Discourse And The Divine

Theo Hobson ponders Rowan Williams’ new book, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language, emphasizing the way language is “made by bodies in time and space” – a view that “ought to make us utterly resistant to neat tidy systems, and final explanations”:

He therefore argues that there is a sort of wisdom in language, when carefully attended to: it teaches us to affirm our dependence and finitude, and it leads us towards acceptance of linguistic difficulty (or ‘mystery’), and silence. For these things are aspects of how complex meaning is made, rather than just deficiencies. One learns to be patiently attentive to such strange, challenging forms of communication when one grasps that ‘there is no level of representation to which all others can be reduced’.

You could say that attention to language-as-representation promotes a sort of slow humanism, an intense tolerance for how human beings actually make meaning (at one point he discusses the fraught communication of a severely autistic child as illustrative of how all language is rooted in finite bodily life). Furthermore, although one’s meaning-making is limited (by one’s embodied nature), one needs to trust other forms of language that are somewhat alien to one — perhaps this entails positing a general meaningfulness in which all particular, limited meaning shares. Is there an argument for God here?

Well, the atheist is unlikely to have broken into a nervous sweat. And Williams cheerfully admits it. But maybe this is what ‘natural theology’ should do, he ventures: not try to find evidence of the Christian God in the world (an erroneous aim, as it undermines the concept of revelation), but give an account of the world that is congruent with the religious view.