44. ORALITY AND LITERACY

    Today, only adherents of some -ism deny that the western philosophical, biblical and theological traditions are transmitted by a dialogue of text with text over the course of almost three millennia.  The code that gives form and direction to my reading of this dialogue is indebted to Walter Ong's re-creation of the revolutionary restructuring of thought inherent in literacy's triumph over orality as the foundation of western culture.  In the following reflection, I hope to lay bare the dynamics of the process in question.

Orality

    Prior to the invention of writing, the immediacy of oral-aural communications fostered both a participative existence and an illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  Since that illusory sense still haunts the rationalists of any ilk, we do well to contrast its role in primary oral cultures and its role in the western literary tradition.

     For the sake of brevity, I focus on the interplay between two factors in oral-aural communications, the workings of language and the fact that, since memory was the only repository of the past, the past lived only in the present.

        (1)  Since sound disperses immediately, the languages used to process everyday experience in primary oral cultures were both fluid and transient.  As a response to the fear of forgetting the hard-won lore of the past, communications were laden with memory-aides such as poetic images, formulaic clusters, frequent repetition and shared myths.  Despite these aids, however, words remained events whose meaning depended on consensual validation, and that validation, in turn, was indebted to tacit clues, such as a shared history, a concrete occasion, facial expressions, tone of voice and bodily gestures.

        (2)  The illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality had significant implications.

             a.  Language-users lacked significant distinctions among language, experience and reality.

             b.  In the same vein, they lacked significant distinctions among past, present and future.

             c.  As a result, they lacked the means to sort out experience in ways that offered glimpses into the depths of human interiority and into the operation of natural forces underlying experience.

             d.  And the resulting participative existence deprived them of the ability to forge fruitful distinctions among the personal, social, political, economic, aesthetic, historical, moral and religious dimensions of human existence.

        (3)  Eliade's analysis of foundational myths shows how these narratives functioned as both an aid to memory and a foundation of culture.  Structurally, myths traced practices conducive to survival and to social cohesion to acts of deities in a timeless past.  As conjunctive narratives, they depicted deities who acted capriciously and powerfully.  (In Gilbert Murray's terms, inhabitants of orally transmitted cultures worshipped their deities because they were powerful, not because they were moral.  I.e., since myths were conjunctive narratives, one could not question why the deities had acted as they did.)   Functionally, they implied that, to prevent a relapse into chaos, these acts must be re-iterated ritually and in everyday life.  And as sacred histories, they implied that questioning would reduce the dialogue they sanctioned to meaningless babble.

Literacy

    My re-creation of the gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of western culture revolves around the emergence of a distinctive literary form in ancient Babylon in the third millennium, B.C.E., and the uses made of that literary form by the Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions.  But certain contrasts between orality and literacy are needed to illuminate the divergent uses made of this literary form by the Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions.

        (1)  The detachment inherent in the act of writing and reading ruptured both the participative existence and the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality. 

             (Though this addendum anticipates a detailed delineation of the process through which literacy displaced orality as the foundation of western culture, the ultimate triumph of literacy was assured because the detachment generated both scientific inquiries into the workings of nature and metaphors of individuality.  Re metaphors of individuality:  In the Modern Era, Descartes' abstract conception of solipsistic individuals who face one another as the Other and Kant's equally abstract conception of the autonomous individual carried the detachment encoded in the early metaphors of individuality to its logical extreme.)

        (2)  To render their texts intelligible to absent audiences, authors who hoped to communicate through texts had to invent literary conventions to supply for the absence of the tacit clues which supplemented oral-aural communications.  To avoid the equivalent of re-inventing the wheel repeatedly, later authors wove conventions forged by their literary predecessors into distinctive literary forms that gave form and direction to emerging literary traditions.

            Over the course of centuries, this inter-textual dialogue was restructured by conventions indebted to the ways that the continuous prose generated by alphabetical writing replaced poetic images, formulaic clusters, frequent repetitions and conjunctive narratives.

            I.e. in ancient Greece, the totalizing thrust of the literary conventions derived from continuous prose evoked an illusory confidence that a literary tradition could repair the original rupture of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality, while in ancient Israel the same conventions lent form and direction to stories designed to illuminate a perpetual journey into the unknown.  (The point at issue:  Authors whose texts inscribed the literary conventions which gave form and direction to the philosophical tradition and the early storytellers who were the strong authors in the Hebrew literary tradition utilized the conventions implicit in continuous prose in very different ways for very different purposes.)

