Presbyterians In Egypt

Mere Orthodoxy recently published an essay of mine detailing part of the history of Anglophone missions in Egypt and investigating the role of American Presbyterians there. I conclude by asking what American Presbyterian activity in Egypt has to teach American Christians today.

Writing a report of his time as a missionary in Egypt, Andrew Watson had this to say about Egypt’s Christians: “In general, the Copts are a simple-minded, devout, religious people, with great reverence for the Scriptures.”^[1] The stated goal of this nineteenth-century mission had been to convert Muslims to Christianity, so it is striking that Watson and his fellow American Presbyterians wound up attempting to convert the Coptic Orthodox to Protestantism. Their attempts to convert the Coptic Orthodox contrast sharply with the attitudes of the English Protestant missionaries who preceded them. ^[2]

The British and American missions were, admittedly, similar in several respects: both worked—or intended to work—for the eventual conversion of the Muslim population in Egypt, both focused on education, and both were self-consciously Protestant and saw one another as co-religionists.^[3]

There was, however, one glaring difference of approach between the English and the Americans: the English missionaries wished to strengthen the Coptic Orthodox Church’s structures and educate her priests (admittedly, to make them more Protestant in theological orientation), but the Americans hoped to convert the Coptic Orthodox to Presbyterian Protestantism.

So what was it about the Scripture-revering Egyptian Christians that Watson and his American colleagues found wanting?

Read the rest over at Mere Orthodoxy.

Reforming Forgiveness

I have a new essay up at The North American Anglican investigating Richard Hooker’s doctrine of the keys of the kingdom and forgiveness of sins. I argue Hooker is fundamentally Reformed; by consequence, his view is actually very similar to that of nonconformist Thomas Cartwright, a Presbyterian who remained within the Church of England.

“And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:19). This cryptic verse and its cognates were fiercely contested during the Reformation.^[1] Rome argued that Christ granted priests and bishops the authority to “pronounce the sentence of remission or retention of sins.”^[2] Already in his 95 Theses and his Explanations of the 95 Theses, however, Luther took aim at this doctrine; in his early treatise, Concerning the Ministry, he lays out what would become the consensus Magisterial Protestant view of the keys: “To bind and loose is…to proclaim and apply the gospel. For what is it to loose, if not to announce forgiveness of sins before God? What is it to bind, except to withdraw the gospel and declare the retention of sins?”^[3]

In other words, for Rome, priests and bishops bind and loose by their own authority, whereas for Protestants, God binds and looses, and the keys consist in the (efficacious) proclamation by human agents in the ministry of the Word, the sacraments, and discipline. The Reformed tradition’s English incarnation remained essentially wedded to Luther’s articulation of the keys, albeit with perhaps greater emphasis on the ordained minister’s role. This consensus was surprisingly stable across ecclesial factions in the Elizabethan era.

This paper argues that the divines Richard Hooker and Thomas Cartwright, a conformist and non-conformist respectively, held to the broadly Reformed consensus on the nature of the keys. Nevertheless, their rhetorical emphases diverged considerably owing to their different opponents. In short, both Hooker and Cartwright articulated a roughly “Calvinist” position, but they highlighted and foregrounded certain elements of this position for polemical purposes.

Read the whole piece here.

Imitation and Habit: Reflections on Plato and St. Augustine

I’ve been working my way through Plato’s Republic again, and this time, I was struck by the oddness of Socrates’ discussion of narration in poetry and theater. Although brief and strange, this passage might help us think about character formation, particularly given the ubiquity of entertainment dependent upon storytelling and acting. At the least, I suspect it will help us uncover certain of our assumptions about how virtue relates to imitation and the forms of entertainment. I should add at the outset that I haven’t read any secondary literature on this topic or read and reread the argument many times over, so my reading of the Republic on this point is somewhat provisional.

In this passage, Socrates discusses not merely the content of poetry and theater, which is what most of us evaluate when assessing the moral worth of entertainment. Socrates also focuses upon their form, and the key issue of form is imitation (mimesis).

Socrates begins his discussion of imitation by distinguishing between two kinds of narration (392c and following). In one kind, the poet speaks in his own voice, narrating the tale as himself. In the second, he speaks in the voice of another, “mak[ing] his own voice as much like that of the indicated speaker as possible” (393). This is imitation. In other words, Socrates contends, imitation is the poet’s attempt to “hide” himself in the persona of another narrator or a character. While it is curious that, for Socrates, the poet’s adoption of other narrative voices constitutes imitating other people, the more interesting feature of the passage is Socrates’s apparent belief that successful imitation requires that the moral character of the one imitated be adopted by the imitator.

