Theology is grammar

Hamann, Miscellaneous notes on word order in the French language

Hegel and the alphabet

D. Esparza

ABSTRACT

The relationship between memory and writing has too often been reduced to
one that can be labelled as hierarchical. According to Hegel, memory retains
names not only through memorising –which might be understood as its proper
function, just as Aristotle claims that thought itself is the thinking of thinking- but
also through recollecting, which seems to be –as suggested by Hegel’s own
distinction- a different aspect of inwardising. How are these two aspects of
inwardising –the performative action that makes inwardness possible- to be
understood? Moreover, how is writing then the exteriorization of this
inwardising and, at the same time, the condition of possibility for it, since its
reduction is precisely the path towards (verbal) memory? Is this verbal
memory different from the graphein that experience inscribes in our souls?
Writing itself has traditionally been related to the experiences of memory and
perception themselves, since they both share with writing a certain inscriptional
nature. I will, then, explain how these inscriptions are not only dependant on
the written word but, moreover, how language –in general- is itself an
inscription –according to Derrida’s reading of Hegel and Ricoeur’s reading of
Plato-. This inscriptional nature of language, I would like to show, is the
condition of possibility of memory. Moreover, language as the condition of
possibility of memory is related to what Aristotle described as thought thinking
itself: a pure potentiality that makes any inscription possible.

It was Derrida, in the final line to the first chapter of his Grammatology, who
defined Hegel as “the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of
writing1”, therefore pointing not to the final product of thought –the book-
but to the process of thinking, relating thought, writing –and, surprisingly,
memory- in a single move. According to Derrida’s argument, Hegel
“rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs2” by reintroducing the
“essential necessity of the written trace in a philosophical –that is to say

1
Derrida, Jacques, On grammatology, p 26.
2
Ibid.
Socratic- discourse that had always believed it possible to do without it 3 ”,
even though some of the most interesting lines on Plato’s Philebus (38a-39c)
seem to equate experience (pathema) and writing (graphein). Moreover, as
Ricoeur notices, Socrates explicitly asks Protarcus to compare the human soul
to a book since “memory and perception […] seem to inscribe [graphein] words
in our soul […] If what [the experience –pathema-] is written is true, then we
form a true judgement and a true account of the matter. But if what our scribe
[grammateus] writes is false, then the result will be the opposite of the truth4”.
Memory, our scribe, produces signs –just as perception, memory inscribes words in
our soul- that thus define our relation to truth and falsity.

Hegel’s work, Derrida continues, “may be reread as a meditation on writing5”

–actually, Part III, Section I (On the Subjective Spirit) is precisely that- and
therefore, if we are to take the aforementioned Socratic suggestion seriously,
also on memory. Truly considering Hegel “the last philosopher of the book”
will depend on our understanding of the idea of the book as an idea of a totality –
which Derrida openly admits might be either finite or infinite 6, just as the
Bible might be considered the infinite yet finite book par excellence-, but thinking
on his work as a meditation on writing leans exclusively on Hegel’s particularly
evident interest in the act of writing. Moreover, on his interest in the
performativity and the materiality of alphabetic writing itself, as the Aufhebung
of hieroglyphic scripture on the one hand and the Leibnizian formalism of the
understanding in mathematical symbolism on the other. Hegel’s own
Enzyklopädie [of the Philosophical Sciences] bares witness to this fact, particularly
on the very dense §459. How is then the performative act of alphabetical
writing related to a productive memory seems to be the question hereby raised,
and Hegel’s answer is, in turn, related to the dialectical nature of writing:
“writing –writes Derrida, paraphrasing Hegel- is that forgetting of the self,
that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory, of the Erinnerung
[memory, recollection] that opens the history of the spirit7”. At first glance,
then, writing opposes and, at the same time, makes recollection possible, since it opens
history. Memory, when exteriorized in writing –when recollected externally- is
history. Hegel himself, in §460, summarizes this movement of external
recollection by stating that

“the name [that is, “the simple sign for the exact idea, i.e., the
simple plain idea, not decomposed into its features and
compounded out of them (§459)], combining the intuition (an

3
Ibid.
4
Plato, Philebus, 38a-39c, as quoted by Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, history, forgetting, p. 14.
5
Derrida, Jacques, loc. cit.
6
Ibid., p. 18.
7
Ibid., p. 24.
 intellectual production) with its signification, is primarily a single
transient product; and conjunction of the idea (which is inward)
with the intuition (which is outward) is itself outward. The
reduction of this outwardness to inwardness is (verbal) memory”.

