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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
The general concern of Austin Farrer's deservedly well-known approach to our discernment of God's activity in the world is to ground it in our knowledge of our own selves as agents, especially as we interact with God as Divine Agent. In his book The Glass of Vision, Farrer develops an account of how this overall approach applies to the concept of revelation and religious language. The “text” he chose for this book, “Now we see through a glass darkly,” sounds as promising as the title.
1 Farrer, Austin, The Glass of Vision (London: Dacre, 1948).Google Scholar
2 See esp. his Faith and Speculation (London: A. and C. Black, 1967Google Scholar) and Finite and Infinite (London: Dacre, 1945Google Scholar).
3 Farrer, Vision, 30.
4 Ibid., 33–34.
5 In this connection see the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, esp. his Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities, 1961).Google Scholar
6 Consider the work of George Herbert Mead, On Social Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).Google Scholar
7 Farrer, Vision, 30.
8 Dewey, John, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn, 1960) 172.Google Scholar
9 Austin defines these dimensions of a single speech act in the following way:
We first distinguished a group of things we do in saying something, which together we summed up by saying we perform a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to “meaning” in the traditional sense. Second, we said ordering, warning, undertaking & c, i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force. Thirdly, we may also perform perlocutionary acts: what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading.
Austin, J. L., How We Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961) 108.Google Scholar
10 This is the phrase of Michael Polanyi, upon whose work I am drawing heavily here. See esp. Knowing and Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).Google Scholar
11 See the chapter “Persons” in Strawson, P. F., Individuals (London: Methuen, 1964).Google Scholar
12 Farrer, Austin, “Revelation,” in idem, Faith and Logic (ed. Mitchell, B.; Boston: Beacon, 1957) 101–2.Google Scholar
13 This paper was originally presented at a conference on Divine Action at Louisiana State University in April 1986. I am especially indebted to Prof. Edward H. Henderson for his stimulating article “Knowing Persons and Knowing God,” The Thomist 46 (1982) 394–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
