I’m not sure I know what “literally” means, but I think I will respond “yes” nonetheless. I’m not sure I can find any coherent way to understand Mormonism (Joseph’s and Brigham’s Mormonism) without a very real Adam figure: some real Adam and Eve must have held the keys on earth and must now hold the keys over the council; some real Adam and Eve must have walked in Jackson County and then in Caldwell County; some real Adam and Eve must have sacrificed until angels came with further light and knowledge; some real Adam and Eve must have been given the heavenly gift of writing; some real Adam and Eve must have held a council in the valley and witnessed the appearance of the Christ; some real Adam and Eve must have died; some real Adam and Eve appeared to Joseph on a few different occasions; some real Adam and Eve will come to Adam-Ondi-Ahman to hold another council; some real Adam and Eve will come to set things in order; some real Adam and Eve will take us back to the Garden; some real Adam and Eve will stand as the heads over a great celestial family; some Adam and Eve will be our parents and our gods and the only gods with whom we have to do; etc. If I buy all of that, I’m not sure how to get around the Fall.

But that doesn’t mean that the Fall isn’t symbolic precisely as you describe as well: what else could the endowment mean?

Robert, I’d like to get back to your comments, but I don’t know if/when I’ll have time, especially because I’ve got to go read your post on chapter 2 right now!

Thank you.

Joe, of course the idea of the unspeakable name is not new to me, but it is not OBVIOUS to me. I loved your explanation.

Do you believe in the story of the fall literally?

I see the story as almost all symbol, and yet, what literal truth there is in is in our following that pattern. That is we see Adam and Eve in a pre-existent state, choosing humanity, choosing choices. As we all do, before we come here. We all choose to eat the fruit, to enter mortality. That’s my belief right now, tonight, and has been for some time, actually.

Thanks for your other comments (trajectories, Racoeur, doubling). They were excellent.

Robert, also thank you for your thoughts. I like seeing your your mind interacts with our subject(s), not only here but also on the blog. I am a little different than you because I don’t assume that scripture is telling me how to act and believe and be IN EVERY INSTANCE; that is, scripture is open to interpretation and even to being wrong. I am really one of those people who believe that when I know, or think I know, how best to be, this understanding comes from a combination of personal experience, learning from the experiences of others, and certain interactions with certain texts, and sometimes, through the direct intervention of Spirit. But I really trust my “gut.” More than any text, I trust the voice within. Thus I read Girard with both openness and resentment, openness because most of the time I believe him, resentment because Girard does say that sometimes our inner voices are not correct.

But . . . I’ve also learned directly from Girard not to take offense (as often), not to try to get the best of most arguments, to walk away from conflict. These counterintuitive actions are a result of changes I’ve made because of the text he gives – I mention this because of your comment about being open to being changed by a text.

And by the way, Girard has written about Crime and Punishment in Deceit Desire and the Novel, and also in To Double Business Bound.

I liked very much your ideas expressed in #42: the way of the accuser vs the way of the atoner.

As a final aside, I love great literature also, and I’m a Harry Potter fan, but I also love baser literature. I do. Give me a panting, page turning, quick read and I’ll devour it in one sitting.

In other words, I read practically anything.

I was picturing us all kind of circing the text and poking it with sticks. I’m not sure why I had this image, but there it was. I was thinking that if I was an artist I would draw this image.

The image would work for a lot of different texts, not just this one.

The idea probably does do us a disservice; we have interacted with the text pretty directly, as Joe says. And yet, I have this picture in my head.

At any rate, I’d like to engage much of what has been raised in the last twenty-four hours here. Answers first.

Regarding trajectories: I don’t know that there is any other good way to summarize chapter 1 than to say that it is a kind of call beyond the text, a summons to the evental truth that speaks without speaking (unconsciously or what have you) in the persecution text. (The very idea of taking up a typology of persecution stereotypes is based on this: there are some necessary features of the persecution text that render it a text that allows the event behind it to speak without speaking, etc.) I call this summons a trajectory towards Badiou and Lacan for two reasons. First, Lacan and Badiou were both fascinated by the event that speaks (in) the text, and they have uniquely posed among French (post-modern) thinkers a call to the truth as such, to some kind of uncompromised, robust sense of the truth. Girard seems to be doing something like this (though I’m still trying to figure whether he is doing so naively—that is, modernistically—or knowingly). Second, more and more as the chapter proceeds, key terms in the work of Lacan and Badiou begin to emerge, primarily terms like “real,” “imaginary,” and, of course, “event” (and it is this what-I-almost-have-to-think-of-as-conscious use of these terms that disrupts my almost automatic assumption that Girard is being naive: if he is making reference to Lacan and to Badiou, or to the strains of thought that are at work in their work, then there may be more going on here than any of us is realizing). I hope that helps.

