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Biblical Hermeneutics
Biblical Hermeneutics
Biblical Hermeneutics
29
30 Semeia
And the author adds this decisive remark: "But is not the
Gospel first of all a news?" (37). Some pages later, speak-
ing of the third fragment as a message about the code, he
makes the remark that "this may be one of the characteris-
tics of parabolic narratives" (48). Then, the meaning may
be disclosed in a kind of "mirror-game", "which is perhaps,
within the text, the game of meaning, the miroitement du
sens" (54). And further, considering the equivalence be-
tween "space" and "word": "il y a là une sorte de miroite-
ment structural 'à l'infini' ou en abysme qui est sans
doute caractéristique du texte évangélique, that is to say
of a text of communication about communication (Good News=
Gospel)" (63, note 34) .
This thesis is already a hermeneutical thesis:
there is nothing existentially meaningful to inquire about,
because a Gospel is a communication about communication.
1.443 This hermeneutical thesis is expressed most
strongly by Louis Marin (1971b) in his structural analysis
of the narrative of "The Women at the Tomb" (Matt 28:1-8,
Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1-11). The narrative is a kind of
"Quest," begun by the "desire" (to find the body), and end-
ing in the frustration of the "desire", as a desire of po-
sessing the body, through the symbolic substitution of a
word. "The substitution of the message for the object of
desire" (45) is, in Hegelian terms, "the transformation of
the desire of the object into the communication of the mes-
sage" (46). The factum is the dictum: "The Lord is risen."
But this means only that "a linguistic object" is substi-
tuted for "the object of desire" (47). The message is the
v
dead body as negated.
Here Marin thinks that he hits upon the speci-
ficity of the Christian text: a surface narrative about a
supernatural event tells of another narrative, which tells
the communication itself of the message. "C'est le moment
exceptionnel dans le récit où les choses, le réfèrent,
les corps s'effacent et manquent et où, à leur place, ap-
paraissent—comme des corps, comme des choses—les paroles,
les messages, bref où les mots deviennent des choses" (48).
Ricoeur: The Narrative Form 63
together imply the way back from code to message for the
right understanding of the text as text.
text and the author, the initial situation, and the primi-
tive audience cannot abolish the dimension of discourse
which still holds texts within the sphere of language. Even
writing, which appears as the consecration of distanciation
more than its cause, and which is even lacking in some forms
of oral transmission, does not alter radically the discourse-
character of language. It only accomplishes a trait which
is virtual in all discourse: the distanciation of meaning
and event. In that case, the task of hermeneutics is to
bring back to discourse the written text, if not as spoken
discourse, at least as speech-act actualized in the act of
reading.
If this first condition holds, then it is false
to say, with Roland Barthes, that in narratives only the
codification of "la langue" below the level of the sentence
and the codification of the "text" above the level of the
sentence count: "entre le code fort de la langue et le code
fort du récit s'établit, si l'on peut dire, un creux: la
phrase" (1966:26). The sentence is not just a "depression
between two strong codes"; it confers the character of dis-
course on the whole.
This dimension of discourse is so essential that
the "actantial model" of Greimas relies on the syntax of
the sentence. Even in the most formalized types of struc-
tural analysis, such as the one elaborated by Lévi-Strauss,
the "bundles of relations" which constitute the "mythemes"
proceed from an analysis of sentences and from a grouping
under paradigms which make sense only in sentences. The
overestimation of blood relationships in the structural
analysis of the Greek Oedipus myth is an example.
I conclude that the object of hermeneutics is
not the "text" but the text as discourse or discourse as
the text.
1.522 The second preparatory step concerns the status
of "literary genres" (such as narrative) in the production
of discourse. With this second step I introduce some cate-
gories which are much more important than the distinction
68 Semeia
3.3 Limit-Concepts
To complete these chapters, I should like to add
my own contribution to the problem of the relation between
religious and theological language.
3.31 From Figurative to Conceptual Expression
A first implication which seems to me to be sug-
gested by the preceding studies is that religious language
itself requires the transposition from "images" or rather
"figurative modes" to "conceptual modes" of expression.
,3.311 At first sight this transposition may seem to be
merely an extrinsic change, I mean, one superimposed from
the outside. Figurative language seems compelled to take
the route of the concept for a reason which is peculiar to
Western culture. In this culture, religious language has
always been exposed to another language, that of philosophy,
which is the conceptual language par excellence. It is a
contingent situation transformed into fate that the Judeo-
Christian culture occurred on the borders of the Greek world
and to a certain extent within its zone of influence. This
explains why so many writings in both the Old and the New
Testament express a certain influence of Hellenism. And it
explains above all why the Christian Church was unable to
elaborate a theological discourse without the help of Greek
conceptuality. Christianity borrowed from Hellenism its
forms of argumentation, and even its fundamental semantics.
Such words as sin, grace, redemption, atonement, eternal
life, etc. received their meaning through the mediation of
philosophical concepts available at the time and above all
under the influence of some prominent problematics in the
cultural world of the day; the concern for eternity in Neo-
Platonic spirituality, for example.
If it is true that a religious vocabulary is
understood only within an interpreting community and ac-
cording to a tradition of interpretation, it is also true
that there exists no tradition of interpretation which is
not "mediated" by some philosophical conception. Thus the
130 Semeia
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^ s
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