A longer version of the following essay by James Matthew Wilson first appeared at First Principles. On Friday, February 10, Catholic Phoenix is sponsoring a happy hour featuring a brief talk by Dr. Wilson at the University Club in Phoenix. Click here to attend.
Imagine: you are seated in one of the middle rows of a large auditorium on a university campus. Outside, the autumnal swell of falling leaves and idling students making their way to the dining hall for their evening meal; within, the formal and dubiously interested shifting of faculty and hungry undergraduates, as one old professor takes the podium. The lights dim, a projector hums, and soon the front wall is aglow with a slide of Botticelli’s St. Augustine.
“How to describe this painting?” the professor muses. “The huge figure of the saint, seated at his writing desk, his eyes absent, yet turned upward. His left hand on an angled lectern, evidently bracing a manuscript page, his right elevated. Too recessed to meet his gaze, yet in line with it: an armillary sphere depicting the motion of the planets, which mark but do not constitute time.
Directly above him, in line with the end of his face, a small crucifix that in fact marks the outline of a radiant cross rather than bearing the crucified Christ upon it. Farther back, behind and above his head, a densely printed and illustrated text on geometry, while just below him, set aside for a moment, his Bishop’s miter. Another text is set before him, no doubt one on which he has been writing a commentary or sermon. But now, Augustine seems perfectly still, save for one imposing, thick-knuckled hand whose movement this image without extension in time leaves ambiguous. Is the hand moving toward Augustine’s breast, to rest upon his heart? It might then signify the descent of the radiant light from, and signified by, the cross above him: the movement of the Holy Spirit. Or is it moving outward, the familiar outward-sweeping arm of the orator in mid-expostulation? The painting leaves this ambiguous.”
A literary theorist in the audience stirs, whispers to an already enervated colleague from History that, of course, it is ambiguous, because this is a painting, not history, narrative, or reality. It lacks the temporal dimension necessary even to claim the hand is in motion.
A theology undergraduate, plunked a row back, sinks down in his seat still more, ashamed to confess that he thought the hand must be moving both ways. Augustine is touching his hand to his heart, signifying the presence of the Holy Spirit within him, and so this movement signifies not the evident physical rest of the painting, but Augustine’s confession to his Lord that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” But no less is his hand sweeping out, the gesture of one who professed rhetoric for years in Carthage, Rome, and Milan before abandoning it as a profession for a vocation in the Church—only, of course, to become the first great rhetorician of Christianity, who reinterpreted literally all of creation (that armillary sphere up above) in terms of the creative light of the Cross. The undergraduate knows when he is out of his depth; he just never got art.
This student, if we may imagine him beyond the present scene, will doubtless sink lower and lower in his figurative chair during the remaining years of his education until finally exiting the academy for good. He will go and find a job—unrelated to theology, most likely—aware, with a hint of relief, that he is not intelligent enough to join the tenured ranks of historians and literary theorists. And yet he is correct in his interpretation of the painting and the confident professor is wrong. Further, he is a fictional instance of that minority of living persons who would interpret Botticelli’s painting without, as it were, destroying it: one of those who know that the temptation an ambiguity sets before us to throw up our hands gleefully and exclaim, “It’s indeterminate! Who’s to judge?,” is a temptation to all manner of error—and even to sin.
Conservatives, or rather persons outside the academy in general, have long tended to view the rise of literary theory as a desecration of traditional values of art. What we tend less often to observe is that modern education in literature and the arts has, from the beginning, been in tension with how most reasonably educated persons would read a book, look at a painting, or listen to a piece of music.
Deconstruction, for those who do not remember it or were educated after its relative decline from academic fashion, insisted that writing existed, on the page, hermetically sealed off from ideas in the mind and things in the world themselves.
Such claims seemed to undermine any positive assignation of meaning and merit to a work of literature, and so also seemed to threaten the two pillars of twentieth century academic criticism: interpretation and evaluation. And they routinely excited the disgust of the casual reader, the retail banker and the candlestick maker, because it seemed preposterous that some academic in a turtle neck and corduroy jacket would presume to tell anyone who lives in the world that sentences do not bear a determined, that is to say, delimited, meaning inherent to themselves.
The scandal of Deconstruction has slackened considerably in the last couple decades. Few persons today would hesitate to deride the absurdity of Deconstruction—unless, of course, they are seeking tenure somewhere. But would such persons as quickly affirm that a printed word on a page signifies an idea in the mind that, in turn, immediately signifies a thing in reality? “Cow” on the page immediately conjures “cow,” an idea, in my mind; but does my idea correspond in some intrinsic way to that real creature chewing the real cud on some real pastoral hillside?
My suspicion would be that many, even most, persons would answer, “No.” The relation of a written word to the mental word of an idea is an internally consistent, but closed, system. Any relation between that closed system and reality is strictly arbitrary, as we may conclude from the obvious phenomenon of there being thousands of languages with different and unrelated words for the same thing. “La vache” signifies cow in the mind of a Frenchman, as “cow” signifies the heifer in my mind, but neither sign signifies of itself a real cow or, to speak in terms of essences, the reality of “cowness.”
Clearly, the words of a language are “conventional” signs; the real cow does not necessitate its being called “cow” and nothing else, as we know simply from the fact that other people call cows something else. But a necessary causal connection between reality and word is not the only possible kind of real connection. As Jacques Maritain argued many years ago, the system of signs that constitute a particular language are not simply modeled upon, but derive from, the system of natural signs we encounter from the very beginning of our lives.
Smoke is a natural sign of fire—not a cultural convention levied upon the burning villages of natives by colonial invaders! A shout, a scream, and a cry—very different though they are—may be natural signs of that singular phenomenon, a body in pain. These are three different ways of expressing pain, but no one would say that they are three merely “conventional” expressions; in their variety and proliferation, natural signs make possible the multitudinous variations of signs that, through the art of human reason, become a complete language.
The ambiguity of a word, a sentence, a play, or even a picture of St. Augustine, arises not from its being “indeterminate.” It arises rather from even a simple word’s being what Dante called “polysemous,” or polysemantic. Even so simple a word as that I have used as an example—“cow”—does not suffer from a dearth of definite meaning but from a surfeit of meanings. When we encounter that or another word in a sentence, our task seems not so much to be to decide if “cow” means anything, but rather, to determine which of the myriad possible meanings seems most immediately—if not exclusively—relevant. “Cow” as in a Holstein in the Irish countryside? Or a lean and hunkering steer on the range? Or perhaps poor, loud, gluttonous Aunt Ruthie? Or an overreaction according to the lights of Bart Simpson?
All of us are aware of the de-signification of everyday life that stands out as one of the apparent hallmarks of modernity. A number of years ago, cultural critics bemoaned the loss of the “figural imagination,” the “sacramental imagination,” the “ritualistic imagination,” or of, as the anthropologists had it, “savage thought.” The surfaces and interior of the things of this world seemed to have been scoured with lime, until all that remained were the inert facts and things of “objective” reality. Things had been reduced to facts rather than objects; that is to say, the world beyond the human intellect seemed to stand in no real or meaningful relation to it.
But such a narrative describes neither the necessary course of history nor an irreversible course. What makes the world seem to coruscate with meanings is not primarily the conventions a given society builds up over time, as if culture were constructed upon the meaningless void of “thing-ness.” Meaning inheres in things. The signs that we call conventional or cultural are founded on natural signs, upon the real disposition of all things to signify more than their literal, factitious existence.
The world is composed of signs—things that are intelligible because they have meaning to divulge, something intellectual to share with minds equipped to know it. That’s the real story.
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