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a form of life, a way of being in the world . . . a religious utterance, one might say, acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence only insofar as it is a performance, an act or deed, which helps create that correspondence."
85 Reference is a practice, a construction, not an innate or merely available correspondence. |
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Recalling Aquinas' insistence that "although in statements about God the human mode of signifying (modus significandi) does not correspond to anything in the divine being, the signified (significatum) does," Lindbeck observes that when, "for example, when we say that God is good, we do not affirm that any of our concepts of goodness (modi significandi) apply to him, but rather that there is a concept of goodness unavailable to us, viz., God's understanding of his own goodness, which does apply."86 Our statements about God do not express directly what God is; rather, they shape the way in which believers are to think and then to act, for the narrative about God implies a narrative about human beings too. |
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He then discusses the skill required for one to understand and speak this analogous, propositional-performative language about God. He argues that an affirmation or denial of the religious truths requires familiarity with the implied way of life, that one become the kind of person who can recognize what is true: "one must be, so to speak, inside the relevant context; and in the case of a religion, this means that one must have some skill in how to use its language and practice its way of life before the propositional meaning of its affirmations becomes determinate enough to be rejected."87 |
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Despite Advaita's awareness of the limitations of language and its concern for experience, it insists on the mediation of the knowledge of Brahman through textual knowledge, and so engages the Advaitin in acts of skillful reading. At the same time, and not contrary to this emphasis on language, it formalizes its positions as propositional claims intended to refer to realities outside the Text.88 Lindbeck's model helps us to understand why it is important and useful that truth claims are thus situated in language, and why this situation need not be a reduction of truth to textual meaning(s). His emphasis on how doc- |
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