English as a Sacred Language: the Fall of the Babel Tower

  The human ecclesia needs a common language and this language is now English, a true sacred language that allows all the children of Gaia to understand each other. You see in the clip above, Anastassia Makarieva, Russian researcher, opening up a whole new world for you. She can do that because she masters English well enough to be able to communicate with us. 

 

 

 

Nowadays, English is enjoying the status that was of Latin in Europe during the Middle Ages. It allows people from widely different cultures to speak and understand each other. It is a little miracle if you think that, up to no long ago, the world was a Babel where you wouldn't have been able to understand people living just a few hundred kilometers from you.

 

This is the pliancy of the human language, an incredibly powerful tool that serves also the purpose of tribal identification. And this second purpose is what creates the Babel tower: humankind as a vast mosaic of communities unable to understand each other. It is possible to overcome the language barriers using sacred languages: for centuries, Latin, Arabic, and Greek, provided the tools needed for communicating for the people living in the Eastern tip of Eurasia and North Africa. Along the Silk Eoad that crossed Eurasia, trade languages were spoken, the most common one being Sogdian, an early Iranian dialect, by now nearly forgotten (some versions of it are still spoken in Tajikistan).

 

None of these trade or sacred languages could ever claim to be global until English came. And, yes, today English has attained this status: the first language that can truly connect the whole human ecclesia. Take a look at this clip

Go to minute 3:10 and you can hear his holiness, Abune Paulos, telling the story of the Ethiopian Christian Church. Isn't it a miracle of our times that father Paulos can express himself in a perfectly understandable English? It is the same miracle that allows Anastassia Makarieva to tell us of faraway lands, rivers, and mountains in the clip at the beginning of this post. It is truly the human ecclesia (a greek word standing for "assembly") appearing.

Obviously, not everyone likes the prominence of English worldwide. You may call it "sacred" but it is true that it was carried everywhere by the American legions, just as Latin was carried by the Roman ones. But just as Latin remained with us for much longer than the Roman legions, English will stay with us well after that the American legions will have disappeared. 

For how long? Who can say? Right now, translating tools are reaching levels that make them able to act as transparent tools that allow people to express themselves in their vernacular language and be understood by others who speak a different vernacular. Will there come a time in which a man and a woman will fall in love with each other while speaking to each other using Google translate? 

Maybe. But, for the time being, we still have English, which is by now morphing into a true world language that even Google-translate may have troubles in replacing. And, as all sacred languages, English brings to us an entire corpus of sacred texts: at least one century of scientific studies that represent the true gospels (the good news) of the goddess Gaia. 

About how vital and widespread English is nowadays, here are some excerpts from the paper by Barry Asker. He stops short from calling it a "sacred language," preferring a more timed "semi-sacred language." But it is the same thing, after all! 

.... it was the sacred language Latin that enabled an Englishman, Nicholas Brakespear, to become Pope Adrian IV in 1154 and 1159. Without Latin this would have been impossible. Similarly, learning English (or some other colonial language) enabled selected colonized people around the world to participate (at a varying and uncertain level) in the life of the linguistic inner temple as well as of other colonial peripheries and so gain remote (but usually impotent) access to the inner streams of distant power. A language of the powerful has a connecting function between peoples at the peripheries at the same time as it exerts its central authority. The pull is in two directions simultaneously. Over time, as we witness today in world literature in English, the vitality and dynamism of a language can shift its centre of gravity, the former peripheries becoming an amalgam of disparate centres in a new and enlivened ‘international empire’ of English.