While Socrates leaves this point unstated, it is, I think, implicit in his discussion of how the guardians should relate to poetry, theater, and imitation. He first asks whether the city’s guardians should be imitators. Earlier, he reminds his interlocutors, he argued that “each individual would do a fine job at one occupation” but would be a mediocrity if he tried his hand at many (395e). The same holds, Socrates claims, for imitation: “a single individual can’t imitate many things as well as he can imitate one.” To prove his point, he shows that different actors feature in different kinds of plays. The same person is not well-suited for both tragedy and comedy (395b).

From this, Socrates concludes that, if the guardians are to be good guardians (i.e. “do a fine job at one occupation”), they must be either forbidden from imitating or else permitted to imitate only conduct “appropriate for them” (395c). Socrates worries that, if guardians begin imitating the wrong things, they’ll develop a taste for the wrong things.

There’s a possible tension in Socrates’ understanding of imitation, however. On the one hand, he argues that only a certain kind of person can imitate a particular character well. The same actor is unlikely to be accomplished in both tragedy and comedy, ostensibly because the kinds of people presented in each—and the manner of their presentation—differ markedly. This indicates that the actor’s competence at the one is due to an innate or developed disposition toward it which cannot be easily suppressed. One cannot easily hide in an alien persona. On the other hand, however, Socrates worries the guardians will successfully imitate those they are not like and, in so doing, become like them. Thus, a man cannot successfully imitate someone he’s not like, but a man may become like someone he imitates. How do these cohere?

The most obvious solution is simply that Socrates thinks trying on vicious personae will gradually make someone vicious, especially someone young and impressionable. One may mostly fail at early attempts to imitate a vicious man, but he will eventually begin succeeding, and therein lies the danger. This solution is confirmed when Socrates claims, anticipating Aristotle, that “Imitations practiced from youth become a part of nature and settle into habits” (395d).

But once vicious imitations become part of our nature, what hope do we have? Are all of us consigned to our youthful follies?

Socrates’ discussion of imitation bears striking resemblance to Augustine’s treatment of habit in book 10 of his Confessions. For Augustine, sinners gradually become habituated to sinful lust. Once habituated, sinful people cannot merely resist lusts of the flesh through a decision of the will. The lust of the flesh (sexual or not) takes captive those who succumb to it—and everyone succumbs. Hence, as Augustine put it, he was enslaved to “habitual practices” which would “reabsorb” him and hold him “in their grip.” Those who are so held—again, all of us—are unable to break free on our own. Augustine takes St. Paul’s horror at himself in Romans 7 to epitomize this condition. Even the convert, having repented of his former life, cannot escape enslavement to sinful habit.

At any rate, he cannot escape quickly. Augustine does hold out hope that freedom from at least certain lusts is possible. God’s medicine, Christ Jesus, “is still more potent” than man’s diseases. How if not at the “moment” of conversion, how does Christ heal? By giving “the price of my redemption” to me in bread and wine at the Lord’s Table. Only heavenly medicine heals. Augustine’s belief in Eucharistic healing should not be confused with contemporary theological trends that propose liturgy or ritual as healing balms in their own right—as though mere repetition could free us from ourselves. Rather, for Augustine, the Eucharist is supernatural rehabituation, and indeed, supernatural imitation. In the Eucharist, we pattern ourselves after Christ and are united to Him in His life, death, and resurrection. We gradually put on Christ, hide in Christ, and become imitators of Christ.

 

The Lord is One

I’m excited to announce a new book, published by The Davenant Institute, entitled The Lord is One: Reclaiming Divine Simplicity. I was honored to pen the book’s introduction and, along with Joseph Minich, co-edit the volume. The volume features contributors with various areas of expertise—exegesis, history, and constructive theology— who investigate the doctrine of divine simplicity, its scriptural bases, historical development, and contemporary challenges to it.  We received endorsements from the systematic theologians Fred Sanders and Kevin Vanhoozer and the historian Carl Trueman, among others. Read the description below, and purchase the book here:

After an age of original integrity, the doctrine of divine simplicity fell from grace. Once a cornerstone of orthodox Christianity’s doctrine of God, many modern theologians expelled it from the garden for the sin of employing passé Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. But was the doctrine of divine simplicity’s fall deserved? Is it unreasonable to hold that God is metaphysically without parts? Is the Lord really one? Rather than dismiss the challenges leveled against divine simplicity, The Lord is One engages them, presenting exegetical, historical, and theological treatments of divine simplicity. This volume argues that the doctrine of divine simplicity is cogent and indispensable while also making space for historically marginalized or idiosyncratic articulations of it. After all, once expelled from paradise, nothing returns exactly as it was.

