Let There Be Quotes

“The tendency to approach the question of creation in such all-or-nothing terms is, for example, less pronounced in the Jewish tradition. Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the book of Genesis, as set forth in his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (in Early Writings: 1910–1917, trans. H. Eiland [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 251–269), provides a summary of an alternative view. It is helpful to see Benjamin’s alternative reading of creation as involving six moments corresponding to the following six sorts of remarks to be found in that essay:
(1) In individual acts of creation . . . only the “Let there be” appears. (259)
(2) With the creative omnipotence of language this act begins. . . . In God, name is creative because it is word. . . . (259)
(3) The second version of the Creation story, which tells of the breathing of God’s
breath into man, also reports that man was made from earth. In the whole story of the Creation, this is the only reference to a material in which the Creator expresses his will, which is doubtless otherwise thought of as immediately creative. (258)
(4) In this second story of the Creation, the making of man did not come about through the word (God spoke and it was so), but this man who was not created from the word is now endowed with the gift of language, and he is elevated above nature. . . . (258) God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. (259)
(5) God’s creation is completed when things receive their names from man—this man from whom, in the name, language alone speaks. . . . (255) Language is therefore that which creates and that which completes; it is word and name. (259)
(6) The absolute relation of name to knowledge exists only in God; only there is the name, because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge. This means that God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge.”
― James Conant