A WESLEYAN "GRAMMAR":
LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND WESLEY TEXTS
by
Maxine E. Walker
The following hymn text by Charles Wesley will serve as a case study for the following exploration of the relation of linguistic analysis and Wesley texts in general:
Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven, to earth come down,
Fix in us Thy humble dwelling,
All Thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus, thou art all compassion,
Pure, unbounded love thou art;
Visit us with thy salvation!
Enter every trembling heart.
Breathe, O breath Thy loving Spirit
Into every troubled breast!
Let us all in Thee inherit,
Let us find Thy second rest;
Take away our bent to sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
End of faith, as its beginning,
Set our hearts at liberty.
Come, Almighty to deliver,
Let us all Thy grace receive;
Suddenly return, and never,
Never more Thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
Serve Thee as Thy hosts above,
Pray, and praise Thee without ceasing,
Glory in Thy perfect love.
Finish then Thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see Thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in Thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.[1]
This well-known hymn has been and remains an act of praise for the faithful, a poetic piece of "experimental and practical divinity." It is a hymn with familiar doxological phrases, but what features of a Wesleyan "grammar" might be disclosed if the poem were "read closely"? That is to say, what if it were "read" by a New Critic, a Structuralist, a Deconstructionist? That such ways of reading are situated in recent cultural-linguistic perspectives is well-known, but what is less determined is whether those ways of reading open the questions and issues that are essential in reflections on the Wesleys' understanding of religious experience and normative doctrinal statements.[2]
Readings from these perspectives - New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction-with their respective assumptions and methodologies, discover the Wesleyan emphasis on the metonymic context as an alternative to metaphoric self-certainty. Metaphor is based on similarity and substitution; metonymy holds contexts together. A metonymic emphasis sets an expanding context in space and time; objects are placed in the larger world of ordinary things. As an alternative to metaphoric representation and substitution, the hymn uses metonymic participation. This is to say that religious knowing is being born into and living a life shaped by a religious tradition transmitted through committed communities. Accepting the central and distinctive practices and convictions of that tradition is to learn the language, to learn the "grammar." Thus, the thesis of this article is that the metonymic accents of this Wesley hymn suggest that an essential feature of a Wesleyan "grammar" begins with the lived reality of the believer and the faithful community in space and time, in contrast to establishing propositional meanings.
Why is it valuable to "read closely" when others have "closely read" the corpus of Wesley's hymns and offer such vital comments as: "it was his [Charles Wesley] blend of the biblical witness with Augustan poetic diction, and classical theology-a synthesis born in and shaped to induce Christian experience-which gave Charles Wesley's soteriological expressions (and the hymns that bear them) a life even into our own day"?[3] Can any advance in understanding occur when a representative Wesleyan hymn from the eighteenth century, an age that accepted the premise that art imitates life, is read with what some label "postliberal hermeneutical strategies"? Thematic, traditional, unequivocal readings of any poem, particularly of religious poetry, have served the academy as well the community of believers. To abandon reading the poem's connection in light of thematic or doctrinal statements may lead to some kind of "anarchical" reading.
As a professor of literature in a Christian college, my bright students grapple with the metaphorical complexities of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and learn faith described in symbolic paradoxes. They recognize the metonymic images in Robert Frost's Stopping by a Wood on a Snowy Evening as part of their own journey. Then, someone always wants to know whether, as a Christian in the Wesleyan tradition, one can/should read deconstructively, whether core writings in one's own heritage are to be "read" as one reads Thomas Hardy or John Milton for the "hinges" and points of unraveling. Critic J. Hillis Miller, whose own deconstructive critical efforts have highly influenced deconstruction practices in America, understands this dilemma:
Any method of criticism which presupposes that meaning in literature is exclusively derived from the interrelations of words, or from the experiences of a self-enclosed mind, or from the living together of a people will be unable to confront religious themes in literature as such. . . .Only if there is such a thing as the spiritual history of a culture or of a person, a history determined in part at least by God himself as well as by human beings in their attitude toward God, can religious motifs in literature have a properly religious meaning. The scholar's position on this issue will follow from his religious convictions, which returns me to the assertion that the religious commitment of the critic, or lack of it, cannot be considered irrelevant to his work [italics mine].[4]
A similar point is well-made by Miroslav Volf:
The history of Jesus Christ is more than a complex "web of significance." Even though the history is accessible to us only with the help of a system of intersignifications, this history itself is always much more than this system of intersignifications. . . . The history of Jesus Christ is about how symbolic fields intersect with relations of force, how the systems of signification that come from Jesus Christ influence the systems of significations and the fields of forces around him, how his own nondiscursive and nonsemiotic behavior shapes the field of multiple forces and influences the webs of significations of the culture in which he lived.[5]
These two scholars, Miller and Volf, rightly posit a divine referent for "religious" meaning in space and time, and yet the strength of current secular linguistic studies dominates in its seeing and describing relationships between the signs. The referent appears to be of little consequence, and, if this is the case, then reading a Wesley hymn in light of these linguistic considerations is contrary to Wesleyan theology. Thus, it seems important to forge ahead to uncover the ways that language works in this Wesley hymn. We seek to discover how culturally-coded "structures" are riddled with human presumption and power, and yet are the very places of divine action and transformation.
