Is hermeneutics related to Hermes? The word hermeneutics comes from the ancient Greek verb áźĎΟΡνξĎξΚν (hermÄneuein) â âto interpret, explain, translateââwhich is etymologically and conceptually related to Hermes. True hermeneutics comes from Hermes.
The ancients believed that the messages of the gods were too cryptic for humans to grasp without an interpreter. HermesâMercury in Roman loreâwas seen as the god of speech. In him, the transcendent meanings were translated into human language.
Hermes was a liminal figureâsomeone âin-betweenâ worlds, times, and meanings. He embodied the idea of interpretation as a journey across a threshold. To truly understand a divine message, we must be carried from one realm into anotherâborne on winged sandals.
Without this journey, there is no understanding. Understanding is less a matter of data analysis than a passage between worlds. We must be transported across the threshold by Hermes himself. This ancient personification of understanding was, in its way, a prefiguration of âThe Word became flesh and dwelt among us.â
The Logos becomes a felt Presence so that we might understand God. Echoing the descent of the Logos to earth, C.S. Lewis describes the descent of Mercury in That Hideous Strength in terms that are almost Pentecostal:
âThere came an instant at which both men [Ransom and Merlin] braced themselves⌠All the fragmentsâneedleâpointed desires, brisk merriments, lynxâeyed thoughtsâwent rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry⌠For Ransom⌠it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the whiteâhot furnace of essential speech⌠For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them.â That Hideous Strength, âThe Descent of the Gods.â
It was the felt presence of Mercury that brought celestial clarity to Ransom and his friends. And it was his felt presence that ultimately overthrew that hideous strength whose power chiefly came from perverting essential speech. What is essential speech? Itâs the âreunitedâ speech that slays Argusâthe giant with a hundred eyes, a fitting symbol of the ever-watchful N.I.C.E.
Unless the Word is enfleshed, it remains intangible and therefore hidden. There is no hermeneutics without an encounter with Hermes. Hermeneutics is often treated as an objective method of extracting meaning from a text, as if meaning resides solely in the words. But true meaning can only be found in the felt Presence of the Word.
During Covid, most of us met online, and for a while we thought it was no different from meeting in person. Yet after a couple of years of staring at screens, we realized how much meaning we were missing. We craved flesh-and-blood people. We longed for the eyes, the touch, the embrace. But why? All the words were conveyed just fine. The words were thereâHermes was not.
Without the descent of Hermes we canât feel the heavenly pleasure of being âin the very heart of Language,â which is true hermeneutics. We hear words through headphones, see faces on screens, yet our hearts yearn for more. For what? For embodied Meaningâfor the âWord made flesh.â And then, at last, the Covid restrictions were lifted, and we saw real human faces again.
In that moment, many of us realizedâin a flash of Platonic anamnesisâthat meaning cannot be digitized. It can only be read in the living contours of a real human face. Words without a body may denote, but they do not mean.
âWe should not forget that there is more to the world than what we can interpret. The materiality and immediacy of our experiences are just as important.â Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence
What do Plato and C.S. Lewis have in common? One curious thing about Platonic ideas is that Plato used the Greek word for idea (ξ៴δĎ, eidĹ), which means âto see,â to denote something one cannot see. For Plato, the idea of a thing is its invisible essence. A carrot can be seen; the idea of a carrot cannot. âCarrotnessâ is invisible.
And yet, Plato uses the word âξ៴δĎ,â which means âto see,â to point to the invisible. Why? How do you see the invisible? In Platoâs mind, a thing is not in one of two states â existing or not existing. It can be in a wide range of states depending on how far it is from the Idea of the thing. The closer a thing is to the Idea of the thing the more it âexists.â
Thatâs why Plato uses the term âanamnesis,â which means re-collection,to suggest that learning is essentially the soulâs act of remembering something that it has always known from its existence in the realm of Ideas. The soul is from that realm. It recognizes the perfect Ideas behind the shadows of this world â or it doesnât.
Thatâs why human consciousness is symbolic. Whatever it looks at, it tries to âseeâ (ξ៴δĎ) â or rather âsee through.â Its question is, âDo I recognize whatâs behind this thing or not?â For the soul all things are symbolic. It strives to see the primal creative Logos (the perfect Idea) behind all things.
âThey serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: ‘See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.’â
When the soul creates, it always re-creates. It strives to remember what it saw in heaven before creating something on earth. It wants to create things that âtruly exist.â The more symbolic meaning it imbues in a thing, the more it reminds us of heaven.
âCreation happens when the conscious mind allows the deeper, unconscious forces to emerge and manifest in the form of symbols.â Carl Jung
Thatâs why C.S. Lewis says in TheFour Loves,
âThe most important thing a mother can do for her child is to show him that he does not need her.â
What is donegality? Leonardo da Vinciâs Vitruvian Man represents the âperfect man,â based on the ancient knowledge of ratios and proportions in human anatomy. Leonardo, often called a Renaissance man, depicted something very different from the medieval understanding of man.
His Vitruvian Man is autonomous. Thereâs nothing around him. He is in the center. In the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098, a man is also depicted in the center, except that the space/cosmos he is in is surrounded by the figure of God. The man is literally inside the womb of God.
In the medieval understanding, the man is in the center, and yet he is not. He exists in Godâs embrace. The space/womb he is in is part of a Universal Body that has a head, face, hands, legs, and feet. The medieval man was not autonomous. He was loved. Embraced by the personal cosmos.
He lived, breathed, and moved inside the Divine womb. When the baby is inside the womb, they canât see the mother, but they can divine her motherly presence in all things. She is hidden behind the walls of the world, and yet she is present in everything. The baby literally eats her body and lives off of her â her body is his whole world. The mother is hidden and yet revealed from the inside out.
