The Senior Common Room was quiet except for the ticking of the clock.
Mr Blottisham broke the silence.
“I have been thinking about the speaking.”
Professor Quillibrace looked up.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“God speaks, and creation happens.”
“Yes.”
“But if speaking is a social process, there ought to be someone listening.”
Miss Stray looked interested.
“Indeed.”
Blottisham smiled.
“Ha.”
Quillibrace folded his newspaper.
“Who?”
“That is precisely the problem.”
“God doesn't need an audience.”
“Then why speak?”
“To create.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it is true.”
Blottisham leaned back.
“If I say something to an empty room, I am still speaking. But I am not really communicating.”
“An excellent observation,” said Quillibrace.
“Thank you.”
“Though not quite relevant.”
Blottisham frowned.
“It is entirely relevant.”
“No. It tells us something about ordinary human speech. Genesis is doing something rather more interesting.”
Miss Stray intervened.
“Perhaps the absence of a listener is the interesting part.”
Blottisham looked at her.
“How can an absent listener be interesting?”
“Because the story gives us a Sayer without an interlocutor.”
“Exactly,” said Quillibrace.
“So?”
“So where is the other participant?”
Blottisham glanced around the room.
“There isn't one.”
“Precisely.”
“The world?”
“Not yet.”
Blottisham stared at him.
“You're suggesting the world is the listener.”
“Not literally.”
“Good.”
“But symbolically, perhaps the world represents what is being addressed by the saying.”
Miss Stray nodded.
“Experience before it has become differentiated as meaning.”
Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.
“So God says something to experience.”
“Not quite.”
“Then what?”
Quillibrace sighed.
“We are looking at the myth, not a transcript of divine conversation.”
“Thank goodness.”
“The point is that the story places saying at the boundary between an undifferentiated world and a differentiated one.”
“God says, ‘Let there be light.’”
“And there is light.”
Blottisham looked at the page.
“So the saying doesn't merely describe the light.”
“No.”
“It brings it into the story.”
“Exactly.”
Miss Stray said, “The thing that will eventually hear the saying has not yet appeared.”
Blottisham paused.
“You mean humanity.”
“Eventually.”
“But humanity is part of the creation.”
“Yes.”
“So the listener is created by the saying.”
Quillibrace looked at him.
“Now you're getting somewhere.”
Blottisham sat back, pleased.
“Then God is talking to someone who hasn't been created yet.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“Perhaps.”
“And eventually that someone will understand what God has been saying.”
Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.
“Or spend several thousand years arguing about it.”
Blottisham looked offended.
“That cannot possibly be the theological point.”
“No,” said Quillibrace.
A pause.
“But it is an observable consequence.”
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