Reading 1: New Criticism and the Mock-Metaphor
New criticism gives literary theorists an assurance that the language in the text provides meaning and returns Wesleyans to the Wesleys' texts and to the primary sources that shaped their theology. For New Critics, the organic work of art is self-revealing and self-contained and serves as its own authority.[6] Readers "read" in isolation, and then compare their readings in search of the right "keys" to the meaning of the poem. Metaphor is the trope in New Criticism, for it pulls the transcendent external world into poem. Metaphor maintains the possibility of a vertical world that links the transcendent with the immanent, or at least an abstract conceptual realm linked to a concrete world, and the central metaphor is explained and analyzed so that the mystery of the transcendent becomes apparent and accessible.
The controlling metaphor of "Love Divine" is essentially an incarnational one, the indwelling of the Divine in persons. Human beings are "temples," a place where the Divine comes and where human beings come to worship, and this temple is defined as "new creation." The metaphor proper is introduced in stanza five. In preparation for this metaphor, the opening line in each of the preceding stanzas is about the nature of God and the line immediately following comments on what God is doing for human beings. In stanza two, "unbounded love" comes down to earth; in stanza three, "Thy loving Spirit" is breathed into every loving breast; in stanza five the Almighty gives "grace" ("life" in some editions). Following the fifth stanza, each first line does not comment directly on an attribute of the Divine, but either identifies what persons do in response to this indwelling or notes God's continuing action in this "new creation." The metaphor at the mid-point links the vertical and horizontal. The fullness of God and human need are linked. In the progression of the stanzas, the new creation takes on the characteristics of the divine, "purity" that has the sense of qualitative difference and "spotlessness" that evokes quantitative difference. The metaphor comes full circle.
In the structure of the stanza sequences, the poet links the divine to the human by the horizontal and vertical application of "all." The adjective "all" is connected to the divine attributes in a vertical way: "all loves excelling," "all Thy faithful mercies," "all compassion," "pure, unbounded love," "Thy perfect love." In these phrases, "all," especially used in conjunction with "perfect," refers to the total entity or the extent of all - the utmost about the divine from a human view. On the other hand, the adjective "all" when applied to humanity refers to the entire number and duration on the horizontal plane of human existence - "Let us all in Thee inherit; "Let us all Thy life receive; "Thee we would be always blessing." The inclusion of Alpha and Omega, synecdoche for the entire Greek alphabet, in addition to the paradox of the faith as both end and beginning, again draws attention to the junction where the vertical and horizontal planes cross.
Reinforcing this link between the eternal and the temporal, persons have the confidence to speak to God in the imperative. Regardless of the creature's low estate, the descending movement of the Almighty to earth allows the poet to address the divine - "Fix, Visit, Enter, Breathe, Take Away, Set, Come, Finish" - as well as the repeated use of "let" as an auxiliary verb for the imperative - "Let us inherit. . .find. . . receive." The poet makes the assumption that "Thy salvation," the reception of "Thy life," "second rest," and deliverance are possible. This Triune Being descends as a special visitor and apparently has every intention of entering into the physicality of human life. The repetition of the emphatic "never" also reinforces this tone of confidence that the poet has in addressing the Divine. Sweeping categories of "all" and "never" include the scope of existence begotten and created.
The metaphor appears straightforward enough and appears to contain all that is necessary for faith and salvation. Throughout the poem, however, paradox pulls at the harmony of the metaphor, the paradox that characterizes the Incarnation itself. The paradox that is at the heart of Christian mystery and that is the key to the meaning of this poem is essentially this: He who is limitless love dwells in the limited; He who cannot be "bound" comes to dwell in a physical heart, a "troubled breast." Moreover, as persons become aware of their poor plight, they also become confident to address God and to participate in that divine life.