One domain where we see very clearly the legacy of English as a language that has adopted those that have adapted it is in contemporary literature. The dominance of nonnative English-speaking literature today is striking with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children voted the strongest ‘British’ novel in a quarter of a century. The act of learning English (combined with the demographic fact that for every native speaker of English there are now three non-native speakers) has created a variety of ‘literary nationhood’ that is transnational and multilingual – with the English language as the linking but fast-evolving thread. Rushdie writes that English is ‘no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for  themselves’. Chinua Achebe writes that English is able to carry the weight of his African experience ‘but it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings’. Han Suyin argues that English is ‘the international vehicle, most effective in accomplishing the task to which every writer is dedicated, i.e., in rendering the unfamiliar and the unknown accessible to all, removing the barriers of ignorance, interpreting for a world audience the wealth of our own cultures, our modes of feeling and thought’

In this literary space, one prominent legacy of English as a geo-political, semi-sacred language is the acceptance that literary expressiveness and human creativity may find an outlet beyond the politics of international hegemony and local contestation. National and linguistic boundaries are there to be negotiated away, not in a process of manipulation that privileges one language over another in the changing power structures that competing nations have created in the past and will continue to create in the future, but as part of a trans-national realm of writers and readers writing a ‘global fiction’.20

The nature and history of the English language (as the language du jour) has proven protean in creating imagined and shared cultural realities that extend beyond and above ideas of a bounded state or nation or ethnic group. A cursory glance at those who now write creatively in English around the globe is sufficient evidence of this. Indeed the concept of a shared linguistic culture predates political boundary-making (nation-states specifically) just as it will post-date it. In this sense, though the status of English as ‘semi-sacred’ may be accepted only ironically and metaphorically, there can be no doubt that today English exists as a creative force that extends well beyond its original borders and keeps within itself the  glowing fire of evolving and fierce energy. Indeed, it may be said that the creative literature produced by those for whom it is ‘foreign’ redeems the English language for all of us in our time.

 

 

English as a Sacred Language: the path to a global ecclesia

Latin was once considered a sacred language all over Western Europe. Today, we can see English as a global sacred language, but how long will it maintain this role?

Imagine living in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. With the collapse of the Roman government, Europe had fragmented in a myriad of cities and statelets, each one with its territory and its language. Starting from your home town, it was enough to travel for a few hundred miles to find yourself in a land where nobody could understand you, nor you could understand them. You didn't even need to cross the border of the main linguistic blocks of the European territory (Romance, Anglo-Frisian, Germanic, Slavic, and more). Just the internal variation of each block was enough to make communication impossible.  It was the Babel tower again.

But the old Roman Empire had left a heritage that kept Europe as a single cultural entity: Latin. Once the language of a small city-state in central Italy, it had spread all over the Empire as the language spoken by the legionnaires, the bureaucrats, the governors, and the tax collectors. All that was gone, but Latin had remained, too useful to disappear. It was the language of commerce, of diplomacy, of pilgrims. of travelers, of intellectuals, and, more than all, it had morphed into a sacred language used by the Catholic Church. It was the language of the holy Christian books. Even though God had never spoken in Latin to anyone (we are not completely sure of the language of the original Christian books: probably Greek, but perhaps Aramaic or Hebrew), Latin was sacred in the deepest meaning of the term: something set apart from everyday use. It was the language that kept together the ecclesia, the assembly of the citizens of Europe. Latin was not just a commercial language, it was a noble language, above and separated from all other languages.

Other languages had played and were playing the role of sacred languages in this sense. Sumerian had been perhaps the first, remaining in use long after the Sumerians had ceased to exist as a separate population in Mesopotamia. Then, contemporary to the Latin of Middle Ages, the Koine version of Greek remained the common language of the Eastern Mediterranean and the sacred language of the holy scriptures of the Orthodox Church. Earlier on, God had spoken to Moses in Hebrew and, around the same period, the Archangel Gabriel spoke to Muhammad in Arabic, giving a sacred characteristic to that language, too.

As universal languages, all these were rather provincial ones, used only in limited regions of the world. As the Middle Ages waned, Europe started to grow, moving along the trajectory that would take Europeans to dominate the whole world. The European armies could have taken Latin with them, restarting on a large scale the process that the Roman Legions had started long before. But that didn't happen. Latin didn't expand beyond Europe and it waned even as an intellectual language. Newton still wrote his Principia in Latin in 1687 but, a century later, Latin had become a relic of old times. It was still used by the Catholic Church for its ejaculatory prayers, but little more than that.

