making Sense in Jurisprudence. Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications. Jackson, Bernard S. 2000. Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Jackson, Bernard S. 2001. A Semiotic Perspective on the Comparison of Analogical Reasoning in Secular and Religious Legal Systems. In Arend Soeteman (ed.), Pluralism in Law, 295 – 325. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Jackson, Bernard S. 2006a. Wisdom-Laws, A Study of the Mishpatim of Exodus 21:1 – 22:16. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Bernard. 2006b. Universalisability and Intuition: Solomon and Secularisation. In Zenon Bankowski & James MacLean (eds.), The Universal and the Particular in Legal Reasoning, 223 – 233. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jackson, Bernard S. 2007. Law in the 9th Century? The Jehoshaphat Tradition in Context. Proceedings of the British Academy 143. 357 – 85. Jackson, Bernard S. 2008. Essays on Halakhah in the New Testament. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Jackson, Bernard S. 2010. Human Law and Divine Justice: Towards the Institutionalisation of Halakhh. JSIJ—Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 9. 223 – 247. http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/ JSIJ/jsij9.html (accessed 4 November 2019). Jackson, Bernard S. 2011. Agunah: The Manchester Analysis. Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications.

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Jackson, Bernard S. 2012. Some Preliminary Observations on Truth and Argumentation in the Jewish Legal Tradition. In Bjarne Melkevek (ed.), Standing Tall: Hommages à Csaba Varga, 199 – 207. Budapest: Pázmány Press. Jackson, Bernard S. 2013a. Trust in(g) Eric. In Ana Claudia de Oliveira (ed.), As interações sensíveis: Ensaios de sociossemiótica a partir da obra de Eric Landowski, 81 – 100. São Paulo: Editions Estação das Letras e Cores e Editora CPS. Jackson, Bernard S. 2013b. On the Values of Biblical Law and their Contemporary Application. Political Theology 14 (5). 602 – 618. Jackson, Bernard S. 2015. Philosophy of Law: Secular and Religious (With Some Reference to Jewish Family Law). In Alison Diduck, Noam Peleg & Helen Reece (eds.), Law in Society: Reflections on Children, Family, Culture and Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman, 45 – 62. Leiden: Brill. Kamin, Sarah. 1986. Rashi’s Exegetical Categorization in respect to the distinction between Peshat and Derash. Jerusalem: Magnes Press (Hebrew with English Summary). Langton, Daniel R. 2011. God, the Past and Auschwitz: Jewish Holocaust Theologians’ Engagement with History. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17 (1). 29 – 62. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1967. Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge. In Arthur P. Shlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Martin Buber, 133 – 150. London: Cambridge University Press. Loewe, Raphael. 1965. The Plain Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis. Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies 1. 140 – 185. MacCormick, Neil. 1978. Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacCormick, Neil. 2009. Rhetoric and The Rule of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pintore, Anna. 1996. Il Diritto Senza Verità. Torino: Giappichelli. Translated as Law without Truth. Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications, 2000. Rabinowitz, Louis I. 1973. Derash. In Encyclopedia Judaica, 13: 330 – 331. Jerusalem: Keter. Raphael, Melissa. 2003. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz. London: Routledge. Rubenstein, Richard L. 1970. Morality and Eros. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schwarzschild, Steven. 1973. Truth. In Encyclopedia Judaica, 15: 1414 – 1415. Jerusalem: Keter. Sekuler, Robert & Randoph Blake R. 1990. Perception. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Urbach, Ephraim E. 1979. The Sages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Massimo Leone

The doodling of Jesus: A semiotic inquiry into the rhetoric of immediacy Writing and power never work separately, however complex the laws, the system, or the links of their collusion may be. Jacques Derrida (1979)

1 Introduction: A mysterious scribbling The Pericope Adulterae (John 8:6 – 8) is one of the most famous, quoted, and studied passages in the Gospels. Here is the English translation of it in the New Revised Standard Version: […] while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. [2] Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. [3] The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, [4] they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. [5] Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” [6] They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. [7] When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” [8] And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. [9] When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. [10] Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” [11] She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

Reams of paper have been used to read this passage. Interpreters have analyzed every detail of it, focusing, in particular, on the following questions: 1) Why does Jesus write? 2) Why does he bend on the ground to write? 3) Why does he write on the ground? 4) Why does he write twice? 5) Why does he write before and after uttering the famous sentence? However, the question that most tormented interpreters is: “what does he write?”¹ In this paper of mine I shall ponder this question in three steps: first, I shall dwell on those interpretations that read the passage with reference to some prac-

 For a recent survey, see Knust and Wasserman (2010). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-015

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tices of writing / non-writing in the Semitic world. These readings do not propose a philological but an anthropological connection: what does it mean, in the cultures of writing, bending down in order to write on the ground with one’s finger? Second, I shall expose a rapid iconographic survey. Not only exegetes, indeed, but also visual artists interpret this episode. What is the meaning of the writing / non-writing of Jesus when it is narrated through images? Third, I shall conclude by putting forward a new hypothesis about this passage: should we perhaps interpret the writing/non-writing of Jesus in the light of the dialectics between mediation and immediacy?

2 Towards an anthropology of scribbling Already in 1833 – 4, in the three volumes of his Kommentar über das Evangelium des Johannes, the theologian and Biblical scholar Friedrich Lücke² pointed out the parallels between the writing of Jesus in John 6:6 – 8 and some texts of Greek antiquity in which the fact of tracing signs on the ground would configure “ein Spiel des Vertieftseins, Verlegenseins, oder der Langenweile, oder ein Zeichen der absichtlichen Nichtbeachtung und des Abweisens” (an act of preoccupation, embarrassment, or boredom, or a sign of deliberate inattention and dismissal) (Lücke 1833 – 1834: 234, 2 “Auslegung von Kap. 5 – 21”). For instance, in The Acharnians, the comedy that Aristophanes³ put on stage in 425 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War, writing on the ground is presented as a manifestation of boredom and impatience with the inertia of parliamentary life. The comedy opens by the dejected monologue of Dicaeopolis who, alone in the assembly, is bored to death and starts scribbling on the ground: ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἀεὶ πρώτιστος εἰς ἐκκλησίαν νοστῶν κάθημαι: κᾆτ᾽ ἐπειδὰν ὦ μόνος, 30στένω κέχηνα σκορδινῶμαι πέρδομαι, ἀπορῶ γράφω παρατίλλομαι λογίζομαι, ἀποβλέπων ἐς τὸν ἀγρὸν εἰρήνης ἐρῶν, στυγῶν μὲν ἄστυ τὸν δ᾽ ἐμὸν δῆμον ποθῶν […].⁴ (Άχαρνῆς, 31)

 Egeln, 24 July 1791—Göttingen, 14 February 1855.  Athens, ca. 450 BCE —ca. 385 BCE .  “As for myself, I do not fail to come here before all the rest, and now, finding myself alone, I groan, yawn, stretch, break wind, and know not what to do; I make sketches in the dust, pull out my loose hairs, muse, think of my fields, long for peace, curse town life and regret my dear country home”; Engl. trans. F.W. Hall and W.M. Geldart (1907).

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Already Thomas Mitchell’s 1820 verse English translation of the comedy would render “γράφω” with “I fall to tracing figures in the sand” (Mitchell 1820: 17);⁵ William James Hickie’s 1853 prose version would translate the same word with “scribble” (Aristophanes 1853). Later, in the 1905 Cambridge edition of the comedy, Charles E. Graves commented (line 31): “γράφω—scratch and scribble on the ground with my stick. Mitchell indeed takes γράφω to mean that Dicaeopolis begins to draw up a bill or speech; but the idea is rather fidgeting with impatience” (Aristophanes 1905). In the passage, then, “γράφω” can ambiguously refer to both the writing of the law, which should be the main occupation of the assembly in normal time, and to idle scribbling, to which Dicaeopolis is condemned by the assembly’s inertia during the war. In an article published in the second volume of Biblica, in 1922, the Jesuit Semitist E. Power, a doctor from the University of Saint-Joseph in Beirut, current Lebanon, drew a further parallel between Jesus’s writing in John 8: 6 – 8 and some analogous Arab-Islamic contexts. In 1911, the German Semitist Friedrich Schulthess⁶ had published as the volume 8, part 3 of the Beiträge zur Assyriologie und Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft some poetical fragments attributed to Umaiya ibn Abī al-Ṣalt, a pre-Islamic Arab prophetical polymath and poet, who was a contemporary of Mohammed and probably influenced his style.⁷ Among these fragments, Power (1921: 55) quotes the one in which Qasim, son of Umayyah, praises the generosity of his tribe: “When asked for gifts they do not write on the earth (‫ﻻﻳﻨﮑﺘﻮﻥ ﺍﻻﺭﺽ‬, la yankutun al’ard) with their sticks in seeking for excuses.”⁸ The fragment associates the act of writing on the ground with a semantic connotation of embarrassment, already registered by Lücke (1833 – 1834) in his commentary. The postural topology of writing on the ground, indeed, implies averting one’s eyes from those of the interlocutor, concentrating the gaze, instead, on following the movements of scribbling. The same act of writing on the ground is mentioned several times in the Kitāb al-aghānī (The Book of Songs), an encyclopedic collection of poems and texts (comprising about 20 volumes in the 1927– 38 modern Cairo edition), dating from the 10th century and attributed to the Persian literate Abū l-Faraj alIṣfahānī.⁹ In one of these passages, the poet Abu Dahbal,¹⁰ from the Quraiš

 On Mitchell’s translation see Venuti (1995: 77).  1868 – 1922.  Ta’if (Arabic: aṭ-Ṭā’if), ca. 630. The bibliography on Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt is vast; see Borg (1998).  Quoting from Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt (1911: 21).  Esfahan, 897—Baghdad, 967.  Abu Dahbal al-Gumahi, Mecca, ca. 640 – 715; see Krenkow (1910).

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tribe, probably born shortly after the death of Muhammad and author of a Diwan, is afraid that some snoopers might interfere in his relation with a beloved person; he therefore utters the verse: “I write on the surface of the earth (‫ﺍﺧﻄﻂ ﻓﻲ‬ ‫ )ﻇﻬﺮ ﺍﻟﺤﻤﻴﺮ‬as though I were a captive fearing death” (l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī 1927– 1938, VI, 1: 17). That is a further semantic connotation of scribbling: neither boredom nor embarrassment, but disquietude. In all these kinetic configurations, though, the fact of staring at the meaningless signs traced on the ground exerts a sort of hypnotic effect, which results in deep engrossment. A contextual feature of the 10th-century Arabian urban architecture might have influenced this imaginary. Although Abu Dahbal, as well as the other poets of the Quraiš tribe, were essentially urban, non-nomadic poets, they must have lived in an environment in which the ground, both in the private space of houses and in the public space of streets, was usually soft, and therefore easily traceable, not covered by flagstones like in Roman or Greek cities. In a subsequent passage of the same Kitāb al-aghānī, Ibrahim ibn Al-Mahdi, Abbasid prince, singer, composer and poet,¹¹ is asked by his nephew – the Caliph Al-Mu’tasim – ¹² to improvise and sing verses on a narcissus bouquet that the caliph is holding in his hand. As Agnes Imhof (2013: 1) points it out in a paper on singing contests at Samarra, Al-Mahdi was a promoter of the then innovative ‘Persian style’ of singing, which “was characterized inter alia by redundant improvisation”. In evoking this challenge to improvisation, the Kitāb alaghānī tells the reader that Al-Mahdi “wrote on the ground (‫ )ﻧﮑﺖ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻷﺭﺽ‬for a while with a stick he had in his hand and then recited […]” (l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī 1927– 1938, II, 1: 9 – 11). A third pragmatic effect of idle scribbling on the ground emerges in this episode: following with one’s gaze the meaningless traces in the sand encourages concentration before the difficult task of improvising. Already in 1933, Leiden Semitist Arent Jan Wensinck had proposed to read Jesus’ writing in John 8:6 – 8 in the light of similar gestural dynamics in the Islamic world, suggesting the “seriousness of the situation” (Wensinck 1933). The Kitāb al-aghānī mentions the scribbling on the ground also in a third and last passage, related to the Arab-Persian Romanesque epic Layla and Majnun,¹³ which originated in Arabia before the 9th century and was later adapted by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi.¹⁴ In this passage, a friend of

 779 – 839.  Abū Isḥāq Muḥammad ibn Hārūn al-Rashīd (796 – 5 January 842), better known as al-Muʿtaṣim bi’llāh (“he who seeks refuge in God”), was the eighth Abbasid caliph, ruling from 833 to his death in 842; see Bosworth (1993).  See Koudéline (2002).  1141 to 1209.

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the mad poet, who had lost his mind when his beloved one went married to someone else, “passed by him one day as he sat writing on the earth (‫ﻧﮑﺖ‬ ‫ )ﺍﻷﺭﺽ‬and fiddling with stones. The friend saluted him, sat by, and offered words of counsel and consolation. However, the poet continued scribbling as before, engrossed in his thoughts” (l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī 1927– 1938, II, 1: 7). The episode attests another semantic implication of scribbling in Semitic antiquity: if in the previous passages doodling was a technique of temporary obnubilation, the poet of Layla and Majnun cannot snap out of the trance generated by the meaningless tracing on the ground. The most intriguing Arabic mention of this writing/non-writing on the ground (on the earth, on sand) is to be found in Ibn Khaldun,¹⁵ the most important scholar in the history of what is now Maghreb; precisely in the first book of the Prolegomena (Al-Muqaddima), the three-volume work that he wrote to introduce the first volume of his universal history, Kitab al-Ibar (literally, “collection of precepts”). The first part of the first volume of the Prolegomena (whose first two volumes were published in 1375 and 1378, whereas the third, “Egyptian” volume dates from later), reports an episode in which Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz,¹⁶ aka Umar II, eighth Caliph of the Umayyad-Marwanids dynasty of Syria (717– 20), summoned Abdallah, son of Marwan II,¹⁷ the last Caliph of the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, in order to have him report the dialogue that he had had with the King of Nubia, when Abdallah had found refuge at his court so as to flee the persecution of the Abbasids: I had spent there sometimes, Abdallah said, when the king came to visit me. He sat on the ground, although I had spread out a precious carpet for him to sit. – Why, did I enquire, don’t you sit on an object that belongs to me? – I am king, he answered, and the duty of every king is to humble before the greatness of God, since it is to him that they owe their high rank. And yourselves, why do you drink wine, although your sacred book forbids that? I answered: – Our slaves and our servants are so fearless to do that. – Why, he continued, have you treaded on the harvest with the hooves of your mounts, although your book forbids you to do evil? – Our slaves and our servants have done that out of foolishness. – Why do you wear silk garments and golden ornaments, since that is forbidden to you by your book? At this question I answered: – Seeing that we were about to lose our sovereign authority, we called to our help some foreigners who had embraced Islam. They dressed in silk despite our will. The king bowed his head, started to trace some characters on the ground, and mumbled these words: – Our slaves! Our servants! Some foreigners who embrace Islam! Then he looked at me and said: – What you said to me is not correct; you are people who have despised the prohibitions of God; you have touched things

 Tunis, 27 May 1332 –Cairo, 17 March 1406.  2 November 682 (26th Safar, 63 AH)—31 January 720.  Marwan ibn Muhammad ibn Marwan or Marwan II (691– 6 August 750).

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whose usage was forbidden to you; you have been tyrants of your subjects. God stripped you of your power and clothed you with ignominy, because of your sins, and to your regard, the revenge of God will be limitless; I am also afraid that it will befall me while you are in my country. You know that hospitality lasts three days; make then your provisions and get out of my territories. (l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī 1927– 1938, I, 1: 1321)¹⁸

A subtle semiotic analogy links the body and writing of Jesus as described in the Gospel of John and those of the King of Nubia in the dialogue reported by Ibn Khaldun. In both cases, the bowing down of the body and the tracing of some apparently meaningless signs on the ground allow the character to manifest a moral hierarchy, in which the substance of the law is affirmed in contrast with its mere appearance and against a caste of morally inferior interpreters (the scribes and the Pharisees in the Gospel, Abdallah and his court in Ibn Khaldun). As it is well known, although Nubia was entirely Arabized from the 14th century on, Christianity had been the predominant religion in the area since probably as early as the 4th century. When Abdallah meets the King of Nubia, he likely meets a Christian king, or at least a king who is familiar with the moral ideology of Christianity. Such ideology translates into a superposition of postural, proxemic, and kinetic codes, in which being in closer contact with the ground and scribbling on it convey the intention to deconstruct the moral hypocrisy of the written law. From this point of view, both passages, John and Ibn Khaldun, seem to intertextually refer to Daniel 5, where a mysterious writing, not traced by human hand, would condemn an abuse of power.¹⁹ It is not excluded that Khaldun himself might have been influenced by John’s Gospel. One of the sources of Khaldun, indeed, the Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems [Muruj al-dhahab] by the 10thcentury historian Al-Masudi,²⁰ relates the same episode.²¹ Furthermore, paragraph 8, chapter 121 of the same work narrates, within a complex myse en abime of enunciations, the dialogue between Nawf and Ali, in which the cousin of Muhammad explicitly refers to Christians as to those for whom “this earth, God’s handiwork, is a rich carpet, the dust a couch, water a perfumed drink. The Koran is their cloak and prayer their covering. They consider this world as but a loan and followed in the path marked out by Jesus, son of Mary, on whom be peace!” (Al-Masudi 1989: 308). The series of semantic connotations of scribbling on the ground must therefore include also a sort of deconstructive pragmatics, which tends to de-natural-

   

Arabic text Cairo: Bulaq, 1857; trans. mine. See Leone (2014). Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī; Baghdad, 897—al-Fustat, 957. See Shboul (1979). Al Masudi (1989: 25).

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ize the law by choosing the ground as support for an apparently meaningless writing. By scribbling on the earth, the King of Nubia is implicitly affirming the hypocrisy of his guest’s interpretation of the written law and the existence of a more natural, more authentic version of it.

