Is hermeneutics related to Hermes? The word hermeneutics comes from the ancient Greek verb áŒÏΌηΜΔÏΔÎčÎœ (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
Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, the archeologist Klaus Schmidt made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time â a temple complex Göbekli Tepe datingabout 11,000 years old.
The most striking thing about this discovery was that the temple complex dated before the advent of agriculture and a settled way of life. In other words, several tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers decided that they needed a temple and settled. Why?
In the traditional view of societal development (influenced by Marxism), economic factors always precede and predate culture and religion. Economy is the basis, the structure; culture is secondary â it is the superstructure. Culture and religion always flow out of the economy, not the other way around.
Schmidt came to the opposite conclusion. The main motivation for building Göbekli Tepe was not economy but religion â which was a huge blow to the traditional understanding of societal development. The hunter-gatherers settled because they had acquired some strong religious belief which substantiated building a temple.
This gave rise to the development of agriculture â they needed to feed all those people involved in the construction. And ultimately, this led to the creation of a âsettledâ way of life. How we live always flows from what we believe, not the other way around. We create an economy around our strongest beliefs, which are usually metaphors.
Metaphor is the structure; how we live it out is the superstructure. The further back we go in history, the more we find vestiges of metaphor-driven consciousness. Thatâs what Owen Barfield discovered in studying languages: the further back we go in history, the more metaphorical the language gets. Ancient consciousness was metaphoric. Modern consciousness is literal.
Man himself is a metaphor. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were acutely conscious of being vessels of the Divine â images of God. They were icons (âimageâ in Greek). Looking at each other, they saw God. They were walking metaphors â microcosms reflecting the macrocosm. After the fall, this metaphor-consciousness started disintegrating. Adam and Eve started taking themselves âliterally.â
Over time, they started seeing themselves as separate beings â not as icons but as idols. An icon is a metaphor of God. An idol is a metaphor of nothing. It doesnât show anything beyond the visible. Idolatry is the loss of metaphor-consciousness. Our gaze no longer penetrates the images; it is arrested by the images at the level of the visible and literal. This marks the rise of literalness-consciousness.
Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? The children of Adam and Eve always vacillate between metaphor and literalness. When we forget about God, we take ourselves literally. We idealize our earthly existence (economy) over the metaphor (religion). When we get fed up with the meaninglessness of the âliteral,â we wake up to our true nature â we are metaphors of God. We experience a shift from an idol to an icon.
The moment we realize we are icons, we start building temples. We see everything as sacred. We take off our sandals for even the ground we are standing on is holy. We reconnect with God and ourselves as The Metaphor.
