Language is used as the manifestation of original sin. ‘In the beginning was the Word’, says God. In our envy and our pride, we take that literally and attempt to create new beginnings every time we use language. We cannot help ourselves, we continuously reproduce the trauma of original sin.
'We have killed off most of the world’s oral cultures, but those which remain, which cling on, can sometimes open us out – we, the abstracted ones – to the damage we do with our writing, with our symbolic abstraction, with our constant flow of chatter, with our endless words.'. Thomas Aquinas never completed his Summa Theologica after experiencing a mystical vision, after which he declared that everything he had written seemed to be like 'straw'. He then lived a more contemplative life.
Could I possibly be the first person to comment on this essay, in writing, with words ?
It is an interesting essay, certainly one with which I very much disagree, in many ways, even if I feel that tackling this problem is courageous.
A few observations that stem from... my perception of me, my journey through life, the patterns that I can see in the enormous and sometimes unbelievably senseless ? things I have done. Is writing about myself this way.. egotistical ? or could it also perhaps be a way to witness my personal experience so that others can ask themselves the questions that I ask myself ? I hope so...
For several years now, I have given up on going to get check ups at the gynecologist. This worried some people around me, and generally I do NOT PUBLICIZE it, but one of the things that made me very uncomfortable about going to the gynecologist was feeling the necessity of talking about myself, as a body, with all those sophisticated Latin words that over time, almost fill me with horror. Words like "vagina", "anus", words that are part of the scientific vocabulary that I know, and used to be able to use comfortably. But over time, the idea of going to see a medical SPECIALIST to talk about MY BODY PARTS, (and ills), and using that SOPHISTICATED VOCABULARY has become distasteful to me. I no longer want to talk to doctors about my body PARTS.
So... while I no longer want to talk about my body PARTS with THOSE WORDS TO A DOCTOR, that doesn't mean that I no longer want to talk.. (and here, I am writing, by the way). So... what are the possibilities ? 1) not talk about body PARTS 2) not talk to a doctor 3) not use that vocabulary. (I will admit that this is a very analytical manner of looking at this problem, but I don't believe that the problem that Paul is addressing should be looked at in terms of ONE or THE OTHER part of the brain, but in the conjunction of the parts. The problem is in making BOTH OF THEM WORK TOGETHER.)
I no longer go to see the doctors. I know that they will not tell me what I want to know, what I am still looking to discover, and what I am still looking to discover is... me. Me IN the world, with other people, with others. Me... in me, too and all those others in me, because there are others in me (and yes, I am divided to a certain extent. Why not, especially if it allows different others to work together in my interest, in the interest of the whole body ? What is in my interest, ( a word that I have chosen expressly) is also in the interest of the... social body. I believe. For the vocabulary, I use my children's words to talk about my sex, at the risk of appearing... childish. But I would rather be a child than a gynecologist any day.
It is possible, perhaps even desirable, to criticize me on this decision. It could and perhaps should be said that I should be able to use the word "vagina" in public, and the childlike word in private. Maybe. I will accept this criticism, but will still use the childlike word in public. I... accept the consequences for this.
Does the fact that I use the word "I" exclude other people ? What stops them from using it too ? But using the word "we", that is a challenge right now. Try using the word "we" and see how easily it comes to... you.
On abstraction : my niece who is a philosophy teacher in high school in a difficult area in northern France says that her young students are incapable of abstraction as she understands it. Language is much more than abstraction, and words... can be real, and not abstractions. In certain contexts, and to certain people. In the Gospel of Saint John, it was... WRITTEN, "In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". Was that an abstraction ?
Why do we ? you ? go so far as to globally condemn language itself, rather than condemn our incapacity to... control ourselves in the way/the places/ the people to whom we speak or write ? Why throw out the baby with the bath water when... WE are the sinners, if there is sin ? When God tells Cain, after refusing his sacrifice that "Sin is waiting behind your door, will you know how to control it/yourself ?" He asks an excellent question. It is not for us to condemn language, but ourselves in the ways/places/the people to whom we speak and or write.
Language is not a tool either. It is our heritage. We are born.. into it. We must do something with it in order to become fully human. Refusing it is refusing to be human. Condemning it is condemning ourselves globally, and not seeking to deal with our individual responsibility.
More following. This is a very important subject for me.
On the problem of abstraction, which is a very important one..
Just how capable of abstraction are many of us in our culture right now, if you accept the idea that words are not necessarily abstractions, which is my postulate ?
One of the big fights between a fundamentalist ? scientific point of view of the creation, and what we call Christian religious fundamentalists, is in the meaning of the words that God created the world in the creation story, and that the world is 6000 years old... Christian fundamentalism involves taking the creation story... literally... and here we can see the problems acutely.
What does the word "year" mean ?... How do we know ? What did it mean when the creation story was... written down ? What does it mean to take something... literally ? That the words are "real" ?
This problem is acute in Islam too, if my very vague knowledge of Islam is correct.
P.S., Paul, I hope that you are feeling better, and thank you for so much... meat and potatoes to dig into right before summer...
Cormac McCarthy once pointed out in an interview with Oprah that the subconscious is likely older than language. I often wonder if my subconscious understands English. It seems like it doesn't. If it does, then it ignores/disagrees with me a lot. If that's the case, is it me?
Re: But once the Semitic peoples got hold of them, turned them into abstract symbols and wrote them down
The same thing had already happened with Cuneiform and Chinese ideograms. Both began as pictiorial representations, but were soon simplified into abstract symbols.
I believe that the problem is one of representation.
There are representations that begin as pictures, and others that do not.
But... they are still representations. One "thing" standing for another.
I also believe that all living beings, maybe even plants, are under the obligation of interpreting what is before them, whether it be inside or outside. Here, the key word is "interpreting". That means no direct access to our experience as living beings. It has to be interpreted, and uncertainty is inevitably involved in interpretation. Ambiguity.
Maybe the word "abstract" that you have written here is the word "arbitrary" ? as in the idea that you can see a logical connexion between what is being represented, and what is representing, whereas in an alphabetical system you can't ? While not denying that there is a difference between a symbolic system with an alphabet and one without an alphabet, there is still representation.
And isn't our insistance that language not be arbitrary a form of misuse of our... reason, and a refusal to admit that our language is there before us, and that we don't choose it when we enter the world ?
These days, I have to deal with pictograms everywhere and I loathe them. Why are we resorting to pictograms so much ? With the idea that SEEING IS BELIEVING ? that the pictures can not be ambiguous, maybe, but are more easily understood and interpreted ?
Bullshit, in my book. Maybe... our pictograms are influenced by the Chinese ones, and we are becoming more Chinese all the time ?
This is a very good piece that goes halfway off the rails because 1) the conductor is too much in the Rousseauan mode and 2) he isn't thinking hard enough about language. I'm not sure how much of it you'd still subscribe to as a Christian--I believe you wrote it before converting--but I'd be curious to know. Perhaps when your book comes out, which I look forward to, I'll get some idea.
Students sometimes ask when we humans invented language. I think this is to get things backward. It's more correct to say that language invented us. We invented *writing*, yes, but language is what makes us human. Our distance from other primates, then, is immense.
Which is not to deny the points you underline: that our behaviors and bodies remain markedly primate. Of course they do. But this doesn’t really matter.
I think you recognize the crux here. We are *something else*. If you are a Christian, you must recognize that we are meant to be. We are the creatures endowed with the "breath of life", which I take as different from just *life*. It refers to the rational spirit, the thing that gives us both free will and the possibility of sin, of falling. It's also what makes us so beloved of God "that He gave his only begotten Son to die".
We are *something else*, and the stakes of this something else are rather large.
We have two creation stories here, one linguistic and anthropological, the other scriptural. I believe they're both true. Language is the main mark that our creation in God's image left in us.