        (3)  In its own right, the detachment inherent in the interiorization of literacy forced a radical restructuring of languages used to process everyday experiences.  I.e., consigned to writing in enduring texts, words which were events whose meaning depended on consensual validation in orally transmitted cultures were laden with meanings indebted to the usage of authors with different visions and agendas.  (Wittgenstein's metaphor:  Words are like ropes woven from many strands, with no strand running all the way through.  As a result, languages took on lives of their own.  In Kant's terms, they functioned as virtual "things-in-themselves".)

             As languages took on lives of their own and words with many meanings could be inscribed in metaphors, both the Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions generated inquiries centered in distinctions among language, experience and reality.

        (4)  In ancient Greece, these distinctions provided the hollow center for Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth.  This theory defined truth as a correspondence of some sort between a linguistic formulation and an experienced state of affairs.  Over the course of centuries, true believers sought to save the theory through metaphors which defined the sort of correspondence required as an imitation, an imaging, a representation, a pre-figuring and a virtual picture.  But the quest was thoroughly discredited in the twentieth century by the collapse of ideal language programs designed to frame analyses of language and experience by a combination of a purely formal framework and a principle of verification.

            Ideal language programs promised a language capable of revealing the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail.  Ironically, even before they came to prominence in the early decades of the twentieth century, Nietzsche's reading of the western literary tradition had exposed the will to power at work in literacy's triumph over orality.  And when I apply his hermeneutical code to these programs, it is obvious that they were legitimate offspring of the medieval metaphor which canonized Two Books purportedly authored by God, an autonomous Book of Nature which could be read by "the natural light of reason," and the Scriptures, grounded in the belief that they spoke as the revealed Word of God. Both books were obviously truth-telling.  I.e., since both these bounded Books were presumably authored by a rational and purposive Creator, the language inscribed in them could presumably present the whole of reality transparently.  And by extension, a reading accredited by readings of both texts would replace orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality with a language inscribed in self-interpreting and self-referential texts, self-interpreting because they consisted of clear and distinct ideas and doctrines woven into a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed system and self-referential because they presented the whole of reality transparently.

                    (A confession:  This delineation of the gradual textualization of the Christian theological tradition supports my conviction that the wedding of philosophy and theology in Aquinas' Summa Theologica distorts the Scriptural message.  The very notion of a "Summa" promises a theological system consisting of clearly and distinctly formulated doctrines interwoven in a comprehensive and closed system.  In effect, it promises an autonomous text which is quite incompatible with the literary form that gives direction to the biblical tradition.  To understand the point at issue, however, we must begin with the literary form forged by unknown authors in Babylon in the third millennium, BCE.)

The Epic Poem as a Literary Form

    The Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions which flourished in the first millennium, B.C.E. utilized the literary conventions which unknown authors in ancient Babylon wove into a distinctive literary form, the epic poem.  Since these poems were preserved, their authors must have been writing for a literate audience aware of the functioning of literary conventions invented by their predecessors.  But in ways that I can only sketch, they wove these conventions into a literary form which inserted an empty literary space into the midst of traditional myths.  Most importantly, they set in motion a restructuring of thought by populating this empty literary space with heroes and heroines in way which traced practices conducive to survival and social cohesion to acts of archetypal human beings rather than anthropomorphically depicted deities.

    The inner logic of this restructuring transformed literacy's rupture of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality into a place where human agency and culture might flourish.  (Since the authors of the poems were still captive to the logic of conjunctive narratives, they could not yet generate significant distinctions among past, present and future.  As a result, the archetypal figures they celebrated, like the deities they replaced, acted in a timeless past and exerted authority over present behavior.)

The Literary Form of the Autonomous Text

    The literary form inscribed in epic poetry gave form and direction to analyses of experience in both ancient Greece and ancient Israel.  But different interests, concerns and purposes led authors in ancient Greece and ancient Israel to frame the empty literary space with the distinctive literary forms which gave form and direction to the philosophical and biblical traditions.  A brief contrast between these literary forms follows.

