Mended-Speech
Hefling, Charles C. Jr.
Books: SPIRITED LANGUAGE NOTHING stays put. So said Hera-clitus, and after twenty-five hundred years we are beginning to learn how right he was. Neither subjects nor objects, knowers nor what they...
...Beneath this partition of language, however, lies a still deeper chasm...
...As he heals one breach, Cahill exacerbates another...
...Each complements the others and cannot get along without them...
...On that score, the dust jacket comparison of Cahill's book with Newman's Idea of a University is apt, in that both stake an academic claim for theology by arguing that without it any overall understanding of the real world will inevitably be distorted...
...whereas theology, being confessional and thus "normative," must be shown the door...
...Mended Speech does argue persuasively for the meaningfulness of statements other than scientific ones...
...In the light of the history of theology, the history of history-of-religions, and the history of the notion of historicity itself, this normative versus non-normative dichotomy can be seen for what it is — a red herring...
...On the other side he puts the moving, affective, myth-laden "tensive symbols," as he calls them, beyond which we look only at our peril...
...So conceived, theology is intimately related to literary and historical Commonweal: 248 methods of inquiry, somewhat tenuously related to disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and psychology, but con-strasted with and even opposed to the so-called hard sciences...
...To speak of engagement, however, is to raise the thorny problem of objective judgments...
...But then, neither does the quite different hermeneutical thought mode for which Cahill claims equal objectivity...
...In effect, Mended Speech endorses the split between C. P. Snow's "two cultures...
...True enough...
...Is it a matter of truth, or merely of taste...
...But perhaps, in a world where nothing stays put, these are one and the same: the quest for transcendence is transcendence...
...Everything the human spirit constructs is an ongoing process, sluggish at times and turbulent at times, but always in time...
...The genius of Heidegger presides over Mended Speech as it pits knowledge about things, knowledge that aims at dominating and domesticating reality through technological manipulation, against knowledge of things, the knowledge that arises out of engagement and participation...
...Their desire to communicate this experience gives rise to symbolic expressions of various kinds, and these expressions are the elements of every religious tradition...
...No "almost" about it...
...There is only one way in which religious meaning develops, according to Cahill, and that is through "evolution in the imaginative understanding and grasp of tensive symbols...
...In any case, Cahill is not saying that there is some "essence of religion" that can be distilled from the many different searches and bottled for academic analysis...
...The next question would be, how is this literary universe related to other universes...
...Any dialogue between them, let alone reconciliation, is precluded by the fact (or what Cahill takes to be the fact) that there are two paradigms of knowing, two sorts of objectivity, two "universes...
...On the contrary, a lived relationship to the subject matter of religion is the very thing that makes it possible to understand religion at all...
...His way of closing the gap that now divides theology from the history of religions is to place them both within one realm of discourse, informed by commitment and imaginative creativity, yet not for that reason subjective or whimsical...
...there is a personal commitment as well...
...But there is a big difference too...
...But when all is said and done, it still leaves the structure of the arts and sciences a house divided...
...Literary expressions are especially important, because by addressing and engaging the reader they can convey the experience from which they first arose...
...Does asking them necessarily undermine the personal engagement that prompted them in the first place...
...Those who have involved themselves in a lived relationship to some particular tradition of religious symbolism can and do go on to ask for explanations of what the symbols mean and how this meaning fits in with the rest of the human world—with politics, philosophy, economics, and even with biology and physics...
...It would be pretentious and naive," he writes, "for the scientific thought mode to hold that it encompasses all reality...
...They are wishing, desiring, imagining — especially imagining...
...Charles C. Helling, Jr...
...How this very basic contrast applies to the study of religion shows up when Cahill insists, for example, that any attempt to state the meaning of religious literature in a systematic way, by introducing technical definitions or logical arguments, can only be misguided...
...In a word, historicity is the hallmark both of human being and of the human world...
...On one side of this linguistic dichotomy Cahill puts the static, unambiguous signs whose meaning lies in one-to-one correspondence and which can be linked through logic to build closed conceptual systems...
...That question, as Cahill recognizes, cannot be sidestepped...
...The trouble is that in order to establish the academic integrity of this realm the mended speech of religious studies has to be cut off quite sharply from the technical language of theoretical thought...
