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.

where to go, where to start

   Most people now are looking for "a better place," which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned . . . . I think he gave up the idea taht there is a better place somewhere else. There is no "better place" than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven . . .
   "Something better! Everybody's talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don't matter if it ain't nothing but a log pen."
   -Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

I don't agree with Wendell Berry's views of education, but then, I don't think he understands education as anything except the prevalent view: a means (degree) to an end (more money). He does not, I don't think, understand education as liberal arts, in the ancient sense.  Perhaps he still would not agree, but I think maybe he does. What he does understand, and what I do agree with so strongly, is his view of land, and the realization that this is where it must begin, with love of earth and land, with appreciating the value of simplicity and the simple life: renewing the land, renewing homes, continuing cultivation through generations, being able to transmit the values from father to son: the importance of hard work, of working with one's whole self. Speaking of his daughter's unfaithful husband, Nathan says, "It would have been better for Marcus if he had been tireder at night."
It is absurd, I agree, how divorced everything has become. People sit in offices all day and then go to other insides to "work out," rather than having a life and job incorporating both--and surely this is possible without everyone farming. Surely not everything must be so isolated, including families--from each other and from themselves, even, so often husbands and wives and children having completely separate lives.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell works from the presumption that families are not, or at least no longer are, the primary shapers of their children. In modern society, this is often the case: that, as Gladwell asserts, the silences that would be filled with the voices of adults are now filled with cell phones, video games, television, texting, et cetera, ad nauseum. But, of course, this does not have to be the case, and returning to the sort of simplicity that Berry's stories portray would be a good place to start.