              a.  The emergence of the western philosophical tradition can be traced to an interplay between the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and literary conventions derived from the totalizing thrust of language.  Left to its own devices, the rule of the interrogatory stance over the workings of language would frustrate efforts to accredit the correspondence theory of truth by licensing infinite divisibility and infinite regress.  Parmenides, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle countered this threat in distinctive ways.  Responding to authors whose inquiries still lacked significant distinctions among language, experience and reality, Parmenides posited a metaphorical One which endowed reality with all the traits of a bounded text written in continuous prose.  (Since the One is supposedly enduring, indivisible, changeless, continuous, bounded and circular, Parmenides had to conclude that change is an illusion.)  Well aware that the languages which transmitted different cultures promoted different values, Socrates imposed a dialectical structure on the dialogue within the city concerning moral issues, though the most he could promise was a self-knowledge that conferred self-mastery.  Dissatisfied with a moral discourse which could never yield definitive judgments, Plato translated the model of a text encoded in the Parmenidean One into a realm of clear and distinct, yet interpenetrating Ideal Forms.  And in and through this idealism, he implicitly fused descriptive and moral issues.  On his part, Aristotle was uneasy with the totalitarianism implicit in Plato's posit.  To counter it, he delineated (1) a language about language centered in a principle of logical identity and (2) an empirical approach designed to penetrate the flux of experience in ways that laid bare the workings of an enduring, bounded reality, as the grounds supporting his correspondence theory of truth.  And over the course of centuries, the literary origin of the abstract conception of reason in which the detachment inherent in literacy was transformed into a detached, god-like perspective on language, experience and reality that would confer both knowledge and power was forgotten.

                  (The Parmenidean One ruled language through the principle of logical identity.  Regarding orality, it generated the medieval conception of an hierarchically and teleologically structured universe and Heidegger's embrace of a purportedly all-encompassing notion of Being.  And in the domain of moral discourse, the rule of reason over unruly passions and desires functioned as a god-term in the contract theories of society forged by the dialogue between Hobbes and Locke and by Kant's effort to remove moral issues entirely from the political domain.)

    Finally, a language which fulfilled the criteria derived from the correspondence theory of truth could presumably be inscribed in an autonomous text.  And the ability of that text to reveal the whole of reality in depth and detail would translate orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality, but without illusions, into a realized project.

The Autonomous Individual and the Myth of Modernity

     

    Given their different concerns and purposes, the Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions forged distinctive literary forms and filled the hollow center of form which they used to process everyday experience in very different ways.  The Hellenic tradition interiorized the detachment inherent in literacy as an interrogatory stance, while the Hebrew tradition interiorized the same detachment as an eruptive self-consciousness which could only be explored through stories.  Here, I focus on the way that the myth of Modernity replaced the medieval promise of an autonomous text with Kant's conception of the autonomous individual.

    1.  Authors in ancient Greece used an evolving understanding of the workings of literary languages which functioned as virtual things-in-themselves to transform an interiorized interrogatory stance into inquiries capable of penetrating the flux of experience in ways that revealed the operation of natural forces.  In effect, they assumed that the mastery over language conferred by a knowledge of its workings was translatable into a knowledge of the workings of natural forces which conferred power over them.

         This insight came into its own at the dawn of the Modern Era, when Galileo, Copernicus and Descartes used it to transform the seminal dialogue among the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle into a method of discovery which centered focused inquiries into a bounded reality in carefully constructed and controlled experiments.

            (In physics, the rule of the One emerged as the law of conservation of matter-energy.  This law was designed to interweave the changelessness of the Parmenidean One and the endless flux celebrated by Heraclitus in an heuristic principle which allowed matter to be transformed into energy, and vice versa, but rescued the commitment to carefully constructed experiments from the possibility that, if matter or energy popped into or out of existence, the identification of factors to be controlled would be quite impossible.)

    2.  A contrast between the languages of interiority generated by the Hebrew and Hellenic traditions offers insights into the point at issue here.  Authors in both traditions wove the literary conventions inscribed in the Babylonian epics into languages which offered glimpses into the hidden depths of human interiority.  To guide its processing of everyday experience, the Hebrew tradition forged a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, since this form respected the mysterious freedom which haunts individuals who seek to respond with personal integrity in interactions with other unique individuals.  (From a Heideggerian perspective, this literary form respected the historicity of experience.)  In marked contrast, the Hellenic tradition favored inquiries designed to provide a description applicable to all human beings, always and everywhere.  Inexorably, these inquiries, governed by a literary construct which promised that reasonable beings could occupy a god-like perspective interchangeably, sought a single god-term capable of generating theories of human motivations which enabled psychologists to predict and, as a consequence, control the behavior of virtually interchangeable human agents.  (From a Heideggerian perspective, reason promised analyses which escaped from the historicity of experience.)

