THE MIRROR OF LANGUAGE: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge.

by Marcia L. Colish

Book by Colish, Marcia L.

Genres: Medieval, Philosophy

404 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1968

Reviews

[withdrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book a month ago. A bit slow on the review.

This is a book for those interested in philosophy of language, epistemology, medieval philosophy or who just want a super gateway to Dante’s Divine Comedy. I originally bought the book for the medieval philosophy, decided to read it as a way into Dante and was rewarded with all of the above. Author Maria L. Colish has done a wonderful job of bringing the thoughts of Augustine, Anselm. Aquinas and Dante to the reader by carrying the concept of a medieval theory of knowledge over the period over of some 900 years highlighting both the many similarities and the differences. Most importantly, she does so in such a way as to leave the reader with a much greater understanding of these authors than can be expected from her stated purpose of setting out their epistemologies. (segue)

Early in my forays into academia, I took an introductory English course, one of those survey courses that run from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Henry Miller. For a first writing effort, we were assigned the task of writing an “explication” of a work by of one of the writers we were studying. After the class I approached the professor with a question, “What’s an explication?” (Everyone else seemed to know.) The professor gave me his most understanding look and gave me a short explanation. I responded, “Eh?” (Which is Canadian for, “Excuse me but I haven’t understood a word you’ve said.”) He then referred me to a couple of journals and said that I would find clear examples of explications there. I happily ran off to the library to do some real research (in real paper journals back then).

Following the next English class, I approached the professor once again to ask, “What’s an explication?” He looked at me doubtfully, thought a moment and replied, “An explication is like shooting an arrow through the work, whether a work of fiction or a poem. The arrow is the main theme, or perhaps better, one of the themes of the work. As it passes through the work, the feathered vanes gather everything in that work that relates to the theme. In the process, it also highlights other variant themes. Thus, an explication can clarify whatever themes the author has put in the work, intentionally or not.” Again I ran off to the library, found a book of John Donne’s poetry, picked one, and explicated it. (I got an A.) The image, and the method, stayed with me throughout my studies and beyond. (Segue back)

Colish has provided an excellent example of ‘explicating’ the works of her four subjects. In undertaking to present their theories of meaning, she has, almost incidentally provided a much fuller overview of their philosophical, theological and aesthetic views of God, man and the cosmos. My own understanding of each of these thinkers has greatly expanded because the analysis of each is now connected to Colishes ‘hooks’ in the epistemology. Reading The Mirror of Language has presented me with so much more than I expected. I will not now give anything like an explication of the book as I have probably already lost most of my readers. Anyone still there please shout out.

Just a summary of the main ideas, sticking to the theory of knowledge. Primarily, ‘to know’ for all four medieval thinkers means to know God. Indeed, prior to being able to know anything at all, one has to be able to know God. That being said, knowledge of God is always imperfect. Drawing on Corinthians 13:12, Augustine, as do the three others, says that knowledge of God is possible only through faith and that is not a complete knowledge. On this Earth, we can only know God as ‘through a glass darkly’ (per speculum in aenigmate). Thus all knowledge is inevitably imperfect, possible only through the intercession of God, or more correctly, through Christ the Word. (If you’re still with me, this is where it gets interesting.)

The question then arises with each of these thinkers as to how are they to communicate or even think about such knowledge. Of course, there is language, but how does knowledge work? Like faith, language is a gift from God (of course). Each of the four, with some variation, follow a sign theory of language which Augustine developed out of the Stoic belief that words signify their objects. This signification, or representational view of words, provides the tools for Christians to understand and to teach, however imperfectly. In addition to the Stoic theory, Augustine includes Aristotle’s view that our world is made up of both material and immaterial objects and that both were knowable. Again, knowledge of these incorporeal entities comes through God. We can know them because God has placed the image of them in our minds. Indeed, it is a prerequisite to being able to speak of anything, whether corporeal or incorporeal, to recognize the thing first. (Can’t speak of a dog until you have perceived a dog. Can’t speak of God until you have perceived, in your prior knowledge, God.)

I won’t be going into each of these thinkers in detail. As I said, I read this to prepare myself for reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’m now about half way through Purgatorio, having finished Inferno. Knowing Dante’s thought and goals has made this reading extremely enjoyable. “Man, for Dante, participates in the mission of Christ; he signifies and mediates God to his fellow men through a just and peaceful social life in the divinely sanctioned human institutions, the church and the empire, through idealized human love, and through inspired Christian poetry.” It is through all of these together, Dante as teacher, Christian, lover of Beatrice, and poet, that he, and his magisterial Divine Comedy, must be understood. He understood the world from a distinctly medieval viewpoint, but with the eyes of a poet. I’m so happy to have read Colish’s The Mirror of Language prior to entering The wonderful world of The Comedy. As a 21st Century confirmed atheist I find myself wandering through Dante’s Christian creation in a state of wonder and awe. Marcia L. Colish has created a great explication.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Aesthetics of Truth

I don't like wine. For me it is sour grape juice. But I have friends who claim to taste peaches and blackberries and hints of apricot in their favourite South African or Australian tipple. The same thing happens on GoodReads on a daily basis - Harriet loves Finnegans Wake and George finds it gibberish. Is Harriet better read? Or does George have superior literary taste? Although she never mentions wine or post-modernist fiction, Marcia Colish addresses just these phenomena in her The Mirror of Language.

Up until the late 18th century, there was a generally accepted answer to these sorts of disagreements: the real state of things, the truth, was what was there. And what was there in its most general form was being. Peachiness was part of the being of certain wine; artistic innovation part of the being of Finnegans Wake. If I or George don't get it, it is our deficient appreciation, our inadequate knowledge that is the problem.

Discovering truth, therefore, is merely a matter of comparing what we think about the world with the way the world actually is, connecting words and things properly. Words are conceived as abstract mirrors of the things they refer to. The science of truth so conceived is called ontology. Colish does a first rate job of understanding the consequences as well as the motivation for this ontological mode of thinking from its formulation by Augustine to its deterioration in the Renaissance.

Many people still think this way. It is particularly popular among religious folk - modern as well as medieval - who believe in God as not just the ultimate being but the one who guarantees that the world we perceive behaves according to fixed rules that we can understand. And it's also a popular stand among scientists, Einstein among them, who presume that ontology rules, that we can find out what is really there by getting ourselves out of the way.

But from the time of the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century through the quantum physicists of the 20th, the primacy of ontology has been fatally undermined. Words, language seem a part of us that we can't get rid of. What we know is often a function of how we know it, which inevitably involves words, not necessarily of what is actually there. The science of how we know things, including how we use language, is called epistemology. And it appears that in many aspects of our lives, it is epistemology not ontology that has the upper hand - booze and books being two examples, photons and black holes being two more.

So the interplay of epistemology and ontology is tricky. It's the adult version of the chicken and egg problem: what comes first, being or knowledge? Neither Colish, nor anyone else has cracked that hard-shelled intellectual nut. But the issue of language is an issue which no educated person, certainly no one who is serious about literature, can ignore. The Mirror of Language is an introduction to that issue that is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader.