A text is a distinct union of material and immaterial: as material, a text
is composed of ink and paper, canvas and color, note and instrument; as
immaterial, text includes an author’s intention, will, and desire evident in
the selection and arrangement of particular words ( CG , 100–02). 40 Texts
convey their meaning “as voice in the act of reading” ( CG , 102). 41 The
material elements of a text are “transfi gured” in the process of reception
(whether as listening or reading) such that their materiality is virtually
effaced; the visibility of the printed page is transferred to the aural realm.
“The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion:
my eyes follow the lines on the paper, and from the moment I am caught
up in their meaning, I lose sight of them.” 42 Printed and spoken words
mimic the Spirit’s own mission within the Trinity: Spirit is the medium of
the Son’s agenda and program (John 16.13), and the Son lived only to
show the Father. The voice also manifests this transient character: voice
resounds and echoes only in the present—it disappears, is silenced as the
reverberations become so faint that they no longer agitate the air. 43
As texts are read they become/return to voice, but in this temporal
restoration, the voice “of the author” is not heard as such but coalesces
with the voice of the reader/listener: “from the point of view of the reader
... the written textual signs are integrated into his or her own ‘vocal’ life”
( CG , 103). In this paradigm of transference from written text to voice,
presence is communicated, for voice is sound “so governed by meanings
and so embedded within an embodied and personal expressivity as to be
virtually indistinguishable from the presence of the one who speaks” ( CG ,
102–03, n12). Voice, then, is the reanimation, the coming again into life,
of the text.
Text, therefore, is a deferred incarnation: one places oneself in a text,
one writes oneself into a text, puts oneself into words. This ensures future
vocalizations through the interpretive reception of others: text is “an
extension of ourselves [carrying] our voice into the world to be recon-
structed at every stage by the minds of others” ( CG , 104). This is the
hermeneutical perpetuation of life: one writes to preserve oneself after the
possibility of sonorous speech is gone 44 ; hermeneutical reception is the re-
presencing of the voice of the text, the voice of the author/other. 45 The
divine speaking resulted in the world as text, as signifi cation and symbol of
divine creativity, love, desire, fellowship, and grace. The world-text is “the
distillation of a divine and subjective economy of speech ... the fl uid pro-
cess of oral communication between the Trinitarian Persons, into another,
objective economy ... that of the written sign, gathered up and opened
40 C.C. EMERICK