A Gnostic Christmas Meditation

Religion, for me, is now and has always been rooted in an experience of language as Logos--something I encounter both within and without myself, both native to me and, yet, independent of me. There is nothing particularly esoteric or "spooky" about such an understanding of language: it is a perfectly "natural" phenomenon.

The key (re-)cognition (or gnosis) of my religion (for it is not a religion exclusively or even primarily of faith) is that we cannot get "behind" our symbolic representations of what Kant called "the manifold" (the "found" world) to the thing-in-itself. As a practical matter, then, what really exists for each of us are verbal symbols. Language is the "Real."

Those who submit to this linguistic exigency--"submission" in this case being a form of acknowledgement or gnosis--become philologists in the literal sense: lovers of the word. Our investigations into language and literature are a kind of sacred practice in which we explore that which is and invent/discover ourselves through that practice. Priests of the Word, we labor to induce linguistic epiphanies and bear witness to our philology.

The philologist's religion is an ancient one, emerging from the power of language to fascinate us. Philologists harm no one and save no one--least of all themselves. Linguists or cognitive scientists may offer explanations for the hold that language has upon the philological imagination, but those explanations do not change the fact of the effect that being language's vassal can have upon one. From the philologist's perspective, such explanations are beside the point. They celebrate the Logos, and leave it at that.