“What is naming?” Walker Percy asks. “Is it an event which we can study as we study other events in natural history, such as solar eclipses, glandular secretions, nuclear fusion, stimulus-response sequences?”
He gives the example of a father pointing to a ball and telling his two-year-old child "this is a ball.” At first this kind name-assignment is not dissimilar from the solar eclipse or the glandular secretions. It is a “stimulus-response sequence" not dissimilar from the way in which a dog might understand the same indicative.
“But one day the father utters the word “ball” and his son suddenly understands that his father did not mean find the ball or where is the ball but rather this is a ball the word ball means this round thing. Something has happened.” (130)
This is actually naming, an event which is “utterly different from a solar eclipse or a conditioned response” (131). Percy directs our attention to Helen Keller at the water pump to suggest that what was learned at the water pump in Tuscumbia, was not an automated response to the sign language “water” but the discovery of the very world itself.
That the world was full of things, Helen already knew. That the world is full of names was a birth into a world of life and meaning hitherto foreclosed.
“Naming brings about a new orientation to the world. Prior to naming things, the individual is an organism responding to his environment; he is never more nor less than what he is; he either flourishes or he does not flourish... But as soon as an individual becomes a name giver or a hearer of a name he no longer coincides with what he is biologically” (134).
Naming and receiving names makes one a “co-celebrant of what is” (134-5).
A problem exists, though. We cannot name ourselves. “The being of the namer slips through the fingers of naming” (136). I have names for everyone else, but for myself? Who am I and how do I know? It is the question Jean Valjean asks of himself when debating whether or not to let an innocent person die falsely accused in his place: “Who Am I?” As Percy suggests “I am that which cannot be named” (136).
We come to be known and named within relationships and along timelines –a process through which “we rejoice at the naming and say ‘Yes! I know what you mean!’ Once again we are co-celebrants of being” (137).
This mutuality of co-naming, of being named, is a risky position. It hazards misuse and abuse. I can be wrongly named under the auspices of unkind speech. Next week we will look at the ways in which the naming goes well or poorly and how to respond to good and bad names given and received, and what regulations apply to good and proper naming.
For now, however, it is not without reason that the first task given to Adam was to call the beasts by name, even as the Lord has called the world by name in creation. It is also not without reason that throughout the serried pages of scripture people and places are not only named but renamed. It makes sense then, that in calling for her Lord the Bride of the Song longs for his name, which like oil is poured-out upon the beloved (Song 1:3). And, when the Lord comes to his bride, he not only gives her his name (Song 1:8; cf. Num. 6:27; Ps. 91:14; Jer. 29:12-14; Rev. 22:4), but names her as well (e.g. Song 4:1-15; cf. Is. 43:1, 62:2; Jn. 10:3; Rev. 2:17, 3:12).