In the last stanza something happens to the language that does not fit in with the metaphorical harmony. The poet fast forwards to the end of the Christian's life. Once again, the believer is "lost." The redeemed are set at liberty only to be "lost" in heaven. The various denotative meanings of this word "lost" (deriving from the past participle of "to lose") are all at variance with the context of the word in the poem. "Lost" does not mean here "strayed or misplaced," "gone in time," "morally astray or fallen," "bewildered," "unable to function," or "no longer practiced." Instead, the word "lost" in the last line of the last stanza, "lost in wonder, love, and praise," takes on an ironical yet accommodating connotation of doing what "we" want to do, what "we" are "made" to do as a new creation. The New Critic argues that the metaphor takes on an additional ironic complexity in that "we" are "lost" as temples of the Divine.
The poet makes it clear that the Divine is known as the Three-One God throughout the way of salvation, and that it is the Trinity who does/will cause this three-fold response in the believer - "wonder, love, and praise." The tone of command and assurance, the central paradox, and the final irony - and thus the ontological status of the poem - reveal that the Triune God has chosen metaphor, paradox, and irony to disclose His life. The organic unity of the hymn finds its boundaries and meaningful conclusion in the ultimate contradiction of being, the Three-in-One God. New Criticism, with its emphasis on "close reading" and the harmonious resolution into a "'well-wrought' urn," implies that a perfect text can be discovered and is apprehended at the moment of completion. The isolation of a central metaphor or paradox in the poem highlights the search for parallels of similarities and contrasts, and in this poem all the poetic elements "link" God and humanity at critical vertical and horizontal points. The paradox of three persons in one being informs the whole poem and affirms the Trinity to the entire Christian life. The poem stands as a metaphor for the experience of conversion and how one worships a triune God both now and in eternity.
At this point critic Murray Kreiger is particularly helpful because as a staunch New Critic in the 1950's, he might have said about this poem that a formalist reads it to determine the precise framework, to provide thematic and metaphoric affirmations about the Trinity.[7] However, as Kreiger over the years examined what appears to be closure in metaphor, he notes in Reopening the Closure that the metaphorical fusion that occurs in the presence of God-in-Christ is the model for the operation of metaphor in the language of poetry, and as such profane metaphors cannot bear that complete literal identity. Thus, Kreiger argues that there is the presence of a "mock-metaphor" that will keep a poem from sacralization and pulls the metaphor out toward the horizontal metonymic.[8] Mock-metaphor in this hymn does not carry a skepticism that disavows belief in the original metaphor; instead, the mock-metaphor opens the closure of the first one. The atonement is indeed finished once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and yet this "new creation" still has work to do, as does the Divine who is implored to "finish then Thy new creation." Lines 1-3 in stanza four celebrate the One who continues to do both first and last work in the created world. The new creation is "set at liberty." The "new creation" remains unfinished so that the poem itself is not teleological.
This mock-metaphor with its opening toward the metonymic is noted in the use of the word "lost." If holiness is about the restoration of the lost image of God in humanity as noted in line 4 of stanza 7, "perfectly restored in Thee," how is the word "lost" used? (Cf. "Come Father, Son, and Holy Ghost/Whom on all-perfect God we own/Restorer of thine image lost, Thy various offices make known. . . ."[9] What can be lost, recovered, and "lost" again? Does this suggest that something is going on in the structure of language and the speech-act shaping Wesleyan understandings? Is the opposite of lost is not "found" but "restored"?
Kreiger offers a way to think about the inability of the metaphor in the hymn to "be" the Christian life. Kreiger believes that metaphor retains its power to enclose meaning and also celebrates the presence of a transcendent realm, but to be "stricken by metaphor" warns against a dangerous enclosure that fails to account for how persons live in this kind of liberty. The mystery of the original metaphor, although evident in justification of the sinner, remains the mystery of the incarnation. But metonymy opens the possibilities of restoration as the image of God occurs in space and time.
Reading 2: Structuralism and "Privileged" Metonymy
Although structuralism as a method of analysis is usually applied to realistic fiction and narrative, it may be appropriate to apply structuralism here since the hymn may be considered as an abbreviated poetic narrative-not only an individual account of religious experience, but also as narrative appropriated by the larger community of believers. For a structuralist, the meaning in the Wesley hymns is acquired and discovered by the language of religious experience. Reality is seen through the categories and relations that language establishes. Important questions are:
-What are the basic interpretative units?
-What tropes require special attention-metaphor or metonymy?
-What system is at work that allows interpretation?
-What ideology is present in this work of literature?
-What ideology and power structures are based on opposing forces?
-How is that ideology and power articulated in characteristic patterns of language and thought?