             (In effect, the supposition that psychology is a scientific discipline echoes the discredited promises of classical determinism.  In its most extreme version, this determinism was encapsulated in Laplace's promise that, if we knew the present position and moment of each particle in the universe, we could in principle predict all future states and retrodict all past states of affairs.  Note well:  As an inquiry framed by a metaphor of power and judgment, this vision of the operation of the universe reduces human motivation to an impersonally operating force of nature.  From a postmodernist perspective, however, classical determinism is simply another -ism designed to confer moral authority on the exercises of the will to power exposed by Nietzsche.  The ploy:  Since rational beings occupy a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective interchangeably, judgments dictated by reason (reasons) are both epistemologically neutral and morally compelling.)

    3.  In both traditions, once enduring texts displaced memory as the repository of the past, the fascination with human agency and culture fostered by epic poems revealed stark differences between the past depicted in traditional myths and epics and conditions of life in the immediate present.  And as languages incorporated signs marking significant differences among past, present and future, authors filled the empty literary space projected by the Babylonian epics with original visions of future states of affairs to be realized through human agency.  In this context, the literary conventions inscribed in the emerging conception of reason framed moral issues as a quest for a culture conducive to the quest for a fully human existence.  And since the original visions incorporated judgments and strategies designed to create conditions conducive to such an existence, the contention among them generated significant distinctions among the personal, social, economic, political, moral and religious dimensions of life.

    4.  In the so-called Age of the Enlightenment, the literary heirs of the rationalist tradition invoked Descartes' use of the interrogatory stance to liberate individuals from the constrictive hold of the dead hand of the past.  To obscure the literary origins of their own myth of pure beginnings, they populated the empty literary space which ruptured orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality with autonomous individuals endowed with the power to create their own unique identities, master the operation of natural forces through the knowledge conferred by scientific advances, and co-author an ideal society capable of protecting their autonomous existence and fostering their longing for a fully human existence and of allowing them to be arbiters of their own destinies.

        From a critical perspective, the intelligibility of this myth depends on literary conventions inscribed in (1) the empty literary space posited by the Babylonian epics, (2) the metaphor depicting the city as the cradle of culture and civilization, (3) the literary construct which defined reason as a detached, god-like perspective on language, experience and reality, (4) the abstract conception of an autonomous text capable of presenting reality transparently, (5) the Cartesian myth of pure beginnings, (6) Kant's transformation of Descartes' solipsistic thinking being into the autonomous individual, (7) the secularization of eschatological themes enunciated in the Judaic-Christian Scriptures, and (8) Bacon's dictum, "Knowledge is power."

        The convergence of two items in this cluster merits special attention:  In the emerging delineation of human existence, the focus on knowledge implicit in the conception of the autonomous text was displaced by a focus on power implicit in the conception of the autonomous individual.  As a result, the promise of immediate presence, fullness and totality was grounded in the promise that autonomous individuals could become free by harnessing nature to their purposes and that this freedom enabled them to be arbiters of their own destiny.

           (A REPETITIOUS SUMMARY: LOST SENSE OF IMMEDIATE PRESENCE, FULLNESS AND TOTALITY  -  BY SUBSTITUTING THE AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS FOR THE AUTONOMOUS TEXT.

           In ancient Athens, the metaphor depicting the city as the cradle of culture and civilization replaced the rule of anthropomorphic deities or archetypal figures with a commitment to subject face-to-face dialogue to the rule of reason.  To endow reason with the power to compel assent to the moral judgments it purportedly accredited, however, early authors had to find a way to impose closure on the endless questioning licensed by an interiorized interrogatory stance.  Clearly, if this stance simply displaced the participative existence fostered by orality, communication would be reduced to meaningless babble and social interactions among detached individuals would be ruled by the dictum, "Might makes right."

