Book Review: The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language

Abstract

The Edge of Words: God and Habits of Language. By Rowan Williams. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xiii + 204 pp. $34.00 (cloth).The Edge of Words is Rowan Williams's first major book since leaving his role as Archbishop of Canterbury, and is a revision for publication of his 2013 Gifford Lectures given in Edinburgh. It is also, in his own words, opportunity to work through an assortment of questions and reflections jotted down over a number of years (p. vi). These reflections focus on nature of our language, and what our speaking implies about ourselves, our universe, and its ultimate context. It is essay, true to bequest behind Giffords, in a certain sort of theology. At heart of these chapters is argument, or at least a series of allusive provocations, that language is not a false or arbitrary construct pushed upon nature. Rather, it arises from a communicative intelligibility intrinsic to nature. Our speaking is at home in world. More than this, it endlessly and generatively unfolds world in representing it. This points beyond world and our speech to intelligible-if unrepresentable in any normal sense-extra-natural context (that is, God). What, at multiple points, is gestured to in phenomenon of our language is something, quite literally, at the edge of words.Williams is careful not to offer this argument as a watertight theistic proof. Nor is it a bad natural theology that offers up God as another datum for dissection. Rather, he pursues intuition that language truthfully and neverendingly represents reality, but describe or contain conditions of its own (p. 172). It suffers from allusive and tense incompleteness, a sort of difficulty (a common word in Williams's writings) that would be case if language's possibility and premise was a communicative intelligence that cannot be denominated as just another item within world.This intuition of allusive, if always incomplete, nature of our speaking and way this leads us toward difficulty is encoded into very way Williams's case is made. Those looking for a clinically logical progression in argument will be disappointed. What they will find, instead, is a series of intertwined conversations and essays. There are forays into multiple fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, poetics, and literature-the last two registers being where Williams seems most comfortable. …