Somehow these two creation stories are intertwined. One of the tasks of the Christian writer or poet is figuring out how.
It's a mistake to assume with McGilchrist that our modern West has a particular problem with balancing brain hemispheres. It's also a mistake to think our malady is somehow rooted in alphabetic writing. It's thirdly a mistake to think that indigenous American cultures, some of which had already founded cities and ruined the ecosystems they depended on, wouldn't have ended up themselves facing the Machine.
I don't put much store in indigenous Americans talking about how Europeans "aren't spiritual". We are of course spiritual, perhaps even more so than they were when they first encountered us. The problem is that *our* spiritual has been reinscribed in a perverse metaphysics that Enlightenment finally turned hyper-productive.
When Newton gave us his mechanics, he was being spiritual. Had a Mayan done it, our academics would be calling it a great triumph of Mayan spiritual insight. And had Mayans engaged some of those other early modern spiritual endeavors that Europeans had, they'd have ended up facing the same Machine.
Enough with the Rousseauan gestures to indigenous cultures. We're an indigenous culture too. *All are condemned.*
I read Chinese, as I live in Taiwan. It's obviously not a phonetically based writing system. Nonetheless it was at the basis of the Chinese imperial civilization that rerouted rivers, deforested much of the Middle Kingdom, and built a sophisticated bureaucracy that wrought havoc on the landscape. And is still wreaking havoc on the landscape.
The Rousseauan song and dance is wrong. No matter what continent we're found on, whether we're mostly oral or literate, we're stuck with language, because it's what made us. I think your ending paragraphs on how we might use language to fight the Machine rather than spread its tentacles are good. But you'd need to rethink this whole dilemma again as a Christian. And you'd need to think much harder about language, what a writer's language *does*, how you and I both are infected and what kinds of tropes and projects and genres might help to break the fever.
Somehow language drags us into grave sin and delusion. But somehow, perhaps employing the right poetics, i.e., the right tactics of language use, we might speak and write in ways less fallen. As Christians, we'd need prayer as well--prayer that the Spirit might lead us toward developing these tactics.
Essays *against* the Machine or *for* this or that are helpful, and your writing, for me, is some of the best. But if you're really looking at *language* as the nexus of our illness, the work is going to be harder.
Some good points here Eric. I think in the end words are just a “tool” of sorts (communication tool) and like all tools in the hands of sick hearts, they will ultimately move us toward evil if the heart is bent toward evil. Impossible to pick just one misuse or one prime cause, in terms of tools, of our current and historic woe. We clearly have misused and do misuse language (and mean it for evil) and in this we lose something of our purpose, of our meaning, and move further away from God. Paul often quotes the ascetics, the Saints, and they are always encouraging us to be holy, to love God first and our neighbor. To become like Him. The question we humans (as a whole) ask less and less is does this “thing”, this “tool”, this knowledge, this innovation, even this word or thought I’m about to speak/write move us/me closer to God or away from Him. Deep down we’ve answered the question already, we want just more of me and mine and do not follow with John in “He [Christ] must increase and I must decrease.”
Agree with your latter remarks, but I strongly suspect, if you think about it more, you will realize language is not “just a tool”. It’s more fundamental than that. And we don’t use it only for communication either.
A tool is generally something we can hold. Language, quite otherwise, is part of us, and begins shaping us as soon as we begin to speak. To use a metaphor, it’s more like a conceptual nervous system, framing our perceptions and reactions. Which means that people in different cultures perceive somewhat differently shaped worlds. As it also means that our language tends to do good or bad *through* us, because it encodes the particular vices of the tribe.
This is part of what Paul is getting at.
You might also consider whether language is “just a tool” by thinking from our faith. God created the universe by speaking it. Christ, who became one of us, is referred to as the Word, the Logos.
Not the Wrench Set, but the Logos.
With the Word and also with words, we’re dealing with something more fundamental.
I'm replying to your whole exchange in this comment. Please look at what I wrote in the comments section above about language. I share many of your beliefs about it, except that I feel that we have put way too much emphasis on the idea that rationality differentiates us from the OTHER ANIMALS (a momentous statement, and one with multiple implications), when a predator who hunts in order to eat is using his rational faculties, his Odyssean "ruse" in order to capture his prey. A predator is obliged to reason ? to calculate ? in order to hunt successfully.
For sure, the Enlightenment mentality gives tremendous importance to intelligence AND rationality as traits that separate Man from the rest of creation, and this is... unfortunate. This exclusive ? glorification of intelligence has wreaked havoc on us, I believe.
On Rousseau... while I have not read Rousseau extensively (and I can, in French, without resorting to translations), I do know that we ascribe to him many things that he never said. The idea that Rousseau could be an idealistic proponent of a romantic view of Man and Nature is false, I believe, and does not reflect Rousseau's complex vision. But what is true, I believe, is that during the pre-Revolutionary period (pre... FRENCH revolution, because the American war of independance was NOT a revolution...) the stage was set for a tremendous wave of... nostalgia for the pastoral origins of our Western civilisation, which probably go way back, even before Homer, who refers to Agamemnon as the "shepherd king". And as I like to point out here, in Plato's "Phaedrus" dialogue, you can once again see the nostalgia for pastoralism at work in the setting for this very important dialogue that brings up points that Paul brings up in this article, 450-460 years before Christ was born ?
And once again, we are being buffetted in Western Civilisation by a tremendous.. nostalgia for our pastoral origins. Probably this nostalgia stems greatly from the PROBLEM of so many of us living in cities, where ONLY GARDENS can keep us in touch with Nature on a daily basis, at best. (A reverent thought for Rome which (at what time ? I don't know..) created beautiful gardens free of charge for its population.)
On language, you can read what I wrote above. I don't believe it is a tool. We are born into it. It is knit into our bones, and flows with our blood in our vein. Man cannot invent anything that does not bear the trace of HIS nature and form as creature infused with the spark ? breath ? of life.
One more point that is very important to me, and I will... shut up. I believe that we need to think carefully about the power of language in context :
WHOM are we adressing ? an individual person, in private, whom we could touch and see ? a small group of people ? a crowd ? an anonymous "bunch" of invisible people, which we do when we PUBLIsh ? What do we "choose" to say ? to NOT say ? (And sometimes the words just come out...) In what words (above, in my comment, the childlike words for talking about my body parts) ? Inside ? Outside, ON THE MOUNTAIN, for example ? Poetry ? not poetry ? Metrics of our poetry ? Beauty of it ? Verbs ? which ones ?
Is it possible that it is fitting to say some things in some contexts that are inappropriate in others ? Could it be.. sin to not differentiate context ? How do we know, and can we learn ? How far can we learn ?
Language, unlike us and everything we see, hear, feel, smell, and think, is eternal. It is God. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1
God, the Word, spoke and there was light. He spoke and there was the world, without form and void. He spoke again and again. And there was everything that we know and can know. For we were spoken, as well. We cannot take credit for anything. Least of all, language. For language is who created us.
Whew boy! What an insightful comment. I’ve read it twice and am still thinking about it.
I, too, was wondering if Kingsnorth might draw some different conclusions now that he’s a Christian. As I read his article, I immediately thought of the prohibitions on cursing your neighbor and the admonitions to bless your family and friends as well as your enemies all throughout Scripture. I think that at least part of what is going on is the reality that we actually have the power to do both (metaphysically as well as physically). It’s not so much God telling us not to be mean, but to wield our power carefully.
Masaru Emoto has some crazy experiments showing what love, hate, and neglect do to water, rice, and plants. I’ve noticed that the more I take every thought in obedience to Christ, the more peace and love and joy surrounds me and others. (And I’m finally able to grow plants now that I bless them! 😎)
Yes. The power of blessing counterbalances ? the power of cursing ?
