The Mirror of Language: A Study of the Medieval Theory of Knowledge by Marcia L. Colish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Aesthetics of Truth

I don't like wine. For me it is sour grape juice. But I have friends who claim to taste peaches and blackberries and hints of apricot in their favourite South African or Australian tipple. The same thing happens on GoodReads on a daily basis - Harriet loves Finnegans Wake and George finds it gibberish. Is Harriet better read? Or does George have superior literary taste? Although she never mentions wine or post-modernist fiction, Marcia Colish addresses just these phenomena in her The Mirror of Language.

Up until the late 18th century, there was a generally accepted answer to these sorts of disagreements: the real state of things, the truth, was what was there. And what was there in its most general form was being. Peachiness was part of the being of certain wine; artistic innovation part of the being of Finnegans Wake. If I or George don't get it, it is our deficient appreciation, our inadequate knowledge that is the problem.

Discovering truth, therefore, is merely a matter of comparing what we think about the world with the way the world actually is, connecting words and things properly. Words are conceived as abstract mirrors of the things they refer to. The science of truth so conceived is called ontology. Colish does a first rate job of understanding the consequences as well as the motivation for this ontological mode of thinking from its formulation by Augustine to its deterioration in the Renaissance.

Many people still think this way. It is particularly popular among religious folk - modern as well as medieval - who believe in God as not just the ultimate being but the one who guarantees that the world we perceive behaves according to fixed rules that we can understand. And it's also a popular stand among scientists, Einstein among them, who presume that ontology rules, that we can find out what is really there by getting ourselves out of the way.

But from the time of the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century through the quantum physicists of the 20th, the primacy of ontology has been fatally undermined. Words, language seem a part of us that we can't get rid of. What we know is often a function of how we know it, which inevitably involves words, not necessarily of what is actually there. The science of how we know things, including how we use language, is called epistemology. And it appears that in many aspects of our lives, it is epistemology not ontology that has the upper hand - booze and books being two examples, photons and black holes being two more.

So the interplay of epistemology and ontology is tricky. It's the adult version of the chicken and egg problem: what comes first, being or knowledge? Neither Colish, nor anyone else has cracked that hard-shelled intellectual nut. But the issue of language is an issue which no educated person, certainly no one who is serious about literature, can ignore. The Mirror of Language is an introduction to that issue that is both scholarly and accessible to the general reader.


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