August 24, 2005
-
High Concept, continued:
“In the beginning there was nothing.
And God
said, ‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you
could see it.“– Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” departmentRelated material:
- On the phrase “verbum mentis”
- From Satan’s Rhetoric, by Armando Maggi
(University of Chicago Press, 2001):
Page 110: “In chapter I I explained that devils
first and foremost exist as semioticians of the world’s signs.
Devils solely live in their interpretations, in their destructive
syllogisms. As Visconti puts it, devils speak the idiom of the
mind.37 …. The exorcist’s healing voice states that Satan has always been absent
from the world, that his disturbing and unclear manifestations in the
possessed person’s physicality are really nonexistent occurrences,
nothing but disturbances of the mind, since evil itself is a lack of
being.”Footnote 37, page 110:
“It is necessary to distinguish the devils’ ‘language of the mind’ and
Augustine’s verbum mentis (word of the mind), as he theorizes it
first of all in On the Trinity (book 15). The devils’ language
of the mind disturbs the subject’s internal and preverbal
discourse.”
