Writing and the Order of Learning

Theology was traditionally built upon the trivium and the quadrivium of the liberal arts. One ascended from approximate signs of reality to the more autonomous but thinner realm of numbers and then, beyond both, once more through signs, one intimated the higher creative numbers of God. But in modernity, the priority of grammar, whereby meaning is naturally linked to thing, has been destroyed and equally the notion of arithmos as an eidos, mediating the transcendental One. In that case, the very possibility of theology, save as a dangerous dogmatism, is compromised. Instead of the liberal arts notion of a diversified and qualitatively different writing of sign and number, intimately linked with things, we have now a uniform flattened writing that is at once and confusedly of both sign and number, which substitutes for real things altogether. By the same token that things cannot answer back, we also cannot hear God. But in the manner of certain aspects of Baroque rhetoric and emblematics, a counter-modernity needs to reinvoke an alternative notion of writing, akin once more to the operation of the liberal arts, which in its concreteness tends immediately to combine number, sign, and thing. Such writing can be taken, after Eriugena, to be that of Scripture, and should be that of theology.