The word for blessing in French is "bénédiction", which means literally "speaking well (of), or "saying good", while its opposite is "malédiction", which means "speaking ill (of) or "saying evil".
In a play that I talk about here often, Shakespeare's "Macbeth", the effects of "saying evil" play out in the action, and destroy Lady Macbeth, who invoked evil spirits to "unsex" her, in order to make her into a sexless ? warrior, capable of being ruthless. And she is destroyed by her words, as their effect produces dire, almost mechanical consequences. Very powerful.
Well I should be more clear with my words. 🤓 I do contend that words and even language are cognitive tools. Especially the writing system Paul described in his post. So they are not just things we hold in this case, though they are that. A tool can be defined figuratively as “that which is used as a means to an end.”
I agree with you words/language are also something far more and hence why they are powerful. They convey spirit. The Word is actually a person through Whom all things were created. Although Scripture is made up of words written through humans, it is far more than what is seen and understood on the page. Or heard. I would say we are indeed dealing with spirit and being in this. Peace.
Agreed. I think “going off the rails” is a bit harsh, but I would love to see a re-write with the essay’s positives substituted with Christian sanctity and holiness. IMO it would really work.
The Bible describes it as To know good and evil. We put meaning to things. Someone decided to write it down. I try to imagine the alternative, how does the mind of a Lion work? Living completely in the moment with no thought of past or present or if something is Good or Evil. Interesting to think about. No going back now. God obviously gave us this capability but it comes with a price.
It appears that the newest Christian "revival" is a rebellion against the wet blanket of reason. Mystery leaves us open to making our own individual choices -- whether or not they are good for ourselves or for those around us. Reason tells us that some choices are helpful and some are destructive. That's no fun.
Oh, the new Christian "revival" loves its own brand of legalism. It's come running back to sacraments and liturgy. And adherence to them appears some sort of rebellion against the prevailing culture. But it's probably not. It's probably a sense of giving up on reason because reason makes demands that we don't like. Liturgy and sacrament make demands we like. We like magic.
Liturgy and sacrament are inclusive. Anyone can do them. Reason is exclusive. You gotta be smart to participate. Reason is a whole exclusive world dominated by the institutional gatekeepers that have created it. I can't compete in the Ivy League/Oxford-Cambridge world, so I glom onto a world that will accept me.
Can't compete in the world of reason? ...let's try "enchantment" and comfort ourselves by explaining that the door we just closed on reason wasn't the world that was meant to be anyway.
But that's all just a false dichotomy. And I think we know it. Heck, we're even using the "reason" we reject to try to persuade everyone else to reject reason so that we can be comfortable in our rejection. Nothing confirms bad choices better than not being the only one making them.
Written language isn't something utterly removed from its oral predecessor. Written word is merely a tool of conveyance and archiving. That's how it was developed in the first place. Characters in clay or on stone to mark the commodities of trade in a developing agriculture-based society. Marks began to represent sounds. The elasticity of the system became self-evident. Language was limited, identifiable, specific sounds and marks could represent them. It wasn't magic. It wasn't enchantment. It was phonics.
But it is true that the Western world (maybe the whole world, but I'm only familiar with the one I live in) began to believe that the written word was a superior conveyance of communication to that of an oral society. A mix of:
> misunderstanding evolution as "things improving over time" instead of evolution's reality -- "things that survive environmental changes" taught the western world an unfortunate lie: that we are smarter than primitive man.
>written word was more accurate than oral tradition, when, in fact, written word has its benefits for conveyance and archiving and holding a legal system together, but written word doesn't do a very complete job of conveying the mood of the words it conveys.
When we read the Gospels we quickly realize that many of the stories are open to interpretation for the very reason that the narrative is absent stage direction. There are no parenthetical markings telling us when Jesus is smiling, frowning, scowling, or shouting or whispering when he speaks, or what his body language is adding to the conversation.
We realize quickly that because of that lack of stage direction, we develop very individualized perceptions of who Jesus is and was because every time someone deigns to represent him in art, half of us are uplifted and enchanted with the image and the other half are mortified and indignant at the heretical misrepresentation.
The oral tradition (of the first century church, for example) carried on the narratives of the life of Jesus -- complete with vocal inflection, body language, and mood, and did so within a context of other eye witnesses to places and events that necessarily kept a check on the accuracy of the telling. Such oral tradition was FAR superior to the written word. But it occurred to John, Mark, and Luke that the day was soon coming when the witnesses would all be gone. They put what they could into writing so that 2,000 years later we could know with certainty the truth of Jesus. It worked pretty well. Denominational differences that divide us over questions of reason vs emotion are real, but a very strong core of orthodoxy remains.
And while the current "revival" is asking us to eschew our written word and glom onto the magic of enchantment, I am thankful for those doing the thankless, boring, never-ending job of trying to accurately reason out what was meant by what was written down -- rather than simply rejecting it because SOME of it appears lost to time by its incompleteness and lack of oral conveyance.
"It's probably a sense of giving up on reason because reason makes demands that we don't like. Liturgy and sacrament make demands we like. We like magic."
To pit reason and liturgy/sacrament against each other like this is incorrect. For many hundreds of years the Church both East and West managed to keep these two things (mostly) in balance. It is the separation of the two, with the resultant exaltation of autonomous reason to the detriment of non-rational (not IRrational) thinking that has caused the problem.
The idea of re-enchantment is not to do the same thing in reverse, but rather to attempt to regain the lost balance between the two. To the extent that "reason" is attacked, it's being criticized in its autonomous form, not in terms of man's general rationality, which should be clear if one looks at pre-modern Christian writing such as that of the Church Fathers. Years ago an Orthodox writer whose name I do not remember called such an attempt the "acquiring of the Patristic mind." And Andrew Louth wrote a brilliant little book in the early 80's called 'Discerning the Mystery' in which he covered this very topic as related to theology and Biblical studies. A quick perusal of the latter would contradict any claims that a return to certain pre-modern ways of theologizing involves irrationality or "magic." In fact, the relegating of liturgy and sacrament to "magic" exhibits precisely the sort of rationalistic bias that Louth and others across the theological spectrum have long criticized.
Edit: Louth, by the way, was an Anglican when he wrote the book. He did become Orthodox several years later.
Not sure exactly what your purpose was in posting this, but I'd say that just because GenX had/has problems with rationality doesn't mean that the Church has to cater to their concerns. In terms of the the Gospel, truth and narrative are connected no matter what GenX was saying 25 years ago. The pitting of the two against one another was problematic then and it's the same now.
It also should be noted that catering to such ideas is what got us "seeker services" and the "Emergent Church."
I suspect that we're mostly talking past each other. That's my fault for not taking the time to explain myself.
The tension I see is in the probability that the modern world has misidentified a chasm between faith and reason that I'm not sure exists.
Most of modern Christianity holds to the idea that faith is an epistemology whereby we accept the things we believe. It thereby allows us to believe irrationally. In fact, it insists that we do.
But the spread of the new belief in Jesus as the Messiah who came, died, and rose again in the completion of the redemption narrative that was present from the beginning of man was not spread by that kind of faith-in-faith. It was spread by eye witnesses who attested to real life, real time events that they saw. And what that redemption narrative means as we interpret the reality of creation is more concrete than it is mystical.
But we still don't know everything. And we can't.
So even those of us who believe that faith is the response to reason (rather than the supplanter of reason) still have an invisible, silent God. And we ultimately do exhibit faith in what we cannot know in the same concrete, falsifiable way that rules the rest of our life and the other things we need to put faith in for our survival (the faith we put in medicine, in the physics by which we can trust the material world that keeps us safe and alive). But that faith is still not without reason. And it's still not how we know what we know. It's still not our epistemology.
Theologians try to explain the invisible, silent God.
