What we can learn from an incarnational perspective

The linguist’s theoretical account of language provides a conceptual tool for analyzing not only language but also other forms of human semiosis, including images, the visual arts and music. The theoretical approach taken here aims at the description of language as a social semiotic system, focusing on its role in defining human experience, and enacting social relationships.

Thinking semiotically gives us a new vantage point from which to pursue a knowledge of phenomena around which the human mind perpetually seems to circle but which it never attains. Once we begin to think in terms of meaning, however, it all begins to make sense. Meaning is a prerequisite for reflection and interaction. Meaning enables us to ‘contemplate, in thought, as in a Picture, the image of a greater and better world’, and to share that thinking with others.

An emphasis on meaning is evident in W.K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. O’Donoghue, in an essay on Wimsatt Verbal Icon, describes how Wimsatt “attempts to trace the link between form and meaning, overcoming the traditional assignment of each element to one or the other (metre to form, literary history to content, and so on)” (O’Donoghue 2002:146). In the case of rhyme, for example, Wimsatt “argues that the traditional assigning of rhyme to form as a kind of separate collaborator with sense fails to recognize the ways in which the choice of rhyme is often influenced by the demands of meaning” (149) O’Donoghue goes on to say: “It may not be putting it too strongly to call his project partly theological; an attempt to see the ‘hylomorphic union’ of content and form – defined in Christian theology as the essence of divinity – as informing the whole of literary culture” (2002:146).

This unity of content and form, abstract and concrete, thoughts and things, is revealed in the incarnational aesthetic of Flannery O’Connor, the American novelist and short-story writer, whose art sought to “reunite what the modern mind has severed” (Bieber 1999). In her dissertation entitled “The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor”, Christina Marie Bieber writes, “For O’Connor, art, like the Incarnation, presents a grotesque body instead of making an abstract argument; it reveals through the concrete, particular, untidy and communal nature of human experience – not in spite of it” (ibid.).

Meaning and matter are joined in the activity of conscious and communicative human beings in community. To put it another way, meaning and matter come together in the mix of human interactivity. Neither meaning or matter exist apart from the other, nor can either be fully known apart from knowing what it means to be human.