Hegel’s §460 is the last paragraph, in the Enzyklopädie [of the Philosophical
Sciences], which the author dedicates to Einbildungskraft (imagination), and
works as the hinge that relates section B to section C, the one in which he
discusses, precisely, Gedächtnis (memory). Memory -according to §461- and
names work analogously, as somehow suggested in the Philebus:

“Under the shape of memory the course of intelligence passes

through the same inwardising (recollecting) functions, as regards the
intuition of the word, as representation in general does in dealing
with the first immediate intuition. Making its own the synthesis
achieved in the sign, intelligence, by this inwardising (memorising)
elevates the single synthesis to a universal, i.e, permanent synthesis,
in which name and meaning are for it objectively united, and
renders the intuition (which the name originally is) a representation.
Thus the import (connotation) and sign, being identified, form one
representation: the representation in its inwardness is rendered
concrete and gets existence for its import: all this being the work of
memory which retains names (retentive memory)”.

Memory retains names, then, not only through memorising –which might be
understood as its proper function, just as Aristotle claims that thought itself is the
thinking of thinking- but through recollecting, which seems to be –as suggested by
Hegel’s own distinction- a different aspect of inwardising. How are these two
aspects of inwardising –the performative action that makes inwardness possible-
to be understood? Moreover, how is writing then the exteriorization of this
inwardising and, at the same time, the condition of possibility for it, since its
reduction (Cf. §460) is precisely the path towards (verbal) memory? Is this
verbal memory different from the graphein that experience inscribes in our
souls?

It might be true that the philosophical tradition had always believed it possible to
do without the written trace, therefore enthroning the spoken word. Plato’s
Phaedrus stands as “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence 8 ” on this
matter since, in it, writing is at once a remainder –there is a mnemotechnic
character in writing, as it should be now evident- and the gate to oblivion, an
invention that “would only spoil men’s memories and take away their

8
1 Peter 2:7-8.
understandings”. Writing is, then, considered to be inferior to speech, since it
is –according to Socrates in the Phaedrus- “unfortunately like painting”. The
very same thought is inherited by Aristotle, who considers phoné –i.e., the
spoken word- a symbol of mental experience, and gramma –the written word-,
in turn, merely the symbol of the spoken word. Gramma is understood as
mimesis of mimesis itself, just as art [painting] is thought of in Platonic literature.
Writing and art share, so to say, the same fate, as they are inscriptions. This
might suggest why memory is also considered to be an art.

However, tradition also proved the saying “the stone which the builders
disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner9” is often true. Just as art
reached its own independence and legitimacy as a thought-object in itself –
with Baumgarten’s publication of Aesthetica in 1750, among others-, also did
writing during the very same XVIII century. Before Hegel’s efforts to address
the fact that “to read and write an alphabetic writing should be regarded as a
means to infinite culture [undendliches Bildungsmittel] 10 ” –therefore suggesting
that the alphabet is the definite memory theatre11- Stoic, medieval and Sturm und
Drang authors suggested different ways to consider how linguistic,
grammatical, philosophical and even theological categories intertwine, in ways
that resemble Hegel’s claim on writing: “the mind, distancing itself from the
concrete sense-perceptible, directs its attention on the more formal moment,
the sonorous word and its abstract elements, and contributes essentially to the
founding and purifying of the ground of interiority within the subject 12 ”. How is then
writing related to the foundation –and, moreover, the purification, as if it were a
religious, alchemic or ascetic matter- of interiority –and therefore, the self itself?