Artists try to illustrate the invisible, silent God.
At best, the artists are influenced and instructed by the theologians and the hand-in-glove result gives us a church worth joining. But at worst, the artists invent theology that illustrates a God that isn't. That, I fear, is the state of the current "revival".
Humans are naturally religious. And we love our oogum boogum. We love magic. It convinces us of the possibility of the existence of that invisible, silent God that we want to believe rather than the God that is.
"The tension I see is in the probability that the modern world has misidentified a chasm between faith and reason that I'm not sure exists."
I agree. In fact I recently read a very good book on this subject -- 'Some New World' by Peter Harrison.
"It was spread by eye witnesses who attested to real life, real time events that they saw. And what that redemption narrative means as we interpret the reality of creation is more concrete than it is mystical."
But I'd say that the separation of the "concrete" from the "mystical" is similar to the chasm you mention above. If the first 1000 years of Christian theologizing, both East and West, tell us anything, it tells us that the early Church's theologians were neither proto-rationalists or proto-Romantics. To them concrete and the mystical were intertwined -- we moderns are the ones that have separated them. To my mind re-enchantment, for lack of a better word, in its best "small-o" orthodox forms, is the attempt to reconnect the two.
Interesting perspective. I don't agree, but it's something to consider.
After 43 years of self-employment, the covid shutdowns forced me into the workplace. I kinda love it. I loved the solitude and autonomy of my private studio, but I'm equally loving interacting with people every day. Furthermore, I'm interacting with people with whom I would probably never naturally connected.
My previous employment cast me into a culture of people far more educated and affluent than I. Because I did something they admired, I was accepted well above my class.
I am now working daily with a very blue collar mix and learning much about my prejudices as often as I am thanking God for sparing me from the desperation that lives without God have become.
I work with two guys -- one a 40-something, thoughtful, quiet and polite guy who only occasionally allows a peek at what I'm guessing is a pretty high level of self education via reading and cultural interests. The other fellow is a 29 year old army veteran (8 years of service) tattoos over every inch of his body below the neck, and the requisite piercings -- plugged ears, nose ring, etc He's built like an NFL lineman and that makes his gentle nature deliciously ironic. Funny, too. He and I talk endlessly through ear buds as we work and I'm discovering a quick wit and colorful imagination.
I once asked the two of them, "Hulk vs The Thing. Who wins?" They didn't miss a beat. They didn't hesitate, nor did they look to each other for confirmation. They both blurted "Hulk!" at the same time. There was no question. There was no doubt.
I've had discussions with both of them about the superhero universe. The older of the two I keep a running dialogue -- a fiction I spin that I have been working with a terribly overweight, badly out-of-shape Batman, trying to whip him back into shape and bolster his faded self-confidence. Daily he asks me how it's going. Daily I give him an update (after a few setbacks, Batman has shed a significant amount of weight and has started back into reading updates from Commissioner Gordon -- a good sign that he intends to be super again).
The younger guy has been instructing me about how the super hero universe works.
It's exactly like theology. It has rules and its own logic. The adherents are VERY dogmatic and they express the super hero universe in didactic and declarative sentences. They conference.
I can't help the creepy feeling -- especially when I read "enchanted" Christians -- that the theology is as untethered from small "o" orthodox theology as the world of Marvel Comics.
Thinking about the momentous decision to commit the Gospels to WRITING to ensure their (imperfect) transmission to future generations, (I can't help publicizing Plato's "Phaedrus" as outlining the disadvantages of writing over oral transmission, including the effects of writing on our capacity to carry our memories inside us...), I thought about the turmoil that our civilisation is going through right now, at the time when the last flesh and blood survivors of the Second WORLD WAR are dying.
Several generations of Americans and Europeans have not personally experienced war, its context and its consequences IN THEIR FLESH, including mine.
Many of us have read the written testimonies, but we have not lived the experience of war on our soils in our flesh...
It seems to me that Means is engaging is sophistry. The Indians, no less than the Europeans engaged in developing the land. They cut trees to build shelter, burned forests to drive game and establish food production, dug pits, developed irrigation, built burial mounds. His premise is flawed to the point of being silly.
To eschew black marks on paper in favor of disturbances in the air makes little sense. All written language is preceded by spoken language, whether to others or to one's self. Humans were given the gift of speech and a written form followed naturally enough. Why wouldn't it. Information and ideas need not be limited to those in proximity of time or place.
The problem is not black marks on paper; the problem is black marks on the human heart.
Black marks on paper affect the capacity to carry works, and memory inside us, without resorting to writing. Black marks on paper externalize memory. It's important.
In my little corner of Science World, the right-brainers have negated the role of understanding the mechanisms and the people and creatures involved. It started as studying “ecological systems” and now we have climate models that predict future agricultural yields without involving any scientists who understand how agriculture is done. One story.. I was promoting some research on fish (understanding how far individual fish move) to a systems-oriented research administrator who said “we don’t need to understand the mechanisms by which the world works to understand the systems.” And so funding is gradually cut off for the more practical, local, and specific, and given to math jockeys who tell us how assumed numbers interrelate.
Per a business attorney friend of mine, the same sort of thing is happening in the field of economics. It has largely ceased to be a humane science and is now mainly an exercise in number-crunching, which in many cases is being turned over to AI to handle.
I had mentioned to him that I'd recently read Robert Skidelsky's "What's Wrong With Economics?" and he said that it has only gotten worse since that book came out a few years back.
The paradox is bitter: language, which should connect us to the world, has instead abstracted us from it. The alphabet, once a bridge, became a cage.
This is where his argument meets incarnational mysticism, the insistence that truth is lived, not dissected. The Lakota distrust of writing, the turn toward myth and silence, is not a rejection of meaning but a deeper embrace of it. The Machine speaks in sterile certainties, the mystic speaks in poetry, in presence, in the unspoken knowing that hums beneath words.
We are exiles in a world we’ve reduced to symbols. The way back is not forward, but down, into silence, into the body, into the soil where words fail and wonder begins.
McGilchrist is mistaken. The left half of the brain must dominate the right half of the brain in their integrative processes for the person to be fully sane. Left-brain dominance is driven by the stream of high-frequency sound through the right ear. I healed our schizophrenic son with a right-eared music therapy, inspired by a dim memory that the French otolarygologist Alfred Tomatis thought the right ear was "more important." That notion turns out to be far more important than even Tomatis realized. When our son relapsed and healed again with the method I now call Focused Listening(TM, trademarked), I set about to find the explanation for how my innovative method worked, and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. My discoveries corrected my understanding of the origins of language (my academic background is English language and literature, with anthropology and philosophy "minors" and work in theatre to pay my way; then a lifetime career in editing, counselling, and behavioural research). I hope my contributions will allow you to fine-tune your understanding of the integration of those differing propensities of the cerebral hemispheres that your source recognizes. My research findings are easy to access in either of my two websites but I would be happy also to send you a summary booklet Awakening Normal, to introduce you to my work. I am blessed by your writing, perhaps especially the wanderings through the countryside in search of holiness.
Babies are born already attuned to the rythyms of speech.they respond to speech rythyms while in their mother's womb.our most important technology is our mother tongue. The very few feral children who have somehow survived without human care and who don't have language are human animals but not human beings and die young.
Language is used as the manifestation of original sin. ‘In the beginning was the Word’, says God. In our envy and our pride, we take that literally and attempt to create new beginnings every time we use language. We cannot help ourselves, we continuously reproduce the trauma of original sin.
'We have killed off most of the world’s oral cultures, but those which remain, which cling on, can sometimes open us out – we, the abstracted ones – to the damage we do with our writing, with our symbolic abstraction, with our constant flow of chatter, with our endless words.'. Thomas Aquinas never completed his Summa Theologica after experiencing a mystical vision, after which he declared that everything he had written seemed to be like 'straw'. He then lived a more contemplative life.
