Word

Use in the book

The hatching passage lets word and idea emerge from each other, then clothes the idea in the word. This reciprocal process resists the model of language as a neutral label attached to fully formed content. Winged, creeping, fixed, moving, flowing and dry words have different manners of appearing; the list is a working set of material comparisons rather than a completed classification. The words for altars, tombs, inheritance and native land depend on an answering feeling in those who utter or hear them. Indifference threatens their force even when their dictionary meanings remain available.

Places to read

1. I, p. 274, entry 6, ¶1Word and idea alternately hatch, then stand in a clothing relation.
2. II, p. 621–622, entry 15, ¶1Words are distinguished through kinetic and material metaphors.
3. II, p. 859, entry 9, ¶1A group of words requires an affective response in speaker and hearer.
4. II, p. 571, entry 6, ¶1Several meanings contribute to a word’s beauty.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves the hatching reversal and the material adjectives rather than substituting generic good or bad diction. The abbreviated names in the list of word types remain unexpanded; no author identification follows from the lexicon.

Use in the book

Traherne is attentive both to the power and the limits of words. Religious language requires an apprehension of the truth it declares; verbal statement alone cannot communicate the full certainty or enjoyment of a reality. Yet Scripture supplies testimony, forms of prayer, and histories that make communion across ages possible.

The creative Word belongs to another register. In the cited account of divine goodness, what God thinks is wrought by the Word and fulfilled by the Spirit. The painter’s analogy calls the Word the pencil through which divine works appear. These images associate expression with effective creation, rather than with speech that merely describes a world already made.

Places to read

1. III.45Language alone cannot replace insight into the truth of religious objects.
2. III.65In the quotation attributed to Nazianzen, divine thought is wrought by the Word.
3. III.75The psalmic Word of the Lord makes the heavens.
4. V.5The Word is the pencil in the analogy of divine painting.

In this edition

The capitalized Word in the creative passages should not automatically be replaced with Bible. Conversely, “the scriptures are God’s Word” in IV.6 refers specifically to the biblical writings.

Use in the book

Within the earlier thinkers’ account of universal mental presence, mind signifies God’s nature, counsel, and affection to itself and to others. It therefore proceeds from God as a word, more precisely as the meaning of a word, from a speaking God. The next sentence argues that word and speaker are present together, and infers mind’s presence wherever God is.

The correction toward meaning prevents the analogy from being treated simply as an acoustic event spreading through air. The function of the comparison is intelligible expression and inseparability from its source. This is the exposition of the view introduced in II.6.14 and closed in II.6.24; it must not be promoted into an unqualified demonstration that every created mind is everywhere. Nor does the passage equate every human thought with divine speech.

Places to read

1. II.6.20, II.6.21Mind as word, more precisely meaning, supports the reported co-presence argument
2. II.6.24The closing attribution marks the scope of the preceding explanation

Translation in this edition

“Counsel” in this passage renders consilium as what mind signifies of God; it need not mean anxious deliberation, the sense disputed in II.82345. “Affection” likewise names a directed disposition, not necessarily emotional disturbance.

loqui

loqui. Printed forms: loquente; loquitur.

To speak. The co-presence of speaker and word illustrates the theory’s claim that mind is present wherever God is. References: II.6.20, II.6.21. See Word and meaning.

verbum / significatio / significare

verbum / significatio / significare. Printed forms: significat; significatio; verbi; verbum.

Word, meaning, and signifying. Mind is compared first to a divine word and then more precisely to its meaning in the reported presence theory. References: II.6.20, II.6.21. See Word and meaning.