One of the suggestions that seems to be –chronologically, but also

theoretically- closer to Hegel’s is to be found in Hamann’s Metacritique of the
Purism of Reason, written in 1784 –the very same year Kant’s first Critique was
published-. This brief essay should be understood as the first critical effort to
correct Kant’s “partly failed attempt to make reason independent of all

9
Ibid.
10
Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Grundrisse, pp. 273-276, as quoted in
Derrida, Jacques, On Grammatology, pp 24-27.
11
Hegel said culture [Bildung], not knowledge [Wissen, Erkenntnis]. This should be enough to
debunk the mirage of total recall as infinite knowledge. The illusion of total recall can be turned
inside-out by relating it to the word but also to the fallibility of alphabetic writing itself:
some characters in the alphabet lack any kind of specific content (even phonetically). In the
Western case, the letter H represents this “fallibility”: not even alphabetical writing can be
considered the means to exhaustive meaningful knowledge. In the Hebrew alphabet, both
Aleph and Hey are letters that correspond to no sound at all. If alphabetic writing is the
means to infinite culture, this culture should be understood as one that, in its foundations, is
already aware of its limitations.
12
Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Grundrisse, pp. 273-276, as quoted in
Derrida, Jacques, On Grammatology, pp 24-27.. The italics are mine.
tradition and custom and belief13”. Hamann’s main claim is that “the synthesis
of predicate with subject (the proper object of pure reason) has for its middle
term [Mittelbegriff] nothing more than an old, cold prejudice for
mathematics 14 ”. If mathematics –he continues- are to be granted “the
privilege of nobility because of its universal and necessary reliability, then even
human reason itself would not be the match of the infallible and unerring
instinct of insects15”.

According to Hamann, then, “language [is] the only, first, and last organon
and criterion of reason, with no credentials but tradition and usage16”, so his
objection on what he considers to be a threefold purism in Kant’s effort to make
reason independent –“free”- from history, experience and language is easily
foreseen: Hamann not only fights the overdetermination and fixation of the
“ideality of the concepts” in geometry, but also the fact that “metaphysics
abuses the word-signs and figures of speech of our empirical knowledge by
treating them as nothing but hieroglyphs”: precisely, one of the terms in the
dialectic pair Hegel sees surpassed in and by alphabetic writing. In §459, Hegel
writes:

“[…] hieroglyphics uses spatial figures to

designate ideas; alphabetical writing, on the other hand, uses them to
designate vocal notes which are already signs. Alphabetical writing thus
consists of signs of signs – the words or concrete signs of vocal
language being analysed into their simple elements, which severally
receive designation. – Leibniz’s practical mind misled him to
exaggerate the advantages which a complete written language,
formed on the hieroglyphic method […] would have as a universal
language for the intercourse of nations and especially of scholars.
But we may be sure that it was rather the intercourse of nations
[…] which occasioned the need of alphabetical writing and led to
its formation. At any rate a comprehensive hieroglyphic language
for ever completed is impracticable”

If Kantian metaphysics -according to Hamann- abuses the word-signs of speech,

which are already the concrete signs of vocal language, analysed into their simple elements
–according to Hegel-, then Kantian metaphysics end up abusing thought –as
the activity of thought thinking itself- since vocal language is itself the symbol of

13
Hamann, Metacritique of the purism of reason, in Writings on philosophy and language, p.
207.
14
Ibid., p. 210.
15
Ibid., pp. 210-211.
16
Ibid., p. 208. Hamann alludes to Kant’s Prolegomena, AA 4.278: “the credentials of pure
reason consist only in its answer to the question ‘how is synthetic knowledge a priori
possible?’”.
mental experience –according to Aristotle, but also to Hegel, as §459 shows-.
This abuse is, precisely, what Walter Benjamin called overdetermination when, in
his essay On Language as such and on the Language of Man –which is an unfolding
of Hamann’s understanding of the intertwining of language and theology- he
developed his own notion of overnaming, referring it to “the overprecision that
[language] obtains in the tragic relationship between the languages of human
speakers17”. Was “the intercourse of nations” –as Hegel suggests- that “which
occasioned the need of alphabetical writing” and, along with it, overdetermination
itself? Moreover, is alphabetical writing overdetermining? And, finally, what
might be the relation –if any- of overdetermination and memory?