Great essay, Paul. Thank you.
Awe...
Could I possibly be the first person to comment on this essay, in writing, with words ?
It is an interesting essay, certainly one with which I very much disagree, in many ways, even if I feel that tackling this problem is courageous.
A few observations that stem from... my perception of me, my journey through life, the patterns that I can see in the enormous and sometimes unbelievably senseless ? things I have done. Is writing about myself this way.. egotistical ? or could it also perhaps be a way to witness my personal experience so that others can ask themselves the questions that I ask myself ? I hope so...
For several years now, I have given up on going to get check ups at the gynecologist. This worried some people around me, and generally I do NOT PUBLICIZE it, but one of the things that made me very uncomfortable about going to the gynecologist was feeling the necessity of talking about myself, as a body, with all those sophisticated Latin words that over time, almost fill me with horror. Words like "vagina", "anus", words that are part of the scientific vocabulary that I know, and used to be able to use comfortably. But over time, the idea of going to see a medical SPECIALIST to talk about MY BODY PARTS, (and ills), and using that SOPHISTICATED VOCABULARY has become distasteful to me. I no longer want to talk to doctors about my body PARTS.
So... while I no longer want to talk about my body PARTS with THOSE WORDS TO A DOCTOR, that doesn't mean that I no longer want to talk.. (and here, I am writing, by the way). So... what are the possibilities ? 1) not talk about body PARTS 2) not talk to a doctor 3) not use that vocabulary. (I will admit that this is a very analytical manner of looking at this problem, but I don't believe that the problem that Paul is addressing should be looked at in terms of ONE or THE OTHER part of the brain, but in the conjunction of the parts. The problem is in making BOTH OF THEM WORK TOGETHER.)
I no longer go to see the doctors. I know that they will not tell me what I want to know, what I am still looking to discover, and what I am still looking to discover is... me. Me IN the world, with other people, with others. Me... in me, too and all those others in me, because there are others in me (and yes, I am divided to a certain extent. Why not, especially if it allows different others to work together in my interest, in the interest of the whole body ? What is in my interest, ( a word that I have chosen expressly) is also in the interest of the... social body. I believe. For the vocabulary, I use my children's words to talk about my sex, at the risk of appearing... childish. But I would rather be a child than a gynecologist any day.
It is possible, perhaps even desirable, to criticize me on this decision. It could and perhaps should be said that I should be able to use the word "vagina" in public, and the childlike word in private. Maybe. I will accept this criticism, but will still use the childlike word in public. I... accept the consequences for this.
Does the fact that I use the word "I" exclude other people ? What stops them from using it too ? But using the word "we", that is a challenge right now. Try using the word "we" and see how easily it comes to... you.
On abstraction : my niece who is a philosophy teacher in high school in a difficult area in northern France says that her young students are incapable of abstraction as she understands it. Language is much more than abstraction, and words... can be real, and not abstractions. In certain contexts, and to certain people. In the Gospel of Saint John, it was... WRITTEN, "In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". Was that an abstraction ?
Why do we ? you ? go so far as to globally condemn language itself, rather than condemn our incapacity to... control ourselves in the way/the places/ the people to whom we speak or write ? Why throw out the baby with the bath water when... WE are the sinners, if there is sin ? When God tells Cain, after refusing his sacrifice that "Sin is waiting behind your door, will you know how to control it/yourself ?" He asks an excellent question. It is not for us to condemn language, but ourselves in the ways/places/the people to whom we speak and or write.
Language is not a tool either. It is our heritage. We are born.. into it. We must do something with it in order to become fully human. Refusing it is refusing to be human. Condemning it is condemning ourselves globally, and not seeking to deal with our individual responsibility.
More following. This is a very important subject for me.
Thank you for your very thoughtful answer, Adam, with which I very much agree in many areas.
Brilliant! Gone off for the day to think further about all of this. Thanks and hoping you are feeling much better now, Paul.
On the problem of abstraction, which is a very important one..
Just how capable of abstraction are many of us in our culture right now, if you accept the idea that words are not necessarily abstractions, which is my postulate ?
One of the big fights between a fundamentalist ? scientific point of view of the creation, and what we call Christian religious fundamentalists, is in the meaning of the words that God created the world in the creation story, and that the world is 6000 years old... Christian fundamentalism involves taking the creation story... literally... and here we can see the problems acutely.
What does the word "year" mean ?... How do we know ? What did it mean when the creation story was... written down ? What does it mean to take something... literally ? That the words are "real" ?
This problem is acute in Islam too, if my very vague knowledge of Islam is correct.
P.S., Paul, I hope that you are feeling better, and thank you for so much... meat and potatoes to dig into right before summer...
I loved this.
Cormac McCarthy once pointed out in an interview with Oprah that the subconscious is likely older than language. I often wonder if my subconscious understands English. It seems like it doesn't. If it does, then it ignores/disagrees with me a lot. If that's the case, is it me?
Beautiful...
"Another way of framing that question: what languages does the Machine not speak?"
RESIST
The Machine uses the language of obfuscation and deception. If we wish to resist, we will use the language of clarity snd integrity.
Re: But once the Semitic peoples got hold of them, turned them into abstract symbols and wrote them down
The same thing had already happened with Cuneiform and Chinese ideograms. Both began as pictiorial representations, but were soon simplified into abstract symbols.
I believe that the problem is one of representation.
There are representations that begin as pictures, and others that do not.
But... they are still representations. One "thing" standing for another.
I also believe that all living beings, maybe even plants, are under the obligation of interpreting what is before them, whether it be inside or outside. Here, the key word is "interpreting". That means no direct access to our experience as living beings. It has to be interpreted, and uncertainty is inevitably involved in interpretation. Ambiguity.
Maybe the word "abstract" that you have written here is the word "arbitrary" ? as in the idea that you can see a logical connexion between what is being represented, and what is representing, whereas in an alphabetical system you can't ? While not denying that there is a difference between a symbolic system with an alphabet and one without an alphabet, there is still representation.
And isn't our insistance that language not be arbitrary a form of misuse of our... reason, and a refusal to admit that our language is there before us, and that we don't choose it when we enter the world ?
These days, I have to deal with pictograms everywhere and I loathe them. Why are we resorting to pictograms so much ? With the idea that SEEING IS BELIEVING ? that the pictures can not be ambiguous, maybe, but are more easily understood and interpreted ?
Bullshit, in my book. Maybe... our pictograms are influenced by the Chinese ones, and we are becoming more Chinese all the time ?
This idea does NOT appeal to me.
This is a very good piece that goes halfway off the rails because 1) the conductor is too much in the Rousseauan mode and 2) he isn't thinking hard enough about language. I'm not sure how much of it you'd still subscribe to as a Christian--I believe you wrote it before converting--but I'd be curious to know. Perhaps when your book comes out, which I look forward to, I'll get some idea.
Students sometimes ask when we humans invented language. I think this is to get things backward. It's more correct to say that language invented us. We invented *writing*, yes, but language is what makes us human. Our distance from other primates, then, is immense.
Which is not to deny the points you underline: that our behaviors and bodies remain markedly primate. Of course they do. But this doesn’t really matter.
I think you recognize the crux here. We are *something else*. If you are a Christian, you must recognize that we are meant to be. We are the creatures endowed with the "breath of life", which I take as different from just *life*. It refers to the rational spirit, the thing that gives us both free will and the possibility of sin, of falling. It's also what makes us so beloved of God "that He gave his only begotten Son to die".
We are *something else*, and the stakes of this something else are rather large.
We have two creation stories here, one linguistic and anthropological, the other scriptural. I believe they're both true. Language is the main mark that our creation in God's image left in us.
