Reading Achille Mizzi: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of the Christian Narrative
Concluding Comment
One fundamental principle of historicist hermeneutics underlies the foregoing observations: that the anticipated whole under whose conditions of purpose and procedure an interpreter singles out relevant parts is itself completed only through understanding the parts. Significant becoming emerges from such meaningful reformulations of a postulated whole. This is why it was possible, in the first place, to loosen the traditional rigidity of a Christian narrative without yet losing its traditional effect, or to have a poetic experience of one’s moral sentiment. Being accessed through the distinctive resources, practices, and norms of a literary experience, the Christian narrative no longer remains a merely dogmatic structure, but proceeds along the questioning enhancements of a poetic intentionality. What this seems to require of the interpreting mind is a clear demarcation beforehand of the provisional whole in terms of which one perceives significant contributions, and an equally clear delimitation of the new competence through which that whole is to be enlarged. This, I believe, Gadamer suggests by his notion of an acknowledged bias, of being aware of one’s prejudice rather than endeavouring pointlessly to stand outside it.
Keywords
Moral Sentiment Poetic Language Pictorial Medium Divine Omnipotence Clear DelimitationPreview
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Notes
- 1.One can subsume this use of the word “interplay” under Gadamer’s general conception of play as the act of superseding the subject, goal, or object of a game with the effort to realize playing itself, that is, through further tasks performed in individual games. It is this sense of the recognition of structure through progressive performance that functions also in the interplay between the closure of meaning and the originality of poetic language. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd., 2nd ed., 1989), pp. 101–7.Google Scholar
- 2.P. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 58. Ricoeur later maintains that “without the support of an economy, of an order in which the symbol signifies (...) symbols are threatened by their oscillation between sinking into the imaginary and evaporating in allegorism; their richness, their exuberance, their polysemy expose naive symbolists to intemperance and to complacency”. Ibid., p. 60.Google Scholar
- 3.H. G. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by N. Walker; ed. and intr. by R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1986), p. 21. The articulatory aspect which inheres in this hermeneutics comes from Gadamer’s ability to see understanding, interpretation, and application as essentially one hermeneutical act. As a consequence, interpreting the text acquires the circularity of a system sustained through its particular performances that are, in turn, granted by the possibilities of the system.Google Scholar
- 4.R. Barthes, Mythologies, selected and trans. by A. Layers (London: Vintage, 1972), pp. 118–121.Google Scholar
- 5.P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot — Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 280.Google Scholar
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- 8.M. Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. by W. R. Trask (Illinois: Harper and Row (Waveland Press reissue), 1998), pp. 77–8. Early on in his work, Eliade subsumes the modern world’s ritualistic and textual performances under mankind’s need to re-enact “the primordial events in consequence of which man became what he is today — mortal, sexed, organized in a society, obliged to work in order to live, and working in accordance with certain rules”. Ibid., p. 11.Google Scholar
- 9.Ibid., pp. 189–91. Eliade propounds a modern literature that “has taken the place of the recitation of myths in traditional and popular societies,” and that recalls initiation in a context that is “desacralized or simply camouflaged under ‘profane’ forms.”Google Scholar
- 10.P. Ricoeur, op. cit., pp. 29–30.Google Scholar
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