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The Sage's Definitions
From Chapter Three. "The Word Restored: Definition, Redefinition, and Satiric Redefinition"
Forms of Definition
Introduction: an Example from Kingsley's Sermons
Preacher's Definitions: Carlyle
Simple Definition: Ruskin
Denying Someone Else's Definition
Corrective Definition: Arnold
Satirical Definition: An Example from Thoreau
Definition as Theme and Technique
Introduction
Mailer: A Twentieth-Century Example
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Another chief device of the sage, one common to all forms of argumentation, is definition. By providing the meaning of terms crucial to one's discourse, one obviously moves that discourse in directions one can control. Moreover, such acts of definition implicitly assert that the audience, whether listeners or readers, depends entirely upon the sage for without the sage, the person who knows the true meaning of things, members of the audience ostensibly cannot even communicate, either with one another or with reality. The essence of such a far-reaching claim lies in the fact that the sage (or someone else who uses such techniques of definition) purports to know as others do not the true relation of language to reality. Just as the sage's moral stature derives from the fact that he knows the good and his audience has lost sight of it, so too his intellectual stature here comes from the asserted fact that he alone can use language correctly. In fact, the sage implicitly -- and sometimes explicitly -- maintains that he, and he alone, can restore language to its supposedly pristine efficiency and authenticity.
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Both the sage's claims to know the true meaning of essential terms and the moral emphasis with which he makes them derive from the homiletic or sermon tradition. Victorian preachers like Charles Kingsley emphasized that in religious matters the believer had a moral duty to get language right and use words correctly. Thus, in differentiating between religion and godliness in a sermon on that subject, Kingsley earnestly instructs his listeners that "a difference in words is a very awful, important difference." He does so in part to make the preacher's usual claim to understand the correct meaning of essential words -- and his further claim to restore true meaning to such words and thereby place his audience once again in a proper, healthy, vital relationship to reality. Kingsley therefore assures his listeners:
A difference in words is a difference in things. Words are very awful and wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all beings, Jesus Christ, the Word. He puts words into men's minds. He made all things, and He makes all words to express those things with. And woe to those who use the wrong words about things! For if a man calls anything by its wrong name, it is a sure sign that he understands that thing wrongly, or feels about it wrongly; and therefore a man's words are often honester than he thinks; for as a man's words are, so is a man's heart ... and, therefore, by right words, by the right names which we call things, we shall be justified, and by our words, by the wrong names we call things, we shall be condemned. '
Furthermore, Kingsley also sounds a familiar theme of the sages when he emphasizes in "The Spirit and the Flesh" that "according to a nation's godliness, and wisdom, and purity of heart, will be its power of using words discreetly and reverently" (43). Placing such importance upon the ability to use language correctly, Kingsley as preacher expectedly opens many sermons with questions of definition. For example, he begins "Self-Destruction," a sermon on 1 Kings 22:23, by directing the audience's attention to the way in which the appointed text provides "an insight into the meaning of that most awful and terrible word,-- temptation" (59), and he begins "The Courage of the Saviour," a sermon on John 11:7-8, by defining fortitude (184-85).
Print version published 1986;
web version last modified 28 March 2000, Karlskrona, Sweden