Somehow these two creation stories are intertwined. One of the tasks of the Christian writer or poet is figuring out how.
It's a mistake to assume with McGilchrist that our modern West has a particular problem with balancing brain hemispheres. It's also a mistake to think our malady is somehow rooted in alphabetic writing. It's thirdly a mistake to think that indigenous American cultures, some of which had already founded cities and ruined the ecosystems they depended on, wouldn't have ended up themselves facing the Machine.
I don't put much store in indigenous Americans talking about how Europeans "aren't spiritual". We are of course spiritual, perhaps even more so than they were when they first encountered us. The problem is that *our* spiritual has been reinscribed in a perverse metaphysics that Enlightenment finally turned hyper-productive.
When Newton gave us his mechanics, he was being spiritual. Had a Mayan done it, our academics would be calling it a great triumph of Mayan spiritual insight. And had Mayans engaged some of those other early modern spiritual endeavors that Europeans had, they'd have ended up facing the same Machine.
Enough with the Rousseauan gestures to indigenous cultures. We're an indigenous culture too. *All are condemned.*
I read Chinese, as I live in Taiwan. It's obviously not a phonetically based writing system. Nonetheless it was at the basis of the Chinese imperial civilization that rerouted rivers, deforested much of the Middle Kingdom, and built a sophisticated bureaucracy that wrought havoc on the landscape. And is still wreaking havoc on the landscape.
The Rousseauan song and dance is wrong. No matter what continent we're found on, whether we're mostly oral or literate, we're stuck with language, because it's what made us. I think your ending paragraphs on how we might use language to fight the Machine rather than spread its tentacles are good. But you'd need to rethink this whole dilemma again as a Christian. And you'd need to think much harder about language, what a writer's language *does*, how you and I both are infected and what kinds of tropes and projects and genres might help to break the fever.
Somehow language drags us into grave sin and delusion. But somehow, perhaps employing the right poetics, i.e., the right tactics of language use, we might speak and write in ways less fallen. As Christians, we'd need prayer as well--prayer that the Spirit might lead us toward developing these tactics.
Essays *against* the Machine or *for* this or that are helpful, and your writing, for me, is some of the best. But if you're really looking at *language* as the nexus of our illness, the work is going to be harder.
Some good points here Eric. I think in the end words are just a “tool” of sorts (communication tool) and like all tools in the hands of sick hearts, they will ultimately move us toward evil if the heart is bent toward evil. Impossible to pick just one misuse or one prime cause, in terms of tools, of our current and historic woe. We clearly have misused and do misuse language (and mean it for evil) and in this we lose something of our purpose, of our meaning, and move further away from God. Paul often quotes the ascetics, the Saints, and they are always encouraging us to be holy, to love God first and our neighbor. To become like Him. The question we humans (as a whole) ask less and less is does this “thing”, this “tool”, this knowledge, this innovation, even this word or thought I’m about to speak/write move us/me closer to God or away from Him. Deep down we’ve answered the question already, we want just more of me and mine and do not follow with John in “He [Christ] must increase and I must decrease.”
Agree with your latter remarks, but I strongly suspect, if you think about it more, you will realize language is not “just a tool”. It’s more fundamental than that. And we don’t use it only for communication either.
A tool is generally something we can hold. Language, quite otherwise, is part of us, and begins shaping us as soon as we begin to speak. To use a metaphor, it’s more like a conceptual nervous system, framing our perceptions and reactions. Which means that people in different cultures perceive somewhat differently shaped worlds. As it also means that our language tends to do good or bad *through* us, because it encodes the particular vices of the tribe.
This is part of what Paul is getting at.
You might also consider whether language is “just a tool” by thinking from our faith. God created the universe by speaking it. Christ, who became one of us, is referred to as the Word, the Logos.
Not the Wrench Set, but the Logos.
With the Word and also with words, we’re dealing with something more fundamental.
God bless.
I'm replying to your whole exchange in this comment. Please look at what I wrote in the comments section above about language. I share many of your beliefs about it, except that I feel that we have put way too much emphasis on the idea that rationality differentiates us from the OTHER ANIMALS (a momentous statement, and one with multiple implications), when a predator who hunts in order to eat is using his rational faculties, his Odyssean "ruse" in order to capture his prey. A predator is obliged to reason ? to calculate ? in order to hunt successfully.
For sure, the Enlightenment mentality gives tremendous importance to intelligence AND rationality as traits that separate Man from the rest of creation, and this is... unfortunate. This exclusive ? glorification of intelligence has wreaked havoc on us, I believe.
On Rousseau... while I have not read Rousseau extensively (and I can, in French, without resorting to translations), I do know that we ascribe to him many things that he never said. The idea that Rousseau could be an idealistic proponent of a romantic view of Man and Nature is false, I believe, and does not reflect Rousseau's complex vision. But what is true, I believe, is that during the pre-Revolutionary period (pre... FRENCH revolution, because the American war of independance was NOT a revolution...) the stage was set for a tremendous wave of... nostalgia for the pastoral origins of our Western civilisation, which probably go way back, even before Homer, who refers to Agamemnon as the "shepherd king". And as I like to point out here, in Plato's "Phaedrus" dialogue, you can once again see the nostalgia for pastoralism at work in the setting for this very important dialogue that brings up points that Paul brings up in this article, 450-460 years before Christ was born ?
And once again, we are being buffetted in Western Civilisation by a tremendous.. nostalgia for our pastoral origins. Probably this nostalgia stems greatly from the PROBLEM of so many of us living in cities, where ONLY GARDENS can keep us in touch with Nature on a daily basis, at best. (A reverent thought for Rome which (at what time ? I don't know..) created beautiful gardens free of charge for its population.)
On language, you can read what I wrote above. I don't believe it is a tool. We are born into it. It is knit into our bones, and flows with our blood in our vein. Man cannot invent anything that does not bear the trace of HIS nature and form as creature infused with the spark ? breath ? of life.
One more point that is very important to me, and I will... shut up. I believe that we need to think carefully about the power of language in context :
WHOM are we adressing ? an individual person, in private, whom we could touch and see ? a small group of people ? a crowd ? an anonymous "bunch" of invisible people, which we do when we PUBLIsh ? What do we "choose" to say ? to NOT say ? (And sometimes the words just come out...) In what words (above, in my comment, the childlike words for talking about my body parts) ? Inside ? Outside, ON THE MOUNTAIN, for example ? Poetry ? not poetry ? Metrics of our poetry ? Beauty of it ? Verbs ? which ones ?
Is it possible that it is fitting to say some things in some contexts that are inappropriate in others ? Could it be.. sin to not differentiate context ? How do we know, and can we learn ? How far can we learn ?
Lots of questions...
Language, unlike us and everything we see, hear, feel, smell, and think, is eternal. It is God. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1
God, the Word, spoke and there was light. He spoke and there was the world, without form and void. He spoke again and again. And there was everything that we know and can know. For we were spoken, as well. We cannot take credit for anything. Least of all, language. For language is who created us.
Whew boy! What an insightful comment. I’ve read it twice and am still thinking about it.
I, too, was wondering if Kingsnorth might draw some different conclusions now that he’s a Christian. As I read his article, I immediately thought of the prohibitions on cursing your neighbor and the admonitions to bless your family and friends as well as your enemies all throughout Scripture. I think that at least part of what is going on is the reality that we actually have the power to do both (metaphysically as well as physically). It’s not so much God telling us not to be mean, but to wield our power carefully.
Masaru Emoto has some crazy experiments showing what love, hate, and neglect do to water, rice, and plants. I’ve noticed that the more I take every thought in obedience to Christ, the more peace and love and joy surrounds me and others. (And I’m finally able to grow plants now that I bless them! 😎)
Wise comment, Renee. For me, a cranky type by nature, it’s a long schooling. But you are right about the power that comes from blessing.
