Faith and Language: Walter Hilton, St. Augustine, and Poststructural Semiotics

Abstract

Perhaps greatest difference between Christian tradition and post-structuralism is that latter questions former by declaring that there is no ultimate meaning, transcendental signified, or God very foundation upon which Christian belief is structured. David Thomson in Deconstruction and Meaning in Medieval Mysticism writes that such disparity has polarized the university community into proponents of 'logo-diffuse' onto-epistemology and proponents of 'logocentric' (107). According to Thomson, poststructuralism's skepticism concerning language has often shifted into skepticism concerning meaning. That is, while it is possible to make claims about language itself, making claims about meaning or signified is impossible because, for poststructuralist, such certainty does not exist--context is all there is. Thomson's insight is that one aspect of Christian tradition, medieval mysticism, understood well fact that human language fails to signify divine. My purpose in this essay is not to argue against Thomson's claims. Quite contrary, using Thomson's claims as starting point, I intend to show that Christianity and poststrucrural semiotic theory can complement each other and that juxtaposing them can help to illuminate manner in which language works in our world. Thomson's essay provides strong argument for reading mystics through deconstructive lens. What he does not do--and what I do not intend to do here--is to deconstruct these texts. I will not use deconstruction as methodology. Rather, I employ it here as viable description of equivocally complex manner in which language works. It is not only viable description of language, but, like structuralism, it holds belief in fact that signifiers produce meaning only in context with other signifiers--and thus that meaning is unstable and negotiable. Poststructuralist critical theory, as I will show, does not provide an apt understanding of use of language concerning Christian afterlife, but no theory can adequately describe such an unknown. St. Paul makes this quite clear in his first epistle to Corinthians: But, as it is written: That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard: neither hath it entered into heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him (2:9). (1) These issues of ineffability and uncertainty are central to what Christian contemplative thinkers have struggled with over centuries. That is precisely issue that I will explore here. mystics, as Thomson demonstrates, held strong belief in limitations of language, belief that aligns them with several aspects of poststructural thought. As representative of late medieval English mysticism, Walter Hilton, in popular devotional guidebook from fourteenth century called Scale of Perfection, writes about contemplative search for Jhesu in way that parallels what Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology and Jacques Lacan in The Instance of Letter in Unconscious centuries later would say about language--namely, that signified is endlessly deferred. English medieval mysticism, however, is not only branch of Christianity to have foreshadowed poststructural thought. Indeed, St. Augustine of Hippo, fourth-century convert known for his Confessions and City of God, frequently struggled with semiotic issues. In On Christian Doctrine, as I will illustrate below, Augustine propounds definition of God that corresponds to what Lacan defines as Real, an ineffable that Slavoj *i*ek in Sublime Object of Ideology defines as both the fullness of inert presence and a hole, gap, an opening in middle of symbolic order-it is lack around which symbolic order is structured (170). Lacan's emphasis on symbolic order, of which language is an integral part, aligns his theories with deconstructive semiotics of Derrida, and these are poststructural theories I hope to compare to excerpts from Hilton's and Augustine's texts. …