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"The Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 is so rich in associations that one could mine it a good while before exhausting its lode…. Did the tale-bearer intend the pun inherent in the peoples' desire to 'make a name for themselves'?… A I any rate, such was the early writer's explanation for the confusion of tongues he found about him. And the result of the breakdown of communication was, predictably, the dissolution of human society. A more concise, graphic explanation for the state of human affairs could scarcely be imagined. What more is there to say except to document the same phenomenon in our own age? "

The Worth of Words
By Virginia Owens

One of the central paradoxes of human life is that our blessings and curses, our strengths and weaknesses, are often interchangeable. What is given to us as a gift we often manage to pervert into an instrument of self-destruction. Fortunately the converse is also true-what seems a veritable mark of Cain can become the means of our salvation. Thus are sin and grace so intertwined in our lives that we spend our best hours marvelling at their mysterious patterns.

I

Language is one of the prototypical paradigms of the paradox. That the problem of language is not just a new discovery, arriving with the discipline of philology or linguistics, is proved by the early archetype of Babel. It seems there are certain central human experiences that, Teilhard de Chardin notwithstanding, do not develop or progress, and most of these are found in the primeval history in Genesis. The concern with the central mysteries of creation, sexual relationships, work, murder, retribution, and language is constant in all cultures. Though the "solutions" to the mysteries may vary greatly, it is obvious that each new age must work through the puzzles afresh. Perhaps this is exactly what defines a "culture," that is, how a certain group of people comes to terms with these central mysteries.

Virginia Owens is a seminarian at the Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado. She has a Master's degree in English from the University of Kansas, and in addition to her theology course, she is editing a volume of verse by seminarians and writing an autobiographical account of a failed commune in New Mexico. She is the author of the article, "Theology and the English Language," which appeared in The Christian Century, July 17,1974.

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Our own age's way of coming to terms with the mystery of language seems to me in need of careful criticism. It is next to impossible to locate oneself on a Toynbeean wave of history. Is our language a manifestation of the downward slide of our culture's wave, the last dying embers of the conflagration of western European civilization? Or are we beginning the first surges of a new era? Of course, applying the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy, it is impossible to tell, and there is always that split second when the downward slide shifts imperceptibly into the new wave. Certainly my own analysis of language today is mostly given over to its decadent aspects-language as curse. Yet I would not feel constrained to bother about the matter at all unless I were also convinced, as was the teller of the Babel tale, that language was once a blessing, a gift that has been perverted, and as such is still a means of grace.

The Babel story in Genesis 11: 1-9 is so rich in associations that one could mine it a good while before exhausting its lode. I will confine this examination to the result of the tower-building, the confusion of tongues. Did the tale-bearer intend the pun inherent in the peoples' i desire to "make a name for themselves"? Certainly the irony of all names being unmade by such arrogance is in the text, although most commentators continue in their parochialism by labelling this story "primitive…. naive," and "unsophisticated." At any rate, such was the early writer's explanation for the confusion of tongues he found about him. And the result of the breakdown of communication was, predictably, the dissolution of human society. A more concise, graphic explanation for the state of human affairs could scarcely be imagined. What more is there to say except to document the same phenomenon in our own age?

II

Our own confusion of tongues is not merely a diversity of languages, although that should not be discounted, seeing as how a language is a repository of all cultural differences. Rather, our confusion is so deep and thorough that even those speaking the same language do not understand one another. What is worse, the purpose of language, which is supposedly to transfer what is inside one solitary spirit into another expectant spirit so that there may be communion, is premediatedly perverted and consciously used for subverted ends. Until all those interested in studying "communication theory" realize that all language has been tainted with this, that even with the best of intentions, none of us can start with a tabula rasa as though the words we were using were perfectly fresh and unspoiled but instead warped and weary tools at best, until then we will be trudging over the same barren ground.

Take for example that greatest assault on language in centuries, perhaps since Babel itself-modern advertising, which is roughly analogous to the assault on the physical environment by technology.

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Horrors have been wreaked upon language through media advertising that had been unknown until the present century. Certainly ancient merchants must have perverted language in their own ways, foisting off a lame camel as sound and healthy. But the difference in exploited language today is qualitative, not simply a matter of heaping up more of the same abuses. How much the very nature of our language has been tampered with can be judged from how "quaint" we perceive old advertisements to be, using antique newspaper ads or posters for decorations because of their charming lack of sophistication.

Given the technology of communication today, language has undergone a strip-mining as severe as Appalachia's. How, for instance, can we ever again bear the words "the land of sky-blue waters" without seeing in our mind's eye not the lakes of the north country but cartoon bears waltzing about with cans of Hamm's beer? Yet at one time and not too long ago those particular words in that particular configuration would have had beauty-evoking power. There is no need to make lengthy lists of this sort of thing. It is all too apparent. But every time a significant word or phrase is sucked into the vortex of advertising-the exploitation of language for profit-it is lost forever to our senses as a means of evoking any image or meaning other than the commercial one.