3 Rhetorics of immediacy By indicating a possible parallel between Jesus’ writing on the ground in John’s Gospel and similar instances in the Greek, Arab, and Islamic world, Lücke, Powell, Wensinck, and other Semitists are not pointing at a philological connection but rather at a semiotic similarity. They suggest the existence of a cross-cultural anthropological dynamics according to which, in those cultures where the religious law is encoded through writing, alternative or even deconstructive decoding of that same law often implies pointing at its arbitrariness by switching to 1) a supposedly ‘more natural’ surface of writing: the earth instead of papyrus, parchment, or paper; 2) a supposedly ‘more natural’ writing tool: the finger instead of a stylus, a quill, or a pen; and 3) a supposedly ‘more natural’ writing itself, in which the rigid schemes of the graphematic transcription of the law are replaced by personal, doodling traces. More generally, to this reading one might add that, from the semiotic point of view, immediacy does not exist or, better, it exists only as result of a rhetoric of immediacy that selects and subverts certain aspects of the mainstream codes of mediation. That was the case in Jesus’ morally revolutionary subversion of the Mosaic Law as it is the case in those present-day political movements that advocate more transparency and, as a consequence, dis-intermediation in the political arena. In both phenomena, a rhetorical effect of dis-intermediation and immediacy is created by rearranging the theater of communication, by stripping it of its customary furnishing, and by replacing it with a sort of minimalist alternative, bearing some stronger connotation of ‘naturalness.’ However, rhetorics of immediacy do not limit themselves to replace a previous theater of communication; they also offer an ideological vision of it, which tends to emphasize its arbitrariness exactly for the sake of extolling the spontaneity of its replacement. For instance, it would be anthropologically and maybe also historically naïve to believe that writing with one’s finger on the ground is a ‘more natural’ option than writing with a stylus on papyrus. The idea that the latter is a sort of cultural regimentation of the former is probably more historically fanciful than the idea that the former is actually a reproduction of the latter with less effective means. As Gombrich (1999) has pointed it out in an amusing essay, doodling has always been influenced by the visual and artistic culture of its epoch.

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Be as it may, semioticians must above all seek to understand whether some common features characterize the various rhetorics of disintermediation,²² transparency, and immediacy, and whether these features are to be better arranged according to historical, cultural, or discursive patterns, or according to a combination of the three. In the course of human history, individuals and groups have acquired hierarchical status and power through codification and control over codification. They have created languages of mediation and simultaneously they have constructed a rhetoric suggesting their primacy or exclusivity in managing such mediation. Only an ideologically populist view of history, however, can neglect that hierarchical status and power can be acquired also by deconstructing these languages of mediation and by formulating some opposite rhetorics of immediacy, whose pragmatic force is necessarily parasitic in relation to the codes of mediation. In searching the semiotic rules of this dialectics, focusing on the specificities of each discursive arena is perhaps as or even less fundamental as singling out cross-discursive ideologies of immediacy and their semiotic manifestations. It is difficult to determine regularities in this field, exactly because immediacy is constructed as a counterpart to the specificity of a codified mediation. Nevertheless, it is impossible to underestimate the importance of a rhetoric of the body combined with a rhetoric of techniques. Every time that a discourse of immediacy attempts to caricature and replace a discourse of mediation, it represents communication as re-centered on the body. Across cultures and epochs, presenting communication as stemming directly from the body, as opposed to communication stemming from an unanimated object, like a book, for instance, tends to emphasize the arbitrariness of the latter and simultaneously to extol the natural motivation of the former.²³ One could argue that much of the Pauline rhetorical opposition between the Jewish Law inscribed in stone and the Christian Law inscribed in the heart revolves around this figure of proximity of the bodily arena of communication. With the advent of Christianity, the stone of the Jewish law was rhetorically presented as much harder than before, and as a consequence the heart of the Christian law was depicted as much softer than before. One might interpret according to this rhetorical logic the physicality of John 8:6 – 8, in which the Evangelist is very careful to note that Jesus bents down twice, as though searching – in the closer contact between the body, the surface,  In economics, “disintermediation” designates the removal of intermediaries from a supply chain, or “cutting out the middlemen”; metaphorically, it has come to indicate every phenomenon of removal of human intermediation from a social or cultural process of communication.  See the concept of logocentrism in Derrida’s grammatology (Derrida 1967).

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the tool, and the content of writing – for a more ‘natural’ law than that inscribed in the Jewish stone. But, perhaps with a provocation, one could interpret in the same way the relation between the German, distant, ethereal, mediated body of Pope Benedict XVI and the Argentinian, proximate, corporeal, and apparently immediate body of Pope Francis. Since the advent of Francis, Benedict has started to appear as even stiffer and intolerably codified in the memory of believers, whereas, exactly because of Benedict, Francis now looks incredibly warm and pleasantly relaxed. Only semiotically naïve interpreters, however, could believe that the communicative power that Benedict barely held in keeping faith to codifications was of an entirely different nature than the power that Francis now fully enjoys by deconstructing them. Immediacy is just as much a result of semiotic engineering as mediation is, yet individuals and groups tend to become blind to the latter after they are exposed for a long time to the rigid codifications of the former.

4 Depictions of immediacy From this perspective, it is interesting to look at visual representations of John 8:6 – 8, which often propose an iconic exegesis of the passage in relation to the dialectics between immediacy and mediation. 17th-century Flemish painters are particularly keen on transforming Jesus’ scribbling into a readable inscription. Gabriel Metsu²⁴ even produced a curious visual syneresis between the protagonist and the narrator: in his painting, dating from 1653, Jesus transcribes the whole passage of the Vulgate relating the episode of the adulterous woman (Figures 24a and 24b). However, the particular visual composition of this painting could not be deciphered without reference to Jewish sources dealing with female adultery. Bamidbar, that is Numbers, 5:11– 31 describes the ordeal of the bitter water, prescribed by Jewish Law for women who are suspected to have been adulterous. In particular, 5:23 reads: “Then the priest shall put these curses in writing, and wash them off into the water of bitterness.” The treatise known as Sotah [‫]שוטה‬, the sixth of Nashim in the Babylonian Talmud, records the in-depth Jewish discussion on the details of the ordeal. Sotah 17b prescribes when, in what form, on what support, with what writing tool, etc. the accusations must be written. The Gemara insists that the document must be written in the form of a “book” (which is identified with a scroll):

 Gabriel Metsu (Leiden, 1629—Amsterdam, 24 October 1667).

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Figure 24a. Gabriel Metsu, Jesus Defending the Adulterous Woman, 1653. 134 x 165 cm. Oil on canvas. Paris: Louvre. Photograph and reproduction permit “Federico Zeri” Foundation, University of Bologna.

Figure 24b. Gabriel Metsu, Jesus Defending the Adulterous Woman, 1635. Detail. 134 x 165 cm. Oil on canvas. Paris: Louvre. Photograph and reproduction permit “Federico Zeri” Foundation, University of Bologna. Raba said: A scroll for a suspected woman which one wrote at night is invalid. What is the reason? An analogy is drawn between two passages where the word ‘law’ occurs: here it is written: And the priest shall execute upon her all this law, and elsewhere it is written: According to the tenor of the law which they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment. As judgment [could only be delivered] in the daytime, so a scroll for a suspected woman [could only be written] in the daytime. If he wrote the text not in its proper order, it is invalid; for it is written: And he shall write these curses – just as they are written [in the Scriptural text]. If he wrote it before she took the oath upon herself, it is invalid; as it is said: He shall cause her to swear and after that, He shall write. If he wrote it in the form of a letter, it is invalid – ‘in a book’ said the All-merciful. (Simon and Epstein 1960)

Read as an early Christian reaction to the Sotah, the Pericope Adulterae sounds like a sort of semi-symbolical subversion of it: whereas in Judaism the adulterous woman must be accused through the precise transcription of her charges in a scroll, and will be exonerated only if she will go through the ordeal of water mixed with the dust of the temple, Jesus scribbles on the dust of the temple an unreadable message that will exonerate the adulterous woman. It is only in relation to this early Christian rhetoric of immediacy that one can understand why Gabriel Metsu insists on placing a book in the hands of the temple’s priest (Figure 24a).

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5 Conclusions: The dialectics of Stone and Heart The contraposition between Jewish mediated accusations and Christian immediate exoneration is even more evident among 17th-century Venetian painters, such as Pietro della Vecchia, in whose painting, dating from the third quarter of the 17th century and currently at the Louvre, Jesus literally pushes back with his left hand the massive in-folio of the accusations (Figure 25).

Figure 25. Pietro della Vecchia (Pietro Muttoni), Christ and the adulterous woman, third quarter of the 17th century. 126 x 172 cm. Oil on canvas. Paris: Louvre. Photograph and reproduction permit “Federico Zeri” Foundation, University of Bologna.

In a second version, recently auctioned by Christie’s, the painter seems to have depicted the instant immediately preceding the rejection (Figure 26). The contraposition between the left hand rejecting the Jewish mediation and the right hand pointing at the scribbled immediacy of the ground is even more evident in a third version, currently in a private Roman collection in Rome (Figure 27). On the one hand, it is probable that these and analogous paintings refer to the Ambrosian exegesis of the Pericope Adulterae, which first proposed a parallel

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Figure 26. Pietro della Vecchia, Christ and the adulterous woman, third quarter of the 17th century. 151 x 206 cm. Oil on canvas. London: sold at Christie’s auction, 2000. Photograph and reproduction permit “Federico Zeri” Foundation, University of Bologna.

Figure 27. Pietro della Vecchia, Christ and the adulterous woman, third quarter of the 17th century. 33 x 45 cm. Oil on canvas. Rome: A. Sabatello. Photograph and reproduction permit “Federico Zeri” Foundation, University of Bologna.

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Figure 28. Biasio Ugolino. Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, 34 vols. Venice: Apud Joannem Gabrielem Herthz, et Sebastianum Coletti, 1744 – 69. Photograph by the author.

with Exodus 31:18 (where the Decalogue too is written “with the finger of God”).²⁵ From this point of view, Jesus is depicted as the one who, with his finger, writes on the ground the new Christian law, replacing the old Jewish Law written by the finger of God. On the other hand, though, it is important to underline that these 17th-century paintings were not executed in early Christianity, but in an era in which, in several European regions, for instance the Amsterdam of Gabriel Metsu or the Venice of Pietro della Vecchia, information on Jewish rituals was circulating often with apologetic or even overtly anti-Semitic agendas. The attention of 17thand even more 18th-century Venetian painters to the visual contraposition between the Jewish scroll and the Christian scribbling, for example, is likely related to works such as Biasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum (Figure 28), a monumental work in 34 volumes in which the author, a Jew who converted to Christianity, transcribed, translated, and commented on the entire Talmud for the sake of Christian apologetics. Pages 43 – 44 of volume 15, in particular, dwell at length on the role of writing in the Jewish ritual of the bitter water (Figure 29).

 See Leone (2001).

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Figure 29. Biasio Ugolino. Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, 15: 43 – 4. Photograph by the author.

The complex dialectics through which Christianity shaped its identity in contraposition with Judaism also implied the shaping of a “rhetoric of immediacy” that was parasitic upon Jewish mediations at the same time that it caricatured these. The Pericope Adulterae can also be read as a powerful text of this rhetoric. It gave rise to an imaginary of immediacy that, many centuries later, would bring about the beautiful painting executed by Valentin de Boulogne in 1620 (Figure 30): here the scribbling of Jesus lies outside of the frame, and the responsibility of encoding its message is entirely attributed to the spectator, with a sublimely persuasive evocation of the supposed immediacy of the Christian law.

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Figure 30. Valentin de Boulogne, Jesus and the adulterous woman, 1620. 167.6 x 219.7 cm. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Photograph and reproduction permit “Federico Zeri” Foundation, University of Bologna.

References Al-Masudi. 1989. Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems [Muruj al-dhahab]. Translated by Paul Lunde & Caroline Stone. London & New York: Routledge. Aristophanes. 1853. The Comedies of Aristophanes: A New and Literal Translation. Translated by William James Hickie. London: Henri G. Bohn. Aristophanes. 1905. The Acharnians. Edited by Charles E. Graves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borg, Gert. 1998. Umayya b. Abi al-Salt as a poet. In Urbain Vermeulen & Daniel de Smet (eds.), Philosophy and Arts in the Islamic World: Proceedings of the 18th Congress of the Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, 3 – 13. Leuven: Peeters. Bosworth, Clifford E. 1993. Al- Muʿtaṣim Bi ’llāh. In Martin T. Houtsma (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, 7: 776. Leiden & New York: Brill. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 1979. Scribble (writing-power). Yale French Studies 58. 117 – 147. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1999. Pleasures of Boredom: Four Centuries of Doodles. In Ernst H. Gombrich, The Uses of Images, 212 – 225. London: Phaidon.

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Imhof, Agnes. 2013. Traditio vel Aemulatio? The Singing Contest of Sāmarrā, Expression of a Medieval Culture of Competition? Der Islam 90. 1 – 20. Knust, Jennifer & Tommy Wasserman. 2010. Earth Accuses Earth: Tracing What Jesus Wrote on the Ground. The Harvard Theological Review 103 (4). 407 – 446. Koudéline, Alexandre. 2002. Histoire romanesque arabe de Maǧnūn et Laylā: l’analyse comparative de trois sources principales. In Stefan Leder (ed.), Studies in Arabic and Islam, 227 – 234. Sterling, VA: Peeters. Krenkow, Fritz. 1910. The Diwan of Abu Dahbal Al-Gumahi. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 1017 – 1075. Leone, Massimo. 2001. Divine Dictation: Voice and Writing in the Giving of the Law. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 14 (2). 161 – 177. Leone, Massimo. 2014. Enigma: Ignoranza e intellegibilità. In Massimo Leone, Annunciazioni: Percorsi di semiotica della religione, 1: 529 – 550. Rome: Aracne. l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Abū. 1927 – 1938. Kitāb al-aghānī (The Book of Songs). Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub Press. Lücke, Friedrich. 1833 – 1834. Kommentar über das Evangelium des Johannes. 2 vols. 2nd enlarged and revised edition. Bonn: Eduard Weber. Mitchell, Thomas. 1820. Comedies of Aristophanes. Vol. 1. London: John Murray. Power, Edmond. 1921. Writing on the Ground (Joh. 8, 6. 8). Biblica 2. 54 – 57. Shboul, Ahmad M. H. 1979. Al-Mas’ūdī & His World: A Muslim Humanist and his Interest in Non-Muslims. London: Ithaca Press. Simon, Maurice and Epstein, Isidore. 1960. Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, 30 vols. London: Soncino. Ugolino, Biasio. 1744 – 69. Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum. 34 vols. Venice: Apud Joannem Gabrielem Herthz et Sebastianum Coletti. Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt. 1911. Dīwān = Die unter seinem namen überlieferten gedicht-fragmente. Beiträge zur Assyriologie und Semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, 8, 3. Edited by Friedrich Schulthess. Leipzig: n.p. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London & New York: Routledge. Wensinck, Arent J. 1933. John VIII. 6, 8. In Herbert George Wood (ed.), Amicitiæ Corolla: A Volume of Essays Presented to James Rendel Harris, D. LITT., on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, 300 – 302. London: University of London Press.

Paolo Heritier

Legal theology and communication: The meaning of Christian eschatology between immanence and transcendence in contemporary social sciences 1 Introduction The relationship between theology, economics, law, and religion has been the subject of much recent analysis on our liberal society. Benhabib (2017), for example, observes a return of political theology in today’s political life, indicating at the same time the need to go beyond Carl Schmitt’s theory. Schütz and Diamantides (2017) express the same intention of overcoming Schmitt’s political theology. Raschke (2015) points to the link between political theology and the crisis of liberal democracy, indicating that the structure of theological politics does not constitute a theology of politics. Crockett (2011) points out the centrality of the notion of postsecularism and the need to identify new strategies between religion and politics after liberalism through the notion of radical political theology. Rivera (2018) proceeds in the opposite direction, indicating the compatibility between political theology, democracy, and pluralism in a democratic society. Other analyses aim at indicating the presence of the concept in religious perspectives even very far from Christianity (Rashkover and Kavka 2014; Losonczi, Luoma-Aho and Singh 2011). The perspectives that have emerged over the last ten years in the debate on political theology are very different. The position in this article appears methodologically close to that indicated by Vincent Lloyd (2011): to start from the results of theological research to think about the topic and, in particular, to analyze the link between mediation and immediacy, i. e., the representation of the presence of the risen Christ before Parousia as a political matter. As Cacciari (2018) states: “The expression ‘political theology’ cannot be limited to the influence of theological ideas on the forms of worldly sovereignty, for this assumes an original separation of the two dimensions; instead, it must comprehend the orientation or political finality immanent to religious life that underlies its theological elaboration” in the form of the Katechon (withholding power of the Empire, 2 Thess 2: 6 – 7, in Cacciari 2018) as mediation and compromise. That is to say, we will start from the theoretical developments of theology, and in particular of 20th-century Christology, to renew the debate on political thehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-016

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ology and, consequently, on the methodology of the social sciences and anthropology. This chapter will seek a new form of Christological mediation unrelated to the centrality of original sin in the definition of anthropology, a new figure of the human grounded on the historical presence of Christ on Earth. The hamartiological perspective of St. Paul defines man moving from Adam, and Schmitt (2008) criticizes the anthropological renewal of Vatican Council II.¹ This figure of man, founded on a different conception of mediation that is defined in theological terms, indicates at the same time the secular exemplariness of the human history of Jesus for the understanding of the intersubjective, political and legal reality. It posits a legal theological anthropology confronting Schmitt’s political theology. This different form of political theology may be defined as legal theology, attenuating the definition of Schmitt’s political theology. As Critchley (2012: 108) rightly points out, Schmitt’s position is linked to a theory of original sin, a theological position that today seems outdated, without however drawing the consequences for a theory of political theology. A different conception of eschatology, however, appears capable of potentially overturning the methodology of the political and social sciences. The article is an attempt to rethink the religious idea of Christological mediation, overturning the link between individual and collective within eschatological doctrine. In this sense, the category of the anthropological mediation of Christ understood in secular terms, linked to the centrality of his real life and story, can assume a properly anthropological meaning and political significance. So, the notion of Katechon (withholding power), traditionally considered a cornerstone of political theology, appears to be surpassed by a theological-legal theory in which the category of Christological mediation  The idea that man’s freedom is related to the theory of original sin is rooted in Saint Paul (Rom 5:12– 31) and Saint Augustine’s work, and refers to the problem concerning the anthropological definition of ‘what is a man.’ It is different if ‘man’ is defined in philosophical terms as Adam (Platonic or Aristotelian anthropology) or Christ (the theological anthropology related to soteriology). The most precise exposition of vision of man grounded in the conception of original sin, defined as ‘hamartiological’ form the Greek term ‘Hamartia,’ permeates Catholic theology up to Vatican Council II. It could be found in an exemplary way within the theological manuals, such as Tanqueray’s Synopsis Theologiae Dogmaticae II (Tanqueray 1905: 721– 795). After Vatican Council II, the problem of theological anthropology becomes a critique of the hamartiological traditional conception concerning soteriology (Meier, Metz, Bultmann, Pannenberg). In the endless bibliography, see for a reconstruction of this conception, Pannenberg (2004: 80 – 142, 265 – 284). As Wenz (2012) defines: “Pannenberg dedicated an entire section to the idea of alienation and the hamartiological meaning of this idea in his “Anthropology in Theological Perspective.” On the critique of the hamartiological conception of anthropology, see Colombo (1988), Sequeri (1996), Isoardi (2012). Moving from Taubes, this article is an attempt to provide some theological elements for a critique of Schmitt’s political theology, a purpose that would naturally require a different and more complex theoretical development.

