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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." * Naming Things5/16/2005 01:06:01Last week I heard a charismatic preacher at a church in Cranston, RI retell the Genesis story in preparation for a Mothers' Day sermon about marriage and family. According to Gen. 2:19, God forms the wild animals and shows them to Adam, and then He watches to see what the man will call them. What man calls them, the story goes, "would be its name." This pastor, however, added something that I'd never heard to the story, that the names Adam gave defined the creatures, and set them in what they were. Upon calling the lion "lion," the creature ceased to be nebulous and became what we know to be a lion. As if he were halting evolution, though I doubt this pastor would see it that way. He emphasized that Adam performed an act upon the creatures, not merely their subjective apparition. They became what they are, and circumscribed as such, by the name Adam gave to each. This sermon reminds me of a discussion over the course of medieval Islamic theoretical jurisprudence, best discussed in the work of Bernard G. Weiss. Over the centuries, jurists proposed several different explanations for the origin of language; for some, words were thought to have a natural, inherent, and imitative affinity to their meanings. For most, though, words were arbitrary signifiers that were consciously and statically mapped to meanings. Even though usage might evolve, the primordial ideal is unchanging. This group was divided between those who believed the lexicon a human creation and those who attributed it to God. In any event, the divine connection was clear because this primordial tongue was unmistakably the language of qur'anic revelation. I suppose the more modern idea that we are given to accept is language as a bizarre, chaotic, and organic process. Meaning evolves with usage, symbols change, and the whole epistemic framework shifts with them all. Only through contraptions of these systems do we conceive of and concoct our prayers to God. After this scriptural exposition, the sermon turned quite in the direction of self-help. Men should "act like men" and men like women not because God said so but because it works. Otherwise you won't keep your spouse, simply enough. Such appeals to such forms of "natual law" sustain the interpretations that they support. Actually, it was not clear that the Genesis narrative he gave had any direct link to the bulk of the talk about family. But the undertones were deeply related. Just as Adam gave the creatures names and so defined their creatureness, the pastor turned to man and woman and took it upon himself to define their natures. People seemed very thankful about this and couples tearfully renewed their carefully-defined vows in the front of the church. The pastor was his own Adam. On the authority of the Bible and Good Advice, he remade the language and meaning, and consequently the being of his hearers. He remade me somewhat, perhaps inperceptively. Correctly, he acted upon me. But upon the animals? Do they hear? God is watching to see what we will call Him. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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