This verbal degradation has another dimension with the advent of the technological device of linking sound with picture, so that the visual image itself, not just the verbal symbols that represent it, become exploited. Coming up on a high mountain lake in Colorado, one has to fight off the automatic mental impulse to see it in terms of an advertising poster or calendar picture. One holds one's breath at every spectacular sunset for fear that screen credits for Walt Disney Productions will appear on the horizon. The recent plethora of greeting cards using photographs of sunsets, lonely beaches, and birds in flight are another symptom of how our ideas of beauty are being depleted by commercial exploitation and turned into visual cliché accents. The loss is so real that this wound in our language will not be healed until this age passes away. And of course technology is not satisfied with anything less than the best. It wants the very words and pictures that are already tied most securely to our viscera in order to do its job most effectively.

III

The marketplace is not, unfortunately, the only offender. If so, we could hope that with the demise of capitalism would go at least this confusion of tongues. The illusion of specialization in our society has produced a certain coyness about language that, though it may be tinged with a kind of commercialism, is primarily aimed at convincing the rest of the world that the users are possessed of any area of knowledge inaccessible to ordinary mortals. Psychology, which purports to treat of the human mind, a subject we all presumably have

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some experiential knowledge of, is perhaps the worst offender. But theology, not to be rendered irrelevant in the modern world, has opted for a similar course of pseudo-specialization. Not that there have not always been words peculiar to theology. God, sin, salvation. But they have become embarrassingly archaic. Irrelevant, in a word. Thus begins the search for best-sellers amongst our word stock. Using the same strip-mining techniques as advertisers, those who should speak to and for the church rapaciously rip and tear the language with the moral abandon of the Peabody Coal Company. Just how substantial their contributions are can be judged by their mayfly-like lifespan.

Littering the theological landscape like discarded Kleenex are black theology, liberation theology, theology of hope, enabler, facilitator, values clarification, transactional theology. Many of these words and phrases would be perfectly healthy uses of language if they had not been overworked to the point of depletion, if they had not been overexposed to where they have accrued such tawdry, shopworn associations that they are virtually prostituted out of meaning. Just as the church was (and is) behindhand in seeing its ecological responsibilities, following in the wake of secular moralists, so it awaits its awakening to the moral problems of language by "outsiders" who seek more fiercely for truth than for a spurious relevancy.

This has not always been so, of course. Dante, a devout son of the church while one of her severest critics, did not hesitate to imbue language, so often currently regarded as a mere tool with no moral value in itself, with an ethical power. "We declare, therefore, to begin with, that the exercise of discernment as to words involves by no means the smallest labour of our reason, since we see that a great many sorts of them can be found …. just as among great works some are works of magnanimity, others of smoke; and as to these last, although when superficially looked at there may be thought to be a kind of ascent, to sound reason no ascent, but rather a headlong fall down giddy precipices will be manifest, because the marked-out path of virtue is departed from." (De Vulgari Eloquentia," Book II, The Latin Works of Dante. J. M. Dent & Sons, 1904, p. 91).

I do not want to dwell too long, however, in this wasteland of language. Even if most people do not take time to articulate what they feel is not quite right with what they hear and read, still they realize a vague malaise, an uneasiness or frustration with communication, a confusion of tongues. Although this malaise usually manifests itself in cynicism, especially towards all public language ("inoperative" and "expletive deleted"), yet buried back in the cave of the mind is still that secret yearning for the pre-Babel period of "one language." For every state of cynicism presupposes a disappointed hope, in this case the yearning to understand and to be understood.

That we are in a peculiar position here seems evident when we compare our situation to the rest of creation. For most of the world-trees, rocks, clouds-there is no need to be understood. They mean

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what they are. Some eastern religions, picking up on this, see such a state as paradisal and seek to return to the simplicity of the stone. The highest attainment of such religions is a life of such purity and integrity that words are unnecessary; we, also, ought to mean what we are. An example of another culture's attempt to deal with the mystery of language. (Consider how the Zen koan tries to discourage the too great dependence on a symbol to stand for the totality of the meaning of a thing.)

Another large hunk of creation-animals do have some kind of communication, although not strictly verbal. Bees dance on the hive, ants twiddle antennae, birds call, dogs whine, bark, growl. And the miracle is that there seems to be no breakdown of communication amongst them. Even without technology, bees manage to tell one another where the nectar is; ants find picnics en masse; birds mate, often for life, and raise families; dogs know their friends and enemies unerringly. No wonder Whitman wrote:

I think I could turn, and live with animals, they are so placid and self-
contained…
They bring me tokens of myself. . .
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

--("Song of Myself," The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. by Mark van Doren. Viking 1945, pp. 98-99).