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for the definition of anthropology is no longer derived from a political theology centered on the miracle and the exception. The main goal of the chapter is to indicate how certain developments in Christology, in delineating a different figure of mediation from that traditionally ascribed to political theology, can give back a different and non-sacrificial figure of the human history of Jesus, taken from the logical relationship between Jesus’ individual death and the hoped-for parousia at the end of time. It seeks, therefore, a new vision of his historical presence and anthropological significance against political power and the State, triggering a different theological figure of the immediacy of the presence of Christ in history. The article will proceed from theology to legal theology, therefore from theology to anthropology and the social sciences, according to a movement contrary to that of secularism, starting from a coherent theory of the immediacy of the divine as an ethical being in the human form of Jesus and seeking for a different metaphysics, aesthetically founded, of its presence in history (Sequeri 1996, 2016).

2 From political theology to legal theological anthropology: Freedom as complex mediation The volume by Jacob Taubes Occidental Eschatology (2009) concludes with a wide-ranging analysis of the eschatological thinking of Marx and Kierkegaard, who criticized Hegel by claiming that reality should be truly real, not already comprised in an ideal scheme of development, and by contesting Christian-bourgeois society. According to Marx, bourgeois society is a society of isolated individuals who deny the generic essence of man (Gattungswesen), while according to Kierkegaard it is the individual who is estranged in a Christianity of the multitude. Marx bases the proletarian revolution of bourgeois capitalism on the economic existence of the masses, Kierkegaard bases the religious revolution of bourgeois Christianity on the individual. The two criticisms seem, however, to meet in the movement from the individual to the collective and in the common presupposition of the collapse (of God and of the world) in the modern era; the leap is necessary: Both perspectives require a leap: from above, into the absurdity below; from below, the realm of necessity, up into the realm of freedom. The situations of Marx and Kierkegaard correspond to one another in this way. […] Somewhere freedom must break the closed circle of the world […]. Marx wants to create the absolute out of a mankind subject to natural frailty; Kierkegaard relies on a God with Whom nothing is impossible. Revelation is the subject of history, history is the predicate of the revelation. (Taubes 2009: 7)

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This article intends to develop the intuition of this correlation by criticizing both Taubes and Schmitt, who were guilty of not understanding the category of the freedom of man, and the classic configuration of Catholic theology, which was guilty of separating Jesus’ individual death and Parousia. The ‘story of Jesus’told in the three synoptic gospels shows Jesus’ freedom and his choice to face Jewish political and religious institutions, not the sacrificial (theological-political) necessity of his death on the cross. The ‘temporal’ difference between the moment of Jesus’ resurrection and the expected moment of the parousia at the end of the world (second coming of Christ) defines the waiting condition of humanity ‘after Christ’ as an expectation of God’s justice. In the Postscript of Political Theology II (2008) Schmitt, in criticizing Blumenberg’s theory of the legitimacy of the modern age, sets against it a version of political theology conceived before and against the logic of the Second Vatican Council. Such a vision forgets the temporal difference between the individual death/resurrection of Jesus and the Second Coming of Christ. The underestimation of this difference leads Schmitt to the theological political notion of Katechon. The criterion of the truth of the ‘earthly history of Jesus’ reveals the anthropological condition of humanity ‘after Christ,’ following the theology of the Second Vatican Council. Based on this post-Conciliar theology, the article will try to sketch a different vision of the connection between eschatology and politics. It will then suggest a research model offering an alternative form of mediation to that which is proper to political theology, seen as legal-theological anthropology, based on a different theory of eschatological freedom. Criticism of the political use of Christian religion focuses on this issue (Agamben 2011; Schütz and Diamantides 2017; Raschke 2015). However, let us proceed in an orderly manner. The point is linked by Taubes (2009: 193) to the question of the decision, invoked as a hiatus that inaugurates what must follow the modern era: This call for a decision marks the beginning of a crisis that is still shaking our present age. For crisis is scission [Scheidung] arising from the call for decision [Entscheidung]. Just as the crisis of the Renaissance and Reformation smashed the framework of the Middle Ages, so, too, the crises marked by Marx’s and Kierkegaard’s call for decision smashes the framework of the modern age.

The two axes structuring the discourse are: 1) that the apocalypse is unveiling, revelation; 2) that the revelation is the subject of history, of the world, whose essence is the freedom that, however, can disclose itself only as a fall, in an ambiguous horizon from the standpoint of the intercurrent relationship with the gnosis. The decision of which Taubes speaks is very close to Schmitt’s theory

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of sovereignty as state of exception, therefore to the conceptual structure of political theology. In fact, on the one hand, apocalyticism is seen as regarding the freedom of man—the moment of the turning point, when the chains that constitute the structure of the world break—in both its social and collective aspect, and in the individual and salvific aspect (Isoardi 2012). The representation of Apocalypse is a political matter interrupting the withholding power of the Empire (Katechon). On the other hand, however, apocalyticism is a transcendent domain that negates this world in its fullness and it brackets the entire world negatively as a totality that keeps itself distinct from the divine, an autonomy in relation to God. The world is that which stands in opposition to God, and God is that which stands in opposition to the world. No mediation is possible, only struggle between the human and the divine. Taubes’ eschatological vision stands within these cornerstones, prisoner of a conception that, despite its elegance and complexity, does not seem to fully untie the historical knot or the relationship between good and evil. He emphasizes that the link between history and spirit is bijective, that one is the presupposition of the other. On the one hand, history attains its essence only in the spirit, on the other hand, the spirit is an element of history. Here man, who shares with the thrownness of the origin the cyclicity of nature, opposes to this thrownness the project of the spirit: that is his freedom, from which history descends as an element meant to overcome the limits of man set by nature. Thus, the world can move towards the new, towards “a new heaven and a new earth,” overcoming the cycle of nature and making the origin a beginning, which will be followed by a middle and an end. The aspect that remains ambiguous, however, is that for Taubes (2009: 13), the middle placed between creation and redemption is a story without meaning: The world as history, has its roots (Schwerpunkt) not in the eternal present of nature but rather is nurtured by the original creation and directed toward the final redemption. The individual event serves the passage from creation to redemption. It does not have any significance in itself, but reveals a glimpse of the order of creation, pointing forward to the order of redemption. An event is always related to the Eschaton.

Correctly, the notion of the event is explained in its relation to truth; however, in placing the centre in history, Taubes does not seem to choose between Marx (and the masses) and Kierkegaard (and the individual), between up (God) and down (Man), giving occidental eschatology an ambiguous image, perhaps on the border with Gnosticism, certainly not Christological. The problem of the relevance of Christology for eschatology also affects the reconstruction of the eschatological doctrine of the Last Judgement, where we differentiate between the question of individual death and the question of Parou-

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sia. This is the thesis expressed by Isoardi, in his reconstruction of the matter of eschatological thinking from the perspective of theological anthropology. The central point is noticing the aporia constituted by the connection between the eschatological discourse in Christological terms and the overdetermination of the category of history in relation to the salvific question. Understanding this aporia leads us to criticize radically the Schmittian formulation of “political theology,” seen, as we know, as the secularisation of the theological. My thesis is that, as in Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology, and also as in his text dedicated to the political theology of Saint Paul (Taubes 2003), we can see a lack of anthropological mediation, a lack of a theory of coherent historical freedom. The terminology that I adopt in this chapter aims to replace the expression “political theology” with the expression “legal theological anthropology” and is intended to indicate briefly the criticism of the reading presented by Taubes (2009: 19): In the world seen as history, mankind stands in the middle between God and the world. As far as the world is concerned, he is oriented entirely toward God; as far as God is concerned, he is oriented entirely toward the world. The nature of mankind is determined by this duality (doppelte Fluten) within him: with God he is entirely divine, with the world he is entirely worldly; he is betwixt and between. Mankind is bound to the world by “the ties of nature.” He is bound to God by a Covenant. He is placed midway between the ties of nature and the divine Covenant.

The nature of the criticism does not refer to the religious position of Taubes, but to the methodological problem he poses in relation to the tension between the individual and the collective, between the individual death and the Last Judgement: the question of the anthropological center in relation to the configuration of the essence of the anthropological, which is a problem that affects, in the opinion of the writer, also contemporary social sciences.

3 Deciding: The criticism of the political theology of Taubes (and of Schmitt) Here, I cannot analyze the difficult and complex text by Taubes on Saint Paul. I will simply indicate that the question is not neutral in relation to the topic of Christian antisemitism, and lies behind the category of political theology itself as an ambiguous question that requires a precise analysis, which I have carried out elsewhere (Heritier 2015). My position is in fact critical toward both Taubes and Schmitt, because, as Beauchamp (2007) states, in configuring the relationship between Israel and Christianity, a painful subject, and in recalling many

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of the Christian persecutions of the Jews, culminating in Nazism, that historical relationship characterises the perverse subterranean link with Christian theology: The preferred expression—the final solution to the Jewish question—clearly explains what it means: finally verifying the ancient accounts of our civilisation. The Christian faith tended rather to await a “final” solution for the eschatological conversion of Israel and, oppressing Judaism, it considered itself to be obliged to watch over its preservation until that final date […]. Nazism wanted to free itself once and for all of this contradiction, of this compromise […]. The adjective “final” therefore means something different and something more with respect to the adjective “radical.” The word is used as the last word of a long history; it is used—I will return to this question—as a “culmination.” For this reason essentially, the genocide of the Jews cannot be confused with that of the Armenians by the Turks, or that of the gypsies by the Nazis […] because this tragedy implies the manner in which Christianity sees itself profoundly rooted in the cross of Christ; this mode perverts the cross, transforming it into a symbol of refusal of forgiveness. Christian antisemitism is an overturned theology. (Beauchamp 2007: 150 – 151)

In some ways for Taubes (2013: 54): Schmitt had one interest: that the Party, that the chaos did not win out, that the State stood firm. At whatever cost […] so long as a legal form can be found whatever hairs have to be split, it simply has to be done, otherwise chaos rules. This is what he later called the katechon ²: the restrainer who holds back the chaos bubbling up from the depths.

From below, that is, from the revolutionary thrust ascribed to Marx and Kierkegaard, which puts an end to the modern era and to the Hegelian vision from above. This katechontic role lies at the center of the political theological tension between Judaism and Christianity; in my opinion, the criticism of it coincides with the category of mediation, and provides the link between freedom and mediation in the vision of Catholic theology following Vatican II and the start of the Christian third millennium, which closes with the statist vision of the Church inaugurated by the papal revolution of the 11th century (Berman 1983). The judge, this cleric of law, must in any case decide. This is also the “moral” question that is “the” cross to be borne by political theology and that qualifies the relationship between time and judgement constituting the basis of the unyielding and terrible concreteness of the law, which must mediate between the immanent law that exists and the transcendent justice that does not yet exist:  2 Thess 2: 6 – 7, Cacciari (2018).

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We are involved in a dispute and my chairman says that we have to end at some point. All things come to an end, at the latest at the Final Day. You just cannot go on discussing and discussing without end; at some point you have to act. That means the problem of time is a moral problem, and decisionism means saying the time available is not infinite. that it is not possible to continue endlessly […]. And whoever denies this is amoral, simply does not understand the human situation, a situation that is finite, and, because it is finite, has to make a separation [Scheidung], that is, has to decide [entscheiden]. (Taubes 2013: 39)

The question of Schmitt’s decisionist theory, according to which the one who decides on the state of exception is sovereign, is therefore simultaneously at the center of political theology and of law, in their necessary separation. The problem of the decision faced by Schmitt and Taubes is a problem (declined by Kierkegaard in an existential sense) that eschatology clearly recognizes. Indeed, in eschatological thought the issue is placed in the separation between the time of the victory over the individual death (preached by Paul with the resurrection of Christ) and the apocalyptical event: two times that do not coincide historically (the former already historically occurred—for Christians—but the other historically still awaits) and whose articulation remains problematic. The representation of the apocalypse as revelation is an immediate form of the theological-political presence that potentially implies the breaking of the established order; however it is founded in turn on a historical Christological mediation (the death of Jesus), whose immediate giving is liturgical (the rite of the Eucharist) and communitarian.

4 From political theology to legal theological anthropology: A different figure of mediation Starting from these bases, I now propose a different configuration of the link between the theological and the legal. I theorize a new formulation that seems to me more cautious and more precise, and that may be characterized as theological-legal anthropology, to be opposed to political theology, a term reintroduced by Schmitt whose formulation remains ambiguous. The question is, on the one hand, to identify the mystification that Schmitt reintroduces in the debate on the foundation and, on the other hand, to indicate the relevance of theological anthropology for contemporary juridical theory. The cautious reformulation of an epochal Schmittian expression such as that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 2005: 36) could be the following: “some legal

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concepts continue to maintain an analogical relationship with other theological concepts that return to anthropology in an ongoing history, and vice-versa.” In this formulation the substitutions proposed are “all” with “some”; “are” with “maintain an analogical relationship,” “secularization” with “anthropology in an ongoing history.” The first substitution is simple: seen as more modest, the link between theology and law does not end with the legal setting. There are many more juridical concepts in Western law, but there is also, undeniably, the theological component.” The second substitution has the same demystifying intention: the link between theological and legal is composed of a similarity in difference, or a difference in similarity, but the two terms of the copula cannot be considered as identical. Indeed, identitarian terms are excessively rigid, although mediated by the ambiguous concept of secularization. Consequently, the theorem of the Schmittian criticism of secularization, although it partially sees the permanence of a continuity between the theological and the juridical in modernity, appears too emphatic in denigrating the new, which is hidden behind a perspective that links the question of the decision to that of the fall—a problem that can already be seen, after all, in the hamartiological³ vision of Saints Paul and Augustine—thus presenting a vision of freedom excessively related to the idea of guilt. However, this is just one facet of the question. In fact, I wish to emphasize that the same distinction between individual and collective, which is intrinsic in the social sciences, is rooted within the eschatological problem and within a criticism of the model of political theology of Taubes and of Schmitt. This distinction can be in turn related to the intersection between mediation and immediacy, as we can see further. My proposal, starting from a criticism of Schmitt’s political theology, is an attempt to outline a theory that is rooted in contemporary Christology, is open to liberal democracies, and refuses illusionary religious forms of immediacy following the theology of the Second Vatican Council and its effects on the notion of political theology. This issue is connected to the method of the social sciences, to communication sciences and semiotics: this is why it is relevant to recall (and it is not possible, or reasonable, to exclude) the eschatological questions of the distinction between the problem of the individual death in the resurrection of Christ—inasmuch as it is envisaged as at least possible/credible at the end of the life of each individual—and the expectation of the Last Judge-

 “Hamartiological” here refers to Schmitt’s conception of the original sin as the definition of the human. For criticism see Isoardi (2012).

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ment, of the Parousia—seen as the collective closure of the historical period and definitive certification of the justice (of God or of the Party, in the revolutionary variant)—on the one hand, and the difference between good and evil on the other hand. Therefore, the figure of Jesus, placed against an anthropological background, referable to the link between theology (Christology) and anthropology, introduces a grounding vertical element to anthropological thought: we could say, an immediate form of the historical presence of the divine based on an invisible transcendence hoped for (the risen Christ). The confrontation of Jesus with religious and political authorities is a religious model of opposition to religious and political power that can be recognized as a model within the historical experience of every man in every age. It is, however, a form of immediacy mediated by Jesus’ death mentioned in the Eucharistic rite, which reverses the sacrificial logic⁴ of every religion to become an identitary definition of the human in its struggle and relationship with power. The configuration of anthropology in relation to history represents the central nucleus of the criticism that is presented here in relation to eschatology in Taubes. In fact, while the Jewish philosopher saw the center in history and outside history, Christian theology of the 20th century sees at the center the (phenomenology of the) history of Jesus, his historical narrative culminating in the death (and/or the Resurrection). This Christological-phenomenological-historical centrality and the shifting between the two perspectives does not seem irrelevant for the configuration of the anthropological thought in general. This is “the” cross that political theology, to paraphrase Taubes’ expression, poses, not only for all theologies, but also for all the philosophies of all eras, in the concrete form of the appeal to the individual, in relation to the problem of the sense of his historical life (in the face of his own death). Twentieth-century Christianity proposes the question in terms of a relation between God and man, configured as respectful of human liberty. It is not the way in which Schmitt’s political theology defines sovereignty and the State. Theology does not intend to guarantee or insure the relation between the divine and the human in terms of scientific or provisional certainty, but in the form of the appeal to the anthropological faith/trust, in the difference between the stable form of the divine and the historical form of the world. This idea of human freedom is grounded on the reliable idea that the resurrection of Christ promises, as anthropological mediation in the form of individual freedoms and their composition in a history that remains inevitably open.

 On sacrifice and political theology, see Yelle (2019).