            Moved by a fascination with form and suspicion of passion, the authors whose texts gave form and direction to the rationalist strand of the western philosophical tradition escaped this fate by filling the empty literary space projected by the Babylonian epics with conceptions of human reality indebted to the totalizing thrust of continuous prose.  To subject the interrogatory stance to this totalizing thrust in ways that transformed endless questioning into revelatory inquiries, they fused differing versions of the rule of the One in a single literary construct, "reason."  As distinctions among language, experience and reality emerged, these versions included (a) the assumption that analyses of language and experience governed by a principle of logical identity would produce a language consisting of clear and distinct ideas in a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed system, (b) the depiction of reality as a finite, bounded cosmos, (c) the Medieval metaphor which depicted the universe as an autonomous Book authored by a rational and purposive Creator, (d) the sort of existence delineated by the Cartesian conception of a solipsistic thinking being and the Kantian conception of the autonomous individual, (e) Marx's promise that a course of human history propelled by a dialectically structured materialism would produce a communistic society devoid of conflict, (f) Nietzsche's insistence that the operation of an all-pervasive will to power was about to produce supermen who would live beyond good and evil, and (g) Heidegger's confidence that a notion of Being projected by the pre-Socratics prior to the emergence of clear distinctions among language, experience and reality could be used as the god-term in a reading code designed to recover the revelatory power of the western literary tradition from rationalizations enshrined in the philosophical tradition.  In this context, I intend to argue that any use of reason as a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality is full of both promise and peril.  My argument begins with the suggestion that the platform for the triumph of reason in the Modern Era was constructed by Medieval authors.  In effect, the constrictive belief-systems generated by a commitment to the totalizing thrust of continuous prose provoked the revival of the interrogatory stance in Descartes' methodical doubt.

    The stage for Descartes' methodical doubt was erected by Ockham's critique of medieval rationalism.  In and through this critique, Ockham forged a metaphor of individuality which, by privileging the interrogatory stance over the totalizing thrust of language, forced reason to recoil upon itself.  His assertion, "There are individuals:  how do we form valid universal conceptions and universally binding moral judgments?", shifted the target of the interrogatory stance from metaphysical to epistemological issues.  In this context, Descartes forged the literary framework for movements which promised that a privileged method could resolve all epistemological issues.

    To resolve those issues, Descartes encoded the interrogatory stance in a methodical doubt that promised a certain starting point for inquiries and laid the foundation for a myth of pure beginnings.  In the twentieth century, his philosophical heirs sought to resolve thorny epistemological issues by producing a critical apparatus capable of generating analyses of everyday languages and experiences which yielded an ideal language capable of presenting the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail.  (The project would signal the ultimate fulfillment of the promise implicit in Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth.)  In every instance, these ideal language programs assumed that the use of a principle of logical identity in the analyses of the everyday languages used to process experience meaningfully would ultimately yield knowledge capable of generating definitive (authoritative) judgments devoid of arbitrariness, conventionality or the hidden exercises of the will to power exposed by Nietzsche's re-reading of the rationalist tradition.  As they collapsed from within, however, they revealed that the interrogatory stance at the center of the fictive voice of reason produces a recoil of reason upon itself whenever a new -ism succumbs to the seductive power of the totalizing thrust of language.

                 Logical Positivism was surely the most rigorous ideal language program.  Its adherents embraced without question the myth of pure beginnings generated by Descartes' methodical doubt.  To erase the tangled moral issues inherent in the convergence of the personal, social, political, economic, moral and religious dimensions of life, they had to ignore an inter-textual dialogue between Hobbes' effort to legitimate a totalitarian form of government and Locke's supposition that liberty is an inalienable right that continues to distort the political process in the United States today.  To that end, they replaced the debt of both Hobbes and Locke to the Hellenistic conviction that reason must rule unruly and disruptive eruptions of passion and desire with the supposition that reason offers a detached, disinterested, dispassionate perspective.  Presumably, such a perspective eliminates the issue of power from moral discourse and frees passion and desire from the hold of an ethical tradition which characterized them as eruptive and disruptive forces.

           (Hobbes insisted that only a form of government which endowed a dictator with absolute authority could prevent relapses into a war of all against all, while Locke depicted freedom as an inalienable right which could only be subjected to a form of government committed to the preservation and enhancement of this right.)

Catholic and Protestant Polemics:  A Misplaced Debate

    At the dawn of the Modern Era, the medieval metaphor of the Two Books provided the stage for a misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant polemicists.  Through his effort to wed faith and reason, Aquinas had unwittingly woven this metaphor onto the metaphor of power and judgment, the literary source for his rationalistic conception of reason.  Then, to articulate the contributions of reason to an understanding of God's activity in the world, he had argued that, as a Book a authored by a rational and purposive Creator, the Book of Nature could be read by a natural light of reason.  To integrate this understanding of the use of reason with his understanding of faith, he began with the traditional belief that the Judaic-Christian Scriptures inscribed the revealed word of God which depicted the incarnation as God's saving response to an original sin.  Finally, to integrate the readings of both books, he drew the conclusion that God's creative and saving wills worked in harmony from the traditional dictum, "Grace builds on nature."

