And the Lord God, having formed out of the ground all the
beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them
to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam
called any living creature the same is its name. And Adam called
all the beasts by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and
all the cattle of the field.
Genesis 3: 19-20
I once shared a home with a young family. I had the upstairs,
Jack and Jennie had the downstairs, and their two little boys had
the run of the place.
The older child, John Kolbe, was four, and a particularly
frequent visitor. Often his visits took a rambunctious form: a
favorite game was Bad Man, in which I, in the starring role,
would grimace and growl Im a Bad Man, and Im
gonna git you, boy! This was followed by a chase scene and
a lot of rowdy wrestling, giggles, and squeals.
But John had a reflective side, too. He would sit still for
long spells, just hanging out, observing me as I went about my
business, offering frequent commentary, and asking a lot of
questions, most of which began with why. He was a
bright and infinitely curious child, a good companion. One of the
things that aroused his curiosity was the skull on my shelf.
Let me explain. When I was young and newly returned to the
Church, I was caught up in the wild romance of Catholicism. Once,
at dinner, when visiting a Carmelite monastery, I had been struck
by the sight of a skull on the mantle of the refectory. Noticing
that I was staring back at its hollow-eyed gaze, an old monk
leaned over and whispered It is to remind us of the
brevity of life, that we may attend to our conversion.
I had been, since I discovered them, an admirer of the wilder
ascetics of our historythe grizzled old monks under the
blazing desert sky, the naked Celtic hermits wandering the
forests, Benedict in his cavethough this admiration no
doubt stemmed from a misplaced sense of romance and adventure. I
hadnt actually tried much self-denial, mind you;
hadnt yet discovered what St. Therese called the
monotony of sacrifice.
Still, I came home from the monastery and bought myself a
skull. It wasnt a real skull, of course, but it was a
convincing replica. I had noticed John Kolbes fascination
with the thing, but he never said anything about it until one
spring afternoon, when he pointed to it.
I know what that is, he said. Its
a head bone. One of those lives inside us. It was a
striking description, creepy and hilarious. But after my laughter
subsided, it occurred to me that I had just witnessed something
very profound: John, who didnt know the word
skull, had very vividly named a thing according to
his knowing. He had, in fact, just fulfilled his vocation as a
child of Adam.
The book of Genesis is an inexhaustible source of wisdom about
man and his place and role in the cosmos. It is the primal text
for any Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) anthropology. In
this
beautiful poetic narrative we learn that man, made of earth
and God-breathed spirit, is created to tend the garden that
is creation; that he is both Lord and servant of the
material world, is to both subdue and
replenish it; and that, made in Gods image,
he is a sort of mediator, a bridge, a priest between the worlds
of matter and spirit. And we learn that man is the namer of
creatures.
To name a thing is to express something of its essence. It is
a function of knowing. Just as Christ is the Logos, the
Word, of the Father, perfectly revealing the Father and speaking
worlds into existence, so man and woman, made in His image, in
knowing and naming the created world, reveal it to itself and to
other human persons, in a sense speaking it into
existence conceptually. If we are, as Juli Loesch Wiley once put
it, the contemplatives of creation, then this role
of the namer of creation is a profound expression
of our more fundamental role as the knower of both
created beings and the uncreated Being from whom they spring.
This sense of the sacredness of the act of naming is not much
understood or appreciated in the modern world, where names are a
sort of shorthand, the meanings of which are seldom contemplated.
Children, for example, are named for favorite celebrities or for
the sound of the word and not for the meaning of the name.
I once met, at a subway station in Manhattan, a young Hare
Krishna devotee. He was not long converted, and thus was more
open to real conversation than most members of that sect. After
discussing some of the usual controversiesreincarnation,
vegetarianism, the nature of Godwe had established a sort
of rapport.
What is your name? I asked.
Ramananda he answered. It means the love
of God.
What was your name before you converted? I asked
He demurred. Thats not important to me. Now I have
a spiritual name.
