Does Homily Work as a Theory of Truth?

Abstract

Patristics increasingly attracts new scholars. Both philosophers and students of human sciences deserve Patristics for its richness of topics, until now discussed under the label of semantics, ontology and theory of knowledge: Fathers are especially appealing for the content of their writings. Without disavowing such an approach, my paper would like to observe how the Fathers did work. Its concern is rather the Signifier, than the Signi­ficatum. How did the Greek Fathers approach the word of God? Before any writing, they held their talks, in a special form of speech, inherited by the synagogue-proclamation and termed a homily. From a logical point of view, a homily is more profitably approached if it is seen as a “language-game,” whose goal was stating the truth-conditions of some crucial sentences proclaimed in their form of life. The homilist succeeded in his task by pairing each sentence of Holy Scripture with a sentence of his own. Thus, the truth-conditions were shown not as a matter of fact, but of replaceable pronouns and other referring expressions.