Ascendant Eloquence: Language and Sanctity in the Works of Gonzalo de Berceo

Abstract

During the European Middle Ages, a fundamental principle of Christian episte mology regarded as verbal both knowledge of God and the process by which human beings arrive at that knowledge. The concept of God as logos, implying reason, wisdom, and Word, identifies God with language and understanding: to know God is to understand or to decipher the message that is God's creation. In order to achieve that goal, human beings have at their disposal the natural world, which God created in his image and which therefore represents a system of signs pointing back to him. Christians can read these signs to advance their cognizance of the divine. In order to facilitate human understanding of the divine, God sent Jesus Christ to earth as Word and linguistic mediator. Christ communicated God's will through his actions and his words, and after Christ, the apostles, martyrs, and saints continued to fulfill that function. Yet the linguistic process that leads humans to understanding is fundamentally flawed. According to St. Augustine, whose extensive writings on the subject es sentially defined medieval sign theory, human language is capable of reflecting reality yet is limited severely by the inherent corporeal nature of words and their dependence on the human senses. In contrast, God as Word implies that in the domain of the divine, words can express perfect understanding and truth through an eternal, incorruptible correspondence between sign and signified. In order to explain and illustrate the difference between human and divine language, medieval sign theory found a perfect symbol in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve transgressed God's verbal command and fell from grace. The resultant physical and spiritual distance between God and humankind reflects linguistic estrange ment as well since Adam and Eve lost their direct communicative connection to the divine.1 In addition to defining the nature of human language and its function in the quest for knowledge, the Fall also determined the moral spectrum of potential uses of words and other signs. If patristic authors recognized language's capacity for drawing the faithful closer to God, they also acknowledged its insidious ability to deceive. In his 1993 book exploring the legacy of the original misuse of language by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Eric Jager traces the biblical origins and