The Beauty of Morphology

June 20, 2008

In Greek this morning, I had an epiphany (a few minutes after downing some coffee - it's always when I have caffeine or go running that thoughts start bouncing around in my head). I began to pen furiously in my moleskine notebook (thank you, Joyanna!) and later e-mailed it to my Greek professor with some additional thoughts. It is here transcribed for your thoughts and comments. For those of you who are not Greek students, "ho logos" means "the word" and "logoi" is the nominative plural form of logos, meaning "words."

Here is the raw, unrevised, unedited transcript of what I wrote. Please forgive its crudeness...I had so many thoughts moving in different directions. I feel like my brain is a jar of ink that someone opened up and spilled half onto the page and this is the result.

6/20/08 - Greek class -
Suddenly the idea of the beauty of morphology is "clicking." The way that letters contract, the way an iota is tucked beneath another letter so that a word can flow easily off the tongue - these are the sorts of things that make Greek more like a dance or a song, not simply a combination of steps or a gathering together of notes. It is the marriage of symbols which have heretofore stood alone. "Gestalt" in all its glory! This marriage reveals that language and symbols are more than simply representative of the Thing to which is points. The meaning, though its source is in the Thing beyond the symbol is found in the uniting of these individual symbols. The medium is the message. As each letter finds its relationship to the other letters of a word (it does so by morphing accordingly), the wholeness of the metaphor is discovered. It is a dialogue between letters, symbols reacting to each other, an improvisation, a bouncing back and forth, two metaphors calling to each other. It is what turns a combination of notes into a whole symphony - each note sings in response to the call of other notes. In this way, language moves beyond discourse and into ; no longer a harmony and a melody, but one song born of the morphing together of two distinct parts. The notes do not cease to be distinct and individual, but in the morphology - in becoming one with another notes - it becomes more fully itself. Before, memorization of these forms and the precise morphological changes was simply so I could know what each word meant - so I might understand what the word stands for. Yet now I see that the beauty is not simply in the "knowing," and that the knowledge (apart from learning the process of morphology) is illegitimate. "Understanding" is not a great leap from one place to another, but a continual shifting, a turning towards. In this, the letters/symbols begin to understand that their "constancy" is only in the Thing they represent, for they themselves are always shifting, morphing, changing. This significance and meaning is not found in their own form, which is in flux, but in the Constant - the One Who is the same yesterday, today and forever. [End of moleskine musings]

I have more thoughts bouncing everywhere now. I was thinking about all this and the idea of the covenant community. I view people not only as users of language, but as language itself; we do not simply speak words, we are words (this goes back to everything I've been writing regarding man as a metaphor for God). It is clear from history that man has continually wrestled with the concept of the individual and the community, from the swallowing of the individual of the Middle Ages to the burgeoning individualism of the Renaissance to the disappearance of the individual in ideas of totalitarianism and similar ideologies. Often the individual and the community are pit against each other. The pervading question is how to be simultaneously one and more than one; how to serve both self and "other than self"? I think the nature of language gives us some insight into this mystery. If there were no other testimony to Christ's deity, the fact that the Scriptures testify that Christ is ho logos would be sufficient, for the nature of words reveals how each "I" relates to all other "I's." Christ is ho logos in which all other logoi live and move and have their being. In Christ, we know what it means to be simultaneously one and many. The saying, "there is strength in numbers," just isn't sufficient to describe the value of the community because the emphasis there is on mass or quantity and not on oneness. In language, the strength of letters is not found in quantity, but in each individual letter relating properly to the other letters of a word. "When two or three are gathered together in My name, I am in their midst," spake Christ. Think of this in terms of words: "When two or more words are gathered together in the Word, the Word is in their midst." Within the covenant community, Christ Himself is somehow present - but He is not "created" by the community. Rather, as the individuals in the community wrestle together to morph into better metaphors/respresentatives/image-bearers of their God, that God is present with them and gives the community its shape and definition. When letters "wrestle" to come together into some sort of distinct word with meaning, they do not "create" meaning, rather, they are formed with reference to the Thing the word represents. The Thing which the word represents exists independent of that word - yet the word does not have any substance or meaning apart from the Thing it represents (otherwise they are simply stray symbols, inert marks on a page, witless sounds). God exists independent of our knowledge of Him - yet we do not exist apart from His knowledge of us. We discover in community that we are not simply a collection of individual letters/symbols, but together whole words - but we are only whole words when we exist in proper relationship to one another. In this proper relationship, a whole word is formed and it well-represents the Thing which stands behind it (and not only stands behind it, but is strangely found in the midst of it; see the poem in Colossians 1). I do not believe that Adam was a "half" representative of God and that he needed Eve in order to "fill in" the other half in order for humankind to be image-bearers of God. Rather, the relationship between Adam and Eve - that they were two yet one - reflects the nature of our God who is three yet one. It is not that Adam was half a man or partial an image-bearer and needed a companion in order reflect the other part of God (some say that the distinctions between men and women reflect different aspects of God's character) but that letters are defined by their relationship to other letters. It is not that people are so very different from one another (although that is, at times, true), but that they are separate entities from one another, yet are meant to live as one. Letters have meaning only when they rest in their proper place within a word. (Could this in any way relate to covenantal nomism? The forms of law [instruction on how the existing covenant community is to live in relationship to one another] have experienced some morphology from the OT covenant community to that in the NT. Likewise, the forms of words and the rules which govern them experience morphology from one language to the next, yet there are still rules which dictate how words relate to each other in every language. There is still a "covenant" of language which each letter keeps and when it fails to keep that covenant - to live in proper relationship to the other letters in a word - it loses its definition. It is not the keeping of this covenant that makes a letter a letter or a word a word, but it is keeping this covenant which enables it to function as it ought to function and retain meaning.)

I want to unpack this more, but that's is enough for now.