The Freedom of a Christian (Rapper)

I’ve recently written a fun piece over at First Things on the Lutheran contours of Kanye West’s conversion and new album. In it, I poke fun at theologians and writers (like myself), monks, and more. But the piece isn’t all jokes. The core of it explains some of Kanye’s lyrics and put them into conversation with Luther.  You can read it here.

Much to the chagrin of over-earnest theology scribblers everywhere, Kanye West is now one of America’s most well-known public theologians. Some Christians have expressed skepticism about his conversion, others about his qualifications. But the good news for all of us (on my side of the Tiber, at least) is this: The man who insists he’s not a theologian is channeling Martin Luther. To this longtime fan of both Luther’s theology and Kanye’s discography, it seems West has taken a path familiar to totally depraved Protestants the world over: Attempting to justify himself, he wound up condemned by the Law, spiritually desolate, and ultimately saved by Jesus…

 

Interviewed by Alastair

My friend Alastair Roberts graciously invited me to discuss my recent article for First Things on his podcast, and he published the interview yesterday afternoon. You can listen to it here. I apologize for my long pauses and verbal tics–this was my first time ever on a podcast, and I confess I was more than a little nervous!

As I mentioned a couple of times throughout the interview, Alastair’s writing has been very important for me; as a college student, he helped me to see that Protestantism could be philosophically sophisticated and theologically compelling, not only or even primarily as an alternative to Catholicism, but simply as a means understanding, critiquing, and making one’s way in the world. If you do not already, I would highly recommend following his blog, Alastair’s Adversaria.

 

Catholicism Made Me Protestant (First Things)

I’ve recently had an essay published in the October edition of First Things. It concerns my near-conversion to and abiding affection for Catholicism, details why I eventually decided to remain Protestant, and reflects upon my discovery of the Protestant understanding of justification. It’s entitled “Catholicism Made Me Protestant.” I’ve posted an excerpt of the piece, but you can read the full piece either in the print edition (my first time in print!) or here.

Like all accounts of God’s faithfulness, mine begins with a genealogy. In the late seventeenth century, my mother’s Congregationalist ancestors journeyed to the New World to escape what they saw as England’s deadly compromise with Romanism. Centuries later, ­American Presbyterians converted my father’s great-­grandmother from Coptic ­Orthodoxy to ­Protestantism. Her son became a Presbyterian minister in the Evangelical Coptic Church. By the time my parents were ­living in ­twenty-first-century Illinois, their families’ historic Reformed commitments had been replaced by non-denominational, ­Baptistic ­evangelicalism.

This form of Christianity dominated my Midwestern hometown. My parents taught me to love God, revere the Scriptures, and seek truth through reason. In middle school, my father introduced me to theology, and as a present for my sixteenth birthday he arranged a meeting between me and a Catholic philosopher, Dr. B—. From high school into college, Dr. B— introduced me to Catholic thought and graciously helped me work through my doubts about Christianity. How could a just and loving God not reveal himself equally to everyone? What are we to make of the Bible’s creation stories and flood narrative? Did Calvinism make God the author of evil? My acquaintance with Dr. B— set my intellectual trajectory for several years…

For those interested, here are some citations of the works/theologians I quoted in the piece.