These questions are not about the mimetic "truth" of the work, but about how human beings behave (perform). It is an immanent "tendency of thought."[10] The immanent structures discovered in the work indicate that the hymn uses ordinary language to extraordinary ends, but it must use language and its codes. The religious language of the poem is not somehow another "language" or even "dialect," but its "displaced function"[11] reveals the core oppositions that are fundamental to relational differences that make meaning.
In "Trinity and Hymnody: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Hymns of Charles Wesley," Barry Bryant argues that the hymns on the Trinity were/are intended to be "metrical theology" and to serve as application of the doctrine of the Trinity to "our hearts and lives" lest the doctrine be merely speculative."[12] Bryant's comments suggest a hierarchy of structures that might characterize the grammatical units of Wesleyan thinking from a structuralist's analysis. This hierarchy may be described as an homology:[13]
God = Doctrine Hearts & Lives = Person
Person Hearts & Lives Doctrine God
Essentially this homology observes that the transcendent God and doctrinal abstractions, privileged in the first equation, are "equal" in meaning with the divine work in persons and communities. The metaphors that require interpretation are subverted to highlight the metonymic message-context.
This shift from metaphor to metonymy is seen in the hymn "Love Divine" as core binary opposition is examined: God/humanity. Other binary oppositions in the poem pull against each other vertically (paradigmatically) and horizontally (syntagmatically). Paradigmatically, the divine is related to humanity, and humanity is explained by different parts of experiences; both the divine and the human are described by different parts of human understanding.
First, the poem exhibits paradigmatic moves along the vertical axis of language that reveal the similarities between things otherwise different. Essential metaphors of the poem are these: the heart is a prisoner and human beings are temples-two metaphors that are by the end of the poem reversed in their literal and figurative uses. In mimetic criticism and New Criticism, the external and transcendent tenor is united with the vehicle and becomes the moment of "incarnational" mystery. At this point for the structuralist, it is important to "naturalize" the text, to interpret the metaphor and make it intelligible, and this is only possible by placing the metaphor in its oppositional structure. In structuralism, there is no getting outside of language; language is innately figurative and not transparently referential. Meaning is sustained by reference to other meanings. This tension is exemplified in the simple binary opposition that the heart is a prisoner, a prisoner "bent to sinning" and must be "set at liberty." Equally, the heart is a structure/place, a "humble dwelling," dedicated to the worship of a deity. These two elementary models of opposition take the thematic form of bondage and freedom: persons are "built" to worship the deity, but they do not possess the freedom ("liberty") to worship.
John Wesley explores this same idea in that "freedom" and "liberty" have varying connotations. In his sermon "The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption," Wesley elaborates on ways men speak of "freedom": "'I am free (may he say) from all the enthusiasm of weak and narrow souls; from superstition, the disease of fools and cowards, always righteous overmuch; and from bigotry, continually incident to those who have not a free and generous way of thinking.'"[14] However, it is the one crying "Abba Father" who is in "true glorious liberty." "Freedom" in both senses is "under" something - either under nature, law, or grace.[15] Randy Maddox in Responsible Grace notes that this "liberty" is the integration of the rational and emotional dimensions of human life into a holistic inclination toward particular choices or actions-the freedom that comes from disciplined practice (e.g., the "freedom" to play a Bach concerto). The sense of "subordination" still is retained, but the binary opposition says something about human will to enact or not to enact.[16]
The other paradigmatic relationship used in this poem is synecdoche, and this trope affirms the virtuosity of the part. The part stands for the whole: "trembling breast" for human fear. The genus is substituted for the species: "new creation" for what God has done for the world through Christ. The species is substituted for the genus: "second rest" for grace continued. The thematic complex is developed as the deity is described in various figures: the Divine is Love, the Divine is the joy of heaven: the Divine is a visitor who can enter human space; the Divine is one who "breathes"; the Divine is one who wills and takes at will; the Divine is one who is a deliverer, who creates new things, and is 
known by several proper nouns - Love Divine, Jesus, Spirit, Alpha and Omega. In the structuralist's analysis, the many "fragments" of the human to describe the divine (metonymy) provides "close-up" shots to provide semantic contiguity, that is to say, with more of the same kind of thing. God is recognized in space and time as well as in human responses by the expanding of what is familiar in human experience.
