An exploratory meditation on the origin, nature, and role of language

 As conversation of all kinds unravels in our world today, and words become unmoored from meaning, it is right and just, perhaps even our duty and ultimately our salvation, to reflect upon words and the Word.

We will begin with the nature of language and its relation to the body and meditate upon how the body influences language and mediates it. I will suggest that the origin of language had something to do with music, and then suggest the cosmic significance of this music. Further, music has to do with the body and with emotions and time. And true language unites these elements into a communion between speakers. Ultimately, language is about empathy and love.

When Adam saw Eve, he exclaimed “this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” As he said this, his words made it true. The original recorded human speech does what it says: it is a kind of performative utterance. Though he didn’t create Eve’s body by his words, he created a unity between the two of them, on a physical as well as intellectual level. 

Before continuing, a word to the reader: To think about this topic is not a straightforward endeavor; therefore, this essay is a kind of wrestling with a reality about words that is perhaps beyond them – and therefore proceeds in a cautious, exploratory way, often circling back to rediscover what was said before, and now seen in a new light. 

Language moves human reality at a deeper level than merely the experience of sonic waves striking the ear and neurotransmitters firing in the brain. It even operates at a deeper level than mental concepts and symbols and abstractions. Language ultimately makes one’s flesh present in another by participation – it initiates a kind of communion by embodied empathic intimacy. Empathy is, in part, the physical reactions to reality present in one body (that is, its emotions) made present in the other. The same feeling, same embodied passionate response to reality. When communication occurs, empathy obtains.

Thus, by empathy, language makes one body out of two by embodying one in the other. Conversely, if it consists of and results in a lie, it brings about the opposite of embodied intimacy, which is murder. Either way, language takes two bodies and results in one. We speak love or death.

In The Master and His Emissary, philosopher Ian McGilchrist cites brain and musculoskeletal analyses which reveal unique similarities between the brains and muscles of birds and humans. Only birds and humans communicate with song, due to structures possessed only by humans and birds. McGilchrist shows that the original common human language developed from gestures with music, that is, from dance. Fascinating explorations suggest the original human communication was musical. But this music arose in an ordered and communal rite, something not unlike a dance. Words arose from a communal setting of gestures and music, which became refined as spoken sound. The original communication was embodied music. From gesture, to dance, to song, to speech, the earliest human communities refined and abstracted their method of communication from the grunts and calls of animals. 

(As an aside: The idea that human language developed from primeval grunts need not conflict with the Biblical account of creation. Saint Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas held to a theistic theory of evolution, and among the Church Fathers, literal six-day creationists were certainly present, but were rarer than the more traditional interpreters of Genesis who held to a metaphorical or allegorical interpretation. The literal interpretation of Genesis became much more common because of Protestant exegesis. Another, alternative, yet tantalizing possibility of situating these reflections into salvation history, is that Dr. McGilchrist’s theory describes the origin of post-Babel language.)

If these conjectures are true, perhaps only provisionally, they gesture to a fascinating meditation on the nature of language. Ancient, classical, and Christian retellings of the story of origins involve the idea of music as the basis of reality. God sangthe world into being. The fundamental structure of reality is in some way imprinted in the nature of man, who is the image bearer of the Creator. In this sense, man is a microcosm, because all of the works of creation bear the signature of its Maker. But in man, the signature of the Maker that is merely a vestige in the rest of reality is condensed and recapitulated into what makes man’s essence: the Image of God. The vestiges of God which the rest of creation receives accidentally is man’s essential nature.

Continuing on this vein, if music is in some way intrinsic to reality – music being the expressive instrument through which reality came to be – and if humanity is a microcosm of reality, then it would seem that music must be inherent to our nature, the Image of God. If God created the world in a musical way, as St. Augustine describes in the Sixth Book of his work on Music, De Musica, and as the Book of Wisdom indicates in its creation meditation, then it would make sense that the soul of man is musical and intended for harmony.

Music creates unity out of diversity, over an extension of time, and emotionally and volitionally unites all those participating in it by shared experience. It causes a unified embodied experience in its listeners. To the degree that the listeners surrender themselves to its effects, and to the degree that any given musical piece corresponds to the essence of what music ought to be, to such degree it accomplishes what it signifies. “When the music is not heard at all,” in the words of Eliot, it creates a hierarchical unity out of diversity in time – “a moment that is the intersection of the timeless and time” – in the world and in the space of the hearts of those who experience it. Another way of saying this would be that it creates a shared response to reality and with the timeless, in an instant in time, among those who experience it together. Or, put simply, it creates a kind of empathy between eternity, space, and time.

If it is true that language has its origin in music, then language to be true language must also approximate the effect of music. The idea of language, then, is to create a unity between two or more minds – a union with, i.e., a communion. 