• First, and perhaps most importantly to the piece, Luther’s Explanations of the 95 Theses can be found either in Luther’s Works or easily in a pdf if searched for online.
• Ambrose’s doctrine of justification: There are numerous places to look for Ambrose’s doctrine of justification, but this letter to one Irenaeus provides a good summary (Epistle 73). Another instance of Ambrose anticipating Luther can be found in his On Jacob and the Happy Life. There, Ambrose provides an allegorical reading of Jacob’s deception of Isaac which implies imputation as a model for understanding justification. Just as Isaac smelled not Jacob himself, but Esau’s garment, so also, when the Father looks upon us, He perceives the “fragrance” of Christ, not our own. “Perhaps this means that we are not justified by works but by faith, because…the brightness of faith…merits for him the forgiveness of sins.”
• “Mourn and you annul the sin.” -St. John Chrysostom, On Repentance and Almsgiving. This is a theme throughout the work, so it’s not hard to find instances of it. It is also worth noting that Calvin, like Chrysostom, heavily emphasizes corporate repentance in the Church, as part of the liturgy, as a primary means of absolution. (See this post for more on Calvin’s articulation of repentance and absolution).
• St. Thomas and Dordt on predestination: I suspect this was one of my more controversial claims, but it shouldn’t be. First, let me say that, while I know Dordt asserts positions on the doctrines of perseverance and assurance of salvation that Thomas would not countenance, my claim was about their doctrines of predestination. And on this point, the evidence is clear.
  • To put it simply, Thomas holds that God causes predestination in the predestined and permits reprobation in the reprobate. In ST I.23.1, Thomas writes, “It is fitting that God should predestine men. For all things are subject to His providence.” He elaborates in the succeeding article that predestination is not a function of God’s foreknowledge of anything in the predestined (faith, merits, etc.), but rather “in the one who predestines,” that is, God Himself. Thus, “Predestination is a kind of type of the ordering of some persons towards eternal salvation, existing in the divine mind.” In article three, Thomas argues that “God does reprobate some. For it was said that predestination is a part of providence. To providence, however, it belongs to permit certain defects in those things which are subject to providence.” In sum, in God, while predestination “includes the will to confer grace and glory; so also reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin.”
  • The Synod of Dordt’s teaching is essentially the same. Article 7, on election, reads: “And so God decreed to give to Christ those chosen for salvation, and to call and draw them effectively into Christ’s fellowship through the Word and Spirit. In other words, God decreed to grant them true faith in Christ, to justify them, to sanctify them, and finally, after powerfully preserving them in the fellowship of the Son, to glorify them.” Article 15, on reprobation, asserts that “Holy Scripture…bears witness that not all people have been chosen but that some have not been chosen or have been passed by in God’s eternal election.” So again, God causes the predestination of the elect, and he permits the damnation of the reprobate.
• The relevant passage from Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (which actually includes a substantial citation from John Jewel’s Apologia, or Answer in Defense of the Church of England) can be found in Book II, Ch. 6.3-6.4.
• As for the texts of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, I am confident that anyone who has read this far can simply search them online and find the relevant quotations for themselves.

 

“Are You Alone Wise?”

It’s been some time since I posted in this space, but that does not mean I haven’t been working. When I started this blog, I wrote that I aimed to work for the betterment of the Church–neither futilely attempting to recapture bygone eras nor doggedly trying to realize utopian dreams. Rather, I wanted to “rebuild our cities, not dream of Islands.” This, my first-ever published essay, is a modest step as I begin pursuing this goal, or so I hope.

In it, I detail Martin Luther’s hermeneutical commitments, as well as how these worked themselves out in practice by looking at his treatment of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. We have, as I have argued before in this space, much yet to learn from Luther, and much to appropriate for the good of the Church.

I’ve provided an excerpt below, but you can read the full thing over at Mere Orthodoxy:

A decade after he began advocating for reform, Martin Luther had become highly attuned to the fundamental issues at stake in the debates with his adversaries. Having made Sola Scriptura his rallying cry, he was forced to face the chaos that ensued. Claiming his reform but rejecting his theology, radical sects had fomented violent revolution in the Holy Roman Empire.

Several of Luther’s disciples had been executed as heretics. To the south from Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli promoted a doctrine of the Lord’s Supper antithetical to Luther’s; to the West, the great Catholic humanist and former Reformation-sympathizer Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote against Luther’s articulation of human enslavement to sin. All the while, Luther’s Catholic opponents piled on: numerous biting rhetorical questions were leveled against Luther by the likes of Johann Eck, Thomas More, and Andreas Karlstadt, no mean assemblage of opponents. “Are you alone wise?” they asked.

Human in all Respects? The (Commendable) Christology of Thomas Joseph White

In good Thomistic fashion, Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord is orthodox, precise, and deep. One of White’s key strengths is the analytical precision of his Christological arguments; one of White’s chief concerns appears to be upholding the council of Chalcedon Thomistically, maintaining the purity of God’s nature and cutting away the dangerous imprecision of much recent Christological thought. White therefore seeks to reclaim Jesus as the incarnate God-man who atones for humanity by living and substituting an obedient and meritorious life of love before the Father. This paper will proceed by first examining White’s account of Christ’s person, then by explicating his theory of the atonement, and finally by articulating the important convergences with and divergences from 20th Century Reformed theology, particularly that of T.F. Torrance.

