Spiritual Grammar

Genre and the Saintly Subject in Islam and Christianity

F. Dominic Longo

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823283699, 9780823275724
• eBook ISBN: 9780823276738
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Spiritual Grammar identifies a genre of religious literature that until now has not been recognized as such. In this surprising and theoretically nuanced study, F. Dominic Longo reveals how grammatical structures of language addressed in two medieval texts published nearly four centuries apart, from distinct religious traditions, offer a metaphor for how the self is embedded in spiritual reality. Reading The Grammar of Hearts (Nahw al-qul?b) by the great Sufi shaykh and Islamic scholar 'Abd al-Kar?m al-Qushayr? (d. 1074) and Moralized Grammar (Donatus moralizatus) by Christian theologian Jean Gerson (d. 1429), Longo reveals how both authors use the rules of language and syntax to advance their pastoral goals. Indeed, grammar provides the two masters with a fresh way of explaining spiritual reality to their pupils and to discipline the souls of their readers in the hopes that their writings would make others adept in the grammar of the heart.

1 Arabic, Latin, and the Discipline of Grammar in the Worlds of Qushayrī and Gerson

She holds a rod and a switch in her right hand and a book in her left. These pedagogical implements make Grammar recognizable, as do the two children below her, one kneeling and the other with head bowed. The southern Portail Royal of the western façade of Chartres Cathedral (ca. 1145–50) thus personifies Grammar as a disciplinarian and schoolteacher. Indeed, the discipline of grammar was largely about rectitude,¹ enforced by violence, as symbolized by the rod and the switch. None of the other Seven Liberal Arts of medieval European learning was represented in twelfth-century iconography as a teacher.² Grammar, the first of the arts taught to pupils, epitomized the pedagogue.

Students of this pedagogue in the medieval Islamic and European dominions learned what we now call the “standard” or “classical” Arabic or Latin languages through canons of grammatical, literary, and religious texts in elementary, secondary, and advanced stages of education. These students were mainly boys, and the pedagogues were men. Through their mastery of the prestige language of their cultural and religious tradition, the learned enjoyed not only geographic and temporal intercourse across vast territories and ages, but also political and social privilege in their present world. As such, grammar in the Islamic and European traditions was both a foundational and pivotal discipline of knowledge. Grammar was not only the stuff of schoolboys—though it was certainly that—but it was also an avenue for profound and erudite intellectual efforts to discover truth and meaning.

Prestige and power thus characterized the positions of the Latin and Arabic languages in their medieval milieus. Neither in Gerson’s Paris nor in Qushayrī’s Nishapur, nor anywhere else, was Latin or the Arabic called al-ʿarabiyya al-fuṣḥā anybody’s native language. They were rather the languages of literature, of intellectual discourse, and of religion, in both instances harkening back to an ideal from centuries past. In other words, they were languages whose written rather than spoken forms had become primary and whose very use cited and nostalgically referred to a mythical past.

Diglossia is the sociolinguistic technical term to describe this phenomenon in which a society uses a privileged standard language for certain prestigious functions and a native vernacular language for other everyday purposes. Jan Ziolkowski, a scholar of medieval Latin, describes diglossia as “a circumstance in which a mother tongue coexists with a father tongue (usually a scriptural language is used by an educated elite).”³ Calling Latin and Arabic “father tongues” matches the nature of their power in their respective medieval diglossic contexts. Indeed, Ziolkowski observes elsewhere that the term “lingua paterna” or “father tongue” is “particularly appropriate since medieval Latin was used predominantly by males to uphold a male-dominated or patriarchal society. It was a tongue that boys were forced to learn en route to positions in the Church, university, and state.”⁴

The Power of Spiritual Grammar

By writing Moralized Grammar and The Grammar of Hearts in the form of grammar textbooks of Latin and Arabic, Jean Gerson and ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī made a trope out of the grammar of these “father languages” for religious purposes. The power dynamics involved in this trope are not incidental or insignificant. Specifically, the operations of patriarchal power in the diglossic sociolinguistic situations of education and religious instruction are part of Moralized Grammar and The Grammar of Hearts. Texts are, after all, the product of specific social practices and circumstances. Moreover, genre “mediate[s] between a social situation and the text which realises certain features of this situation, or which responds strategically to its demands.”⁵ Genres link texts back to the social practices and contexts in which they are produced.

Contemporary critical theory, initiated in important ways by Nietzsche and further developed by Derrida and Foucault, offers a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that can be an incisive tool and revealing lens for excavating and examining power dynamics that easily remain concealed.⁶ Indeed, a hermeneutics of suspicion can raise vital questions and perhaps impertinent objections to religious and theological studies, including our comparative study of Moralized Grammar and The Grammar of Hearts.

Regarding Gerson’s and Qushayrī’s spiritual grammars from the perspective of critical theory, we see traces of what Derrida called “phallogocentrism,” a patriarchal insistence on the presence in language of transcendent meaning. In their trope of spiritual grammar, both Gerson and Qushayrī use their privileged positions as patriarchs to imbue the structures of the “father languages” of their respective societies with the metaphorical significance of the structures of spiritual reality. In their patriarchal insistence on the presence of meaning in language, Gerson and Qushayrī strive to bring about distinct changes in their readers. They have pastoral objectives for the spiritual formation of their readers’ souls.