There were good reasons for the demise of Latin as a would-be global language. For one thing, it was too provincial: as soon as Europeans started expanding in faraway continents, Latin was useless for dealing with the locals. More than that, the development of the printing press gave a big boost to national languages. When books were handwritten, they were hugely expensive and it made sense to write them in a universal language (Latin) that ensured their widest diffusion. But the printing process made it possible to write books also for people who didn't understand Latin. The printing press was a powerful factor that caused the fragmentation of Europe in nation-states. Without a common language, people couldn't understand each other anymore. The result was the great massacre that we call today "the 30 years war."

Still, the loss of a universal language was a big handicap for commerce and for culture. For a few centuries, the struggle for world domination was at the same time a military struggle and a struggle for the prevalence of a specific European language. Spanish did well in South America, French made an attempt to dominate worldwide out of sheer boasting, German became diffuse as a scientific language, and Italian found a niche in the bel canto of Opera. Some people dabbled at reinventing new languages from scratch, such as Esperanto. Even more creatively, the Catholic Church attempted to develop a new kind of international language, not based on words, but on icons and images. It was a bold attempt, but it failed. In this age of European dominance, non-European languages, Swahili, Chinese, Arabic and others, had no chances to be anything more than regional languages.

Eventually, military might gave to English the right to become the first truly global language in history. Carried first by the British legions, then by the American ones, English is spoken nowadays by at least 1.5 billion people and probably understood by many more than that. It is the one language that gives you a chance to be understood and to understand the locals everywhere in the world.

In religious terms, English has never been as directly linked to God's words as Latin and older languages were, although many people claim to have received revelations in English directly from God. But English became the language of the Ecclesia, the assembly of the citizens of the world and, for this reason, it can justly claim to be sacred in the sense to be special, set apart. Besides, English does have a sacred corpus of scriptures: more than a century of scientific research, practically all of it written in English. It is from this corpus that a sacred creature called Gaia, may one day emerge. Not a Goddess, but the very spirit of the Earth, a new reference point for the human ecclesia.

And from now on? Despite the ongoing fall of the American Empire, English could follow the path that Latin had followed centuries before. It could expand and maintain its leading role as the world's global language. Or it may not. Just as Latin was destroyed by a technical improvement, the printing press, the same could happen for English. It could be mercilessly replaced by a new language that we could call "Googlish," the result of the Google translating engine.

I am not so happy at seeing English disappear, because it is a language I know reasonably well, even though I am not a native speaker. But I can see the writing on the screen. For one thing, my Italian students can't speak English anymore and they seem to be surprised, at times shocked, when they discover that science is normally written in English. Even my Italian colleagues sometimes seem to write in English with the same ease and attitude of someone undergoing a root canal treatment (with some commendable exceptions). 

What surprised me even more, recently, is how efficient automatic translators have become. A friend of mine, a professional translator, used Google to translate one of my posts in English and publish it in his blog in Italian. The result was far from perfect, but it was readable and it required just a few retouches to be made smooth to read. 

Even more than that, I was amazed at seeing the discussion that's taking place on my Facebook pages. I tend to write mostly in English on Facebook, but I write in Italian about subjects that I think are of more local interest. The interesting thing is that people often comment in both languages, in Italian on the English pages, and in English on the Italian pages. They understand each other. Evidently, it is a small miracle worked by the automatic translator embedded in Facebook. The beauty of this way of communicating is that you don't have to be ashamed of your poor English (or your poor Italian). You speak in the language you know best and the mistakes are a fault of the translating engine. And you can communicate with almost everyone on this planet. It had never been possible up to now.

So, are we going to build a true planetary ecclesia, realizing the dream of those who invented Esperanto? Maybe. So we can conclude with a quote from the Ecclesiastes (it means "the person who convenes the assembly"). It goes as, "there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak." It sounds very wise when applied to our social media.