Mediation and Immediacy

A Key Issue for the Semiotics of Religion

Jenny Ponzo, Robert A. Yelle, Massimo Leone, Jenny Ponzo, Robert A. Yelle, Massimo Leone

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783110690323
• eBook ISBN: 9783110690354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Linguistics

Religion, like any other domain of culture, is mediated through symbolic forms and communicative behaviors, which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality. While many traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to the divine, or to some transcendent dimension of experience, such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility of mediation, which is necessarily conducted through channels of communication and exchange, such as prayers or sacrifices. An understanding of such modes of semiosis is therefore necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the 'ineffability" of the deity or of mystical experience.

This volume models and promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-cultural perspective on these issues by asking prominent semioticians, historians of religion and of art, linguists, sociologists of religion, and philosophers of law to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the topic of mediation and immediacy in religious traditions.

Part I: Classical traditions

Immediacy and mediation in Philo’s interpretation of divine names

Naomi Janowitz

1 Introduction

Numerous religious and philosophical thinkers make claims about the limits of language, stating that the most important dimensions of existence cannot be talked about and thus are ineffable.¹ How language is imagined to fail, and what exactly it is that cannot be talked about, depends on the historical and cultural context. Many contemporary notions of ineffability are based on a presumed late antique Negative or Apophatic Theology. This notion of primary ineffability posits that the deity is better described by what he is not rather than what he is, and best not described at all.² This view of the ineffable nature of the deity is said to represent a wide range of interpreters of Plato and articulates with Jewish claims that the deity is beyond naming.³ Any late antique thinker who uses the Greek modifier “un-speakable” (ἂρρητος) is assimilated into this ineffability.⁴ For example, John Whittaker, one of the most sophisticated interpreters of the 1^st century CE Jewish exegete Philo, argues that Philo wanted to claim that the deity was nameless but was not able to due to the presence of divine names in scriptural texts (Whittaker 1992: 66). Philo himself does not make this argument. It is all too easy to read later ideas about names anachronistically into earlier texts.⁵ The over-simplified histories of the divine name do not distinguish between ineffability, distancing techniques when naming a deity (e. g. issues of deference and honorifics), and name taboos, which do not presume ineffability but rather the danger of speaking the Name aloud. The rich linguistic analysis of the multifunctionality of personal names has not been introduced into studies of Philo’s use of divine names which, like so much written about Jewish divine names, substitutes homogenized theological summaries for analysis.

Far from imagining a nameless, ineffable god, Philo uses divine names as a prism for viewing the problem of immediacy and mediation. Philo’s interpretations of divine names fall on the fault line between the frequent appearance of specific names for the deities in Hebrew Scriptures, including YHWH over three thousand times, and the philosophical articulation of a monotheistic imagining of divinity.⁶ Instead of being beyond language, this transition must be talked about from many angles in order for a new divine mediation to emerge. Clarifying Philo’s divine name strategies will in turn lead to a much more nuanced “history” of the divine name and of Negative Theology in general.

2 Names and name-givers

Gods with personal divine names were not a problem in early Greek or Israelite religious texts, where names were the means for organizing both the appearances of divinity and the relationships between gods and specific locales.⁷ Philo’s ideas about divine names were articulated in the specific historical context of a shift towards a tenuous vision of a monotheistic deity who was the creator of matter, with both monotheism and the role of pre-existent matter being issues of interpretation in his time.⁸ If gods had to have personal names to distinguish them in previous theological traditions, the role of a name when there is a single deity presented linguistic challenges.⁹ Words that previously described a type of being are now closer to personal names, as in the shift from god to God and lord to Lord. The term “Lord” may have been usable to show deference, but that was no longer true when it became a personal name.