How this overnaming and the overprecision of language are to be experienced –

“melancholically”, we read a few lines later- is best described by Benjamin
when, in his essay on Experience and Poverty, he explains how “strategic
experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience,
by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the
ruling powers18”. Even more tragically, Benjamin claims that the experience of
memory has been substituted by an “absence of illusion” for the present age
that, paradoxically, is accompanied by “an unlimited commitment to it 19 ”.
This paradox substitutes inwardness [Innerlichkeit] for mere interior [Inner],
therefore displacing the work of recollection (and Selbstbildung, along with it):

“A complex artist like the painter Paul Klee and a programmatic

one like Loos –both reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of
man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past. They turn
instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a
newborn baby in the dirty diapers of the present20”

How is this displacement of Selbstbildung, then, to be understood, in its

relationship to recollection and the insertion of recollection in the dirty diapers of the
present? According to Benjamin, through a Hamannian correction of our
notion of experience, as related to language. That the whole Benjaminian
project has Hamann’s objections on Kant’s Critique at its base becomes
evident when, in his Program for The Coming Philosophy, Benjamin clearly states
that “the great transformation and correction which must be performed upon
the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-
mechanical lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language, as

17
Benjamin, Walter, On Language as Such, Selected Writings (1913-1926), Volume 1, p. 73.
18
Benjamin, Walter, Experience and Poverty, Selected Writings (1927-1934), Volume 2, p.
732.
19
Ibidem, p. 733.
20
Loc. cit.
was attempted by Hamann during Kant’s lifetime 21 ”. How is this relevant on an
attempted discussion on memory might be foreseen when language is
considered –as Hamann and, therefore, Benjamin do- as inheritance.

As Kenneth Haynes explains, even though Hamann’s Metacritique might have

“more in common with Aristophanes’ mockery of Socrates than with
philosophical texts 22 ”, the three pillars of his argument against the threefold
metapurism of reason do have precise and systematic philosophical implications,
i.e., that “we speak a language we did not invent, we inherit a history we did
not make, and live in a body we did not create23”. If we are to understand
memory and writing –may it be as an internal (as in recollection) or an external (as
in history) phenomenon-, then language has to be thought of as inherited. Language –
allow me to put forward- is the condition of possibility of memory, as well as
our first recollected piece of memory: its grammatical nature is, at the same
time, memory and its condition of possibility.

Hamann foreshadows Hegel’s understanding of alphabetical writing when,

right after affirming that thinking is possible thanks to “the genealogic priority
of language and its heraldry over the seven holy functions of logical
propositions and inferences 24 ”, he immediately takes the next step and
describes the two aspects of writing and how the written gramma paradoxically
–or synthetically, as if the inscription were to be the materiality of Aufhebung
itself- joins them together:

“Words […] have an aesthetic and logical faculty. As visible and

audible objects they belong with their elements to the sensibility
and intuition; however, by the spirit of their institution and meaning,
they belong to the understanding and concepts. Consequently,
words are pure and empirical intuitions as much as pure and
empirical concepts. Empirical, because the sensation of vision or
hearing is determined by nothing that belongs to those sensations.
Words as the undetermined objects of empirical intuitions are entitled, in
the original text of pure reason, aesthetic appearances; therefore,
according to the endlessly repeated antithetical parallelism, words as
undetermined objects of empirical concepts are entitled critical appearances,
specters, non-words or unwords, and become determinate objects for

21
Benjamin, Walter, On Language as Such, Selected Writings (1913-1926), Volume 1, p. 108.
22
Haynes, Kenneth, Introduction to Hamann’s Writings on philosophy and language, xviii.
23
Ibid.
24
Hamann, op. cit., p. 211. Even though Kant identified twelve logical functions of the
understanding in judgment, arranged under four heads and each of them under three
moments, it is more than probable that Hamann –a well versed Biblical scholar- just added
the four heads to the three moments to yield seven, as in a numerological suggestion of
infinite perfection.
 the understanding only through their institution and meaning in usage. This
meaning and its determination arises, as everyone knows, from the
combination of a word-sign, which is a priori arbitrary and
indifferent and a posteriori necessary and indispensable, with the
intuition of the word itself; through this reiterated bond the
concept is communicated to, imprinted on, and incorporated in the
understanding, by means of the word-sign as by the intuition
itself25”