C.S. Lewis once visited County Donegal in Ireland and was struck by the specific feel of the local landscape. He coined the term âdonegalityâ to describe the unique atmosphere or mood that gives a particular setting or narrative its distinctive character. Donegality is a unique feel of something.
The Chronicles of Narnia is intentionally suffused with a certain donegality so we can recognize the Mother. All its symbolism â the talking animals, mythological landscapes, magical transformation â the whole atmosphere creates an irresistible sense of wonder and and an invitation to ask the main question: âWho?â Who is behind it?
To be born means to go out of the womb and see the mother face to face. But while we are in the womb, we live in her donegality. We see her dimly, as if through the looking-glass. We swim in the cosmos of her Divine Body, eating and drinking her self-revelations.
In J.R.R. Tolkienâs worlds, this âdonegalityâ is even more pronounced because Iluvatar, the Divine Source, is mentioned only in the beginning of The Silmarillion. In the rest of the legendarium, he is not mentioned but implied. He is the force behind all forces. An attentive reader divines his Presence in all the peripeteia of the plot. Tolkien plunges us into the donegality of the Music of Iluvatar.
Both Lewis and Tolkien represented a deeply medieval understanding of man. The man is only himself when he is embraced by the cosmos of Divine love. The Divine love puts him in the center and nourishes him until he is ready to see her face to face. When in the womb, he sees her only in dreams, visions, symbols, metaphors, and parables. She is revealed from the inside out.
St. Gregory Palamas (1296â1359), a Byzantine monk and theologian, taught that even though God is unknowable in his essence, he is revealed in his energies. While in the womb, we cannot see God face to face, but we can know him partially through his energies. God manifests himself through his donegality, the unique atmosphere of the world.
Thatâs why Jesus said, âHe who has ears, let him hear.â Hear what? The heartbeat of the mother, the warmth of her womb, the nourishment of her Body. When we feel embraced, we become ourselves. Divine donegality gives us the energy to be who we are.
How do we understand what a text means? How do we know what Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, or Tolkien meant? Is it enough to read their books? How do we elicit meaning?
Isnât it curious that God didnât come to humanity with a book? He came with a body. The ultimate knowledge of God is enfleshed in the Son of God. He walked among us, and we saw his glory. The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen, touched, smelled, and heard, and tasted Meaning. It affected us bodily. We dwelt in its Presence.
Apart from the body, Meaning is impervious. It is ungraspable at the level of the mind.
As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht says:
âWhat we need is a form of thinking that is based on the possibility of presence and on the possibility of presence being related to meaning.â
Is meaning related to presence? It is. And our ability to perceive meaning arises from our contact with the Form. Meaning is read off of that Form in which it is embodied.
âThat which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touchedâthis we proclaim concerning the Word of life.â
The Logos must be incarnate to be perceivable. Knowledge without a body is misleading at best. We donât arrive at Meaning through interpretation; we arrive at meaning through coming in contact with its embodied Presence.
Interpretation is misleading without Presence. It is a form of narcissism â we tend to reduce the Meaning to the lens through which we choose to see the world. When we see, touch, and taste the Presence, we donât need to interpret. We grasp the Whole.
Interpretation is necessary when thereâs no Presence. Interpretation is the child of absence. In the absence of the body, texts require interpretation. In the presence of the body, they come alive. They walk, talk, and dwell among us.
We see the text, talk with it, laugh with it, eat with it â we have a relationship with it. Meaning is what happens to us as we engage in that relationship. We know without interpreting. If we have to interpret, we donât know.
âBy this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.â
To know God means to touch his flesh. When we touch the Body, we know, and all texts come alive. When we interpret the text without touching the Body, it is a dead letter.
The Spirit loves forms. It loves being in the body. It creates âfelt presences.â Whatever we encounter in a text, whether itâs Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, or the Bible, already exists in this world as a Presence. Something that we can touch, see, and experience.
What is the meaning of Aslan’s name in Narnia? I have always found it curious that the name of Aslan caused such different reactions in the Pevensie children. In fact, when I first read that passage, something jumped in me too:
âAt the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.â
âBut Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror.â
It felt like some judgment was going on. Not externally but internally. The name of Aslan was the ultimate revealer of what was in a person. It amplified the contents of your heart. If there was light in it, you could almost touch it. If there was darkness there, you couldnât help but feel horror.
When I read John 3:19, it all came together:
âThis is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light.â
What is the meaning of Aslan’s name in Narnia? When the light comes, it reveals what is. Thereâs nothing else to judge. Judgment is internal. It jumps from within us every moment we encounter the Light. We either delight in the light or hide from it. Depending on the state of my consciousness in the moment, the Light will either make me lighter or heavier.
The same curious thing happened in The Lord of the Rings when the company entered LothlĂłrien. The effect of entering the realm of the Lady was such that all the company felt the presence of some inexplicable magic.
For some, it was a delight. For others, torment. Tolkien seems to suggest that the whole land was Galadrielâs mirror â not just the stone mirror itself. As the fellowship walked through the enchanted wood, they saw their secret thoughts and desires revealed as if in a mirror.
Some liked it; others hated it. But they couldnât hide from it. They stepped into a land of the Last Judgement unfolding 24/7. Galadriel wasnât the Judge â she was the revealer of what was in each personâs heart. The Judgement was internal, not external.
For Boromir it was torment. For Aragorn, it was a delight. Boromir said,
âIt is said that few come out who once go in; and of that few none have escaped unscathed.â âSay not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth,â said Aragorn.â
In the final analysis, we are all judged by how we respond to our encounter with the Ultimate Beauty. For some, it is an eternal delight. For some, eternal torment. If you come with a pure heart, it is a delight. If you come with an idol, it is a curse.