Trying to pinpoint the problem exegetes had with names, David Runia argues that for Philo, a follower of Plato, using a name might seem to predicate something about the object named: “[I]mplicit at this point is the Platonist argument, derived from the theological reflection on the first and second hypotheses of the Parmenides, that any name or attribute adds to Being. A name entails predication, which necessarily involves a measure of plurality and—the aspect that Philo will later stress—a degree of relationality” (Runia 1988: 77). However, Parmenides does not make this exact claim. The dialogue states: “But can that which does not exist have anything pertaining or belonging to it?” “Of course not.” “Then the one has no name, nor is there any description or knowledge or perception or opinion of it.” “Evidently not” (Parmenides 142a, translation by H. Fowler from Loeb Classical Library, hereinafter “LCL”¹⁰). The issue in Parmenides is predication about something that does not exist, which does not explain Philo’s stance.

In the ancient Greek linguistic ideology, the term “name” (ὄνομα) was used indiscriminately for nouns, personal names and sometimes adjectives and other linguistic units as well (Plato, Sophist 262a).¹¹ The basic Platonic debate about language was whether names are “natural” (physis) or the result of custom and agreement (thesis).¹² The options are delineated in bewildering detail by Plato in the Cratylus, and associated with particular philosophical schools (Eleatic, Heraclitean). A hefty stream of modern commentary is still trying to clarify the options and Plato’s conclusion (if any).¹³ It is hard to overstate the importance of ideas about names and naming. The models migrate, re-appearing in other cultural debates; for example, are forms of government and political organizations fixed by nature or by communal agreement?¹⁴

Most ancient theorists retained some belief in a natural connection between names and the objects named.¹⁵ Socrates did not conventionalize all names but distinguished between types of names: standard naming is mostly based on convention while naming ideal forms involves a special type of “ideal” names (Parmentier 1994). This point lays out the basic path Philo and others will follow: they are searching for the ideal divine name, a search which will only be abandoned long after Philo completed his exegesis. Philo at times made use of his belief in the natural connection between words and their objects, following the tracks of other Platonic interpreters closely. For example, his etymologies exploit the natural status of word-names.¹⁶

As a good Platonist, Philo was also committed to the role of name-givers as the originators of at least some names.¹⁷ According to Cratylus, the name-giver “is the rarest of craftsmen among men” (Plato, Cratylus 388e7 – 389a3). Others were less sure: “Might the original name-makers have been ill-informed and encoded their misinformation in the names they coined?” (Cratylus 436b, trans. Sedley 2003). Philo happily enters into this discussion since it is an opportunity to present the superior Jewish name-givers. Without wanting to homogenize Philo’s distinct exegetical moves too much, we can trace a series of comments about Moses and Adam as name-givers. Moses offered “perfectly apt and expressive” names (On Husbandry 1 – 2; Colson translation, LCL 3:109). Philo emphasizes that the fit between names and things is perfect since “the name given and that to which the name is given differ not a whit” (On the Cherubim 56; Colson translation, LCL 2:43). The Jewish version, giving the task to only one person, is even more likely to make it successful and “bring about harmony between name and thing” (Allegorical Interpretation 2, 15; Colson translation, LCL 1:235).

Adam, who names the animals, is presented as a superior name-giver with royal status (On Creation 148 – 150; LCL 1:118 – 119).¹⁸ Naming was a test to show his wisdom and he was so successful that the nature of the being was understood through his naming. Adam knows that he does not truly know his own nature so he does not name himself (Allegorical Interpretation 1, 91 – 2; LCL 1:209). Adam does have a name, but it is given to him by the deity who does know Adam’s nature. This exegesis sets up the problem similar to who will bell the cat: who can be the giver of a name to the deity? The deity must have an ideal name, like the Forms, which can only be known by revelation.

3 Philo’s three strategies for divine names as mediation

In addition to the problem of a name-giver for divine names, when Philo moves from the names of animals to those of the deity, he crosses over from common nouns into personal names. Personal names are a special test case where exegetes often articulate meanings and proper use even if they are not sure why. Philo, working from the idea that all nouns are names, outlines how he thinks names work and how they are a model for stud...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Figures
• Introduction: Mediation and immediacy, a key issue for the semiotics of religion
• Part I: Classical traditions
• Part II: Contemporary movements
• Part III: Religious legal systems
• Contributors
• Index