Sacre impronte e oggetti - Università degli Studi di Torino

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Michael Singleton
tended meaning of the spoken words written down by inspired authors
or scribes. For lack of tape recorders they could do no better than
transliterate the Word of God into a Bible or Book.
A classic example is the verse 14 of Exodus chapter 3 seen as the culminating
point of the Old Testament in that Yahweh there supposedly
translates Himself theologically as “I am who (or what) I am” 14 . For
centuries or more, exegetes have pondered over the onto-theological implications
of what they (mis)took to be a declaration of metaphysical
identity. In fact, vulgarly translated, what Moses’ transcendent interlocutor
told him was: “whatever I might be is none of your business,
your job is to promulgate my Ten Commandments!”. As Tennyson
would have put it: “yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die!”.
In oral cultures words tend not to be idle but illocutionary. “Primitive
peoples” such as those of Melanesia would have no difficulty in understanding
what Austin meant by “performative language games” since for
them thinking, speaking and doing were all one 15 . In terms of theological
information, the New Testament is no more informative than the
Old. Long before he found himself transformed by conciliar decree from
the son of God to God the Son, Jesus after having seen it for himself did
not reveal or unveil the true nature of the godhead but more prosaically
proposed (Jn 1.18 exegesis) that since the Infinite acted lovingly the best
finite creatures could do in turn was to love one another. It was to take
two thousand years before yet another inspired Semite, Levinas, was to
come to the same conclusion: let us stop trying to reason about God
and content ourselves with being responsible.
On the field it took me a while to realize that the WaKonongo, like
most people most of the time, make do with a strict minimum of clear
and distinct ideas. While being illiterate did not prevent them from making
their world meaningful and managing it accordingly, it did mean
Paris 1998). Interestingly too, archaeologists have recognised the ambiguous origins
of writing and its equivocal functions – cf. the section “The role of writing
and literacy in the development of social and political power” in J. GLEDHILL - B.
BENDER - M.T. LARSEN, State and society: the emergence and development of social
hierarchy and political centralization, New York 1988, 169-186.
14 A. LACOCQUE, La révélation des révélations, in A. LACOCQUE - P. RICŒUR,
Penser la Bible, Paris 1998, 314-345.
15 M. LEENHARDT, Do Kamo. La personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien,
Paris 1971.