A Grammar of a World: I. In the Beginning: Creation as Instantiation

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

So begins Genesis.

It is difficult to imagine a more familiar sentence, or one more heavily burdened with interpretation. It has been read as theology, cosmology, metaphysics, history, poetry, myth, and — by some — as an alternative to science.

But what happens if, for the moment, we do something rather less ambitious?

We can simply look at the grammar.

The sentence gives us a temporal circumstance:

In the beginning

followed by a material process:

created

with its participants:

God — Actor

the heaven and the earth — Goal

The grammar therefore gives us a beginning, an Actor, a process, and what that process brings about. But it does not yet tell us that the heaven and earth emerge as a fully differentiated, fully ordered world. Indeed, the next verse will complicate that assumption.

That matters because creation need not be understood as the manufacture of a finished object. The verb created provides a general construal of what is happening. The narrative will subsequently give us more specific ways in which things come to be: dividing, gathering, bringing forth, making, setting, and so on.

There is therefore a distinction worth keeping in view from the outset:

Creation is the general construal; particular processes disclose its manner of actualisation.

This makes the opening verse unexpectedly compatible with a distinction familiar from our thinking about instantiation.

A potential may be instantiated as an instance. A general configuration may become an actual occurrence. The relation is not one of manufacturing something from nothing, but of something becoming actual in a particular instance.

We should be careful here. Genesis is not secretly offering a technical theory of instantiation. Creation and instantiation belong to different explanatory vocabularies. But the grammar allows us to notice a structural affinity between them:

creation can be construed as the actualisation of what was not yet an instance.

And that possibility becomes much more interesting in the next verse.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The earth, apparently, already exists.

Yet it is without form, and void.

So existence has not yet become differentiation.

This gives us our first important distinction:

Existence is not the same thing as articulation.

Something can be there without yet being construed as a differentiated world.

The opening of Genesis therefore does not begin with a catalogue of things. It begins with a movement from existence toward determinate construal.

And then, in the third verse, something extraordinary happens:

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Here the grammar changes the character of creation.

God says something.

What is said is not a description of something already present. It is a projected proposal:

Let there be light.

And then:

there was light.

The relation between the two clauses is striking. What is projected in language as not-yet-actual becomes actual.

The grammar thus gives us a sequence:

speech → projection → actualisation

The world does not merely appear in the story. A possible state of affairs is first put into language, and then it occurs.

That is a much more interesting beginning for our purposes than the question of whether the story describes the physical origin of the universe.

For here, at the very beginning, the narrative is already concerned with something that language does remarkably well: bringing a possible configuration into the space of actuality.

We need not yet call that meaning.

We need not call it consciousness.

We need not even call it semiotics.

For the moment, we can simply follow the grammar.

Something exists.

It is not yet differentiated.

A possibility is projected.

The possibility is actualised.

And then, as we shall see, the newly actualised phenomenon is seen, assessed, divided, identified, and named.

The creation story is beginning to look less like an inventory of objects and more like a history of how a world becomes available for construal.

But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

For now, there is only the beginning.

And the beginning is already grammatical.