Wish you ever-better gardening!
Yes. The power of blessing counterbalances ? the power of cursing ?
The word for blessing in French is "bénédiction", which means literally "speaking well (of), or "saying good", while its opposite is "malédiction", which means "speaking ill (of) or "saying evil".
In a play that I talk about here often, Shakespeare's "Macbeth", the effects of "saying evil" play out in the action, and destroy Lady Macbeth, who invoked evil spirits to "unsex" her, in order to make her into a sexless ? warrior, capable of being ruthless. And she is destroyed by her words, as their effect produces dire, almost mechanical consequences. Very powerful.
Well I should be more clear with my words. 🤓 I do contend that words and even language are cognitive tools. Especially the writing system Paul described in his post. So they are not just things we hold in this case, though they are that. A tool can be defined figuratively as “that which is used as a means to an end.”
I agree with you words/language are also something far more and hence why they are powerful. They convey spirit. The Word is actually a person through Whom all things were created. Although Scripture is made up of words written through humans, it is far more than what is seen and understood on the page. Or heard. I would say we are indeed dealing with spirit and being in this. Peace.
Agreed. I think “going off the rails” is a bit harsh, but I would love to see a re-write with the essay’s positives substituted with Christian sanctity and holiness. IMO it would really work.
substituted or augmented
The Bible describes it as To know good and evil. We put meaning to things. Someone decided to write it down. I try to imagine the alternative, how does the mind of a Lion work? Living completely in the moment with no thought of past or present or if something is Good or Evil. Interesting to think about. No going back now. God obviously gave us this capability but it comes with a price.
I'm not sure that the animals live completely in the moment. Right now... WE seem to have built a civilisation of emergency, though...
I'm not really sure of anything any more. It makes life... interesting, and challenging.
It appears that the newest Christian "revival" is a rebellion against the wet blanket of reason. Mystery leaves us open to making our own individual choices -- whether or not they are good for ourselves or for those around us. Reason tells us that some choices are helpful and some are destructive. That's no fun.
Oh, the new Christian "revival" loves its own brand of legalism. It's come running back to sacraments and liturgy. And adherence to them appears some sort of rebellion against the prevailing culture. But it's probably not. It's probably a sense of giving up on reason because reason makes demands that we don't like. Liturgy and sacrament make demands we like. We like magic.
Liturgy and sacrament are inclusive. Anyone can do them. Reason is exclusive. You gotta be smart to participate. Reason is a whole exclusive world dominated by the institutional gatekeepers that have created it. I can't compete in the Ivy League/Oxford-Cambridge world, so I glom onto a world that will accept me.
Can't compete in the world of reason? ...let's try "enchantment" and comfort ourselves by explaining that the door we just closed on reason wasn't the world that was meant to be anyway.
But that's all just a false dichotomy. And I think we know it. Heck, we're even using the "reason" we reject to try to persuade everyone else to reject reason so that we can be comfortable in our rejection. Nothing confirms bad choices better than not being the only one making them.
Written language isn't something utterly removed from its oral predecessor. Written word is merely a tool of conveyance and archiving. That's how it was developed in the first place. Characters in clay or on stone to mark the commodities of trade in a developing agriculture-based society. Marks began to represent sounds. The elasticity of the system became self-evident. Language was limited, identifiable, specific sounds and marks could represent them. It wasn't magic. It wasn't enchantment. It was phonics.
But it is true that the Western world (maybe the whole world, but I'm only familiar with the one I live in) began to believe that the written word was a superior conveyance of communication to that of an oral society. A mix of:
> misunderstanding evolution as "things improving over time" instead of evolution's reality -- "things that survive environmental changes" taught the western world an unfortunate lie: that we are smarter than primitive man.
>written word was more accurate than oral tradition, when, in fact, written word has its benefits for conveyance and archiving and holding a legal system together, but written word doesn't do a very complete job of conveying the mood of the words it conveys.
When we read the Gospels we quickly realize that many of the stories are open to interpretation for the very reason that the narrative is absent stage direction. There are no parenthetical markings telling us when Jesus is smiling, frowning, scowling, or shouting or whispering when he speaks, or what his body language is adding to the conversation.
We realize quickly that because of that lack of stage direction, we develop very individualized perceptions of who Jesus is and was because every time someone deigns to represent him in art, half of us are uplifted and enchanted with the image and the other half are mortified and indignant at the heretical misrepresentation.
The oral tradition (of the first century church, for example) carried on the narratives of the life of Jesus -- complete with vocal inflection, body language, and mood, and did so within a context of other eye witnesses to places and events that necessarily kept a check on the accuracy of the telling. Such oral tradition was FAR superior to the written word. But it occurred to John, Mark, and Luke that the day was soon coming when the witnesses would all be gone. They put what they could into writing so that 2,000 years later we could know with certainty the truth of Jesus. It worked pretty well. Denominational differences that divide us over questions of reason vs emotion are real, but a very strong core of orthodoxy remains.
And while the current "revival" is asking us to eschew our written word and glom onto the magic of enchantment, I am thankful for those doing the thankless, boring, never-ending job of trying to accurately reason out what was meant by what was written down -- rather than simply rejecting it because SOME of it appears lost to time by its incompleteness and lack of oral conveyance.
"It's probably a sense of giving up on reason because reason makes demands that we don't like. Liturgy and sacrament make demands we like. We like magic."
To pit reason and liturgy/sacrament against each other like this is incorrect. For many hundreds of years the Church both East and West managed to keep these two things (mostly) in balance. It is the separation of the two, with the resultant exaltation of autonomous reason to the detriment of non-rational (not IRrational) thinking that has caused the problem.
The idea of re-enchantment is not to do the same thing in reverse, but rather to attempt to regain the lost balance between the two. To the extent that "reason" is attacked, it's being criticized in its autonomous form, not in terms of man's general rationality, which should be clear if one looks at pre-modern Christian writing such as that of the Church Fathers. Years ago an Orthodox writer whose name I do not remember called such an attempt the "acquiring of the Patristic mind." And Andrew Louth wrote a brilliant little book in the early 80's called 'Discerning the Mystery' in which he covered this very topic as related to theology and Biblical studies. A quick perusal of the latter would contradict any claims that a return to certain pre-modern ways of theologizing involves irrationality or "magic." In fact, the relegating of liturgy and sacrament to "magic" exhibits precisely the sort of rationalistic bias that Louth and others across the theological spectrum have long criticized.
Edit: Louth, by the way, was an Anglican when he wrote the book. He did become Orthodox several years later.
https://firstthings.com/002-talking-to-generation-x/
Not sure exactly what your purpose was in posting this, but I'd say that just because GenX had/has problems with rationality doesn't mean that the Church has to cater to their concerns. In terms of the the Gospel, truth and narrative are connected no matter what GenX was saying 25 years ago. The pitting of the two against one another was problematic then and it's the same now.
It also should be noted that catering to such ideas is what got us "seeker services" and the "Emergent Church."
I suspect that we're mostly talking past each other. That's my fault for not taking the time to explain myself.
The tension I see is in the probability that the modern world has misidentified a chasm between faith and reason that I'm not sure exists.
Most of modern Christianity holds to the idea that faith is an epistemology whereby we accept the things we believe. It thereby allows us to believe irrationally. In fact, it insists that we do.
But the spread of the new belief in Jesus as the Messiah who came, died, and rose again in the completion of the redemption narrative that was present from the beginning of man was not spread by that kind of faith-in-faith. It was spread by eye witnesses who attested to real life, real time events that they saw. And what that redemption narrative means as we interpret the reality of creation is more concrete than it is mystical.
But we still don't know everything. And we can't.