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, and therefore Chalcedon, White believes that Christ is God incarnate. Jesus is fully God and fully man; he possesses two natures, but he is one subject. White ascribes “all properties and actions of both the divine and human natures of Christ to their one and only concrete subject, who is the incarnate Son of God” (White, 283). Thus, everything predicated of either the divine nature or the human nature is predicated of the person Jesus Christ. The natures are distinct, but they do not divide Christ in two: “The concrete subject is that one who is truly God, who is this obedient man, etc.” (283).

Crucially, however, although the human and divine natures coexist equally within the single person of Jesus, in practice White holds that Jesus’s divine nature conditions his human nature in important ways. A particularly instructive example of this occurs when White examines whether Jesus’s final cry in Mark’s gospel—“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”—indicates that Jesus experienced the alienation from the Father which properly belongs to the damned. White argues against Calvin, who wrote that Jesus “‘experienced the dread of damnation’” which was humanity’s due (308).  In other words, Calvin argues that Jesus took on the subjective state of the damned–he experienced what it is to be damned.  White argues, by contrast, that Jesus neither experienced alienation from God on the cross nor the wrath of God against human sin (313, 318).

For White, such an experience is simply impossible for two reasons. First, Jesus’s divine nature conditions his humanity such that, because he “in his human intellect possessed direct, intuitive knowledge of his own divine identity and will at all times,” Jesus could not undergo any alienation from the divine wisdom and will (310). This would also appear to preclude the possibility of Jesus experiencing a host of other human states—uncertainty, for example, or the full subjective experience of temptation. The question which challenges White’s position, and which will become important later when engaging Torrance’s position, is this: in what sense can Jesus be said to be fully human, indeed, one who “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin,” if his divine nature so conditions his human (Hebrews 4:15)?

Second, Jesus cannot have been said to experience alienation from God on the cross because damnation entails the pain of “definitive privation of the grace, knowledge and vision of God” arising from “a personal aversion to the will of God” (313). Because Jesus is God, he could not have been averse to the will of God (i.e. his own will) and so could not have experienced damnation, even in a purely subjective manner. At all times, he was in perfect harmony with the Father, and at all times he felt himself to be in perfect harmony. Thus, the divine nature of Jesus qualifies and circumscribes the possibilities open to Jesus’s human nature. Unrelated, but of note, is the fact that White simply defines damnation such that it precludes the possibility of Christ experiencing it; White makes no argument for said definition, and one wonders whether there might be more merit to Calvin’s case than White allows if a different definition of damnation were employed.

Having examined White’s vision of the person of Christ, and the possible problems attending it, attention should be focused on his conception of the atonement. Perhaps surprisingly, White conceives of the atonement in substitutionary terms, only, for White, Jesus substitutes his merits for human merits rather than his life for the life of all humans. Jesus saves humanity by “substituting his obedience and love for our injustice, lovelessness and disobedience, so as to render us just” (349). In other words, Christ’s merits are substituted for human lack of merits. This substitution is possible precisely because Jesus is God and man: “only because [Jesus] is a man like us” can his merits justly be substituted for other humans, and these merits are only of infinite worth—i.e. able to cover all humanity—because Jesus is God (349). Both the human and the divine nature, therefore, operate in distinct but complementary ways to save humans. White does not articulate precisely how the fact that the merits are God’s makes them of infinite worth (simply because God is infinite?), but he asserts that this is the case.

White differs from 20th Century Reformed thinkers, and T.F. Torrance implicitly, in a couple of important ways. First, as was hinted at above, because Jesus’s divine nature conditions the human, White does not think it possible or even desirable for God to “introduce” into his deity “suffering, death, non-being, and separation from God” (351). For White, such an introduction would not cleanse humanity; it would merely taint God. Indeed, a God possessing such characteristics would not be able to save humanity from them precisely because they now existed as fixed features within the divine nature. This would appear to rule out, for White, the possibility of Torrance’s claim that Jesus “made his own that estranged and disobedient condition of our human being” (Torrance 79). For White, Jesus made pristine (or “pure”) human nature his own, but he could not make fallen nature his own without introducing into the single subject of the incarnate God characteristics which are definitively excluded by God’s nature (White 167).