Doubling the scapegoating event: I think Girard begins to anticipate his second chapter when he discusses the inability to speak the word “plague.” That is, he is trying to uncover a kind of typology of persecution texts, a kind of rubric for recognizing a text as allowing the persecution event, again, to speak without speaking in the text. That is, I’m understanding his discussion of the unspeakable name to be a kind of exergue, a conceptual summary of the typology he will work out in chapter 2. Or in still other words, because Girard himself calls this unspeakability a kind of scapegoating of a word within the text, he seems to see this as summing up or gathering together the several textual stereotypes that point to the scapegoating event. The scapegoating event outside the text is doubled by a scapegoating of a word within the text, and this is the overarching or archetypical clue that the text is a persecution text and that it allows the persecution event to speak without speaking. In the end, though, I wonder if I can’t really explain this until we take up chapter 2 together, but see below when I consider the unspeakable name more thematically.

Ricoeur’s “double vow”: This is something Ricoeur formulated relatively early in his career (relatively early in his hermeneutical period, that is), and it seems to me to have characterized basically all of his work on hermeneutics from there out (Ricoeur, sadly, died a little over a year ago). Two vows, he suggests, characterize the hermeneutic: one makes to the text a vow of rigor (or a vow of suspicion), and one makes to the text a vow of obedience (or a vow of faith). The former: in order to interpret a text, one must be willing to question the text, whether in the name of Freud (in terms of the psychical economy), of Marx (in terms of ideologies and material history), or of Nietzsche (in terms of genealogies). The latter: at the same time, in order to interpret a text, one must give oneself to the text, must trust it absolutely and thus allow it to question one, to call one and one’s presuppositions into question. Ricoeur suggests that these two vows enter, in the hermeneutical act, into a dialectic: one’s suspicion and one’s obedience, thrown together in one act, play with and alter each other, so that one’s altered suspicion and one’s altered obedience play with and alter each other, so that one’s doubly altered suspicion and one’s doubly altered obedience play with and alter each other, so that on’e triply… you get the point. The hermeneutic experience thus becomes an event in which the text (which calls for the vow of obedience) and the reader (who calls for the vow of rigor) come to mean something new, come to inhabit the world in a new or different way. (What I’ve been trying to think about throughout our discussions of this first chapter, then, is this: to what extent does Girard agree with this model of hermeneutics, and to what extent is he “simply” asserting that we should take up only a hermeneutic of suspicion? Is his assertion that it is the text itself that gives us reason to suspect something an assertion that we only come to suspicion because we have first given ourselves to the text in faith? More and more, though, I’m convinced that Girard he calls only for a text of suspicion, but I’d really, really like to be convinced otherwise.)

Believing the Fall: Perhaps in anticipation of chapter 3 (nothing of which I’ve read, but the title itself suggests something of what is coming), I’m sensing that Girard does not believe in the Creation/Fall myth, that he will claim that all myths are persecution texts or ways of covering over a kind of primal murder (as in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism). I suppose this is just as much as to say that Girard’s ideas seem to me to imply a rejection (I’d simply love to here this seeming questioned) of the idea of the Fall, because the Fall myth would be the persecution text par excellence. So I suppose I’m formulating my discomfort with Girard to this point as a kind of defense of the Fall, of the scriptures as much as of the endowment drama: I can approach these texts with a vow of suspicion, but not without a radical vow of obedience as well. (Ricoeur, incidentally, marvelously interprets the Creation/Fall myth, along with exegete Andre LaCoque, in Thinking Biblically. The whole book is on my “recommend to as many people as possible” list.)

The unspeakability of the name: Oh, this topic is so rich! Ancient history: to speak a name is to call or to summon, to bring into presence or into reality; hence, to speak the name of the terrible or the horrible is to give it place, to present it or to bring it here and now, which is obviously something one does not want to do. Psychoanalysis and (good ) philosophy: the name-of-the-father is unspeakable because it is the name/word/metaphor that allows all language to be language (as opposed simply to a physical or animal mimic). That is, inasmuch as language is a system or a structure (cf. structural linguistics, Saussure, etc.), it must be built or structured by something outside of itself, and that is the unspeakable name, the name that allows all other names to take on meaning (within the structure). To speak that name that is outside the system—a name that does not differ or defer, that has no differance, and this is very wrapped up in chapter 2… again we’ll have to take this up more explicitly in our discussion of chapter 2—is to threaten the system’s own systematicity, to threaten the possibility of speaking at all. To speak that name is to destabilize the structure or body of language in a movement of pure ecstasy (ecstasy, literally: out of stasis or stability), as one does in speaking the unspeakable tongue of angels or speaks (negatively?) the unpronounceable name of God (YHWH). (Mysticism, right?) Hence, Girard: speaking and writing also have their scapegoats, something that must be thrust from the community or system in order to maintain the systematicity of the system. To speak the name of the exiled (which is forbidden in so many societies in history) is to question the system; to speak the name of what reduces the differences that structure the system to nothing is to summon that threat right into the system, or perhaps to allow oneself to be summoned out of the system into the realm of exile (again, ecstasy). Either way, the threat is very, very real (or imaginary… or symbolic… or symbolically real in the imagination, or really imaginary in the symbolic, or etc.).