What becomes disturbing about a structuralist's analysis is the elimination of the sacramental nature of the subject. As a strong contrast to a structuralist, John Tyson, in his fine essay "Charles Wesley's Theology of Redemption: A Study in Structure and Method," notes that "in [Charles Wesley's] parlance Christ's blood became the 'power of Thy passion below.'"[17] Thus, Tyson has read the single noun to speak for the power of the transcendent and external God. In opposition to Tyson's reading, the structuralist favors indicating the place of the subject within the signifier itself. The connection between the power of the passion and blood is nowhere but in the signifier.
"Ideology" was mentioned earlier in regard to structuralism in the sense that structuralists suggest that individuals are "made up of" ideologies and that identity is comprised by an allegiance to certain forms of thought. Ideology becomes "privileged" as the first element of the binary making up the power struggle between ideologies. Evidence indicates that the oppositions in the hymn are present, but also that it is equally difficult to conclude with certainty that binaries "control" the meaning of the poem, even though they "should." There is the dialectical resolution of the binary oppositions that concludes the poem with the four-term homology.[18] Humanity is to bondage as Love Divine is to freedom. However, the "new creation" is also described as "Thy salvation." Curiously, the polarity is there and yet not there.
At this juncture, Jerry Gill's work on tacit knowing and dimensional models of knowing in religious discernment and aesthetic experience is most helpful. First, he suggests that the possibilities for knowing are "mediated" rather than cognitively separate; the dualistic or reductionistic nature of meaning does not take into account the unified, holistic character of experience. One dimension mediates the significance of the other. A particularly helpful point is the way Gill interprets Polanyi's "indwelling": "We come to know some realities because we engage them, indwelling their particulars in order to reach beyond them. One would expect the transcendent to be known in this way."[19] For Wesley, the "new creation" affirms the love of God, but not just as a concept functioning as a binary to a performance: "There is no love of God but from a sense of his loving us."[20]
The Love Divine that stands "superior" to all other love about which doctrinal truth claims are made - "He is the 'true God,' the only Cause, the Sole Creator of all things"-exists in and for persons, metonymically, in space and time, through the witness of the Spirit:
Then it is that heaven is opened in the soul, that the proper, heavenly state commences, while the love of God, as loving us, is shed abroad in the heart, instantly producing love to all mankind: general, pure benevolence, together with its genuine fruits, lowliness, meekness, patience, contentedness in every state. . . .[21]
With the third person of the Trinity, "Thy loving Spirit," there is "a semiotically mediated power that is more than the power created by the semiotic impact of the system of symbols and practices."[22] It is paradox and metaphor in the hymn that bring this way of power to light. So New Criticism is not to be abandoned, but there is also something at work moving between the binaries.
Structuralism works on the idea that arbitrariness is at the heart of language and that it is the systematic relationships between words that enable them to communicate meaning rather than the relationship between words and things. When the binaries are discovered in "Love Divine" binaries that show how things stand in relationship, it is evident that Love Divine as triune is not just numerical superiority, but witnesses to how relationships exist, move, and have their being. It is the Spirit that witnesses to the power and significance of the Incarnation as metaphor and also the Spirit that justifies and sanctifies the metonymic, enabling and empowering performances and practices of holy living. However, for the structuralist, how will the speaker of this language know if a mistake is being made in performance? What keeps the reading from being subjective and impressionistic? Without extratextual propositional and thematic statements for standards and guidelines, what will keep individual and/or community religious practices from being just cultural taste and preference?
How will one choose the most satisfactory language for this grammar of faith among the diverse grammars? Jerry Gill helps by affirming that conflicting views show their grounding in the relevant particulars of the experiential and in the total configuration, which can be retraced from one to the other in an unending interpretative cycle,[23] Wesley also helps by his synthesis of personal and social holiness, both the workings of the Spirit:
How does the Spirit of God "lead" his children to this or that particular action?. . . Do you imagine it is by "blind impulse" only? By "moving" you to do it, you know not why? No, he leads us by our "eye" at least as much as by our "hand.". . . For example, here is a man ready to perish with hunger. How am I "led by the Spirit" to relieve him? First, by "convincing" me that it is his will that I should and secondly, by his filling my heart with love toward him. . . .This is the plain, rational account of the ordinary leading of the Spirit. . . . (A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part I and II)
Reading 3: Deconstruction and the Metonymic Domain
The two readings above of "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" are "provisional" according to deconstructionists since those readings do not read nearly "close" enough.[24] Contrary to some critics of deconstruction, deconstructive reading does not mean that the text authorizes almost anything. If it is necessary to ask which reading is preferred, the answer is that it is impossible to decide since each requires the other and contains the other within "itself." As Derrida himself notes in Of Grammatology, "[Without] all the instruments of traditional criticism. . .critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything."[25] What deconstruction attempts is "to interpret as exactly as possible the oscillations in meaning produced by the irreducibly figurative nature of language."[26] Deconstruction is a "deadlock of the grid of assumptions enabling metaphysics which must be negated."[27] It is not an end to values or to the transcendental, but it is the inconceivableness of something in the system, absence.
