Word, Image, History

In his study of Image, Word and God in the Early Christian Centuries , Mark Edwards contrasts the place of text and language in early Christianity and Platonism. For Christians, Scripture is “an archive of salvific truths that could not have been known otherwise,” while for Platonism the truth is already present in the soul, though it may be reawakened by a text (189).

Further, the two treat the relation of word and history quite differently:

“Faith in the inerrancy of scripture implied belief in its veracity wherever it purports to be a record of historical events. The events themselves may presage events of loftier significance or adumbrate great mysteries, but if they had never taken place in fact, we should have no assurance that there is any truth corresponding to the symbol. The text is iconic, therefore, in the sense that it is a representation, in plain though pregnant words, of real occurrences.” Texts are iconic in Platonism too, but differently: the text “is an imaginative construct – a myth or something merely a plausible account, an eikos logos – of realities that cannot be adequately conveyed in words” (189).

This is especially true of Jesus and his history. These events must have taken place or “the human race would still be dead in sin.” More, Jesus is the word that is found “beneath the many words of Scripture.” There is no such figure in Platonism: “Socrates is a pioneer, an apostle of the examined life, a pattern for all disciples, but it can never be said that he, and he alone, is the truth communicated by the text” (189).

For Christians, knowledge of God and religious experience were understood to be tied to study of the text of Scripture. They believed that knowledge “is granted only through the incarnation of God’s word and image in Jesus of Nazareth, and remains accessible after his ascension only by virtue of his continuing embodiment in the scriptures.” As a result, “there is no unmediated knowledge of which [scripture] is merely an index,” in contrast to Platonism where “the function of Plato’s text can never be more than indexical” (190).

Mystery for Platonists was “the ineffable stupefaction that the soul can hope to enjoy when she is freed from the importunity of the senses,” and in this experience the text can be described as a mystery only in a metaphorical sense. Christians, by contrast, saw the sacraments as mysteries and “made no provision for any private experience of the mystical outside the practice of scriptural commentary.” There were “ecstatic and erotic transports” yet “all such episodes are parentheses to the exegesis of canonical texts, and we have no right to surmise that one could enjoy such states without equally prolonged and reverent study” (190).