When this writer met the late Cardinal J. Parecattil in 1986, he was given a letter addressed to the Secretary of the Oriental Congregation for Oriental Churches of that time. It was a reply to Abp Miroslav Marusyn’s letter about the final verdict on Holy Qurbana. Cardinal asked him: who are we to pronounce a final verdict? We will go and generations will come and we shall not forbid the future to speak. They should have their say. The Cardinal was making a distinction between the said and the saying, as E. Lavinas would say. Any authoritative text does not stop further sayings. Every text is interpreted and understood accordingly in every age. No text is stopping any further talk, because further sayings are possible. Moreover, God’s sayings are not fully comprehended and finalised in any written text. The Holy Spirit is working within us.
Theologian Ratzinger has been shown to hold firmly that the Scripture cannot be understood properly apart from tradition or outside of the communion of the Church. Thus, the text is trying to maintain the proper role of tradition in biblical interpretation. As Ratzinger warns: “to separate Scripture from the total tradition of the Church leads either to Biblicism or modernism or both.” “Progress is the concern of scholarship; basically, the teaching office has the negative function of describing impenetrable terrain as such.” Interpreting St Bonaventure, Ratzinger considered revelation is not equated with scripture, because God’s act of revelation involves both the exterior witness to which scripture attests and the interior illumination of the individual human soul. Bonaventure had tried to understand also the phenomenon of Joachim of Fiore. Revelation, which involves all that God says and does with respect to humankind, is always more than what has been attested to in scripture. Revelation transcends what is written down in scripture.
Levinas writes: “In this said, we nonetheless surprise the echo of the saying, whose signification cannot be assembled.” A saying is an echo, perhaps because of the way that ‘the saying’ circulates within “the said,”… “the saying” as heard, or perhaps because of the way “the saying” despite being absorbed by “the said,” always returns again, like the person who just passed by “the said” is not given priority over “the saying,” wrote Levinas. Within “the said” there is always the trace of “the saying:” Within experience there is this always already there – “the saying” as a meaning in pieces.
The crisis of art criticism is thought of as a loss of criticality: that art criticism has lost its critical edge because it withdraws from playing the role of handing down authoritative value judgements and designating meaning through interpretation, becoming instead a weak relativism that is reluctant to take up a specific position. The dynamic approach that is not “deaf” to either “the said” or “the saying”— does not avoid the agency of declaring a critical position, nor does it abandon subjective judgement. Rather, it is the vulnerability of stepping forward and declaring a response that can help retain this moment of being in question. A key aspect of this critique is not to diminish the subjective role. As a Levinasian approach, this would mean that the doubt and hesitation that can be experienced within the initial encounter with a text can be retained within the final objective analysis. The intimacy and uncertainty of personal involvement involves the risk of failure. Intimacy opens the possibility of failing to respond to the text’s call, of failing to retain the text’s calling, of assembling its meaning in pieces; a failure of not retaining the original “heat and intimacy of a first encounter,” of diminishing that intimacy through interpretation. To retain the intimacy of the “first encounter” means to retain the chance of failure; to retain the question of failure; to retain a doubt and hesitation that always questions one’s own authority, a hesitation that holds back from the “giving signs,” a doubt and hesitation that allows space for the call of the artwork to interrupt. To go toward God “is not to follow his trace which is not a sign; it is to go toward the others who stand in the trace of illeity”. We are called like Moses to imitate God ethically, i.e. in his good deeds. The trace as “the marvel of the infinity in the finite.” God’s signature simultaneously states and erases his presence. To be I, atheist, at home with oneself, happy, created – these are synonyms. Egoism, enjoyment, sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority – the articulations – the sayings.