The dark and bewildering questions about deconstruction are typified in the usual starting query, what if there is no transcendental signified? What if there is no presence in which we can find ultimate truth? What if there is no unifying element in the universe? If signification is both arbitrary and conventional, as deconstructionists hold, then the search for a transcendental signified, an external point of reference, is the only possibility for ultimate meaning - or as Derrida says, "a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign." If God is posited as the transcendental signified then the concept of "God" becomes the unifying principle upon which the world is structured. Everything has meaning if filtered through this unifying ultimate signified: God. This transcendental signified becomes the "center" of meaning, the "center" of truth. Such a center of meaning could not subject itself to structural analysis, for in so doing it would lose its place as a transcendental signified to another center. According to Derrida, Western metaphysics has invented a variety of terms that function as centers: God, reason, origin, being, essence, truth, humanity, beginning, end, and self. Each operates as a concept or term that is self-sufficient and self-originating and serves as a transcendental signified.
Since the establishing of one center of unity automatically means that another is "decentered," Derrida concludes that Western metaphysics is based on a system of binary operations or conceptual oppositions. For each center, there exists an opposing center, as noted earlier in this Wesley hymn: Love divine/other loves; heaven/earth; up/down; unbounded/limited; fixed/changeable; breath/death; fear/hope; give/take; end/beginning; hosts above/hosts below; new creation/finished creation; glory/Glory; worship above/worship below; found/lost; second rest/first rest; return/leave; command/obey; found/lost; crown/deform; wonder/expect; love/abhorrence; praise/lament. What happens in the hymn's conceptual binary oppositions, sustained by cultural codes, is that the element on the top is always in a "privileged" position and the bottom element is "unprivileged," that is, in reading deconstructively. To invert the privileged and the unprivileged elements is a starting place, but this reversal or "decentering" is merely to substitute one hierarchy for another and adds little to meaning. What does happen, however, in the examination of the decentering is an awareness of how the meaning of terms arises from the differences between them; new insights are possible. Moreover, it is interesting to mark what happens to metaphor and metonymy, figurative language, in such a reading.
That the poem is a doxology has long been valued and valid. God is praised by humankind, for God is and is doing that which is worthy of human praise as the created being. The hymn not only makes a statement but claims to be a performance of praise. S. T. Kimbrough says of this hymn and others: ". . . he [Charles Wesley] exemplifies an indispensable pattern for the search for God, the pilgrimage of faith, and the living faith. . .live in constant praise of God even when God seems distantly and painfully unknown. Endure!"[28] However, the poet's language reveals that his worship and praise are vulnerable in precisely the way he wants to worship. A literal, direct, non-figurative signification of praise about "Love Divine" is only possible through the figurative, and the figuration moves in ways that seem to counterfeit praise of the sovereign God.
Out of the thirty-two lines in the poem, approximately twenty-three lines are devoted to the human condition. The poem's second-line introduction of Jesus' coming-down and entering-in movement establishes the human arena as the primary stage for knowing God's action. Personification makes the unfamiliar familiar; the transcendental God is flesh and blood. The Spirit has "breath"; the Almighty is a "deliverer"; the finished "new" creation is described in this-present-world language. The "new creation" is the "same" as the "old creation," a created being described in comparative terms of age. The language used to describe this new creation has a beginning and ending, just as one does about anything made or as the subject-verb-object in an utterance. To "finish" a created order is the same kind of language as an artist might use in finishing an artistic design. Moreover, the concluding lines of the poem seem very similar to what any faithful eighteenth-century subject did in front of a passing monarch. The concept of taking one's place and tossing off one's hat as the magnificent royal coach and horses pass by is not necessarily a "privileged" heavenly activity.
What is "new" about humanity's action in this other world? This heavenly activity appears to replicate an earthly activity - praying, praising, serving. The desire to serve and obey is undercut and unraveled by the "setting our hearts at liberty," an action that occurs precisely mid-way in the poem. Can liberty exist apart from obedience and service? How is this liberty to be qualitatively/quantitatively different from what came before and what comes after the moment of being set free? The meaning of "liberty" that comes in salvation, according to the poem, carries with it a certain passivity (e.g., a recipient as an inheritor) and a prescribed set of actions that define this liberty, "praying and praising." What the text does is to blur the distinctions between the differences that were so important to the structuralists. There is an incompatibility between explicitly foregrounded assertions and illustrative examples or less explicitly asserted supporting material. Does the poem say more about God or about humans, and is this reason for skepticism or praise?