Historically speaking, the music from which language arose also involved a kind of communal gesturing, a sort of dance. This idea hints that the original communication embodied and flowed from the reality that it created. It arose from a communal, participatory gesture which united many bodies in one action, and it created that same unity on the level of the mind. Incidentally, for the Christian and the classical Aristotelian, the mind ought not be separated from the body; as St. Thomas puts it, we are bodies, and we have souls. 

What does language communicate? Granted that we are bodies, and communication is an embodied communal activity, what is communicated? The answer must involve some kind of embodied state; all knowledge comes from the senses, and thus involves the effects of external reality upon the body, and the interplay of body and soul that we call the mind. Significantly, an emotion is the quintessential form of an embodied state. It is a physical and mental reality, which occurs in the body and arises in the mind because of how the external world affects the soul through the body. This hints at a solution to the question at the beginning of the paragraph: language primarily communicates emotion . The emotion becomes a kind of vehicle by which the speaker’s body becomes united in spirit to the body of the listener. The speaker initiates an experience by which the listener comes to understand the physico-emotional state of the speaker. 

In “understand” is the idea of ‘taking a stand under’. This implies this very act of embodied empathy. Taking a stand means an embodied action of commitment. The element of doing this ‘under’ something or someone indicates that the embodied commitment involves an element of passivity or submission. We do not understand the things that we try to control; rather, we understand what we submit to. It requires a kind of surrender to something over and above oneself. 

To understand another, then, means to make an embodied act of committed submission to another. In more simple language, this means, “to care.” Caring means a surrender of one’s particular opinion and perspective and desires for the good of something greater and higher or for the well-being of someone else. To understand, in this sense, then, becomes synonymous with caring. 

Music is the language of care, of embodied emotional commitment to undergo some experience. And language extends this to higher mental states which nonetheless begin in the same way – an embodied act of care for another. 

What happens, then, when language becomes distorted, away from its nature as a communal embodiment of empathy? Again, the opening chapters of Genesis provide a clue. The first lie initiates the first murder. Cain tells Abel that they ought to go walk in the field. Nothing is farther from the truth; Cain’s words express a desire for companionship, but they conceal a plan to kill. The first murder is the lie. Taking Abel’s life simply concludes the process Cain began with his lie. The warping of language destroys the enfleshed union of souls that comes to be through the expression of empathy in words. Communication is destroyed, and then life. 

To lie and to consent to lies is therefore an act of the greatest betrayal to humanity. It involves one in the guilt of destruction of life. No one can live by lies. They always destroy. The devil is the father of lies, and a murderer from the beginning, says the Lord. The being of the devil personifies the connection between abuse of language and destruction of life.

In contrast to the devil, the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This Personifies the relationship between communication and love, and care. The Word is the perfect expression of the Father’s love – His care, His empathy, for the world. It is through this Word that all things came into being. Given the connection between word and music, then the ancient myths are true, that all things came into being by song. And the Word did not come into the world to condemn the world – that is the role of the accuser, the one who speaks against, the murderer from the beginning. Rather, the Word came into the world as the perfect Incarnation of Infinite Caring. And so, he submitted, and suffered, and was betrayed, and lied about, and destroyed. His life and death embodied all the suffering and all the death of all those who have suffered the effects of the lie. Because He is the Incarnate Word, He embodied in Himself all embodied empathy, making the suffering of all His Own. He, the Word, is the perfect empathy.

In high school speech and debate classes I was taught, “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” I think that this is true. Caring is the precondition for the communication of knowledge, of speech. Without caring, the speaker cannot communicate, but only engage in a farce – at best, but all such farces culminate in destruction. Without his care and the care of his listeners, he cannot initiate or achieve communication. Caring is the structure of embodied empathy, which is the essence of communication, expressed in language. 

Given this connection between music, dance, and caring, which constitutes real communication, we can more fully appreciate the technical precision of St. Paul’s statement that without charity, all tongues of men or of angels are merely sounding gongs and tinkling cymbals. Charity turns tinking and clanging into song. Without caring, there is no embodied motion, no dance, no music, only noise. But words make flesh the union of minds, so that all can be bone of bone and flesh of flesh, most truly when united in the Flesh of the Word. Love makes truth. 

To speak with love is the precondition of truth. St. Thomas adds that without charity, statements may be accurate but they are not true, since truth entails a union of minds that is love. Literally, we may be as accurate as Hell, since everything is very legalistic and precisely accurate in Hell, but unless we love, what we speak is not true.

Therefore, at all times and in all ways, we must care for and about those to whom we speak, and our words only count as true if they embody  our care for each other, and our desire to empathize and to evoke empathy. The Scriptures tell us that we will have to answer for every word we speak. How is this different from what St. John of the Cross says, that “in the evening of life we will be judged by our love”? Let us love, then, one another. And our words will then be true.

Love is the answer to the chaos of the cacophony of confused identity and culture politics.