At least three things in the Hamannian text –which, in more than a way,
resembles both Aristotle’s and Hegel’s own writings- deserve further research:
the first one, the spectre that suddenly appears in it, which has to be related to
the Greek eikon or, even more accurately, the phantasma, as the appearance of
an absent thing –as when an event is recollected in memory, may it be written
or not-. The second one is the fact that, whenever Hamann speaks of the
institution of words and their meaning, he is intentionally using theological
language. By choosing the word institution –according to Haynes- he is
referring to the establishment of the sacrament of the Eucharist with the
words spoken by Christ, so whenever Hamann speaks of the visible and audible
elements of words he is alluding –it goes without saying- not to the bread and
wine that become the body and blood of Christ, but to the Lutheran –
moreover, the Augustinian- doctrine that understands sacraments as the unity
of both institution and elements. Luther himself quotes Augustine –in the Large
Catechism- on the matter, saying that “it is said, accedat verbum ad elementum et fit
sacramentum, that is ‘when the Word is joined to the external element, it
becomes a sacrament’ […] the Word must make the element a sacrament,
otherwise it remains a mere element26”. This means that whenever Hamann
uses the word element he is actually using the letters of the alphabet as the constitutive
material of a sacrament –bread and wine, gramma and phoné, inscription and breath-,
contrasting them to the elements of mathematics and, naturally, those of
Kant’s Critique. Needless to say, sacraments are memory –“do this in
remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19)-. The third thing, finally, is the inversion

25
Ibid., pp. 216. The italics in specters and imprinted on are mine. Both the suggestion of
something spectral living in words, and the possibility these specters have of being imprinted
in the understanding are key to relating memory and writing: they introduce the notions of
tradition and, more importantly, inheritance. It was Hölderlin who wrote that language as
“the most dangerous of goods” given to man “so that he bears witness to having inherited
what he is”. Inheritance –I will go back to this- implies dealing with present absences. That
is specters, ghosts, spooks. How are we to differentiate one from another is a hauntological
matter –as Derrida defined it- but, allow me to put this forward from the get-go, it seems
to me that Derrida’s hauntology confuses ghosts with demons. His whole discussion on
exorcism –Injunctions of Marx, the first chapter on Specters on Marx seems to treat ghosts
and demons as the same kind of entities (which, goes without saying, they are not).
26
Luther, Large Catechism, The book of concord, p. 448, as quoted by Kenneth Haynes on
Hamann’s writings on philosophy and language, p. 215, footnote 88.
of Benjamin’s overdetermination in present-day language for underdetermination,
understanding words as undetermined objects of empirical intuitions as well as
undetermined objects of empirical concepts. Their final determination is to be granted
not by their correspondence to the eikon –the idea of which they are, allegedly,
symbols- but by institution: words are the constitutive material of the sacrament-
meaning as much as the sacrament-meaning itself, in their historical –i.e,
inherited, recollected- presence. They are themselves –paraphrasing Benjamin-
both “the traditional, solemn, noble image of man, festooned with all the
sacrificial offerings of the past” and “the naked man of the contemporary
world who lies screaming like a newborn baby in the dirty diapers of the
present”. Memory –as the intersection of the past with the present- is a
function of the word.

However, what seems to be definitely relevant in Hamann’s text, when it

comes to understanding the relationship between alphabetical writing and
memory, is the suggested overcoming of undetermination through institution: the
spectre Hamann literally sees in the unused word is then imprinted in the
understanding “by means of the word-sign”, just as in the sacrament the
presence of Holy Spirit transubstantiates the elements. Is this process of
imprinting the spectre that is the unused word in the understanding what Derrida
understood as a conjuration and as an exorcism? It hardly seems so, since
Hamann is never referring to an evil spirit, as Derrida does in his Spectres of
Marx. Moreover, the confusion between conjuration –as when in-voking- and
exorcism –as when ex-pelling- seems to be rather arbitrary, at least as presented
by Derrida:

“[…] ‘conjuration’ means […] ‘conjurement’ (Beschwörung), namely,

the magical exorcism that, on the contrary, tends to expulse the evil
spirit which would have been called up or convoked (OED: ‘the
exorcising of spirits by invocation’, ‘the exercise of magical or
occult influence’27”.