The final use of metonymic "crown" also sets up responses in contiguous space and time. The use of metonymy in this last stanza has value because metonymy is a mapping in the same domain, not across domains. The "crown" in the last stanza of the poem is a metonym for eternal life, the part proceeds from the whole. The headpiece, usually associated with royalty, is a response of contiguity much as the syntax of a sentence. The idea depends on contiguity. Metonymy is a figure based on qualities shared by the two objects being compared. The poem uses this syntactical relationship earlier, "All Thy faithful mercies crown." The verb and the noun "crown" are signifiers that indicate a measure; however, they do not portray the whole. Moreover, the signifiers have superlative connotations because of cultural contexts.[29] One can continue the syntactic units by substituting "circlet," "coronet," "pate," "crest," "top," "wreath" for "crown." The metonymic conclusion in the poem reveals that there are not two separate domains: eternal life is an extension of life here.
Additional metonymic features of the hymn reinforce this focus on human space and time. The deictic references, those references to words that give a verbal message its temporal, spatial, and interpersonal orientation, are dominated by "us" and "we." These pronouns are coextensive with persons -all of us - so that the context broadens out from the individual to the collective. On the other hand, the proper titles given to the divine locate the one addressed in time and space, i.e., not just any "thee" and "thy," but one whose proper name is Jesus. Further spatial contextualization occurs with the verb usage: the imperative is used throughout until the end when three past tenses appear: "restored," "changed," and "lost." Thus, the present tense is affirmed from two vantage points: one largely from the immediate present and the other looking back using the language of the present.[30]
John Wesley suggests this difficulty with language as he explores the differences between the old and the new creation in his sermon "The New Creation" and implies that what makes metaphor in the poets' world will be the major change in the new heavenly world - "all will be transparent as glass."[31] No possibilities for metaphors there. For example, elements will be entirely changed as to their qualities, but not as to their nature. Fire will retain its vivifying power, but will lose its consuming destructive characteristics. Elements that allow for similarities and contrasts will be gone. In his final analysis of these differences in his sermon, Wesley continues to rely on binary oppositions to talk about the new creation- with one exception. ". . .[T]here will be a deep, an intimate, an uninterrupted union with God; a constant communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; a continual enjoyment of the Three-One God, and of all creatures in him!"[32]
In another binary opposition, "second rest/first rest" seems to state exactly what the American Holiness Movement "privileged" - the second "rest." The two "works" of grace were set in contrast so that one gained a "superior" position and allowed distinctive functions to the Trinity - Christ in atonement; Holy Spirit in sanctification. The separate camps and theological positions of the late nineteenth-century in American Methodism are, of course, not anticipated in this hymn, but the hymn also undercuts the notion of a separate "second" rest by its positioning of the experience in the middle of the poem. Something comes before and something follows. The work of the Holy Spirit in taking away the "bent" to sinning is preceded by a full stanza on the atonement, and is followed by another entire stanza on the call to the Almighty to "deliver" and a fourth stanza on the creation that is not yet "finished."[33] The "granularity" of grace (semantic units) is seen as contiguous, and the "higher" goal may not be higher, but the completion of what was begun. Final justification is the end of the sentence.[34] Is the object, final lefting grace, qualitatively "higher" or "greater" than the subject, initial lefting grace? Yes and no. Does the repetition of the stanza rhyme scheme without a linking line rhyme also suggest this dual response?
Wesley says, "Go on, in virtue of the grace of God preventing, accompanying, and following you. . . ."[35] As Randy Maddox notes, "Justification is not a stage we leave behind to enter sanctification, it is a facet of God's saving grace permeating the entire Way of Salvation."[36] A deconstructionist describes it this way: Any given signifier is defined not in and of itself, but rather in its relationship to other signifiers. Meaning to Derrida becomes "not so much a matter of an 'either/or' proposition in which the semantic territory covered by a signifier is clearly marked, as it does a 'both/and' view, with which the semantic territory of a given signifier overlaps that of associated signifiers, thus compromising its univocality."[37] The telos or closing referent is not outside the text but is operating infinitely and without closure in the signifiers.