...It has nothing to say about any reality that, supposedly, is infinite and eternal...
...Yet they do follow a common pattern, for being related to some sort of ultimacy is an experience all people have, in moments of theophany or enlightenment...
...But this meaning is anything but arbitrary because there is a linguistic and literary universe as objectively palpable as any-other universe...
...how one conceives the process of coming to know inevitably determines how an investigation of the sort Mended Speech undertakes is going to turn out...
...Those who move from understanding the history of a religious tradition to embracing what its symbols convey are not making an intellectual decision...
...Here Mended Speech runs into serious difficulties...
...Such is the context within which P. Joseph Cahill reconsiders the relation between theology and religious studies...
...It rests on a way of specifying what religion is all about that bears some resemblance to Paul Tillich's thought...
...The issues at stake here are more than academic, but since the academy is Cahill's main concern in Mended Speech it is interesting to find him quoting literary critic Northrop Frye to the effect that it is the structure of the arts and sciences in a university which shows what the real world really is...
...Such is the gist of Cahill's proposal...
...Are all such questions, in so far as they call for answers that go beyond symbolism to theory, illegitimate...
...For Newman, theology was still a science, the science of God and of all things as related to God...
...Cahill opposes them...
...On one hand, there is an important sense in which the theologians have been right all along: religion is not the sort of thing that can be pinned to a board and dissected with cool detachment...
...There is more to a lived relationship with religious symbols than simply understanding their history...
...Neither subjects nor objects, knowers nor what they know, are fixed entities...
...One wonders, though, whether it can be heard only by silencing every echo of the demand for clarity and precision...
...What 19 April 1985: 247 then is the cognitive status of this more profound level of involvement...
...And such an engagement with one's own tradition, fully articulated, is for Cahill the precondition for understanding the symbolism of any other religion...
...That process, in Cahill's judgment, can be conceived in two ways...
...By contrast, the theology that Cahill advocates is just one of the components in a study of human religiousness...
...Now there is no question but that ours is an age of imaginative starvation, and by emphasizing the affective power of myth and symbol Mended Speech is saying something that both theology and the history of religion need to hear...
...Instead of normative versus non-normative, it is a case of art versus science...
...Creative imagination bestows meaning on the symbol...
...The point is well taken...
...Accordingly, allfour of these approaches can and ought to be included under the general rubric of religious studies...
...He answers it by proposing that religious truth — the truth of religion, not the truth of this religion or that — is like the truth of a work of art...
...Perhaps the unity of human knowledge does depend, as an older view of the theological enterprise held it does, on whether there is a truly transcendent reality, who creates all that is, seen and unseen, and whose existence the human spirit can truly know—not just search for...
...According to conventional wisdom, there is a place in the university for religious studies inasmuch as they are objective, pluralistic, and "non-normative...
...But, on the other hand, such a relationship is presupposed not only by the mental operations that theologians perform, but also by the kind of thinking that goes on in literary, historical, and comparative studies of religion...
...So far so good...
...Not so, Cahill contends...
...They change, and the changes are more than ripples on an otherwise tranquil pond...
...Since religious symbol systems are ongoing and historical, each is unique...
...Mended Speech identifies the subject matter of religion with transcendence or ultimate meaning itself, sometimes with the human search for ultimate meaning...
...Natural science's claim to be objective knowledge does not extend beyond the world of space and time...
...One of them, the "Enlightenment mentality," he finds operative today in the natural sciences...
...the other is ' 'hermeneu-tics," which he characterizes as historicity taken seriously...
...Cahill puts his finger on its source when he writes, "How one conceives knowing is very influential — indeed almost decisive — in the formation of concepts about the history of religions, theology, and the relationship of the two to the larger field of religious studies...
...Sometimes MENDED SPEECH THE CRISIS OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THEOLOGY P. Joseph CahUl Crossroad, $12.95, 199 pp...
...It may be that shifts of this kind, from a symbolic to a theoretical apprehension of scriptural meanings, have in fact occurred within the history of the Christian tradition, but if so they have been mistakes, deformations rather than genuine developments...
...But these two conceptions of knowing are not just different...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 8