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It is precisely in moving from this background that we can observe how the reading of the link between history and freedom in Taubes is still heavily conditioned by an hamartiological figure, designed to bind the freedom of man to the figure of the Fall and original sin. While the essence of history is freedom, and only man within freedom is historical, it is necessary to remember that, following Taubes, freedom can reveal itself only as the Fall. It is therefore configured as destiny and not by chance, the apocalyptical gnostic lexis is that of the thrownness, of the being thrown (in the body). Taubes specifies that the blending of light and darkness makes the drama of salvation possible, in fact it originates from the Fall. It is therefore the scenario of the Fall that allows the definition of freedom. The point is taken up once again, stressing the link that can be seen between the configuration of the concept of history and the “boulder of the biblical account of the original sin,” posing the anthropological problem of the coherence of the figure of the “second Adam,” which is however not meant as Christ. According to Taubes (2010), who quotes Kant here, history is not in an immediate relationship with God. History is the story of the eighth day of the Creation, the story of Adam’s Fall. Here the lack of Christology, of mediation, in the configuration of history is quite evident. In the language of the philosopher of law, Vico, of the verum et factum convertuntur, history only tells the truth if it is man himself who gives form to the events. The link between Christology and eschatology is then qualified by Isoardi in what is called a re-negotiation of theological Christology, in relation to the question of the freedom of man, so to speak from within. Isoardi (2012) reads Christian eschatology as the correlation between historical life and the accomplishment beyond history, namely resurrection from death. The term correlation is not intended to mean alternative or juxtaposition (between the individual moment and the apocalyptical moment, the problem indicated by Taubes as “the” cross of every theologian): The historical form and the accomplishment of the history beyond history are not confused (the historical form is always in doing, the accomplishment is stable); and neither do they connect in a progressive evolutionary linear progression (death is fracture and radical crisis; and separates that which is in movement, and therefore never completed, by the definitive complete adjustment). But they stand in an interior relationship. The historical form tends to its completion in the resurrection, passing through death; without the tension of this accomplishment, however real and tending towards the fulfilment, it would remain undetermined or involute in its incompleteness. The resurrection from death is the accomplishment of the historical form, of the faith and of the historical obedience. (Isoardi 2004: 123, translation mine)

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This correlation, whose interior relation echoes the ‘Kierkegaardian’ problem of Taubes, is moreover to be considered asymmetric with regard to man’s relationship with the man Jesus, which is both authentically (historically) horizontal and yet—coherently, inasmuch as he was resurrected—it must be understood by theology also vertically in its difference, being divine. Therefore, the Christian form of eschatology expresses a historically realistic nucleus (since it is proposed as freedom, related to the historical freedom of Jesus and its anthropological significance in the face of the historical primacy of political power), which is the relation between an eschatological event like the resurrection of Jesus which has been configured “in a relationship of hope for all those who still exist in history” (Isoardi 2004: 125) and the individual faith of the believer. The intersection of the relationship thus configured between asymmetric vertical and asymmetric horizontal axes constitutes an efficacious figure of the fundamental anthropological articulation between the theological and the legal (as a methodologically important problem for the social sciences and for the theory of contemporary communication), within an ongoing story dominated by the historically unsolvable problem of death (which we could call “the” cross to be borne by every philosophy and every theory of justice). The problem that emerges is that of the dualism between fundamental (nonChristian) anthropology and Christian revelation. In relation to the problem of the need to conceive a correlation, and not a mere juxtaposition, between the two moments of the resurrection and the Parousia, within a discourse intended to keep the two points together: From the standpoint of the content, it is a question of understanding how the resurrection from death constitutes the salvific accomplishment of the anthropological. From the gnoseological and epistemological standpoint, it is a question of specifying how our language can be adapted to describe an accomplishment that expresses our hope but transcends our experience. (Isoardi 2004: 367, translation mine)

And again, briefly, in ordering the relationship between the story of Jesus and the Parousia: It is not the Parousia that explains the resurrection and makes it possible. It is rather the resurrection that explains the Parousia and makes it possible. (Isoardi 2004: 367)

So, it is not by chance that the lexis of the exception is transformed by Isoardi into that of the surplus. Isoardi observes that the singular way in which the texts say that Jesus was resurrected is in fact different from that with which the individual dies: that the corpse of each of us “remains” after death in any

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case testifies to the singularity of Jesus—whose corpse “disappears.” In any case, the Christ event is not realised so much as an exception, but rather as a “surplus.” That is to say, as the enactment of a human existence that, in its uniqueness, makes Jesus the Lord and the saviour of all, so that what Jesus is capable of doing (unlike others) becomes the basis of the existence of all, in relation to the common problem of learning to live before a God in the faith. (Isoardi 2004: 195)

Precisely the terminological reference to the surplus—not to the exception—in specifying the anthropological meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ configured unitarily and not dualistically—i. e., the link between Jesus’ individual resurrection and Parousia—seems to me to be also a theological content indicating a fundamental anthropological question: The theological discourse must present itself as the Christian interpretation of a human experience (capable of expressing what happens when human hope [that death is not the last word] meets the event of Jesus Christ and is qualified by the faith in him). […] In the second place, the critical resumption of the tradition implies a twofold confrontation: the confrontation with a specific enculturation and in even more fundamental terms the confrontation with the phenomenology of death. (Isoardi 2004: 125)

The fundamental anthropological question mentioned could be seen as a statement that tries to respond to the Böckenförde Dilemma (Böckenförde-Diktum) concerning the fact that the liberal (freiheitlich) secularized state draws its life from presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee, and that this is the great risk for the sake of liberty (Böckenförde 2016). If Critchley (2012: 108) contrasts the Schmittian model of political theology founded on original sin with other optimistic models, Isoardi’s theological position constitutes a figure of the divine, in its difference from the human, that is thought as stable, and firm. The perspective of the Parousia is a logical and credible achievement of the Resurrection as an outgrowth of the death of Jesus. However, from the epistemological and human point of view, this outcome can only be hoped for, and in no way solves the problem of the political order, which remains open to historical events and their evolution. Instead of a political theology based on withholding power (Katechon), this theological position proposes anthropology based on hope and not on sacrifice, on democracy, without denying, however, the possibility of the tragic outcome of individual experience (as in the life and death of Jesus) and the fragility of any institution, religious or political.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genalogy of Economy and Government. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beauchamp, Paul. 2007. Stili di compimento: Lo spirito e la lettera nelle Scritture. Assisi: Cittadella. Benhabib, Seyla. 2017. The Return of Political Theology: The Scarf Affair in Comparative Constitutional Perspective in France, Germany and Turkey. In Allen Speight & Michael Zank (eds.), Politics, Religion, and Political Theology, 223 – 240. Dordrecht: Springer. Berman, Harold. 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 2016. Constitutional and Political Theory: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cacciari, Massimo. 2018. The Witholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology. London: Bloomsbury. Colombo, Giuseppe (ed.). 1988. L’evidenza e la fede. Milano: Glossa. Critchley, Simon. 2012. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. London & New York: Verso. Crockett, Clayton. 2011. Radical Political Theology. New York: Columbia University Press. Heritier, Paolo. 2015. Oltre Costantino: Le radici cristiane del pluralismo religioso nell’Epistola ai Romani 9 – 11. In Ilaria Zuanazzi (ed.), Da Costantino a oggi: La libera convivenza delle religioni, 41 – 55. Napoli: Editoriale Scientifica. Isoardi, Carlo. 2004 (unpublished). La speranza: La prospettiva cristiana sulla vita e sulla morte. Isoardi, Carlo. 2012. La promessa e la croce: Cristianesimo e antropologia. Torino: Giappichelli. Lloyd, Vincent. 2011. The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Losonczi, Peter, Mika Luoma-Aho & Aakash Singh. 2011. The Future of Political Theology: Religious and Theological Perspectives. Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. 2004. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. London & New York: T & T Clark International. Petrosino, Silvano & Sergio Ubbiali (eds.). 2014. Il male: Un dialogo tra teologia e filosofia. Milano: Glossa. Raschke, Carl. 2015. Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Rashkover, Randi & Martin Kavka. 2014. Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rivera, Joseph. 2018. Political Theology and Pluralism: Renewing Public Debate. Dublin: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2008, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology. Cambridge & Malden, MA: Polity Press. Schütz, Anton & Marinos Diamantides. 2017. Political Theology: Demistifying the Universal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Sequeri, Pierangelo. 1996. Il Dio Affidabile: Saggio di teologia fondamentale. Brescia: Queriniana. Sequeri, Pierangelo. 2016. Il sensibile e l’inatteso: Lezioni di estetica teologica. Brescia: Queriniana. Tanqueray, Adolphe. 1933. Synopsis Theologiae Dogmaticae II. Parisiis Tornaci Romae: Desclée & Soc. Taubes, Jacob. 2003. The Political Theology of Paul. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Taubes, Jacob. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Taubes, Jacob. 2010. From Cult to Culture: Fragments toward a Critique of Historical Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Taubes, Jacob. (2013 [1948 – 1978]). Thirty Years of Refusal. In To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. New York: Columbia University Press. Ubbiali, Sergio (ed.). 2018. Jacob Taubes: La fenomenologia dialettica. Milano: Glossa. Yelle, Robert A. 2019. Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Wenz, Gunther. 2012. Introduction to Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Richard K. Sherwin

Post-secular jurisprudence: A visual semiotics of the sacred source of law’s authority 1 Introduction When basic paradigms of knowledge and belief begin to waver and shift, new scenes appear across the landscape of history. It is as if a different lens had been placed before our eyes. Such is the case today with devolving notions of secularism¹ and the emergence of a so-called ‘post-secular’ perspective.² Across diverse expressive media, a discerning eye and ear may register the legal, historical, and political remains of an excess that paradoxically resists both denial and capture. Embodied cultural forms shimmer with an incalculable fullness. Call it the erotic, the sublime, the numinous, the sacred—traces of the transcendent have always been there, waiting to be named or visualized anew—in law no less than in the culture at large. As Robert Cover famously wrote: “No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each Decalogue a scripture” (Cover 1995: 99). The historical, cultural, and political genesis of law’s sovereignty coincides with unusually charged representations of the sacred. This creative—as well as disruptive and regenerative—task of representation falls within the province of the sovereign imagination. In this essay, I contend that the sovereign imagination aspires to identify—in periodic acts of affirmation or transformation—the core values upon which law’s sovereignty and ongoing legitimation depend. These shared normative beliefs, together with the aesthetic modalities through which they are expressed, bind the community. In this view, a proper understanding of the transcendent source and nature of law’s sovereignty requires a semiotics of the sacred. It is in this

Note: Wallace Stevens Professor of Law, Director, Visual Persuasion Project, New York Law School. I wish to thank Robert Yelle and Jenny Ponzo for their insightful editorial comments. Errors in the text are mine alone.  See Taylor (2007).  See, for example, de Vries, Sullivan, and Ward (2008); Habermas (2008); and Hammill, Reinhard Lupton, and Balibar (2012). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-017

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sense that sovereignty, the sovereign imagination, and the sacred must be thought together. The norms we hold most sacred animate and inspire acceptance of law as ‘right’ or ‘good’ or ‘just.’³ This sense of ‘rightness’ goes beyond fear of punishment by the state as a basis for law’s authority (“the gunman writ large,” to use legal positivist, H.L.A. Hart’s phrase⁴). Collective acceptance of law’s rightful authority transcends formal or merely structural claims of legal validity by providing a norm-based warrant for legitimacy arising from a shared sense of law’s moral significance. In short, with a general acceptance of shared core values comes legitimacy, and with legitimacy comes fidelity to the rule of law (Sherwin 1986). To be sure, constructing a semiotics of the sacred in the context of law’s sovereign authority invites danger. Law enforces its commands with the power of the state. Doing so in the name of a sacred source remains troubled by an inescapable paradox. What makes a source sacred is precisely its irreducibility to any given expressive representation. The excess that flows from a transcendent source saturates the sign (or representamen) that claims such an uncanny origin. Its excess is always greater than the sign itself. As Massimo Leone writes: “representations of transcendence are fundamentally those that bring about in human beings a transcendental dynamics of cognition, emotion, and imagination. It is the infinitude of semiosis that awaits human beings beyond the sign” (Leone 2014: 51). But infinitude is a point humans can only relate to “asymptotically in that they are given the chance and freedom to imagine what has been hidden” (Leone 2014: 51). In short, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the sign and what lies hidden beyond its finite limits.⁵ Law’s aspiration to unite power and transcendent meaning remains troubled by a similar uncertainty. Such an aspiration can never escape the precarity of negotiating the unbridgeable distance that separates legal signs from the veiled source of their authority.⁶  As Justice Sotomayor recently put it: “Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments.” Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, et al., Petitioners v. Hawaii, et al. [June 26, 2018] 585 U. S. (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).  Hart (1979: 80).  Bruno Latour (2002) employs the term ‘iconoclash’ to describe the historic vicissitudes attending our experience of that gap. We both love the iconic or transcendent image for what it promises, and hate it for the idolatry that it threatens to engage. See also Schacter (2008).  Compare Cover (1995: 102) describing law as “a force […] that holds our reality apart from our visions and rescues us from the eschatology that is the collision in this material social world of the constructions of our minds” with Cover (1988: 201– 202) describing law as that which “con-

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Theorists and practitioners of law can ill afford to ignore or evade the dangers associated with this paradox. To do so risks amplifying something “rotten” at the heart of law.⁷ As Durkheim recognized, core values that bind the community and authorize the law must periodically be expressed anew. Durkheim (1995: 228) refers to this phenomenon as “collective effervescence.” Irreducible forces—Weber’s “charisma,” Otto’s “the numinous,” Yelle’s “the sacred”—animate and bind us to law beyond the merely formal claims of validity within a given legal system.⁸ It is in this sense that we say, what is sovereign renders law legitimate.⁹ If sovereignty and the sacred arise together, they must be thought together.

2 Law, the sacred, and sovereign images Visual representation of the sacred is one expressive modality among others that has historically served to identify transcendent sources of law’s legitimate authority. In what follows, I provide historic examples as well as a more contemporary embodiment of this aesthetically and politically entangled phenomenon.

nects the world we have to a world we can imagine.” See generally Sherwin (1989). For the necessity of institutional structures to check and balance claims of law’s sovereignty against risks of tyranny on the one hand and anarchy on the other, see Sherwin (2019).  See Sherwin (2014: 53).  See Weber (1968); Otto (1970[1917]: 1– 30); Yelle (2019).  Carl Schmitt (1985: 5) famously declared, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In fleshing out this idea, Giorgio Agamben (1998: 19) described sovereignty as “a formal structure” that identifies “the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity.” That space is defined as a “state of exception.” If simply declaring a state of exception were sufficient to express the sovereign authority to suspend ordinary rules of legal validity, then such a decision might indeed constitute an ultimate source of legal and political power. However, if the state of exception implicates more than a formal structure for law’s validity, and more than an act of naked power, if it depends upon, and brings to light core values that determine whether even valid laws may be deemed legitimate or not, then the state of exception, like sovereignty itself, is irreducible to the necessary conditions for law’s validity alone. On this analysis, the state of exception marks the threshold of the sacred, an undifferentiated excess that animates core values. As such, the exception is both closer at hand than we might expect, and more uncertain than we would prefer. As Walter Benjamin (2003: 392) writes: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule […] [I]t is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.” The danger of political precarity may well be the price we pay in a liberal democracy to avert the totalitarian nature of the Schmittian decision.

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These images are the offshoots of a sovereign imagination that dares to express what the sacred calls for in its time. We encounter such phenomena throughout history. Consider, for example, the invisible image that recedes from our gaze in the Byzantine icon of the incarnation. In early medieval times, those who gazed with the eyes of the spirit looked upon this image not as a representation, but a window. The icon thus became not simply a form or object, but an event, a liturgy, a meeting of the flesh of the gaze with “the flesh of the resurrected,” as Ivan Illich (2005: 115) put it.¹⁰ Jumping forward in time by a millennium, consider another example of the visual sublime: Vermeer’s Girl With A Red Hat (Figure 31). What a strange pictorial intensity confronts the viewer’s eye. What is that looming vermillion color field that barely even pretends to be a hat? Its very presence seems to undermine the painting’s representational coherence. We might say it is a kind of painterly disfigurement, an abstract expressionist eruption that points toward an entirely different sort of aesthetic: another code, perhaps another epistemology, or ontology, breaking through. This uncanny disruption forces us to look differently. Paintings like Vermeer’s compel viewers to confront their assumptions about what painting is.¹¹ I have written elsewhere about similar uncanny irruptions in contemporary films, such as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), where we encounter the force of law within a strange, neo-Baroque dreamscape,¹² and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), which sweeps viewers into a ‘state of exception’ fever dream.¹³ One may even find irruptions of the uncanny in notorious criminal trials, like the 1993 trial of Randy Weaver for the shooting of federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. In summation before the jury, defense attorney Gerry Spence planted lay decision makers within a great historic epic, comparing them to members of the Continental Congress of 1775, who have been called upon to do “something permanent, magnificent and lasting” (Sherwin 2000: 56 – 71). In the face of such spatial and temporal disruptions one senses something happening. This isn’t conventional mimesis as imitation, representation, or copy. It is as if an uncanny fullness were struggling to burst forth, severing the constraints of painterly or narrative semiosis—like a symptom from the un-

 See also Mondzain (2005: 28): “In order for the visible to be transfigured, it is necessary to discover the term that will effect the transition from the gaze carried by our bodily eyes to the gaze of the spirit.”  See Didi-Huberman (1990).  See Sherwin (2011: 95 – 117).  See Sherwin (2014).

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Figure 31. Jan Vermeer, Girl With A Red Hat, 1665, courtesy of National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

conscious. In jurisprudential terms, we might consider in this context analogies to the invisible perturbations of natural reason or equity (“the wisdom of the heart”) or the irruption into history of an unwritten customary law that extends from time immemorial and that appears to the eye of the spirit as well as the eye of the senses. As Sir Edward Coke wrote, “in reading it is not the words but the

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truth which ought to be loved” (in Legendre 1997: 28). Peter Goodrich’s interpretation is apt: “beyond the letter or between the lines, the text embodies a passion, truth or spirit … legal meaning could only properly be found in the soul or heard beneath or beyond the text, subauditio or subintellectio as an intuition, image or unconscious form” (in Legendre 1997: 28). Or, shifting from the longue durée of customary law to the immediate demands of a concrete case in the still vibrant Anglo-American common law tradition, consider the flash of judicial insight. In a leap of intuitive judgment particular facts in a given legal controversy fuse with doctrinal precedent, or policy, or the demands of a regnant principle, in the service of what a situated sense of justice or right outcome seems to demand. Forging a right answer, where no two cases are exactly alike, reflects what Vico has called the aequum bonum, the spirit that remains of nature in mind, in words written upon the heart: physis as the mythos (or eros) of logos. Extant legal templates may guide the work of legal decision makers, but equity will never reduce to a mere copy of precedential authority. In this sense, the expression of justice in a particular case calls for an act of representation that goes beyond imitation. Here we may speak of mimesis not as imitation or copy (in the familiar Platonic sense), but rather as a singular event, a juridical performance that is original and unique to the case at hand.¹⁴ Something happens in response to the felt need for conflict resolution, for an authoritative and just seal to a searing rent in the social fabric.¹⁵ Traces of the transcendent that break into time on the threshold between conflict and resolution are always at once fragmentary and over-determined. This is the paradox of bounded and unbounded meaning. As the great American poet Wallace Stevens observed: “A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.”¹⁶ The fullness of unbounded excess to which heart and mind respond yields (albeit incompletely) to an inscription of meaning in a cognitive act of bounded representation. We could well be describing here the very source of law’s authority in an encounter with the sacred origin of sovereignty in the state of exception.¹⁷ Yet, on a micro level—call it ‘sovereignty lite’—every legal decision reframes the divide between unbounded authority and circumscribed law. The agony of law’s legitimation gets replayed in every narrative exercise that constitutes the legal decision making process, whenever law transmutes power into authority.