A primary "both/and" oscillation occurs in the binary opposition lost/found. Undoubtedly the Scriptural paradox echoes here: Matthew 10:39. However, in the poem, there is a concluding metonymy that pulls along the horizontal landscape and shows the deadlock of the binary. That the poet reverses and thereby privileges "lost" is evident in the fact that he is "lost" in wonder, love, and praise. The binary found/lost can indeed be interchanged and decentered, but it appears forever deadlocked about which reading of "lost" should dominate. As noted earlier in the structuralist's reading, one can be found (literally) and "lost" (metaphorically); one can be "lost" (literally) and found (metaphorically). Such is the case for the new creation. The vertical binary oppositions, even if reversed, show that they are inextricably linked to each other; one cannot exist without the other. The two are not diametrically opposed; meaning is deferred. There is a "trace" of one signifier in the other. In this reading, the "trace" of "found" in "lost" is that very possibility of restoration, a notion that sounds strangely like a third that will not only break, but also open the binary.
What Derrida has done is to deconstruct the implications of Saussure's most important argument that no intrinsic relationship exists between the two parts of the sign. Saussure states that in the differential character of language, that which is signified by the signifier is never present in and of itself. Derrida's denial of the transcendental signified is not a denial of reference or a denial of any access to extra-textual reality. However, it is meant to suggest that meaning [sic] can be derived only from the texts through deferral, through différance.[38] Derrida describes that "différance" (differing and deferring) that works within as well as between elements. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls this part played by the radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign- the "trace."
Derrida in Of Grammatology makes this point clear:[39] The "trace" creates a ceaseless undoing/preserving oscillation. I suggest that the witness of the Spirit, the peculiar work of the Trinity, creates this undoing and preserving oscillation. The binary language in "Love Divine" cannot be discarded without losing the relationship between God and human beings. The binaries are preserved by the activity of each "person" of the Trinity in the first three stanzas, each of which establishes the work of God in contrast to the state of human beings. Even in the final stanza, the "Thy/we" and "we/Thy" binaries endure; however, the binary is also thwarted by the very Trinity that preserves it, a Trinity that is present/absent in glory/glory and that defers the meaning of wonder, love, and praise by our being "lost." If the "trace" itself is the very work of the triune God, then the Derridean idea that reference is relegated to a secondary and derivative status may indeed be a vital presence/absence that opens the reading and living of texts.
Reading Wesley Texts Closely
Fifteen years ago, at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, Albert Outler set the stage by proclaiming in "A New Future for Wesley Studies" that the marks of careful homework in the Wesley texts requires that the texts be read more closely than ever.[40] Each of the above readings do "read closely," but each is incomplete in itself, an inadequacy rectified or strengthened or changed by even closer readings. Moreover, in the examination of any single piece, reading pitfalls abound. This linguistic analysis of a single hymn may be too mimetic for a New Critic's hermeneutical comfort, too incarnational for a structuralist, and to determinate for a deconstructionist's palate, but it does take linguistic analyses seriously and suggests that dominant methods of reading Wesley may be inadequate to contribute to the conversation about practices in the academy and the church.
New Criticism values the metaphor and affirms the primacy of the Incarnation, but the lure of certitude in one's reading and the resulting closure remain constant temptations. Structuralism offers the practice of reading in terms of internal patterns of connection rather than as sets of isolated terms and their historical sequence, but, as Leonard Jackson points out in The Poverty of Structuralism, an objective theory of value in structuralism is a logical impossibility.[41] Among the diversity of "grammars," what happens to "I am the way, the truth, and the life"? Deconstruction, with its accusers who see a yawning abyss of nothingness, may be the adventurous submission to the both/and and the ceaseless making and unmaking.
However, each reading discovers the metonymic through its own assumptions and methods. That this hymn's language is highly metonymic affirms choosing practices of a holy life in an interpretative community living in a way fully aware of its individual and corporate horizontal holiness.[42] How, what, and who constitutes the interpretative community? What texts shape the grammar for those who live this Wesleyan vision? A Wesleyan grammar, with its metonymic linear expansion, does not mean that just anything is endorsed or that Wesleyan texts can mean whatever a reader chooses. The social context and conventions, the communal practices, will limit a reading and correct understanding.[43] A Wesleyan grammar assumes we are "born/born" into a cultural-linguistic system with a language that "creates" and "restores us."[44] This language reveals that the witness of the Spirit makes the work of the Trinity both "new" and "finished" and sets us at liberty to break with tradition, imitation, and repetition as well as to follow tradition, to imitate, and to repeat. Linguistic studies may provide points where this centering and decentering are essential. Reading Wesley closely opens the possibilities for the myriad of metonymic ways that the Spirit actively works in the length and breadth, bits and parts, similarities and contiguities of human living.
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