Histories of textuality tend to locate “orthodox discourse” as a monological/theological foil to textualities considered in various ways to be new, or even revolutionary, in relation to it. At the same time, modern and post-modern theorists of textuality have drawn productively on the vocabulary, imagery, and metaphors of these logocentric, theological, orthodox discourses. This paper considers the aesthetics and philosophy of language of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin alongside the work of several theologians of the Origenian-Caesarean tradition. Bakhtin himself valorized the dialogism of the modern novel in contrast to the monologism of “the word of the fathers” (Discourse in the Novel [Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981], 342). I consider Origenian theology and exegesis and Bakhtin’s theories of intertextuality as two traditions engaged in deep critical reflection on the metaphysics of textuality.
Origen, Eusebius, the Cappadocians, and Bakhtin range over an aporia at once metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical: the problem of how to hold in tension unity and difference. This aporia lay at the core of early Christian speculative theology in the Origenian tradition, both in speculation concerning the ontology of a God whose unity consisted in multiplicity and in semiotic/exegetical theories that located the unity of logos in polysemy. Bakhtin’s theory of novelized discourse, and related concepts of polyphony, heteroglossia, and dialogism, wrestles with the embodiment of language’s multiplicity in the artisitic unity of modern prose. For both the Origenian tradition and Bakhtinian theory, moreover, the question of the embodiment of logos/slovo in text is also a question of ethics. The paper should also prompt theologians and historians to explore the trajectories of Logos-theology beyond the theological tradition proper and encourage theorists of literature to consider the theological dimensions of contemporary theories of textuality.
No comments:
Post a Comment