6 - Voice and sacrifice

Summary

Scriptura est sicut panis, qui nisi frangatur et distribuatur, non satiat.

Scripture is like bread which until it is broken up and given out does

not satisfy our hunger.

Nicholas of Cusa, Sermones

The extended exegesis of the preceding two chapters posits that the world precipitates from the living and plural speech of God as a text crystallises from the dynamic speech-processes of human culture. But the ‘text’ that deposits through the divine creative act is more properly to be thought of as a ‘Primal Text’, that is to say, it cannot itself be known as text, for it eludes all our constructions, but is that by which textuality is possible. This Primal Text is the very bedrock of spatio-temporal existence and from this our world emerges. It is a kind of primal matter, though not in the sense that the scholastics used this term, for even a Primal Text must combine the material and the notional in a way that primal matter did not. It is not a foundational passivity, which is what the scholastics understood by primal matter, but something far more dynamic, for it already stands in the most intimate relation with divinity, from whose speech it has precipitated, as the human voice, personal and immediate, is encoded and made strange in the visible and material signs of the text. This Primal Text participates in and communicates the divine speaking, but it does so through something other.