   

See See See See

Spariosu (1984). generally Watt (2009). Stevens (2009), “Connoisseur of Chaos.” Schmitt (1985).

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And just as legal judgments remain inconceivable without narrative,¹⁸ the same may be said in regard to the functional limits of abstract rules and concepts. They simply cannot be relied on to do the work of justice on their own. Narrative rises to the particular, as Karl Marx once said (Bruner 1990: 60). Conceptual thinking, by contrast, is abstract and general. This distinction between general and particular, between abstract conceptualization on the one hand, and particularistic narratives on the other, points to two completely different modes of cognition. Each organizes the world and orders experience in its own way. A good story and a well-formed argument are different sorts of creatures. They embody different ways of knowing and being. Arguments are modeled upon science and mathematics; they aspire to proof, or verification. They seek empirical data that instantiate the rule or verify (or falsify) the hypothesis. Stories, on the other hand, including visual storytelling, aspire to the most compelling kind of verisimilitude, to lifelikeness, if you will (Bruner 1986). These different modes of cognition—argument and storytelling—may complement one another, but the one will never be reduced to the other. Stories cohere and move us when they comport with our sense of the world or (more rarely) when a visionary, like Einstein or Picasso, imagines something radically new and transformative. As Hannah Arendt (1970: 22) has written: “No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.” And whether in words or images (augmented perhaps by sound or the integration of multiple expressive media¹⁹), stories cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the play of emotion. Contemporary scholarly interest in affect theory and sensory studies, including synaesthesia (the operation of multiple sensory forms of expression in which one sense may substitute for another) bear witness to a profound epistemological shift. Classical Renaissance standards of objectivity and universality (“the view from nowhere”²⁰) are yielding to a sense of inescapable entanglement in the particular, the contextual, the sensory, the affective, the embodied, and the intuitive.²¹

 See Cover (1995: 95 – 96).  See Sherwin (2013).  See Nagel (1989).  See, for example, Howes & Classen (2014); Laplantine (2015); Sherwin and Celermajer (2019: 15 – 16): “Synaesthetic jurisprudence inquires into the various ways in which the embodied political subject acquires the capacity to think, feel, and judge as an inextricable entangled process. Judging in this sense is to a significant degree an offshoot of the orchestration of the subject’s passions in accordance with the dictates [or ‘logic’] of a given social imaginary.”

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This expansion of what counts as knowledge, together with its concomitant enlargement of our methodological toolbox, broadens the stage on which scholarly inquiry occurs. Today, we are able to explore in new ways how law’s distinct disciplinary investments demand and constrain belief. New epistemological perspectives invite us to ask what lies beyond law’s formal bounds? Might it be that out of the sometimes violent clash between law’s extant forms and the extralegal, anti-structural sources that constitute law’s sovereign authority, new forms of experience and knowing emerge? Is this an example of how the sacred, or the sublime, is refracted into history? These are the sorts of questions that post-secular jurisprudence raises. And it is here, oscillating between the history-bound domain of the will to meaning and the sudden irruption of an uncanny fullness, that the dialectic of surplus and constraint enters into dialogue with the ethics of representation. By combining broader cross-disciplinary and cross-historical perspectives we gain access to new methodologies that help us to manage the often opaque complexity of our textual, visual, aural, haptic, intuitive and performative experience of law’s aesthetics, epistemology, and legitimacy. To be sure, new intellectual opportunities bring new challenges. For example, as various subfields and cognates of sensory studies unfold, intensity in its own right has come to the fore as a self-justifying norm.²² On such occasions one may feel the need to remind oneself that material processes and sensate information are not the same thing as meaning, just as affective intensity, as recent and more distant history teaches, is fraught with social and political danger when it is claimed as an overarching cultural or legal value. Indeed, the elevation of nonsignifying material sensation might well augur a new de-humanism, a movement oddly averse to language and judgment itself. In this respect, the new attention to affect theory and sensory studies more generally, risks losing sight of the fact that sensation is not self-organizing. At some point, shifting sensory inputs and affective intensities gravitate toward some organizational point of reference— some ‘agencement,’ what Deleuze calls an ‘assemblage’ or ‘plateau.’²³ These organizational reference points provide a shared basis for generating coherent notions of self, Other, and the social world we inhabit. It is with this gathering process in mind, that one may ask: How do heterogeneous elements take on consistency? How do they cohere? What is the operative code or moral register for pattern recognition? In short, it takes a code to organize sensate data into symbolic frames of reference. And it takes a moral code to organize our collective

 See Massumi (2015: 99): “Intensity is a value in itself”; Sherwin (2015) (probing signs of ‘dehumanism’ in recent affect studies).  See Deleuze (1987: 22– 23).

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preferences regarding where along the spectrum of affective and emotional intensity we wish to occupy, when (i. e., under what set of circumstances).²⁴ Such is perhaps the most important work that culture performs (if we allow it). And this is where the crucial idea of a social or legal imaginary enters the scene. An imaginary is both a repository for and a discrete way of organizing sensory data and affective intensities, together with memories, beliefs, and other constituents of meaningful experience. Shared imaginaries generate common understandings that make possible everyday practices, expectations, and beliefs that constitute our collective sense of political and legal legitimacy. The imaginary—or imaginaries—we inhabit are descriptive as well as normative: they tell us how things typically go, and how they ought to go. Since people typically are not conscious of the constitutive elements of a given imaginary, conflicts or even contradictions that arise as we shift from one framework to another are ordinarily not an issue. It’s just ‘the way things are’: the way events and others appear to us when a given set of cognitive routines, affects, and expectations are cued up by the particular situation we find ourselves in. As Jerome Bruner has noted, we inhabit different worlds when we shift from one way of knowing to another, shifting ways of minding self, others, and events around us.²⁵ Law may be a house containing many mansions, opening onto many worlds, constituted by diverse forms of knowledge and discourse, but law’s ultimate authority remains unitary.²⁶ How, then, are we to speak of this authority? Here is where the idea of sovereignty arises, for law’s unitary authority is an offshoot of law’s sovereignty. Sovereignty directs us to an ultimate source of authority for law that lies outside law itself. As Harold Berman puts it, “Law—in all societies—derives its authority from something outside itself” (Berman 1983: 16). Or as Jacques Derrida has written: “The positing or establishing of law or right are exceptional and are in themselves neither legal nor properly juridical” (Derrida 2009: 49). Positive rules may generate and sustain valid legal systems. But core values and shared beliefs go beyond formal claims of legal validity by providing a proper warrant for law’s legitimacy. There is an irreducible excess beyond the forms law takes that animates, legitimates, and binds us to law. In the pre-modern era, one associates that excess with the divine right of kings. In the modern era, we associate it with the rise of popular sovereignty and the nation state. Perhaps the greatest problem with Hobbes’s positivist model, pointing to a larger failure in legal positivism more

 See Nussbaum (2013).  See Bruner (1986).  See Hobbes (1991: chapter 18); Bartelson (2008). See also Grimm (2015: 22, 41).

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generally, lies precisely in its incapacity to account for law’s excess (its Other). Simply stated, Hobbes and the legal positivists leave no place for anti-structure.²⁷ Yet, it is precisely the trace of that disruptive source which infuses cultural objects and expressive representations with the legitimating force of meaning and shared value. The animus of anti-structure binds us to, even as it hovers beyond, the symbols and other representations of sovereign authority. What is unitary in origin, however, may not be experienced as unitary in historical forms of expression. As Vico taught, the way we interpret the source of sovereignty is subject to change in history. Shifting interpretations of the sacred, including the manner in which authoritative interpretations get produced, are what make a genealogy of law’s historic claims to sovereign authority possible, and necessary. The irruption into history of anti-structure—by which we account for the sovereignty of law’s unitary authority—is a good way to describe the sacred. ²⁸ Correlatively, to speak of a discrete way of organizing the sacred expressively within the splintered timbers of history is a good way to speak of a sovereign imaginary. It is sovereign because, like the one ring of power in Tolkien’s great saga, this imaginary rules them all. It is in the name of sovereignty that state power claims legitimacy. If you operate in a knowledge system or use an expressive code unrecognized by law, you are off the power grid. Speak or act in accordance with such an unacknowledged code and your claims of right in its name will remain unheard and unseen. This helps to explain why Aboriginal land claims in Australia, for example, based on alternative metaphysical assumptions (like the Ancestral Spirit), expressed in correspondingly alien codes, such as sacred songs and dances, fell upon deaf ears and blind eyes within the official (logo-centric) Australian court system.²⁹ This is what it is like to be disempowered.³⁰ The main point I wish to make is this: We need to recognize the different actual and possible sources of authorized legal meanings and meaning-making practices that originate within and operate alongside a given sovereign imaginary. In other words, we need to ask: what is the operative semiotic code for a given sovereign imaginary at a given point in time? That code encompasses both an agreed upon source of meaning as well as agreed upon meaning making strategies, a shared cognitive and methodological toolbox (as Jerome Bruner liked to put it). Understanding the code requires forms of legal, political, and cultural literacy that are prerequisite to the meaningful exercise of freedom in democratic societies. This kind of literacy informs critical judgment in regard to the most cru   

See See See See

Hobbes (1991: chapter 39) on civil religion and the positivist generation of the state. Yelle (2019). Koch (2013). Kahan (2007).

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cial tasks in political life, namely: whether to affirm or reject the legitimacy of a given sovereign imaginary and, if repudiation takes place, the capacity to imagine an alternative. Whether in politics or law, it matters where we invest along the spectrum of affective intensity and emotional as well as narrative truth.³¹ Each generation must wrestle anew with competing images, memories, and affective intensities in an effort to understand who we are, and what sort of world we live in. In the clash and play among extant and aspiring sovereign imaginaries, we sometimes witness fundamental shifts in meaning and meaning making practices. This can result in major shifts in the foundation of law’s authority. As Charles Taylor has written, a salient feature of social imaginaries is their ability to help us recognize ‘ideal cases’ and to discern the underlying moral or metaphysical assumptions that constitute the ideal.³² In recent years, for example, we have witnessed in popular culture a deepening distrust of state authority. This sentiment is manifest in images and affective intensities that organize around the secret, unconstrained malevolence of the state. Consider, for example, the Netflix series Stranger Things (2017). Here, as in Hamlet’s Denmark, the source of state power has become rotten. Stranger Things is set during the era of America’s cold war with the Soviets. It opens with the immediate aftermath of a secret U.S. federal agency’s kidnapping of an eleven-year-old girl. In an effort to gain a strategic advantage over their Soviet counter-parts, American scientists, in a series of grueling experiments, succeed in altering her mind. This produces an uncanny set of extraordinary powers. However, along the way, they seem to have inadvertently opened a doorway to a monstrous alternate reality: a parallel world, dominated by images of rottenness. In this world, the air is filled with post-9/11 snowflakes of toxic ash; the physical environment is fetid, sticky, viscous, overgrown, stifling—sensorial cognates of putrefaction and rot. The sense of repugnance verging on horror that we encounter here corresponds with an aspect of the sacred described by Georges Bataille. He writes: “What is sacred undoubtedly corresponds to the object of horror … a fetid sticky object without boundaries, which teems with life and yet is the sign of death. It is nature at the point where its effervescence closely joins life and death, where it is death disgorging life with decomposed substance” (Bataille 1993: 95). Popular culture is not immune to signs of the sacred irrupting anew.

 For example, in recent political history, the United States, as elsewhere in the world, citizens have faced a political landscape in which the affective intensity of the friend/enemy polarity, with its rage against the alien Other, has, with varying degrees of success, become the agency of a newly empowered nationalism. See, e. g., Inglehart and Norris (2016).  See Taylor (2007: 172).

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Less common perhaps, but among the most potent of expressive codes when we encounter them, are aesthetic productions that perturb our senses with a strange sense of over-determination: like the incalculable fullness of a Byzantine icon as seen within Nicene optics³³, or the disruptive presence of a vermillion ooze of paint barely posing as a hat in a painting by Vermeer to which I have previously alluded. I want to argue that the anti-structural nature of such disruptive images in the history of culture finds a corollary in the history of law. We encounter similar anti-structural forces operating within representations of the sovereign source of law’s authority. Traces of an incalculable, unrepresentable excess may be discerned within any given sovereign imaginary of law. That excess exposes the disorder at the root of law’s order.³⁴ In this reckoning, the sovereign and the sacred occur together. The antistructural animus of sovereignty, like the over-determined presence of the sacred, disrupts conventional aesthetic and ethical codes in order to reveal a deeper, potentially novel source of authority. It is this uncanny source that animates and compels shared beliefs and affective intensities within a given sovereign imaginary. In what follows, I would like to offer a brief, illustrative genealogy of sovereign imaginaries in recent history. I will conclude with a contemporary film that holds out the promise of a regenerative sovereign imaginary for our own time. We begin with legal emblems, which visually depict law’s source of legitimacy in the early modern era. Ernst Kantorowitz famously coined the expression, the King’s “two bodies” to describe the integration of the divine and the human in the symbol of royal authority.³⁵ Consider, for example, the legal emblem: Wisdom Dominates the Stars (1635) (Figure 32). Here the Sovereign stands between the globe and the heavens. As Peter Goodrich (2014: 105) writes: “The celestial light rains down on the book of wisdom which as sovereign speech is the highest law.” In this image, the theological provenance of law’s divine authorization is plain. The King’s two bodies—human and divine—manifest the divine source of the law. As Louis XIV liked to say, “The King is like the Sun, holding everything together.” Or consider the legal emblem: ‘Triunity’ (Emblematum ethico-politicorum [1654]). According to this image, the sovereign law-giver derives his authority from an invisible, absconded power. An imageless source shows the passage from a non-figurative origin (an eternity  “The Council of Nicaea explained the icon as a way of leading the gaze through a shadow of glory into a union with the reality beyond, which it then brings back. The icon was not yet a place in which to see things but through which to see them.” Illich (2005: 117).  See Stevens (2009).  See Kantorowitz (1981).

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Figure 32. Wisdom Dominates the Stars, 1635, courtesy of the Pennsylvania State University libraries.

that is image-less): the nothingness that the esoteric triangle of Triunity represents, out of which power and law arise. This is a natural law invisibly inscribed “on the heart, in memory alone, without any need for writing” (Goodrich 2014: xxiii).

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But how, then, do we explain the post-revolutionary metaphysical shift away from the sovereign imaginary of the divine right of kings to one that is based on popular sovereignty? One way is to see a devolution of power away from the King’s two bodies to the People’s two bodies. As Eric Santner argues, we see this represented (or perhaps I should say ‘abstracted’) in Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting Death of Marat (1793) (Figure 33).

Figure 33. Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium.

This classic work depicts the murder of the French revolutionary leader JeanPaul Marat, who lies dead in his bath. Hovering above that image, strangely taking up more than a third of the canvas, is an uncanny empty space. That radical absence is suggestive of the way the ethical or any substantive notion of the good resist assimilation into expressive form.³⁶ Art historian T.J. Clark has written that in the cult of Marat, David saw the first forms of a liturgy and ritual in which the truths of the revolution itself would be made flesh—People, Nation, Virtue, Reason, Liberty.³⁷ As Morgan Thomas puts it, David’s evocation of charged empty spaces “draws the viewer in turn into the vortex of revolutionary enthusiasm” (Thomas 2018: 109). This uncanny irruption of a sacred force into the realm of the finite promises to reconstitute the body politic. It is as if in the painting’s “inflection between the particular and the universal” David was seeking to “wrap”³⁸

 See Thomas (2018).  Clark (1999: 29).  See Leone (2014).

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the former with the latter. Along the way, “Marat’s fragile person becomes an unconditional figure of evanescent presence” (Thomas 2018: 112– 113). Eric Santner discerns in this new liturgy an aesthetic as well as a political and legal revolution at work. It emerges as a new kind of abstraction. Echoing Thomas, Santner writes that David “seems to make Marat much the same substance—the same abstract material—as the empty space above him” (Santner 2011: 89 – 95). In this analysis, equating the enigmatically-charged upper space in ‘Death of Marat’ with the sacred marks a revolutionary moment: the transmutation of one sovereign imaginary into another. In effect, the King’s sublime body has been replaced with the evanescent flesh of Marat. “Marat had to be made to stand for the People,” Clark concludes (Clark 1999: 47). And so, the divine sovereignty of the king, in David’s radically subversive painterly imagination, is excarnated from the royal flesh and incarnated in an abstraction of Marat, symbolically transformed now into an evanescently-charged expression of popular sovereignty, the very ideology for which Marat stood. In this revolutionary semiosis, popular sovereignty is seen to be animated by a libidinal or somatic surplus of immanence, an internal daimon (Eros) that, as Sigmund Freud would later make clear, each of us carries within our own flesh. Libido now serves the dual role of helping us understand both the psychology of the individual as well as “a theory of the masses” (Santner 2011: 96).³⁹ In this view, the impossible incommensurabilty of the transcendent and the particular generates an uncanny, hidden aura (emanating from the unconscious) that resists resolution. The expression of this transformative event in David’s work, at least as an aesthetic feat, if not a political or psychoanalytical one, anticipates the strangely charged spaces of abstract expressionism. Over the years since David’s Death of Marat abstraction in art deepened dramatically. Indeed, in the late modern school of abstract expressionism all representational form has been evacuated. Only numinous abstract forms, jazzed painterly drips and dashes, or shimmering colored fields remain. Consider, in this regard, Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red (1958) (Figure 34). Without figures or representations of any kind to relate to, there are no stories to tell. Words fall away, as will happen when one is immersed in music. All that remains is the slow dance of these shimmering color forms, and your own gaze feeling its way across, around, and within the canvas. It is a strange visual  Santner (2011: 100) regards libido as a recent incarnation of political theology. In this view, one might say that the semiotics of the sacred has become synonymous with the semiotics of the unconscious within the sovereign imaginary of late modernity in the West. Such a scenario was ripe for the critical (‘deconstructive’) interventions of Bataille, Foucault, and Derrida, among others—clearing the way for the post-secular moment to come.

