Power and Might

"Now the whole earth had one language and few words" when the line of cursed Canaan began to build the infamous tower, when the Lord thwarted their arrogance by acting to "confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." (Gen 7) It is terrifying, these words, terrifying to think what power lies in language. In pure language, tainted by sin but as yet unbroken, there are "few words." One word holds a vast amount of reality, which is not yet dissected by syllogisms hypotheses logarithms &c. This makes sense, since God, who is perfect, has only One Word by which all things were created, and from which all things take their identity. The multiplicity of creation serves, each bit, to illuminate another aspect of the fullness of Reality, which is God.
Now, thousands of years after Babel, the perversion and reduction of language to babble if not drivel--in accursed "texting", and when language is bent and twisted to serve hideously warped philosophies, two facts are driven home to me:
The centuries-old wisdom of a Latin Liturgy, immune to the perversions and corruptions of time, common usage, colloquialism, ignorance. Yes, Latin is immune to ignorance, for those who do not want to bother with learning, which not all need do!, cannot cheapen the meaning of a Latin word through everyday usage or incomplete comprehension, as happens to the common vocabulary. How right and wise and foreseeing were these ages of the Church, and what a calamity has overtaken the modern Liturgy, which inevitably, inevitably I tell you, sinks to the lowest common denominator!*

Secondly, though, and not completely separately, is the occult dimension which seeks power over the material world by attempting to rediscover words of power--real, actual utterances of the mouth by and through which they can control physical and even human realities. Lewis knew of this aspect of language (and Tolkien, although he focuses on it to a much lesser extent)--they were, after all, first philologists and linguists, the both of them, and only secondarily writers. It runs through his stories, even Narnia:

"The Queen let go of [Digory's] hand and raised her arm. She drew herself up to her full height and stood rigid. Then she said something which they couldn't understand (but it sounded horrid) . . . and those high and heavy doors trembled for a second as if they were made of silk and crumbled away until their was nothing left of them."
and the "Deplorable Word", that  "secret of secrets", by which Jadis (the White Witch) had destroyed her world. (The Magician's Nephew)

It makes the kernel of That Hideous Strength, where Lewis recreates the story of Babel in the modern scientific and academic worlds, where Merlin has returned to help overthrow the new evil and wants to "wake [nature]. I will set a sword in every blade of grass" and Ransom rebukes him:

"I forbid you to speak of it . . . whatever of spirit may still linger in the earth has withdrawn since your time. You shall not speak a word to it. You shall not lift your little finger to call it up. I command you. It is in this age utterly unlawful."

Oh man! I won't draw this out any longer. But ponder, in your own mindframe and your own time, what insights are here in these brief sentences. Power over creation; the idea that body and spirit are drifting further apart with each passing year day hour; things that were possible or permissible ages ago simply may not be so any longer, yet people seek it because perhaps of pride and desire for more power than humans should have (cf Revenge of the Sith and Anakin's fall), or maybe because they desire mystery, that sense of more-than-self that does not exist in the mind that does not know God.




*The "Latin Mass" community is NOT perfect, nor does it have all the answers, and I am frequently ashamed and appalled at the arrogance and judgementalism with which its adherents attempt to propagate and defend their position. It is inexcusable. I speak "merely" of the language itself, not in defense of the unChristian attitude of any individual who might agree.

and the Spirit hovered

I have been returning in my mind to the opening words of the Bible lately, for various reasons. The book of Genesis opens with the beautiful, mystic words

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

Some translations render it hovering, brooding over the dark deep waters. Regardless, I find it a truly imagination-capturing image. It is the first glimpse of the Trinity, of God being not a solitary isolated God, but one who is in some vastly mysterious way in communion: The Father in perfect and eternal union with the Son, which unity breathes forth, or spirates, the Spirit.

And God said . . . First, He says, Let there be light. Reach forth in time, and the opening words of the Gospel of St John (which are read at the close of the Tridentine Mass in supreme fittingness) expound this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God , and all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 

And so: God the Father, who creates through speaking His Word, His one and perfect Word, Who is Jesus, Yeshua, and this act of speaking is spirating, or breathing forth, the Spirit.

I have been thinking of these things so much lately. Speech was broken at Babel into our thousands of babbling imperfect languages, but before then . . .
My tenth-grade physics teacher told us how they were discovering that the smallest particles vibrated constantly, that essentially they are sound. Whether they are or not, in fact, the smallest particles, I don't know, but certainly there is the fact that everything has a vibrating point, that every object will answer, respond to, a certain frequency.
We are separated from the spiritual realms, in this fallen state at least, by our bodies . . . Christ's glorified body was not: even as the Son of God, His body still respected the bounds of physical limitations. After He rose again, however, He was walking through locked doors and such, because His body was glorified. I do believe after the Second Coming and Final Judgment, we in our glorified bodies still will be physical beings, but untainted any longer by the restrictions, the limitations, of sin--also why some of the saints have overcome some of these bonds and have levitated, bilocated, &c.
Likewise, because of sin our words were broken, limited, bonded to and by speech. Like bodies, they can be corrupted, disappear, shift meanings as our bodies change with age . . . but what is perfect speech?

God spoke . . . the Word was with God, and the Word was Go d . . .

Many many many know the power of music. Hans Christian Anderson phrased it, "When words fail, music speak." My mind half-remembers a quotation I ran across in high school along the lines "When all else fails,  when art has nowhere left to go, people turn to music."
What then is this draw to, this pining for, relief in music?
I think it is the closest thing we have to the unbroken, perfect Word. Somehow, when all is said and done in irrevocable finality, when our bodies are glorified and the world made new, our speech will be no longer bounded by these cumbersome letters and phrases, but will be akin to music.