Precisely such techniques of formation of the self and the construction of the subject are at the core of Foucault’s lifelong project of tracing the “genealogy of the subject.”⁷ Though nuanced, Foucault was unabashedly suspicious in his excavations of buried traces of insidious power.

Focusing single-mindedly on the patriarchal power dynamics in Gerson’s and Qushayrī’s texts and their marshaling of both pedagogical and religious discourse for specific pastoral goals related to what Foucault would call “the formation of subjects,” we could handily cast aspersions on these spiritual grammars. From such a perspective we could fantasize a scene of Derrida’s “phallogocentrism” and see that in writing these texts, Gerson and Qushayrī—both consummate patriarchs—took up the grammatical rod of the forcefully fatherly schoolmaster. Wielding that phallic instrument of pedagogic discipline in an aura of sanctity, the spiritual grammarians forcefully instruct their puerile pupils by pouring out onto their submissive tongues the sacred “logos” of religious meaning. These medieval masters and religious authorities thus call forth in the service of spiritual direction or pastoral care the scholarly powers of grammar, by which pupils are normally trained merely in linguistic correctness.

Such a view of the possibilities inherent in spiritual grammar is not without merit or insight. Power dynamics of domination and submission were at play in educational and religious relationships of authority in Qushayrī’s and Gerson’s world, as they are in different ways in our world today.⁸ However, the violent fantasy that religious teachers like Qushayrī and Gerson are simply exploiting their paternal position to force a kind of moral or spiritual knowledge onto or into their pupils is reductive and cynical. At the same time, ignoring the power dynamics of domination and submission in Christian and Islamic education and spiritual formation is naively optimistic.

The spiritual grammars of Qushayrī and Gerson are especially well suited to a Foucauldian investigation of the genealogy of the subject—that is, an analysis of how techniques of domination interacted in the Western and Islamic traditions with techniques of the self.⁹ In these texts of spiritual grammar, the patriarchal authors wielded the pedagogic power of grammar to impart to their pupils training in the formation of the self. As James Bernauer has argued, it is possible to find in Foucault’s work a kind of negative theology.¹⁰ A full-fledged analysis of the power dynamics at work in Gerson’s and Qushayrī’s world could thus bring to light the aspects of The Grammar of Hearts and Moralized Grammar and the authors’ other writings that were and perhaps still are liberative rather than oppressive.¹¹

In the present study, what Paul Ricoeur called a “hermeneutics of retrieval” or “hermeneutics of faith” rather than a “hermeneutics of suspicion” will predominate.¹² This interpretive approach reflects my intention of making these texts available and accessible to intellectual and religious readers today. I find them to be of value, and I hope that other readers will, as well. Emphasizing a “hermeneutics of faith” more than a “hermeneutics of suspicion” also fits my position as a theologian who risks still believing and still remaining a member of the Catholic faith community.

This chapter aims to uncover the linguistic politics and cultural significance of the intertextuality of The Grammar of Hearts and Moralized Grammar by which the authors interwove religious discourse with the grammatical discipline of the two “father languages” in question. This exploration of intellectual history in the contextual worlds of the two authors is worthwhile not because Schleiermacher was right that the way to determine the real meaning of a text is through recreating the mind of the author, but rather because a historically conscious reading of the texts will set some reasonable boundaries in our own interpretive efforts to find meaning in the texts for us today.

The Diglossia of the Latin and Arabic Worlds

A first step toward analyzing the linguistic politics and cultural significance of these spiritual grammars is to deepen our understanding of the place of standard Arabic and Latin in the worlds of Qushayrī and Gerson. One way to think about the language situation of the Arab world with its standard fuṣḥā “father language” and its many national and local lahjāt (Arabic dialects) is to compare it to an imaginary Europe where the French, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Italians, and the Romanians speak as they do today but write their texts, deliver their speeches, and undertake classroom conversation in classical Latin. Though Europeans today do not use Latin (much!), their medieval predecessors did indeed.

In fact, both Romance language scholars and Arabic scholars have noted the striking similarities between the Arabophone world today and medieval Europe. One Romance language professor, for example, asks suggestively:

Is it not conceivable that the situation in early m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Half Title
• Introduction. Genre Trouble: Queering Grammar for Spiritual Purposes
• 1. Arabic, Latin, and the Discipline of Grammar in the Worlds of Qushayrī and Gerson
• 2. Genres and Genders of Gerson
• 3. Gerson’s “Moralized” Primer of Spiritual Grammar
• 4. From the Names of God to the Grammar of Hearts
• 5. Forming Spiritual Fuṣaḥāʾ: Qushayrī’s Advanced Grammar of Hearts
• 6. The Fruits of Comparison: Constructing a Theology of Grammar
• Appendix. Translation of Jean Gerson’s Moralized Grammar
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page