Yet we are the only part of creation unable to achieve the simplicity of a stone, or to build an economy or raise a family as effectively as ants or birds, and largely because of our failure with language. What more compelling argument for original sin? But despite the failure we cling to language, the very thing that separates us from the rest of creation, as a means of grace. Magic words, words of power, the words of institution, vows, covenants, promises, blessings, curses. Iris Murdoch in an address at the National Book Awards a few years ago said, "Words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being, since they are the most refined and delicate and detailed as well as the most universally used and understood of the symbolisms whereby we express ourselves in to existence."

Children discover in amazement the ineffability of words when they first play the game of repeating the same word twenty times. The "real" word simply fades away like a timid deer in the forest and all we are left with is a few letters, tracks of the meaning that once stood there. The same is true with the printed word. Confronted with a page covered with columns of the same word, one's mind and eye immediately reject the non-meaning of such an arrangement and begin frantically to move up and down the page, across, diagonally, rearranging in patterns that will make some sense out of lines that, by sheer repetition, have become not words but marks.

Given our compulsion to find meaning through language, to understand and to be understood, to find the white stone with our own true

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name written on it that St. John the Revelator speaks of, how does our culture approach this mystery? To whom can we go for the words of life? Or, how do you tell a false from a true prophet?

IV

Although our problems are peculiar and perhaps unprecedented, it seems to me that there is a common thread in the remnant of language which almost every culture has saved from absolute destruction. Consider the character, for example, of the patrons of poetry in the mythologies of such divergent cultures as early Hellenism and the northwestern American Indian. Hermes, herald of Zeus, protector of poets predating Apollo, and inventor of the written alphabet, is also patron of liars. Old Man Coyote, with the same ambivalent morality as Hermes, is the supreme teller of tales amongst the Indian deities. Lies and truth intermingle in the stories. But how do their kinds of "lies" differ from those of the Pentagon when it falsifies death counts or cranks out euphemisms like "anti-personnel bomb"? Simply in this way: the lies of exploitation are aimed at the acquisition and the protection of power. And in the technological age that necessarily means the reification of the person. On the other hand, the lies of poets are attempts to burrow into the marrow of reality, whatever the risks or consequences. And because they are keenly aware of the fragility of words, of how they can collapse the moment they are made to bear too much meaning, they are constantly shifting angles, trying to stalk the "real" by slipping up on it from the unexpected ambush. Thus in both Hermes and Old Man Coyote there is always the element of the unpredictable against the predictable, play versus pomposity, the primitive over the sophisticated.

The patterns of words must continually be broken up and not allowed to cast spells on our minds, freezing out new possibilities of meaning. One cannot say the same thing with the same words too many times, or truth evaporates. Only when we realize that slogans of all kinds are no more than black magic can we begin gleefully to crack them up. The prophets of Israel (also poets) recognized this. Instead of trying to return to one, even one liturgical, language, they broke into the word patterns of every segment of the nation's life and ransacked them for unexpected, outrageous uses in order to shatter the spell cast over the people by words used too ceremoniously too long. Their purpose was not to gain or to protect power, but to expose it. Their intent was not to overthrow either the king or the cult, but simply to render them ridiculous in their attempt to usurp Yahweh, the only one to whom power is "natural." They cast Yahweh in the role of a lawyer, a farmer, a husband. As soon as they develop one image, they leap to another, eager to incorporate the truth inherent in each bit of reality into the great totality of Yahweh. Of course, we know what happened to most of the prophets. They decidedly did not live the life of advertising executives. The state powers usually put into

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practice most effectively the later Platonic dictum of throwing the poets out as a threat to the government, because poets tell "lies."

But only in this way can language be enriched and made fertile again after its depletion by exploitive forces. In A Continuous Harmony, Wendell Berry speaks of the "necessity, the usefulness, of poetry." In attacking political rhetoric specifically, he says, "This sort of speech, no matter whose it is, is preparing the world to fight-to the last man-the final war. The poetry that is most useful to us, that has most devotedly sought the humble exactitude of the personal, never makes the deathly pretense of being more than human, and if we read it, will help to keep us from making such a pretense." (A Continuous Journey. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972, p. 61). How much theology is written like political rhetoric and how much like poetry?

V

It is the core of our Christian belief that there is no going back to the old paradise. One cannot unlearn original sin, and the ruins of the tower of Babel still stand. Esperanto will not save us. The confusion of our tongues is too deep and thorough. We are a people of unclean lips. The story of Babel ends with the dispersion of human society. Yet if we will give up "the deathly pretense of being more than human" (remember the heaven-storming motivation for the building of the tower), then perhaps we can at least invent language that will have some correspondence with reality. This involves, however, the resolute rejection of sloganizing, the casting of soporific spells, the commercial exploitation of our word stock. I don't really have any more hope that the world at large will suddenly be smitten with its moral responsibility to language than that Georgia Pacific will begin decrying the extravagant waste of disposable paper. If one is a realist, one doesn't expect redeemed behavior from an unredeemed society. Yet I harbor a hope that some remnant of the church can begin to take its poetic tradition, which has been considerable, seriously. And if we cannot be Ezekiel or Augustine, let us at least learn to speak with "humble exactitude."