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Figure 34. Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958, Whitney Museum of American Art.

dance, as if accompanied by an other-worldly score, watching subtle hues (black within black, red within red) separate out and move amongst themselves within each separate band, as each band oscillates against the unsettled borders of its neighbor, and the ensemble oscillates together as a unified whole within the larger luminous field of incandescent red. Without words, affect surges. An uncanny joy pierces the heart, a deathly despair, an insistent hope, as of daybreak… The perplexing source of somatic excess, what Santner describes as the royal remains transferred to popular sovereignty through libidinal evanescence, has now become an entirely abstract expression. Of course, this may hardly come as a source of political comfort. A source of legitimacy that has grown this esoteric, this far removed from more familiar rites and liturgies of popular investiture, is an unlikely basis for a sustainable visual economy of law. Yet, without understating the gravity of an incipient legitimation crisis that has dogged the liberal state throughout late modernity, a more accessible, one might say more inhabitable source of legitimation may lie closer to hand. If we begin with the ontology of the image, before long—amidst the various registers of being, from sublime presence to sensorial delight that different kinds of images allow (or preclude)—we come across what visual ethnographer David MacDougall (2006) calls ‘the corporeal image.’ MacDougall’s notion of seeing with the whole body may be read against the current cultural backdrop of the so-called ‘affective turn’, including renewed interest in cross-cultural sensory studies and ‘synaesthetic’ knowledge. Unfortunately, the sheer profusion of visual images today invites the prospect of continued obscurity, burying the corporeal image in the digital baroque clamor and clutter of undifferentiated, transient visual spectacle. I believe this state of affairs defines one of the great challenges

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of our time.⁴⁰ Before law’s legitimation may be stabilized within a decaying, or perhaps still emergent sovereign imaginary, enough contemporary artists, cultural critics, and scholars need to assimilate and clarify that imaginary’s aesthetic and ethical registers and demands. This process of clarification may well be the most profound task of contemporary culture: namely, to sustain the legal and political groundwork necessary for law’s and culture’s production, maintenance, and vitality within a viable liberal democratic framework.⁴¹ To illustrate in greater particularity the claim that ‘corporeal images’ are closer at hand than the example of abstract expressionism may suggest, one could choose from an extensive archive of films that to a greater or lesser degree shimmer with a kind of uncanny corporeal excess. Let me conclude with a brief example drawing on Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent quasi-documentary film, The Look of Silence (2014).⁴² I believe that Oppenheimer’s film not only shows, but also performs an integrated sovereign imaginary for law and politics in which discrete ethical and aesthetic registers dialectically play out. First, some background: In 1965, a group of high-level army officers staged a coup in Indonesia. To legitimate their action they characterized it as a necessary response to a ferocious ‘enemy within’ who were threatening to violently seize the state. In the aftermath of the coup, the officers unleashed a killing operation in which enemies of the state (alleged ‘Communists’) were rounded up and slaughtered. No exact estimate exists, but more than five hundred thousand people were killed in this way. Violence on such a massive scale exceeded the capacity of the army without assistance. Accordingly, the state enlisted a civilian cadre of willing killers within a widely distributed network of local militias. The leaders of the Indonesian coup remained in power for over four decades thereafter. As co-agents of that political and military triumph, the civilian killers were subsequently praised as heroes of the state. And for all these years, the sur-

 See Sherwin (2015).  For further discussion of the essential requisites of liberal democracy, see Sherwin (2011).  Oppenheimer’s films resist placement within a conventional documentary framework. For example, The Look of Silence opens with text, describing aspects of the 1965 – 66 Indonesian genocide, superimposed on a nighttime video of military trucks approaching the camera. Yet, the only sound one hears is of crickets, not the vehicles. The impact is eerie, and foreboding. Oppenheimer likens this subjective soundscape to magical realism: “I felt it was essential to create around Adi’s family life a feeling of magical realism in a non-fiction way. I re-read Gabriel Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and the passage about the Macondo massacres. I had the feeling that magical realism is the best genre for unacknowledged atrocities, when you can’t talk about the facts, the reality of a murder, when the dead are never acknowledged and continue to haunt the living.” http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/exclusive-interview-joshua-op penheimer/ (accessed 25 March 2019).

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vivors of mass violence, along with the families and friends of the victims, were subjected to continued oppression by the thugs, gangsters, and neo-fascist militias that continued to serve the state’s needs. What is it like to live with the knowledge that you have murdered in cold blood scores, perhaps even hundreds of innocent people? And what is it like for the victims to live within a regime of such repressive silence? Oppenheimer’s first film, The Act of Killing (2012), posed the first question. His second film, The Look of Silence, posed the second. In The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer shifts from the perpetrator’s mindset to that of the victim. Adi is the main protagonist. His brother, Ramli, was brutally tortured, mutilated, and killed during the Indonesian genocide, a year before Adi was born. Working now as an optometrist, living amidst his brother’s killers, Adi’s life mission is to speak truth to power. But it is not vengeance that motivates him. Rather, it is the need to pierce the veil of oppressive silence, to confront the killers with their feckless denials, their empty fantasies, their perverse bravado. Do you not see it was wrong? Have you no remorse, no regret? Such is Adi’s refrain as (in no idle metaphor) he calmly fits lenses on the eyes of the killers around him, or sits across from them, including those in positions of significant political power (Figure 35).

Figure 35. Joshua Oppenheimer (director), The Look of Silence, 2014, courtesy of the director.

Forced to hide his identity, resisting threats of renewed violence if he continues to speak the unspeakable about the past, Adi persists in his questioning. If only the killers could acknowledge the wrongness of their actions, if only they could take responsibility, and apologize, face to face with the survivors of so many innocent victims, perhaps reconciliation might become possible. Perhaps politics might begin anew, based not on violence, but rather a deep commitment to empathy (even with the perpetrators) combined with a profound moral conviction as to the necessity of taking responsibility and seeking forgiveness for that violence. This is the moral thrust of truth and reconciliation in Adi’s steady gaze (Figure 36). Adi’s morally stable universe is sustained by the human capacity for relationship, radical empathy, and the redemptive possibility of forgiveness—perhaps even love. In scene after scene of everyday life, The Look of Silence models for

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Figure 36. Joshua Oppenheimer (director), The Look of Silence, 2014, courtesy of the director.

us Adi’s capacity for love: love of his elderly, long-suffering parents, for whom he must now care, love of his lost brother, who so many years ago set in motion the ethical demand of Adi’s life mission, and love for his children, who will inherit a legacy of suffering and injustice. We see this in simple scenes of everyday life, scenes that are suffused with moral fortitude and love, holding out hope for political renewal through redemptive justice. In this sovereign imaginary, empathy and love pulsate with an uncanny excess.⁴³ This is Oppenheimer’s ethical phenomenology of the empathic gaze. It tells us that it is not enough to bind the body politic with fear, as Hobbes believed. Fear may prompt obedience or even acquiescence to law’s commands, but it will never inspire empathy or fidelity based on a libidinal cathexis (or erotic investment)—what Hannah Arendt called amor mundi (love of the world⁴⁴)— with which we make a shared community truly our own. As Giambattista Vico wrote over three centuries ago: “The soul of man must be enticed by corporeal images and impelled to love, for once it loves it is easily taught to believe. Once it believes and loves, the fire of passion must be infused into it so as to break its inertia and force it to will” (Vico 1990: 38). These are the stakes when we ask, what might constitute a sovereign imaginary that legitimates law’s authority in a post-secular time.

3 Conclusion Corporeal images constitute one expressive modality among others through which the sovereign imagination identifies core values upon which law’s sover See Sherwin, Oppenheimer, and Celermajer (2019).  See Arendt (1959: 48 – 49, 218, 362) discussing love as a world-making bond between people —against the historic backdrop of Christian ‘worldlessness.’ Arendt’s initial title for this work was ‘Amor Mundi.’ See https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/what-does-itmean-to-love-world-hannah-arendt-and-amor-mundi/ (accessed 25 March 2019).

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eignty and ongoing legitimation depend. Tracing the historic and contemporary operation of this world-founding (disruptive and regenerative) faculty is what a semiotics of the sacred is for. The challenge of authorizing the image in a visual economy of law is twofold: First, we must learn the different ethical and aesthetic registers that operate within the different visual economies of our time. This is a matter of visual literacy. It portends the ascendance of visual semiotics as a major player in the theory and practice of law. Second, we must embrace the challenge that accompanies the exploration of non-conceptual, embodied forms of knowing as we grapple with the ontological (perhaps metaphysical) complexity of corporeal representations. Different kinds of images circulate in different visual economies—from the iconic incarnation of early modern legal emblems to the uncanny surplus and sublimity of abstract expressionism to the calculated impact of brute sensorial intensity (in horror and delight) of the digital baroque. As envisioned in the ethically inflected aesthetic of post-secular jurisprudence, justice is to law as beauty is to art: as distant as an abstract expressionist canvas, as close as any neighbor, or indeed any screen on which the neighbor becomes real to us. That is where we simultaneously behold both the subject and source of law’s judgment and authority. This is how law persists, iconically, perhaps kenotically, as a shimmering corporeal image. In the modern era, the art work may have “replace[d] the cult of the holy image” (Belting 1996: 489 – 490). But it is not enough to vouchsafe the visual economy of law in aesthetic terms alone. Law’s visual economy also must be linked to our ongoing commitment to justice. That commitment grows out of a renewed sacral investment that binds us to the nomos in which we live. We encounter potential sources of this corporeal or libidinal bond in a diverse array of post-secular representations, including paintings, films, and video images on screens large and small. Approaching jurisprudence in this way leads away from the exclusively conceptual, abstract thinking that has long dominated the field. I seize upon the admittedly ambiguous phrase “post-secular jurisprudence” precisely in order to capitalize on its very open-endedness. To do legal theory in a different key we need to make way for unconventional sources of experience, knowledge, and expression. The image-saturated digital culture in which we live today already pre-empts the old presumption of logocentric or propositional/linear rationality. Where images rule affect reigns. But what images are sovereign? The answer to that question, at least in part, turns on who or what (object or event) we deem to be a proper bearer of the sacred.

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Today we speak of the haptic image and of multi-sensorial, multi-mediated performances.⁴⁵ Sensory studies⁴⁶, the new materialism⁴⁷, embodied knowing⁴⁸, the extended mind⁴⁹—these emerging fields, among others, suggest something interesting is afoot in contemporary semiotics and cultural studies. The ceremonies of law—the various ways in which we perform law’s meaning and authority —are an offshoot not only of words, but also of our encounter with sounds and images, as well as emotions, desires, and bodily movements.⁵⁰ As with words, different sensory forms of expression operate within discrete codes. These codes are loaded with various cultural, historical, and ideological contingencies—reflecting a broad range of epistemological and even metaphysical assumptions. So when sensory codes are semiotically deconstructed, we get to learn about the various social, cultural, cognitive, and affective factors that help make them what they are. Along the way, we learn to appreciate how aesthetic and ethical elements interpenetrate—weaving complex, integrated patterns of cultural and psychological meaning. We need new forms of cultural literacy—as a matter of knowledge, judgment, and methodology—in order to constitute a new critical theory and a new self-reflexive practice of multi-modal judgment. Perhaps, this is another way of describing the expanded project of the humanities in the 21st century. What is in our cultural repository of meaning-making tools and practices? How are memory, imagination, and judgment to be understood in an age that increasingly features the digital re-invention of mind and experience, as well as of self and the various social worlds that we inhabit? In addition to cultivating new forms of cultural literacy, however, we also must embrace the phenomenological (and perhaps metaphysical) challenge that accompanies non-conceptual, embodied ways of knowing. Law’s origin in the sacred may be elusive, but to the extent we may claim knowledge of such a transcendent source, our knowing arises more from states of being than abstract concepts. One does not shudder from abstractions. We shudder in the grip of intense forces that threaten to destabilize all that we are, all that we

 See Young (2009); Hamilton, Majury, Moore, Sargent, and Wilke (2017); Macdonald, Murphy, and Swann (2018).  See Howes and Classen (2014).  See Rieger and Waggoner (2016); Bennett (2010).  See Mukherji and Stuart-Buttle (2018).  See Menary (2010).  See Sherwin and Celermajer (2019: 1): “Shifting the modality of communication brings to the fore diverse standards of truth-making and judgment in politics and law.”

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think we understand and value.⁵¹ Only forces of such magnitude create “real” states of exception⁵² leading to novel forms and expressions of law’s sovereignty. This sublime, non-rational encounter is what the sovereign imagination strives to contain by assimilating (or “wrapping”⁵³) the sacred within a shareable semiotics. The modern era may be a secular age, but the disruptive, anti-structural force of the sacred’s uncanny excess, paradoxically saturated within, and hidden beyond law’s signs, persists. We must continue to look for and critically assess the mediate traces of this immediate source—whether driven by the “infinitude of semiosis” from without,⁵⁴ or individual libidinal investments from within⁵⁵—in painting, theater (both live and digitally intermediated) as well as in dance, song, film and video. These traces bind us to the sovereign imaginary in which we live. The sacred disrupts conventional order—such as market-based utility. This is how transcendence functions: it creates a clearing for something to happen, for new forms of experience, new economies, new ways of being among others.⁵⁶ As distant as an abstract expressionist canvas, as close as any neighbor, or any screen on which the neighbor becomes real to us, that is where we may become fully present—present in the flesh—to both the subject and source of law’s judgment and authority. Such is the redemptive promise of Adi’s empathic gaze in The Look of Silence. Re-authorizing the sovereign imaginary of law in our time calls for a re-encounter with the invisible source of a sacral presence. Call it law’s excess: like desire, like love, the gathering impulse of justice remains before us: beckoning, demanding, entreating: as before a roseate light, rising.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 See, for example, Naomi Janowitz’s chapter in this volume.  See Benjamin (2003).  See Leone (2014: 78): “[I]cons wrap the [sacred] index, and together they wrap the intangible object of transcendence.” Compare St. John of Damsacus (2003: 93): “[S]ince we are twofold, fashioned of soul and body, and our soul is not naked but, as it were, covered by a mantle, it is impossible for us to reach what is intelligible apart from what is bodily.”  See Leone (2014).  See Santner (2011).  As Largier (2010: 543 – 544) writes: “The ground of the soul, the aspect of the soul that transcends all specific and determined sensation, is the basis for freedom and possibility […]”.

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John of Damascus. 2003. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Kahan, Dan. 2007. The Cognitively Illiberal State. Stanford Law Review 60. 101 – 140. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1981 [1957]. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Koch, Grace. 2013. We Have the Song, So We Have the Land: Song and Ceremony As Proof of Ownership in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land Claims. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Research Discussion Paper 33. https://aiat sis.gov.au/publications/products/we-have-song-so-we-have-land-song-and-ceremonyproof-ownership-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-land-claims (accessed 5 November 2019). Laplantine, François. 2015. The Life of the Senses. London & New York: Bloomsbury. Largier, Niklaus. 2010. The Plasticity of the Soul: Mystical Darkness, Touch and Aesthetic Experience. MLN 125 (3). 543 – 544. Latour, Bruno. 2002. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Legendre, Pierre. 1997. Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader. Edited by Peter Goodrich. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Leone, Massimo. 2014. Wrapping Transcendence: The Semiotics of Reliquaries. Signs and Society 2 (S1). 49 – 83. Macdonald, Robin, Emilie K. M. Murphy & Elizabeth L. Swann (eds.). 2018. Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge. MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Menary, Richard (ed.). 2010. The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mondzain, Marie-Jose. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mukherji, Subha & Stuart Buttle-Tim. 2018. Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nagel, Thomas. 1989. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2013. Political Emotions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Otto, Rudolf. 1970 [1917]. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rieger, Joerg & Edward Waggoner (eds.). 2016. Religious Experience and the New Materialism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Santner, Eric. 2011. The Royal Remains. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schacter, Rafael. 2008. An Ethnography of Iconoclash. Journal of Material Culture 13 (1). 35 – 61. Schmitt, Carl. 1985 [1922]. Political Theology. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sherwin, Richard K. 1986. Opening Hart’s Concept of Law. Valparaiso University Law Review 20 (3). 385 – 411. Sherwin, Richard K. 1989. Law, Violence, and Illiberal Belief. Georgetown Law Journal 78. 1785 – 1835. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2667022 (accessed 5 November 2019). Sherwin, Richard K. 2000. When Law Goes Pop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Sherwin, Richard K. 2011. Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements. New York: Routledge. Sherwin, Richard K. 2013. Présences et simulacres, sur scène et au tribunal. (Law as Performance: Presence and Simulation Inside the Theater/Courtroom). Revue Communications 92. https://www.cairn.info/revue-communications-2013 - 1-page-147.htm (accessed 5 November 2019). Sherwin, Richard K. 2014. Law in the Flesh: Tracing Legitimation’s Origin to The Act of Killing. No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 11. http://www. helsinki.fi/nofo/NoFo11_2014.pdf (accessed 5 November 2019). Sherwin, Richard K. 2015. Too Late for Thinking: The Curious Quest for Emancipatory Potential in Meaningless Affect and Some Jurisprudential Implications. Law, Culture and the Humanities 11. 1 – 13. Sherwin, Richard K. 2019. Character is a Sacred Bond: Reflections on Sovereignty, Grace & Resistance. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24 (4). 70 – 86. Sherwin, Richard K. & Danielle Celermajer. 2019. A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age. London & New York: Bloomsbury. Sherwin, Richard K., Joshua Oppenheimer & Danielle Celermajer. 2019. Wrongs: A Conversation with Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. In Richard K. Sherwin & Danielle Celermajer (eds.), A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age, 145 – 167. London: Bloomsbury. Spariosu, Mihai. 1984. Mimesis in Contemporary French Theory. In Mihai Spariosu (ed.), Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, 65 – 107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Stevens, Wallace. 2009. Connoiseur of Chaos. In John N. Serio (ed.), Selected Poems, 124. New York: Random House. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Morgan. 2018. Law and the Revolutionary Motif after Jacques-Louis David. In Desmond Manderson (ed.), Law and the Visual, 101 – 121. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Vico, Giambattista. 1990. On the Study Methods of Our Time. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. de Vries, Hent, Lawrence E. Sullivan & Ian Ward. 2008. Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. Journal of Church and State 17 (50). 150 – 151. Watt, Gary. 2009. Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 1968. On Charisma and Institution Building. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yelle, Robert A. 2019. Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, Alison. 2009. The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Cime, Affect. New York: Routledge.

