Among my hobbies is the study and acquisition of languages. I’ve studied or am presently studying French, Spanish, German, Finnish, and Hebrew. The first two have largely lapsed but I’m trying to reacquire them and am pleased to see how quickly they are returning. In German I am a bit stale but still somewhat conversational, in Finnish getting a sort of basic mastery, and in Hebrew a novice. And I often wonder about the origins of language: What were the first words? What words in modern language have been most preserved through the ages? How long have we been speaking to each other? Did it co-emerge with symbolic culture in general or did it come later? Did it arise once and then diverge, or several times, independently, in different places and times?
The Bible has its own narrative of the origin of language, or at least the origin of its diversity, and it paints a problematic picture both of God and of language. The Bible’s story of the Tower of Babel is a short one: the descendants of Noah, who spread across the earth in the wake of the flood, founded a city on a plain in the land of Shinar, which is the Biblical word for Mesopotamia. In order to make a name for themselves, the inhabitants decide to build a tower that reaches to Heaven.
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
Genesis 11:5-6, NRSV
I’ve heard this story told that the confusion of speech was God’s punishment to humankind for their vanity in wanting to rival God by building a tower to Heaven, but this is not what we find in the Text. God confuses the speech of humankind in order to prevent us from any great accomplishments, then or at any time in the future. One then wonders what God must have thought of the moon landing. The seeming lack of a divine and wrathful response to that undertaking contradicts either the original narrative, or the one that says that God is perfect and unchanging. In both options there seems to be a disappointment stemming from our lofty expectations of God.
But this seems in keeping with the history of some religious institutions, which, for example, persecuted scientists at the beginning of the modern era when their discoveries undermined those institutions’ authority. We can certainly imagine an church, authentic to its love of and devotion to God, which would have taken the Copernican Revolution and other scientific discoveries as means to a deeper understanding of God and Their creation. The heliocentric solar system and evolution by natural selection would have been, and would continue to be, religious revelations just as much as they were scientific ones. If we are to take the sacred texts as at all divinely inspired, these revelations would give us new insight into their interpretation. The fact that the opposite occurred, that historical and present religious institutions have taken these revelations as challenges to their authority to control belief, can only mean that God and truth are not the true foci of these institutions.
As a contrast to the small, Biblical view of God, I’ll take as an example “Tower of Babylon,” a short story by Ted Chiang. In this story, we see a very different sort of God from the one who tries to keep us from our own capacity. Instead, we see a God for whom the Tower is an opportunity for humankind to see the greatness and the mystery of creation. The tower is constructed without interference, and extends so high that it takes a month and a half to climb from the base to the summit, even as the tower is still being constructed. What is ultimately revealed in this endeavor is more remarkable still.
It is within our capacity to imagine a better God. So should not then this be our God instead of the lowly and petty one that the Bible so often describes?
But more troubling to me is the notion of language as a barrier to prevent us from working together, rather than a medium through which we can understand human diversity and imagination. When I speak of God, this is closer to what I mean, something that reflects the broadest possible conception of who we are rather than the narrowest.
For all that I love of other languages, English remains to me the best of all possible worlds. English, my mother tongue, with its maddening orthography, is a vast museum of the etymologies of all the languages from which it has been assembled. It is my metalanguage, the language through which I understand all others, the language which taught me to love language. In seeking to realize that same value in languages that are not my own, however impossible that may ultimately be, I come to a deeper and more expansive understanding of the breadth of humankind. Maybe God meant it as a curse but I see it as a gift.
This also makes the acquisition of languages a particularly Satanic undertaking, thwarting the will of God by circumventing God’s efforts to confuse and mislead us. And one may see in this why Satanism might be the more appealing religion to the seeker of knowledge: God, as described in the Bible, did not want that we should know of good and evil, and now makes it so that we cannot easily coordinate our knowledge and our efforts. It is Satan, conversely, who encourages and materially supports the pursuit of knowledge. Satan, in the Bible’s narrative from the creation stories to this point, has been much more our benefactor than God has.
Later, in the Gospel of Mark, Christ Jesus proclaims the ability to speak in tongues as one of the signs that one is a believer (Mark 16:17-18). This gives a Christian value as well to the act of learning other languages, by way of approaching and assimilating the diversity of human experience. I think that people have an innate capacity to learn language because we have our own language as reference and because we are are trying to signify, to some degree, the same things in the world. We all signify these things in different ways, even among those who speak the same language, but that’s just more experience for everyone to learn from and grow from.