These review-type posts are very helpful, esp. as I think about what to post on Chapter 2. Warning, I’ll probably continue to circle the text rather than engage more directly. I’m not really sure why that is, but here’s one reason I might put forth to defend that approach: I want to allow the text to change my core beliefs in some way. In order to do this, I must put my “core beliefs” on the table, or take up the text from the perspective of my core beliefs, or rethink (aloud) some of these core beliefs. I think this approach differs from the way that I read scripture because I am willing to trust scripture more in terms of allowing scripture to form my core beliefs, rather than just engaging my beliefs.

I think this is related to your question about Joe’s question about the doubled-scapegoating at work, and the more general and fundamental question about how a text affects and changes us. This is why psycholanalysis, esp. a la Lacan, fascinates me (and presumably Joe), because it helps us think about the conscious and unconscious issues at work in our mind as we engage with others (a text in particular). By thinking carefully about what goes on as we read a text, we are more likely to learn from the text, and to allow ourselves to learn from a text.

Now, different texts say different things, oftentimes quite contradictory of each other. The core beliefs I put in square quotes above are indeed a scary matter because I think they often work as blinders, at least in a sense. But I wonder if this is avoidable or not. I’ve been listening to a book about ancient philosophy (Gotlieb’s Dream of Reason) and so the skeptics and the critics of certain extreme forms of skepticism come to mind esp. here: can we make our way through life without something resembling core beliefs?

Another big question I have that might help explain some of my circling of the text, is regarding the way I reinterpreted one of Joe’s early points in terms of a change of heart. Probably more than the intellectual changes a text can effect in me, I’m interested in the supra-intellectual effects, which again suggests good reason to be interested in Lacan and all of post-modern-ish thinkers who question the modernist tendency to approach everything merely intellectually/rationalistically.

I’m partly thinking about all this in response to the recent Harry Potter hype, esp. in light of my love for literature. I think that at least in many ways, fiction has more real effect on society (esp. contemporary society) than scripture. In some ways, I think this is a result of “shallowness” in society. But in many ways not. My tendency is to take up scripture more intellectually and I’ve wondered why. I think it is largely because fictional characters are usually written in a way that “pulls me in” more—emotionally, I guess. And the best literature, I think, pulls us in and then exploits that effect in a way that changes us for the better. A simple example might be Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—inasmuch as we relate to Raskolnikov as a character, as a human being, then we are allowed to see something terrifying in ourselves (since he murders a woman). I think this way of pulling us in and allowing us to see something in ourselves that is usually hidden is what is remarkable. (I think, by the way, that J. K. Rowling does this rather effectively also.) I think I’ve had more “truly moving” (read: “cry-inducing”) experiences with literature than with scripture, and I think I’m typical. Is this because of the way I approach literature vs. fiction, or something inherent in fiction vs. non-fictional (or less fictional!) scripture? (Joe, somehow I think all of this touches importantly on our many discussions about “personal application,” at least in terms of the inability to really know something without “living it” in the sense of allowing the text to pervade your being….)

In contrast to great literature, I think shoddy literature can be characterized (or caricatured) as reinforcing a baser belief in ourselves. The easiest stereotype for this is perhaps the revenge play: someone is wronged and the reader/viewer is pulled into the drama because of a desire for revenge which is achieved in the end, though sometimes rather tragically. The catharsis at the end of such fiction is what I think Girard is getting at with this notion of persecution texts—the joy we feel when the bad guys “get what they deserve.” In great literature, we see the “bad buys” more sympathetically, and we learn more about the tenuous balance between good and evil, and we learn to see evil more compassionately, with new respect for our own capacity for evil, etc. etc.

Sorry to be so rambly here. I’m partly trying to get some of the many thoughts I’m immersed in out, so that perhaps I might write something at least loosely coherent that doesn’t appear completely unrelated to Chapter 2….