Contributors Mohamed Bernoussi is Full Professor of Semiotics at the University of Meknes, president of the Moroccan Association of Semiotics, vice president of the International Association of Semiotic Studies (IASS, Ais), and editorial commitee member of Semiotica and Nouveaux actes sémiotiques. He is interested in the works of Umberto Eco, intracultural problems in Morocco and the Arab world and intercultural conflicts between East and West. He was visiting professor at the universities of Paris-Sorbonne, Bologna, Palermo, Torino, Nice and Tours. He recently published: Principes de la sémiotique du texte (Principles of the Semiotics of Text, 2016), Umberto Eco sémioticien et romancier (Umberto Eco Semiotician and Novelist, 2017), Mémoire et trauma dans la culture marocaine (Memory and Trauma in Moroccan Culture, 2017), Introduction à l’interculturel (Introduction to Intercultural Studies, 2018), L’art du roman chez Umberto Eco (The Art of the Novel in Umberto Eco, 2018), Special issue of Cahiers de narratologie (2018), Douces schizophrénies (Soft Schizophrenia, 2018), La Culture Culinaire marocaine (2019), and The Culinary and the Clash of Civilisations (2020). Fred Cummins is Associate Professor in the University College Dublin School of Computer Science, where he co-directs the Cognitive Science Programme. His 2018 book The Ground From Which We Speak: Joint Speech and the Collective Subject was published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2018. He has published extensively on joint speech and the philosophy of embodied and enacted approaches to cognition. Paolo Heritier is Full Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy) and teaches, in addition to Philosophy of Law, the courses of European Law and Humanities and the Legal Clinic of Disability in Turin (Italy) and Nice (France). His research interests concern legal aesthetics, law and humanities, affective neuroscience, theology and disability, in their relationship with law. Former President of the Interdepartmental Research Center on Communication (CIRCe) at the University of Turin, he is co-director of the journal Teoria della regolazione sociale, and of the series Tôb – Antropologia ed estetica giuridica (Giappichelli, with Pierangelo Sequeri) and Antropologia della libertà (Mimesis, with Sergio Ubbiali). Among his publications are Estetica Giuridica (2 vols., Giappichelli 2012) and La dignità disabile: Antropologia del dono e dello scambio (Dehoniane, 2014). Bernard Jackson is a former Professor of Law at Liverpool Polytechnic, the University of Kent, and the University of Liverpool (Queen Victoria Professor of Law), Alliance Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and Co-Director of its Centre for Jewish Studies and Director of its Agunah Research Unit (2004 – 09), Professor of Law and Jewish Studies at Liverpool Hope University (2009 – 15). He was also the founding editor of The Jewish Law Annual (1978 – 97). His research interests concern legal theory, semiotics of law, and Jewish law. He published a number of seminal works in the fields of legal semiotics and biblical law, among which are Semiotics and Legal Theory (Routledge, 1985), Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence (Deborah Charles, 1988), Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law (Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), and Wisdom-Laws: A Study of the Mishpatim of Exodus 21:1 – 22:16 (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Contributors

Naomi Janowitz, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California–Davis, is the author of numerous articles on Judaism, Christianity and Graeco-Roman religions in late antiquity. Her four books are The Poetics of Ascent: Rabbinic Theories of Language in a Late Antique Ascent Text (SUNY Press), Magic in the Roman World: Pagans Jews and Christians (Routledge), Icons of Power: Ritual Strategies in Late Antiquity (Penn State Press) which was chosen as a Choice Journal Outstanding Academic book for 2003, and The Family Romance of Maccabean Martyrdom (Routledge, 2017). She has also published on semiotics in Signs in Society and on psychoanalytic semiotics in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is a graduate of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Volkhard Krech is Full Professor of the Study of Religion at Ruhr University Bochum and director of the Center for Religious Studies. His main research interests cover the theory of religion and religious evolution, religious pluralisation and globalisation, processes of sacralisation, religion and violence, religion and art, and history of the study of religion. His publications include: Georg Simmels Religionstheorie (1998); Religionssoziologie (Bielefeld 1999); Wissenschaft und Religion: Studien zur Geschichte der Religionsforschung in Deutschland 1870 – 1933 (Tübingen 2002); “Sacrifice and Holy War: A Study of Religion and Violence,” in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan (eds.), International Handbook of Violence Research (Dordrecht/Boston/London 2003); (with Stefan Huber) “The Religious Field between Globalization and Regionalization: Comparative Perspectives,” in Bertelsmann Stiftung (ed.), What the World Believes: Analysis and Commentary on the Religion Monitor 2008 (Gütersloh 2009); Wo bleibt die Religion? Studien zur Ambivalenz des Religiösen in der modernen Gesellschaft (Bielefeld 2011), and “Theory and Empiricism of Religious Evolution (THERE): Foundation of a Research Program,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 26 (2018). 1: 1 – 51, 2: 215 – 263. Massimo Leone is Full Tenured Professor (“Professore Ordinario”) of Philosophy of Communication and Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy and Permanent Part-Time Visiting Full Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China. He is a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant recipient, the most important and competitive research grant in Europe. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). He was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid, Fulbright Research Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Endeavour Research Award Visiting Professor at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Faculty Research Grant Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, “Mairie de Paris” Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Potsdam, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon (Collegium de Lyon), Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich, Visiting Professor at the University of Kyoto, Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Visiting Professor at The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, Eadington Fellow at the Center for Gaming Research, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics in the History of Religions Between Asia and Europe” (Bochum, Germany), Visiting Senior Professor at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, High-End Foreign Expert and Visiting Professor at the University of Shanghai, China, Visiting Senior Pro-

Contributors

291

fessor at the Centre for Advanced Studies, South Eastern Europe (Croatia), Visiting Senior Professor at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, Warsaw (PIAST), Senior Visiting Professor at FRIAS (Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany), and Visiting Fellow at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. His work on the semiotic study of cultures, with particular enphasis on religion and images. Massimo Leone has single-authored ten books, Religious Conversion and Identity: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 242 pp.), Saints and Signs: A Semiotic Reading of Conversion in Early Modern Catholicism (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010; 656 pp.), Sémiotique de l’âme, 3 vols (Berlin et al.: Presses Académiques Francophones, 2012), Annunciazioni: percorsi di semiotica della religione, 2 vols (Rome: Aracne, 2014, 1000 pp.), Spiritualità digitale: il senso religioso nell’era della smaterializzazione (Udine: Mimesis, 2014), Sémiotique du fondamentalisme: messages, rhétorique, force persuasive (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2014; translated into Arabic in 2015), Signatim: Profili di semiotica della cultura (Rome: Aracne, 2015, 800 pp.), A Cultural Semiotics of Religion (in Chinese) [Series “Semiotics & Media”] (Chengdu, China: University of Sichuan Press, 2018, 210 pp.), On Insignificance (London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 226 pp.; Chinese translation 2019), edited forty collective volumes, and published more than five hundred articles in semiotics, visual studies, and religious studies. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. He is the chief editor of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Turin, Italy, and editor of the book series I Saggi di Lexia (Rome: Aracne) and Semiotics of Religion (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter). He directed the MA Program in Communication Studies at the University of Turin, Italy (2015 – 2018) and is currently vice-director for research at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy. Costantino Marmo is Full Professor of Philosophy and Language Theory at the University of Bologna. He holds a PhD in Semiotics (1992) and was visiting scholar in Copenhagen (Institut du Moyen Age Grec et Latin), Toronto (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies) and UC Berkeley (Dept. of Philosophy). He published a monograph on the Modists in 1994 (Semiotica e linguaggio nella Scolastica: Parigi, Bologna, Erfurt 1270 – 1330: La semiotica dei Modisti, Roma: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo), various articles (in Italian, English and French) on the history of Semiotics and Philosophy of Language, and several books: La semiotica del XIII secolo tra arti liberali e teologia (Milano: Bompiani, 2010); Segni, linguaggi, testi: Semiotica per la comunicazione (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2014); La semantica dei frame di Fillmore (Bologna: Pàtron, 2017). Since 1998, he teaches General Semiotics and History of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. Atsushi Okada is Professor Emeritus of the University of Kyoto where he had taught Art History and Aesthetics from 1991 to 2020. His recent books include Hantomei no Bigaku (Aesthetics of Diaphanes, Iwanami Pub., Tokyo, 2010), Eiga wa Kaiga no youni (Ut Pictura Kinesis, Iwanami Pub., Tokyo, 2015), and Eiga to Mokusiroku (Cinema and Apocalypse, Misuzu Pub. Tokyo, 2019). He is the co-editor of Occhi e sguardi nella filosofia e nelle arti (Universitalia, Roma, 2015), and the translator of some books by Giorgio Agamben. Enzo Pace is Professor of Sociology of Religion at Padua University. Directeur d’Études invité à l‘École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, he served as President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion. In 2014, he received the Vechta University Award for In-

292

Contributors

tercultural Competence. He is the co-editor of the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (Brill). Latest publications: The Changing Soul of Europe (Routledge, 2014); Cristianesimo extra-large: la religione come spettacolo di massa (EDB 2018); Religious Congregations in Italy, in C. Monnot & J. Stolz (eds.), Congregations in Europe (Springer, 2018); Muslim Communities in a Catholic Country, in A. Ata, J. Ali (eds.), Islam in the West (Oxford University Press, 2018); Les cyber-religions entre dématérialisation du sacré et réenchantement du monde, Sociétés 139 (1) (2018); Un papa moderno, in M. Simeoni (ed.), La modernità di Papa Francesco (EDB, 2020). Jenny Ponzo is Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Turin (Italy), Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC research project NeMoSanctI – New Models of Sanctity in Italy (g.a. n. 757314, nemosancti.eu). She is the Director of the Interdepartmental Research Center on Communication (CIRCe) and the President of the Master’s Degree Program in Communication and Media Cultures of the University of Turin. She holds a PhD in Arts from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and a PhD in Language and Communication Sciences from the University of Turin; she formerly worked at the University of Lausanne, Faculty of Arts, and at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (Germany), Interfaculty Program for the Study of Religion. She is the author of three monographs, the latest of which is entitled Religious Narratives in Italian Literature after the Second Vatican Council: A Semiotic Analysis (De Gruyter, 2019). Richard K. Sherwin is the Wallace Stevens Professor of Law and Director of the Visual Persuasion Project at New York Law School. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at Fitzwilliam College and a Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University, and as the inaugural Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair in Law and Literature at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill University. His books include: A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (2019); Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques and Entanglements (2011); and When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line between Law and Popular Culture (2000). Ugo Volli is retired Professor of Semiotics of the Text and Philosophy of Communication at Turin University, where he directed until 2019 the Interdepartmental Research Center on Communication (CIRCe), and coordinated the PhD program in Semiotics and Media. He taught at a number of international universities, such as Bologna, IULM, Brown, Haifa, and NYU. He was was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the New Bulgarian University. He is the editor in chief of Lexia – Journal of Semiotics and is member of scientific boards of many international journals. His last books are Periferie del senso (Aracne 2016) and Il resto è commento (Belforte 2019). His research deals with communication both from the theoretical point of view (Il libro della comunicazione, Il Saggiatore 1994; Manuale di semiotica, Laterza 2000, translated also into German, Portuguese, and English; Laboratorio di semiotica, Laterza 2005) and from the practical one (Leggere il telegiornale, with Omar Calabrese, Laterza 1994; La Tv di culto, Sperling & Kupfer 2002, Semiotica delle pubblicità, Laterza 2003). He has carried out research about fashion, theatre, body, advertising and desire theory (Contro la moda, Feltrinelli 1988; Una scrittura del corpo, Stampa alternativa 1998; Fascino, Feltrinelli 1997; Block modes, Lupetti 1998; Figure del desiderio, Raffaello Cortina 2002; Semiotica della pubblicità, Laterza 2003). Other fields of work are political communication (Come leggere il telegiornale, Laterza 1995; Il televoto, Franco Angeli 1997; Personalizzazione e distacco

Contributors

293

Franco Angeli 2000), the philosophy of language as reflection on the subjective and historical side of language experience (Apologia del silenzio imperfetto, Feltrinelli 1991; Lezioni di filosofia della comunicazione, Laterza 2008; Parole in gioco, Stampatori 2010), semiotics of religious texts (Domande alla Torah, L’Epos 2012; Il resto è commento, Belforte 2019); images and iconism theory, general semiotic theory (Periferie del senso, Aracne 2016). He collaborates with several newspapers, radio and TV stations as well as websites and has worked as a consultant for communication for many companies and Italian and international institutions. Annette Wilke is Professor Emeritus of the Study of Religions at the Westfalian Wilhelms University of Muenster, Germany (1998 – 2019). She received academic training in the History of Religions, Philosophy, and Theology at the University of Fribourg (CH), and in Indology in the US, Zurich, and Varanasi. She has widely published on the aesthetics of religion, comparative mysticism, goddess worship, Advaita-Vedānta, Tantra, temple Hinduism in the diaspora, and the role of sound in Hindu traditions past and present. She conducted a DFG-funded research project on the Paraśurāmakalpasūtra and has been member at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Muenster. Her publications include Ein Sein – Ein Erkennen: Meister Eckharts Christologie und Śaṃkaras Lehre vom Ātman: Zur (Un‐)Vergleichbarkeit zweier Einheitslehren (1995); with O. Moebus, Sound and Communication: An Aesthetic Cultural History of Sanskrit Hinduism (2011); with L. Traut (eds.), Imagination – Religion – Ästhetik (2015); ed., Constructions of Mysticism as a Universal: Roots and Interactions Across Borders (2020). Robert A. Yelle is Professor of Religious Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He was educated at Harvard, Berkeley, and Chicago. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Yelle is the author of several books, including Explaining Mantras (2003), The Language of Disenchantment (2013), Semiotics of Religion (2013), and Sovereignty and the Sacred (2019); as well as the co-editor of various edited volumes, including After Secular Law (2011), Language and Religion (2019), and Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization (2020).

Index Abbruzzese, Salvatore 191 Abdallah 235 f. Abdou, Sheikh M. 117 Abel 25 Abel, Yehudah 220 Abelard, Peter 76, 82 Abeyesekara, Ananda 199 Abraham 12, 25 – 27, 29, 36, 39, 41, 43 f., 56, 62, 210 f. Adam 22, 209 f., 248, 257 Adelmannus of Liège 75, 79 Adonis, Ali I. 113 f., 116 f. Agamben, Giorgio 58, 62, 250, 265 Akhan 215 Akhnai 12, 37 Al-Bana, Hasan 189 Al Bukhari 115 Al-Gumahi, Abu Dahbal 233 Al-Iṣfahānī, Abū l-Faraj 233 – 236 Al Jahiz, Abou O. 113 f., 116, 123 Al Jorjani, Abdul K. 111, 115 – 117, 123 Al-Masudi 236 Al Moutawakkil 113 Al Naddam 113 Al-Shadhili, Abu H. 194 Al Shafii 113 Al Tabari 111, 113, 115 Al Zandani 117 f. Ali 194, 236 Alighieri, Dante 194 Alles, Greg 3 Almond, Gabriel A. 200 Ambrose of Milan 70 Amor (see also Cupid) 49, 51, 281 Anteros 49, 51 Anthony, saint 150 Anuradhapura, Mahasena 187 Apollo 7 Appleby, Scott R. 183, 200 Arendt, Hannah 269, 281 Aristophanes 232 f. Aristotle 24, 113 Arjuna 35 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690347-018

Arunachalam, Ponnambalam 184 Aryaratne, Ahangamage T. 191 Ashton, Nichols 149 Athena 50 Augustine of Hippo 9, 49, 54, 67 – 69, 71, 79, 150, 160, 255 Austin, John L. 36, 119 Ayanna, Amiri 101 Aydede, Murat 172 Bachrach, Bernard S. 85 Backlund, Alexander 94 Badone Jones, Robin N. 198 Bakhuizen van den Brink, Jan N. 82 Balibar, Étienne 263 Baltzer, Ulrich 93 Bandaranaike, Solomon W. 184, 190 Bartelson, Jens 271 Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. 193 Bataille, Georges 91, 273, 277 Bateson, Gregory 97 Baudelaire, Charles 152 Baxter, Timothy 21 f. Beauchamp, Paul 252 f. Bechert, Heinz 182, 187 Belting, Hans 282 Ben-Menahem, Hanina 219, Benedict XVI, pope 239 Benhabib, Seyla 247 Benjamin, Walter 265, 284 Bennet, Jane 283 Berengar of Tours 67, 75 f. Berger, Peter L. 98, 125 Berkovits, Eliezer 227 Berman, Harold 253, 271 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 49 Bernoussi, Mohamed 2, 10, 111, 121 f. Bernstein, Alan E. 91 Berthoz, Alain 85 Bickenbach, J.E. 225 Bidney, Martin 149 Bietenhard, Hans 21 Blake, Randolph 208

296

Index

Blanke, Olaf 85 Bleich, David J. Rabbi 221 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang 259 Bolter, Jay D. 34, 45 Bond, George D. 191 Boulnois, Olivier 157 Braithwaite, Jason J. 85 Bremmer, Jan N. 91 Brown, Roger 28 Bruner, Jerome 269, 271 f. Buber, Martin 222 Bucur, Bogdan G. 52 Buddha 179, 182 f., 185, 188 f., 191, 198 f. Buddharakkitha, Mapitigama T. 184 Budick, Sanford 19 Burnside, Jonathan 208, 211, 227 Buttle-Tim, Stuart 283 Cabaniss, Allen 68 – 71 Cacciari, Cristina 86 Cacciari, Massimo 64, 247, 253 Cain 25, 210 Calvin, John 189 Capitani, Ovidio 75 Carrel, Peter R. 62 Carvalho, Gil B. 100 Celermajer, Danielle 269, 281, 283 Certeau, Michel de 1 Chakraborty, Munmun 127, 130 f. Chalmers, David 172 Chazelle, Celia 68, 71 f. Chidester, David 22 Chinmayananda, Swami 142 f. Chomsky, Noam 168 Choueiri, Youssef 189 Clark, Andy 172 Clark, T.J 276 f. Classen, Constance 269, 283 Claudel, Paul 11, 149 – 153, 155, 157, 159, 162 Coccia, Emanuele 62 Cohen, Hermann 221 f. Coke, Edward 225, 267 Collins, Randal 197 Colombo, Giuseppe 179, 184, 191, 248 Colson, F.H. 22, 24 – 26 Connerton, Paul 91

Connor, Steven 169 f. Corbin, Henri 61, 63, 180 Costantine, Greg 179 Courcelle, Pierre 159 Cover, Robert 263 f., 269 Cranmer, Thomas 82 Crapanzano, Vincent 123 Critchley, Simon 248, 259 Crockett, Clayton 247 Cummins, Fred 5, 11, 165 – 167, 175 Cupid 49 f. Damasio, Antonio R. 100 Daniel 43, 61, 236 D’Aquili, Eugene G. 86 David, Jacques-Louis 221, 276 f. De Jaegher, Hanne 175 De Jesus, Paulo 175 De Munck, Victor 194 De Silva, Chandra R. 182, 191 Deacon, Terrence 93 f. Decharneux, Baudouin 53 Dee, John 59 Deegalle, Mahinda 199 Deleuze, Gilles 59, 101, 270 Della Quercia, Jacopo 51 Dempsey, Charles 51 Dent, Kevin 85 Derrida, Jacques 19, 231, 238, 271, 277 Descartes, René 165, 170 f. Dewey, John 172 Dhammaloka, Hinatiyana 189 Dharmapala, Anagarika 184, 188 – 190, 200 Dharmarāja, Adhvarin 132 Di Paolo, Ezequiel 175 Diamantides, Marinos 247, 250 Didi-Huberman, Georges 266 Dieguez, Sebastian 85 Dinzelbacher, Peter 92 Ditterich, Joseph 94 Dollinger-Smith, Nevada S. 179 Donatello 50 f. Donatus 72 Durkheim, Emile 196, 265 Dworkin, Ronald 224 f.