    Here, the debt of Aquinas's hermeneutical theory to Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin is obvious.  Presumably, this sin darkened the natural light of reason.  As a result, the Scriptures were needed to guide and govern readings of the Book of Nature.  In the course of history, however, the Scriptures had generated wildly different readings.  In this context, a knowledge of the workings of God's creative will could be used to guide readings of the Scriptures.

    In Aquinas' hermeneutical (interpretative) theory, therefore, neither Book spoke as a straightforwardly autonomous text.  The emergence of this literary form awaited Descartes and Luther.  On his part, Descartes argued that, since the Book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics, readings governed by a hierarchically and teleologically structured metaphysical system were no longer tenable.  In his search for a certain starting point for inquiries capable of yielding objective descriptions, he used a suspect application of his methodical doubt to support both the autonomy of the natural order and a myth of pure beginnings.

    In the same vein, Luther grounded his polemical protest against abuses perpetrated and perpetuated by ecclesiastical authorities in a doctrinal formulation, "Justification by faith alone."  Rejecting traditional syntheses of faith and works, revelation and reason, and the sacred and the secular, he invoked a theological discourse which faced individuals with a terrifying choice between a life of eternal bliss in heaven or a life of eternal damnation in hell.  From this starting point, he could argue that, in such a momentous matter, God must have revealed his saving will clearly.  And since his doctrine of justification by faith alone could not be validated by experience, he framed it with a slogan, sola Scriptura, which implied that, if the Scriptures present the doctrine as the word of God devoid of the interpretations imposed by his Catholic adversaries, they must be an autonomous text, self-interpreting and self-referential.

     In this highly literary context, the slogan sola Scriptura played the same role in theological discourse that Descartes' methodical doubt played in the philosophical discourse designed to save Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth.  Presumably, it enabled those who accepted Luther's reading of the Scriptures to strip away traditional interpretations in a way that allowed the true meaning of the Scriptures to show itself.  And that pretense was critical if advocates of the doctrine of justification by faith alone hoped to persuade others that a confession of the utter sinfulness they inherited from Adam would enable them to stand naked before God, open to the reception of the gift of justification by faith alone which restored a relationship with God severed by Adam's sin without transforming them in any way.

    Here, I simply note that the extraction of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone from the Judaic-Christian Scriptures depends on two premises that do violence to that sprawling text.  One is the doctrine of original sin which Augustine extracted from the story of Adam and Eve.  The other is Paul's reading of this text as the history of a Covenant of Law.  Since I read the text as a history which reveals the difficulties involved in integrating orality and literacy, I suggest that the supposition that the Scriptures spoke as an immediate word of God capable of exposing human interpretation was designed to endow this doctrine with the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.

    To support this suggestion, I trace Luther's embrace of the slogan, sola Scriptura, to his desire to erase Tradition as a mediating code for interpreting the Scriptures.  If Tradition is limited to a dialogue of text with text, I share that desire.  With others, I want room for consideration of the sensus fidelium.  In this context, Luther's embrace of the dictum, "Faith comes through hearing," provides such room.  But fundamentalist Christians show that his commitment to Scripture alone takes back what he has given;  i.e., they realize that this commitment must be framed by a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and a pretense that God speaks immediately in and through their supposedly literal readings of a purportedly self-interpreting text.

 

       (Admittedly, my suggestion that Catholic and Protestant theologians have engaged in a misplaced debate for centuries revolves around the literary origin and the implications of Luther's slogan, sola Scriptura.  As a rallying cry, this slogan voiced a laudable desire to recover the authority of the biblical tradition.  When it began to function as the defining trait of the Protestant protest, it ensured that the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant polemicists was framed by a metaphor of power and judgment which functioned as an arena in which authors could vie for authority over past, present and future readings of the Scriptures.

        Sadly, theologians seduced by Aquinas' promise of clear and distinct doctrinal formulations interwoven into a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed belief-system uncritically embraced the polemical structure of misplaced debate.  In so doing, they allowed the polemics to be defined by the metaphor of power and judgment inscribed in Luther's slogan, sola Scriptura and in the doctrines of exclusive election implicit in Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone and Calvin's doctrine of eternal predestination.)

    To recover the biblical tradition from readings governed by the abstract conception of the autonomous text, I offer an extended analysis of the revelatory power of the literary form of the prose narrative forged by the Hebrew narrative tradition and the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets.  Here, however, such an analysis would repeat analyses developed in reflections on the interplay between orality and literacy in the quest for deepening person-to-person involvements.  In the next reflection, however, I will explore the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant polemicists in more depth and detail.