In order to expel an evil spirit, then, it must first be summoned, i.e., called,
convoked by its name. This calling is an appeal to a name, to a basic and
fundamental de/nomination of a spirit, as breath (spirit) is de/nominated in the
uttered or written word. If we remember, then, Hegel’s definition of names as
“the simple sign for the exact idea, i.e., the simple plain idea, not decomposed
into its features and compounded out of them” -as in §459- then writing, the
sacramental practice and exorcisms are revealed to be effective actions that
convoke, institute and imprint into the present time that which was not there.

27 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx, p. 58.

The Hegelian critique of writing, Derrida claims, “stops at the alphabet 28”.
Even though in its phonetic dimension –already pointed out by Hamann, as I
have already quoted, as the aesthetic (that is, empirically perceptible) faculty of
the word (spirits are then perceivable, as breath is perceivable in the uttered
word)- alphabetic writing seems to be “even more servile” –Hegel inherits
Aristotle’s understanding of the written word as mimesis of the mimesis, as the
sign of signs 29 - it is also true that alphabetic writing remains the best of all
possible writing systems –when compared to both ideographic or hieroglyphic
writing and the Leibnizian mathematical symbolism- since it is the mind’s
writing30: in it, “the mind, distancing itself from the concrete sense-perceptible,
directs its attention on the more formal moment, the sonorous word and its
abstract elements31”. It is by doing so that then –by being the sign in which
the infinite spirit relates to itself in its discourse and in its culture, that is, in the
writing of history- the written word “contributes essentially to the founding and
purifying of the ground of interiority32”. The inherited gramma –even more:
the performative act of writing, as an inherited practice- is the locus in which
the relationship of the Geist with itself is understood as history. This history –
this convoking of human memory in writing-, when displayed not collectively but
individually, is also a sacramental practice: it is confession.

In his De Ordine, Augustine indicates that “anything memorable consigned to

letters necessarily pertains to grammar33”. The letter –that is, the gramma- is a
historical element, historically built and historically inherited. Following the
Stoic theory of language –which, according to Agamben, Augustine adopts as
his own34-, there are two levels in language. The first, that of pure nomination
[impositio or nominatio], which was accessible only for Adam and is, therefore,
the inauguration of history itself. The second one is that of discourse
[declinatio], which derives from the first “as a river from its source35”. This
means –for Augustine as for Varro- that since human beings can only receive
names though historical transmission –“in descending”, as Varro affirms- their
access to the fundamental dimension of language –naming- is mediated by
history. Moreover, “this infinite descent of names is history 36 ”, and the
performative act of alphabetic writing –that is, of writing history- itself is an act
of Selbstbildung, is absolutely evident in Augustine’s Confessions. In The Question
of the Subject, Ricoeur defines the act of confessing as both the subject’s reflecting on

28
Derrida, Jacques, On grammatology, p. 24.
29
Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Grundrisse, pp. 273-276, #459.
30
Derrida, Jacques, op. cit., p 24.
31
Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften in Grundrisse, pp. 273-276, #459.
32
Hegel, loc. cit.
33
Augustine, De Ordine, 2, 12, 37.
34
Cfr. Agamben, Giorgio, loc. cit.
35
Varro, De lingua latina, VIII, 5-6.
36
Agamben, Giorgio, op. cit., p. 50.
himself or the positing of the subject by himself as a narrative founding act. Ricoeur
frames this definition of confession within a wider frame, involving a very
particular understanding of the relationships between emplotment and history.
Augustine’s notion of history as grammar is inseparable from both questioning
the purpose of Augustine’s Confessions and understanding the process
described by Hegel in terms of purification and interiority of the subject, but the
answer to those questions is none other than spirit –may it the individual soul,
as in Augustine, or Geist, as in Hegel- being convoked in writing. And that spirit
has to reply by inscripting itself –as in Hamannian institution- into the present.
Such is the purpose of Augustine’s Confessions: the building of a responsive, free
self, as required by religion, in narration: that is, a self which is freely able to
respond, in –or through- recollection to that which has received: both word –
that is, language as the ability to discourse- and knowledge of the Word –that
is, the gift of Logos, as in the donation of God itself unto man (as understood
in the Christian dogma of the Incarnation of God’s Word) or as in being
given the faculty of reason, as a grammateus.