The Senior Common Room was unusually quiet.
Mr Blottisham was reading Genesis.
“Really,” he said, “I don't see the difficulty. God created the world, and Genesis tells us how.”
Professor Quillibrace looked up.
“How?”
“By creating it.”
“That wasn't my question.”
Blottisham frowned. “You asked how.”
“I asked how Genesis represents creation.”
Miss Stray put down her tea.
“That is slightly different.”
“Different?” said Blottisham. “Surely the world was created whether Genesis represented it or not.”
“Certainly,” said Quillibrace. “But Genesis repeatedly represents creation as something that happens through saying.”
Blottisham looked at the page.
“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”
“Precisely.”
“He spoke. The light appeared.”
“According to the narrative.”
Blottisham looked suspiciously at him.
“You're not suggesting God didn't actually speak?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I am suggesting that the interesting question is why creation is represented as speaking.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“Perhaps the text is doing more than describing an event.”
“Everything describes an event,” said Blottisham.
“Language does rather more than that,” said Quillibrace.
Blottisham sighed. “Here we go.”
Quillibrace ignored him.
“We usually imagine language as something we use after we have thought. Experience comes first, thought follows, and language communicates the result.”
“Yes.”
“But language also provides the resources through which experience becomes construable as meaning.”
Blottisham stared at him.
“So language helps us think.”
“More than that. It participates in the organisation of thought.”
Miss Stray added, “And language can therefore construe the very activity by which we construe the world.”
Blottisham looked from one to the other.
“You mean Genesis is a theory of language?”
“No,” said Quillibrace.
“Good.”
“It is a mythology in which the world is represented as emerging through language.”
Blottisham considered this.
“But God is speaking.”
“Yes.”
“So the point is that God created the world.”
“Perhaps. But notice what the narrative makes creation look like.”
Blottisham looked again at the page.
“Speaking.”
“Exactly.”
There was a pause.
Miss Stray said quietly, “Perhaps Genesis is mythologising something humans had already discovered without formulating it theoretically: that experience becomes a world for us through language.”
Blottisham looked appalled.
“You are saying that God is a metaphor for grammar.”
“No,” said Quillibrace.
“Good.”
“Although that is an impressively rapid misunderstanding.”
Miss Stray turned away to hide a smile.
Blottisham closed the book.
“I think I preferred it when God was simply creating things.”
“So did Genesis,” said Quillibrace.
Blottisham relaxed.
“For the moment.”
He reopened the book.
Miss Stray noticed that Quillibrace was smiling.
No comments:
Post a Comment