Index

Eagleton, Terry 195 Eckhart, Meister 103 Eco, Umberto 112, 118 – 120, 122, 195, 197 f. Einstein, Albert 269 Elon, Menachem 219, 222 Emmeche, Claus 85 Enoch 56, 59, 61 Epicurus 21 Eriugena, Johannes 73 – 75, 78 Eros 49, 51, 277 Esau 40 Eskildsen, Stephen 90 Europa 35 Eve 209 Ezekiel 54, 211 Ezra 215 f. Fleming, Luke 23, 28 f. Ford, Marguerite 28 Forner, Fabio 158 Foster, Edgar G. 62 Fowler, H. 21 Francis, pope 239 Francis, saint 153 Franke, William 19 Franklin, James C. 103 Frede, Michael 20 Fredugardus 73 Freud, Sigmund 1, 63, 277 Friedland, Roger 199 Gabriel (archangel) 43, 62, 243, 279 Galvani, Luigi 150 Gandhi 191 Ganjavi, Nizami 234 Gautama, Siddhartha 199 Geertz, Clifford 123 Genette, Gérard 40 Gibson, James 172 Gibson, Margaret 75 Gieschen, Charles A. 61 f. Gill, Meredith J. 59 Gioia, Ted 166 God 3 – 5, 8, 12, 20, 24 f., 29 f., 35 – 43, 45 f., 53 – 55, 60 – 63, 69, 74, 79, 83, 87, 89 – 92, 96 – 98, 100 – 103, 114 – 116,

297

118, 120, 138, 151 – 158, 160, 162, 180, 207 – 218, 222, 226 f., 234 – 236, 243, 249 – 252, 256 f., 259 Gombrich, Ernest 237 Gombrich, Richard 187 Goodrich, Peter 268, 274 f. Goschler, Juliana 87 Gramigna, Remo 67 Gramsci, Antonio 122, 200 Graves, Charles E. 233 Greimas, Algirdas J. 1 Greyson, Bruce 85 Griffiths, Roland R. 85 Grimm, Dieter 271 Grundmann, Herbert 83 Grusin, Richard 34, 45 Günther, Gotthard 94 Guruge, Ananda 189 Güttgemans, Erhardt 1 Gyatso, Tenzin 188 Habermas, Jürgen 263 Hagar 41, 43 Halivni, David Weiss 218 Hamilton, Sheril 283 Hammill, Graham 263 Hanson, Anthony 22 Häring, Nikolaus 78 Harnack, Adolf von 60 Hart, Herbert L.A. 264 Harvey, W.Z. 218 Hasbullah, Shaul H. 189 Haug, Walter 103 Hayman, Peter 30 Heidegger, Martin 33 Hera 50 Herberichs, Cornelia 102 Heritier, Paolo 13, 247, 252 Hermes 35, 50 Hickie, William James 233 Hildegard von Bingen 62, 64 Himeros 50 Hobbes, Thomas 271 f., 281 Hodge, Robert 195 Hofstadter, Douglas R. 86 Holt, John 187 Howes, David 269, 283

298

Index

Humbert of Silva Candida Hume, David 171 Hussein, Taha 111, 115 Huxley, Aldous 126, 143 Hypnos 50

78 – 79

Ibn Abd al-Aziz, Umar 235 Ibn Abī s-Salt, Umaiya 233 Ibn Al-Mahdi, Ibrahim 234 Ibn Al Mouqaffa’ 113 Ibn Khaldun 235 f. Ibn Mandour, Mohamed 112 Idel, Moshe 90 Ilaria del Carretto 51 Illich, Ivan 266, 274 Imhof, Agnes 234 Inglehart, Ronald F. 273 Iris 50 Isaac 41, 43 – 46, 56 Isaiah 37, 54, 61 Iser, Wolfgang 19 Ishmael 41, 43, 45, 219 Isoardi, Carlo 13, 248, 251 f., 255, 257 – 259 Ivo of Chartres 82 Jackson, Bernard 2, 12, 36 – 38, 207 – 209, 211 – 213, 215 – 218, 220 – 225 Jacob 40, 43 – 45, 54 Jakobson, Roman 7, 161 James, William 36, 150, 155, 246 Janowitz, Naomi 3, 8, 19, 26, 29, 284 Jasmin, Kyle M. 167 Jeauneau, Edouard 75 Jehoshaphat 212, 214 – 216 Jesus Christ 53, 59 f., 62, 259 Joas, Hans 98 John the Baptist 63 Johnson, Matthew W. 86, 91 Johnson, Rob 179 Jonah 38, 71 Josephus, Flavius 27 Joyce, James 149 f., 158 f. Justin Martyr 61 Kahan, Dan 272 Kamin, Sarah 218

Kant, Immanuel 171, 257 Kantorowitz, Ernst 274 Katz, Steven 126, 161 Kavka, Martin 247 Keane, Webb 2, 7, 161 Kearney, Richard 159 Keller, Hildegard 103 Kennedy, George 24 Kernan, Alvin 162 Keul, Hildegund 92 Khatibi, Abdelkébir 10, 111 Khema 199 Kiening, Christian 102 f. Kleine, Christoph 87 Koch, Anne 3 Koch, Grace 272 Kosior, Wojciech 39, 43 Krech, Volkhard 4, 9, 85, 87, 102 Kress, Gunther 195 Kretzmann, Norman 21 Kripke, Saul 28 Krishna 35 Kroll, Jerome 85 Kroskrity, Paul 2, 161 Kull, Kalevi 93 Kumārila Bhaṭṭa 133 Lakoff, George 86, 91 Lambek, Michael 161 Lamech 210 Lanfranc of Bec/Pavia 67, 75 – 82 Langton, Daniel 227 Laplantine, François 269 Largier, Niklaus 284 Latour, Bruno 264 Layla 234 f. Le Goff, Jacques 91 Legendre, Pierre 268 Leone, Massimo 1 f., 12 f., 27, 30, 50, 95, 98, 151, 231, 236, 243, 264, 276, 284 Leroi-Gourhan, André 33 Levinas, Emmanuel 222 Lewis, Clive S. 11, 149 – 151, 155 – 157, 159, 162 Lewontin, Richard C. 97 Linden, Sandra 103 Ling, Trevor 182

Index

Litwa, David 29 Lloyd, Vincent 247 Loewe, Raphael 218 Lollo, Renata 158 Losonczi, Peter 247 Lotman, Jurij M. 93, 122 Louis XIV 274 Louth, Andrew 19 Lücke, Friedrich 232 f., 237 Luckmann, Thomas 98 Lüers, Grete 90 Luhmann, Niklas 87, 93, 95 Luke (Evangelist) 7 Luoma-Aho, Mika 247 Luther, Martin 5 Lynch, David 266 MacDonald, George 156 Macdonald, Robin 283 MacDougall, David 278 Machacek, David W. 92 Mahdi 234 Maimonides 35, 46 Majnun 234 f. Majury, Diana 283 Malachi 37, 63 Manzi, Franco 62 Marat, Jean-Paul 276 f. Marduk 55 Marin, Louis 1 Marmo, Costantino 9, 67 f., 73, 78 Marquard, Odo 45 Martello, Concetto 76, 79 – 81 Marty, Martin 183 Marx, Karl 13, 249 – 251, 253, 269 Mary, mother of Jesus (also Madonna) 53, 93, 236 Massumi, Brian 270 Matthew 56, 71, 166 McCracken, George E. 68 – 71 McCullough, Lissa 162 McGinn, Bernard 87, 103 McLuhan, Marshall 33, 45 Mechthild of Magdeburg (or Mechtild von Madgeburg) 9, 85, 89, 91, 95, 103 Meier, Brian P. 91 Meier, Samuel A. 43, 45, 248

299

Menary, Richard 283 Messier, Claude 85 Metsu, Gabriel 239 f., 243 Michael (archangel) 43, 58, 60 – 63 Mitchell, Thomas 233 Mohr, Christine 85 Molinaro, Aniceto 158 Mondzain, Marie-Jose 266 Montclos, Jean de 75 f., 78 Moore, Dawn 283 Morris, Charles W. 100 Moses 22, 27, 29, 36 f., 40, 44 f., 54, 207, 209, 211 f., 215 f., 221, 227, 231 Müller, Friedrich Max 3, 6, 14 Muhammad 114, 234 – 236 Mukherji, Subha 283 Murphy, Emilie K.M. 283 Muttoni, Pietro (see also Pietro della Vecchia) 241 Nagel, Thomas 269 Nawf 236 Nemes, Balázs J. 102 f. Nettesheim, Agrippa von 59 Newberg, Andrew B. 86 Newman, Barbara 90 f. Niehoff, Marin 29 Nike 50, 52 f. Noah 209 Norris, Pippa 273 Nöth, Winfried 93 Nussbaum, Martha 271 Obeyesekere, Gananath 187 Odin 35 Okada, Atsushi 3, 9, 49 Olive, Isadora 85, 231 Omar (caliph) 113 Ong, Walter J. 168 Oppenheimer, Joshua 266, 279 – 281 Origen 61, 170 Otten, Willemien 82 Otto, Rudolf 125, 265 Pace, Enzo 4, 11 f., 179 f., 182, 194 f. Padoan, Tatsuma 2 Palacios, Miguel A. 194

300

Index

Panier, Louis 1 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 248 Pannesekhara, Kalukondayave 189 Papini, Giovanni 11, 149 f., 157 – 159, 162 Parmenides 21, 173 Parmentier, Richard 2, 21, 27, 30, 93 Paschasius Radbertus 67 – 73 Patte, Daniel 1 f. Paul of Tarsus (the Apostle) 55 f, 70, 83, 248, 252, 254, 255 Peirce, Charles S. 1, 7, 10, 33 f., 92 f., 97 Peiris, James 184 Penner, Hans 126 Pépin, Jean 74 Peter 55 f., 60, 93, 125 Peter Lombard 81 f. Peter the Venerable 78 Peterson, Eric 62 Petrarch, Francesco 159 Pharaoh 36, 207 f. Phillips, Stephen H. 86 Philo of Alexandria 8, 53 f. Picasso, Pablo 269 Pietro della Vecchia 241 – 243 Pintore, Anna 221 Pisano, Nicola 57 Plato 19 – 22, 29 Plessner, Helmut 98 Plotinus 19, 29 Plutarch 7 Ponzo, Jenny 1 f., 5, 8, 11, 85, 149, 153, 263 Powell 237 Power, Edmond 11, 179, 233 Pragnasara, Yakkaduve 190 Premadasa, Ranasinghe 191 Preston, Alex 179 Prieto, Luis 33 Priscian 72, 76 Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite (or PseudoDionigi l’Aeropagita) 58, 74 Qutb, Sayyed

189

Raba 240 Rabinowitz, Louis Isaac Raffaello 51

218

Rahula, Walpola 190 Ramanathan, Ponnambalam 184 Rāmarāya Kavi 132 Rambelli, Fabio 2 Raphael, Melissa 227 Raphael (archangel) 56, 58, 62 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) 50 Rappaport, Roy 167 Raschke, Carl 247, 250 Rashkover, Randi 247 Ratramnus of Corbie 67 f. Rebora, Clemente 11, 149 f., 157 f., 162 Reed, Edward S. 171 Reinhard Lupton, Julia 263 Rhabanus Maurus 73 Richter, Sandra 30 Ricoeur, Paul 1 Rieger, Joerg 283 Rilke, Rainer M. 42 Rimbaud, Arthur 151 Ritzer, George 188 Rivera, Joseph 247 Robbins, Philip 172 Roques, René 74 Rosati, Massimo 196 Rosier-Catach, Irène 75 – 77, 81 Rothko, Mark 277 f. Rublev, Andrei 62 f. Runia, David 20 f., 23 – 25, 27, 30 Sadānanda 132, 135, 137 Sainte-Beuve, Charles A. 160 Sander, Emmanuel 1, 7, 33, 86, 92 Śaṅkara 10, 125, 127 – 137, 140, 142 Santner, Eric 276 – 278, 284 Sarah 43, 62 Sargent, Neil 283 Sauneron, Serge 7 f. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1, 6 f., 168 Savan, David 94 Schacter, Rafael 264 Schmitt, Carl 13, 247 f., 250, 252 – 256, 265, 268 Schober, Juliana 179 Schulthess, Friedrich 233 Schütz, Alfred 98, Schütz, Anton 98, 247, 250

Index

Schwartz, Barry 91 Schwarzschild, Steven S. 221 f. Sedda, Franciscu 122 Sedley, David 21 f. Sedulius Scotus 72 Seelhorst, Jörg 92, 98 Sekuler, Robert 208 Sells, Michael 19 Senanayake, Frederick R. 184 Senanayake, Stephen 184 Senarat 193 f. Seneviratne, H. L. 184 – 188, 190 Sequeri, Pierangelo 248 f. Serres, Michel 59 Shah, Mustafa 112 Sharf, Robert H. 87 Shelley, Percy B. 149 f. Sherwin, Richard 13, 263 – 266, 269 f., 279, 281, 283 Short, Thomas L. 92 Silaratana, Hendiyagala 189 Silva, Mervyn 199 Silverstein, Michael 2, 23, 27, 101, 104, 161 Singh, Aakash 247 Sivan, Emmanuel 200 Slingerland, Edward G. 86 Smith, Andra M. 85 Smith, Anthony 187 f Smith, Bardwell 182 Smith, Barry 172 Smith, Imogen 21 Socrates 21, 77 Soeffner, Hans-Georg 98 Solomon 12, 184, 208, 213 f., 223 Somarama, Talduwe 184 Spariosu, Mihai 268 Spence, Gerry 266 Spencer, Herbert 154, 155 Spencer, Jonathan 187 Spiro, Melford 3 Stace, Walter Terence 126 Stausberg, Michael 91 Steinberg, David 179 Stevens, Wallace 263, 268, 274 Stewart, James 198 Stewart, John 172, 174

301

Stirrat, Roderick L. 193 Stjernfelt, Frederik 193 Stock, Brian 69 f. Stokoe, William C. 91 Stone, Suzanne Last 241 Stridde, Christine 102 Stroumsa, Guy 19, 29 f. Strozzi, Zanobi 50 Stuckenbruck, Loren T. 62 Sureśvara 136 Swamy, Narayan M.R. 179 Swann, Elizabeth L. 283 Sweetser, Eve E. 86, 101 Tambiah, Stanley 4, 182 f., 185, 191, 199 f. Tanqueray, Adolphe 248 Tapovan, Swami 126, 128, 131, 142 Taubes, Jacob 13, 248 – 258 Taves, Ann 87 Taylor, Charles 263, 273 Teresa of Avila 151, 159 f. Terhune, Devin B. 85 Thanatos 50 Thera, Mahanama 186 Thero, Hikkaduwe S. 184, 190 Thomas, Morgan 60, 149, 276 f. Thomas Aquinas 50, 149, 158 Tobias 56 Tobit 56 Tononi, Giulio 87 Toth, Alfred 94 Touati, Houari 112 Treis, Yvonne 28 Trump, Donald J. 264 Turner, Alicia 179 Uexküll, Jakob J. von 95 Ugolino, Biasio 243 f. Urbach, Ephraim E. 216 Vahanian, Gabriel 162 Valentin de Boulogne 244 f. Varela, Francisco 174 Vasileiadis, Pavlos 20, 24 Venus 49 f. Verdun, Nicolas de 62 Vermeer, Johannes (or Jan) 266 f., 274

302

Index

Vico, Giambattista 257, 268, 272, 281 Vijaya 184, 187 Vijgen, Jörgen 76 Vivekananda, Swami 142 f. Volli, Ugo 2 f., 8, 33, 36, 38, 40 Volney, Gay 1 Waggoner, Edward 283 Walther, Elisabeth 94 Ward, Graham 19, 263 Watt, Gary 268 Watts, Frederic 58 f. Weber, Max 5, 265 Weil, Simone 11, 149 – 151, 153 – 155, 159, 162 Wensinck, Arent J. 234, 237, 246 Wenz, Gunther 248 Werner, Martin 61 Whittaker, John 19, 25, 27 Whorf, Benjamin L. 195 Wilcox, Melissa M. 92

Wilden, Anthony 97 Wilke, Annette 10, 133 f, 139 Wilke, Christiane 283 Wilkens, Katharina 3 Wilkins, Leanne K. 85 William the Conqueror 75 Wilson, Margaret 172 Winston, David 21 f. Wirathu, Ashin 179 f. Wolfson, Harry 19 Wordsworth, William 156 Yelle, Robert A. 1 – 3, 5 f., 14, 85, 91, 101, 256, 263, 265, 272 YHWH 20, 211, 214 Young, Alison 149, 283 Zeus 35, 50 Ziolkowski, Theodore Zwingli, Ulrich 82

149 – 151