On White’s model, Torrance’s claims about how Jesus achieves redemption are ruled out. Where Torrance claims that Jesus “really took upon himself our sin and guilt,” White counters that redemption occurs by the substitution of merits (Torrance 63). Torrance does not precisely define in what sense he means his claim that God took fallen humanity into himself in the person of Christ, leaving himself open to the claims of incoherence White levels at 20th Century Christological reflection. Did God really take sin into Himself? Surely not. But if not, what does Torrance mean?

Against the Reformed tradition, White explicitly rejects penal substitution as an accurate model of how atonement is accomplished. Citing Aquinas positively, White writes that the penal substitutionary model does not make sense: “It is impossible for an innocent man to submit to a penal substitution for the guilt due another, as if he were to assume the sins of another” (318). White does not consider the possibility of a cultic model of substitution. This is unfortunate, but also particularly striking given that Thomas himself argues that Christ “assumes” sin. Such assumption of sins occurs precisely in the cultic ritual of scapegoating detailed in the Leviticus 16, in which a goat was burdened with (i.e. in which a goat assumed) Israel’s sins and was sent into the wilderness, effectively separating the people from their sins. White does not consider that Christ’s atonement should or could be understood on the substitutionary model of Yom Kippur.

For White, then, in sum, Jesus is the incarnate God who effects salvation by substituting his infinite merits for humanity’s utter lack of merit. Jesus is able to do this because he is both man, and so his work may stand in for man’s, and also because he is God, granting his merits infinite value. It is the work of Christ which is substituted on behalf of humanity, not Christ’s person. This contrasts sharply with Torrance’s vision of atonement, in which Jesus as God substitutes himself for sinners, takes into himself human wickedness and sin, and destroys it. Furthermore, White’s healthy and important desire safeguard divine perfection leads him to condition the possibilities of Jesus’s humanity in crucial ways, to the effect that White’s Jesus is not, in the final analysis, like us. His is a superhuman nature, untouched by feelings of alienation from God or by the possibility of real temptation. Still, if it is hard to see how White’s Jesus could be “like his brethren in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17), it is hard to see how Torrance’s view that Jesus assumed fallen humanity does not do violence to the nature of God.

The World of Persons

I’ve recently been reading a curious and delightful work of phenomenology, The World of Persons. Originally written as a dissertation, I believe, The World of Persons advances a deeply suggestive argument from its first pages. Charles Winckelmans de Cléty, S.J. begins by noting that we generally see and understand objects as both hermetically sealed individual units and as bearing meaning independent of the objects around them. A house bears its meaning apart from the yard upon which it sits, a window apart from its shutters, a nob apart from its door, and so forth. This way of viewing things, de Cléty contends, is entirely wrongheaded.

De Cléty begins with the number 6 on a clock, arguing that its meaning is not independent of the clock. The meaning of 6 on an alarm clock differs from the meaning of 6 in a sequence of even numbers on a number-line. Of course, the number 6 in the context of the clock “means something of its own,” for “its meaning is not identical with the meaning of the figure 3” (3). But does this mean the 6 bears meaning independently of the 3, or of the clock? Assuredly not. For if each element of the alarm clock—numbers, arms, the frame, screws, and so forth—bears its meaning independently, then the unity of the alarm clock, the fact that it bears meaning as a singular entity, becomes very difficult to make sense of.

De Cléty thus proposes that we ought “to look at the whole clock in order to understand the meaning of this figure 6: the whole clock gives it the precise meaning it has in the place which it occupies” (3). From this, he deduces that each part of the alarm clock’s meaning is determined by “communication with the other elements, its insertion in the whole” (3). The clock’s constituent members bear its totality within themselves, and the totality of the clock’s meaning includes the constituent members. “Each element of my alarm-clock has its individuality because it expresses the whole clock according to its particular modalities” (4, emphasis original).

Thus, meaning becomes reciprocal: the clock means what it does only because of its parts, and the parts mean what they do only in relation to the totality of the clock. Indeed, they bear within themselves the meaning of this totality, expressing it according to their own modalities. The meaning of the whole clock is in the screw, but in a “screw-y” way; the meaning of the whole clock is in the figure 6, but expressed differently than in the screw. “There is no such thing as an isolated object” (7).