So even those of us who believe that faith is the response to reason (rather than the supplanter of reason) still have an invisible, silent God. And we ultimately do exhibit faith in what we cannot know in the same concrete, falsifiable way that rules the rest of our life and the other things we need to put faith in for our survival (the faith we put in medicine, in the physics by which we can trust the material world that keeps us safe and alive). But that faith is still not without reason. And it's still not how we know what we know. It's still not our epistemology.
Theologians try to explain the invisible, silent God.
Artists try to illustrate the invisible, silent God.
At best, the artists are influenced and instructed by the theologians and the hand-in-glove result gives us a church worth joining. But at worst, the artists invent theology that illustrates a God that isn't. That, I fear, is the state of the current "revival".
Humans are naturally religious. And we love our oogum boogum. We love magic. It convinces us of the possibility of the existence of that invisible, silent God that we want to believe rather than the God that is.
"The tension I see is in the probability that the modern world has misidentified a chasm between faith and reason that I'm not sure exists."
I agree. In fact I recently read a very good book on this subject -- 'Some New World' by Peter Harrison.
"It was spread by eye witnesses who attested to real life, real time events that they saw. And what that redemption narrative means as we interpret the reality of creation is more concrete than it is mystical."
But I'd say that the separation of the "concrete" from the "mystical" is similar to the chasm you mention above. If the first 1000 years of Christian theologizing, both East and West, tell us anything, it tells us that the early Church's theologians were neither proto-rationalists or proto-Romantics. To them concrete and the mystical were intertwined -- we moderns are the ones that have separated them. To my mind re-enchantment, for lack of a better word, in its best "small-o" orthodox forms, is the attempt to reconnect the two.
Interesting perspective. I don't agree, but it's something to consider.
After 43 years of self-employment, the covid shutdowns forced me into the workplace. I kinda love it. I loved the solitude and autonomy of my private studio, but I'm equally loving interacting with people every day. Furthermore, I'm interacting with people with whom I would probably never naturally connected.
My previous employment cast me into a culture of people far more educated and affluent than I. Because I did something they admired, I was accepted well above my class.
I am now working daily with a very blue collar mix and learning much about my prejudices as often as I am thanking God for sparing me from the desperation that lives without God have become.
I work with two guys -- one a 40-something, thoughtful, quiet and polite guy who only occasionally allows a peek at what I'm guessing is a pretty high level of self education via reading and cultural interests. The other fellow is a 29 year old army veteran (8 years of service) tattoos over every inch of his body below the neck, and the requisite piercings -- plugged ears, nose ring, etc He's built like an NFL lineman and that makes his gentle nature deliciously ironic. Funny, too. He and I talk endlessly through ear buds as we work and I'm discovering a quick wit and colorful imagination.
I once asked the two of them, "Hulk vs The Thing. Who wins?" They didn't miss a beat. They didn't hesitate, nor did they look to each other for confirmation. They both blurted "Hulk!" at the same time. There was no question. There was no doubt.
I've had discussions with both of them about the superhero universe. The older of the two I keep a running dialogue -- a fiction I spin that I have been working with a terribly overweight, badly out-of-shape Batman, trying to whip him back into shape and bolster his faded self-confidence. Daily he asks me how it's going. Daily I give him an update (after a few setbacks, Batman has shed a significant amount of weight and has started back into reading updates from Commissioner Gordon -- a good sign that he intends to be super again).
The younger guy has been instructing me about how the super hero universe works.
It's exactly like theology. It has rules and its own logic. The adherents are VERY dogmatic and they express the super hero universe in didactic and declarative sentences. They conference.
I can't help the creepy feeling -- especially when I read "enchanted" Christians -- that the theology is as untethered from small "o" orthodox theology as the world of Marvel Comics.
It's not real ...
Thinking about the momentous decision to commit the Gospels to WRITING to ensure their (imperfect) transmission to future generations, (I can't help publicizing Plato's "Phaedrus" as outlining the disadvantages of writing over oral transmission, including the effects of writing on our capacity to carry our memories inside us...), I thought about the turmoil that our civilisation is going through right now, at the time when the last flesh and blood survivors of the Second WORLD WAR are dying.
Several generations of Americans and Europeans have not personally experienced war, its context and its consequences IN THEIR FLESH, including mine.
Many of us have read the written testimonies, but we have not lived the experience of war on our soils in our flesh...
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It seems to me that Means is engaging is sophistry. The Indians, no less than the Europeans engaged in developing the land. They cut trees to build shelter, burned forests to drive game and establish food production, dug pits, developed irrigation, built burial mounds. His premise is flawed to the point of being silly.
To eschew black marks on paper in favor of disturbances in the air makes little sense. All written language is preceded by spoken language, whether to others or to one's self. Humans were given the gift of speech and a written form followed naturally enough. Why wouldn't it. Information and ideas need not be limited to those in proximity of time or place.
The problem is not black marks on paper; the problem is black marks on the human heart.
Black marks on paper affect the capacity to carry works, and memory inside us, without resorting to writing. Black marks on paper externalize memory. It's important.
In my little corner of Science World, the right-brainers have negated the role of understanding the mechanisms and the people and creatures involved. It started as studying “ecological systems” and now we have climate models that predict future agricultural yields without involving any scientists who understand how agriculture is done. One story.. I was promoting some research on fish (understanding how far individual fish move) to a systems-oriented research administrator who said “we don’t need to understand the mechanisms by which the world works to understand the systems.” And so funding is gradually cut off for the more practical, local, and specific, and given to math jockeys who tell us how assumed numbers interrelate.
Per a business attorney friend of mine, the same sort of thing is happening in the field of economics. It has largely ceased to be a humane science and is now mainly an exercise in number-crunching, which in many cases is being turned over to AI to handle.
I had mentioned to him that I'd recently read Robert Skidelsky's "What's Wrong With Economics?" and he said that it has only gotten worse since that book came out a few years back.
I wonder how many different scientific and other communities have noticed the same thing? I’ll have to read that book.
The paradox is bitter: language, which should connect us to the world, has instead abstracted us from it. The alphabet, once a bridge, became a cage.
This is where his argument meets incarnational mysticism, the insistence that truth is lived, not dissected. The Lakota distrust of writing, the turn toward myth and silence, is not a rejection of meaning but a deeper embrace of it. The Machine speaks in sterile certainties, the mystic speaks in poetry, in presence, in the unspoken knowing that hums beneath words.
We are exiles in a world we’ve reduced to symbols. The way back is not forward, but down, into silence, into the body, into the soil where words fail and wonder begins.
McGilchrist is mistaken. The left half of the brain must dominate the right half of the brain in their integrative processes for the person to be fully sane. Left-brain dominance is driven by the stream of high-frequency sound through the right ear. I healed our schizophrenic son with a right-eared music therapy, inspired by a dim memory that the French otolarygologist Alfred Tomatis thought the right ear was "more important." That notion turns out to be far more important than even Tomatis realized. When our son relapsed and healed again with the method I now call Focused Listening(TM, trademarked), I set about to find the explanation for how my innovative method worked, and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. My discoveries corrected my understanding of the origins of language (my academic background is English language and literature, with anthropology and philosophy "minors" and work in theatre to pay my way; then a lifetime career in editing, counselling, and behavioural research). I hope my contributions will allow you to fine-tune your understanding of the integration of those differing propensities of the cerebral hemispheres that your source recognizes. My research findings are easy to access in either of my two websites but I would be happy also to send you a summary booklet Awakening Normal, to introduce you to my work. I am blessed by your writing, perhaps especially the wanderings through the countryside in search of holiness.
Babies are born already attuned to the rythyms of speech.they respond to speech rythyms while in their mother's womb.our most important technology is our mother tongue. The very few feral children who have somehow survived without human care and who don't have language are human animals but not human beings and die young.