After some persistence, I got it out of him. Rather
reluctantly he said, My name was John.
John! I exclaimed. In Hebrew that means
beloved of God!
He was amazed, and had apparently never been told that his
name was more than a pleasant sound.
It is important to remember that the modern world is unique in
this attitude toward names, as it is unique in so many of its
unquestioned, but aberrational ways. In pre-modern societies
names express the essence of the person. Often, naming a child is
postponed until his personality is expressed in his behavior, and
even then ones name may be changed several times in a
lifetime to better describe the emerging personality or to
describe ones experiences.
Among the Navajo of the American Southwest a person was known
publicly by one of these descriptive nicknames but he also
possessed another, secret name, given at birth and unspoken even
by his family, who would refer to the person within the family
circle by kinship terms, my mothers brothers
third son being more easily rendered in Navajo than in
English. This secret namec alled the war
namewas considered a persons personal
property and was not necessarily even revealed to ones
spouse. Navajo culture thus serves as a preparation for the sort
of secret intimacy that God desires with us and reveals in Jesus
Christ: to those who prove victorious, I will give the
hidden manna and a white stone, a stone with a new name written
on it, known only to the one who receives it. (Revelation
2:17).
In Western traditional societies, though nicknames were
common, people were named most often for some holy person whose
particular virtues were admired or, especially among Calvinists,
for the virtue itself. And while hardly as esoteric as the
practice of the Navajo, traditional codes of etiquette retained a
sense of the mystery and intimacy of the personal name. A young
man, for example, might court a young woman for a good long while
before he was granted permission to address her not as
Miss So-and-So but by her given name. This
signified in an obvious way that his affections were being
returned. And ones elders were always addressed by formal
title and family name.
I am not saying that these social codes possess any absolute
moral status; such cultural ways are obviously relative things.
Personally, American that I am, formality makes me nervous,
except in the liturgy. But such mores do emphasize something that
can be obscured by the easy familiarity that once characterized
American culture (increasingly replaced by in-your-face
rudeness): there is a correspondence between naming and knowing.
The name of a thing mysteriously expresses its being.
This correspondence exists, often, even in the sound of the
name. I would imagine that in the Edenic Tongue this
correspondence existed perfectly, that every word outwardly
expressed the inner being of the named, that unfallen
Adams knowing and loving of creatures was so thorough, so
complete, that the names he bestowed on them emanated from
their very essence.
In a fallen world, with its babble of broken tongues, our
knowing and loving and naming are fractured and incomplete,
but still we often get it right, or close to right. This is true
of words that sound like the thing described
(crash, boom, hiss) but
it exists in other words, words that dont describe a sound
but still manage to sound appropriate. Some may say
this correspondence stems solely from our linking of words and
beings, is a purely subjective construct that springs from
habitual association. But I am convinced otherwise.
To take two creatures as examples: is there not
something in the word bumblebee that expresses
bumblebeeness? Doesnt the stuttered
buh-buh-buh of its repeated bs
connote something appropriate to the fat, fuzzy, awkward
creature it names? And doesnt the word
wasp, with its single sharp syllable, express
waspness? Doesnt it seem appropriate for the sleek, shiny,
pointy creature it names? Can you imagine swapping the names,
calling the big round bumblebee a wasp or
calling the thin glossy arrow of a creature that is the wasp a
bumblebee? To know the names of these creatures is
to know something of their essence.
And while I will not get into the old debate in which the
Dominicans hold that one must know a thing to love it and the
Franciscans hold that one cannot know a thing until it is loved,
it is clear that knowing and loving are closely related both to
each other and to naming. (In the Old Testament to
know meant to make love with.)
While these are not the musings of one who has studied
linguistics, and are perhaps only the speculations of a layman
with too much time on his hands, and while I am not a theologian,
I cant help applying these observations to the secularized
post-industrial milieu in which we find ourselves in the waning
years of the second millennium. I think, for example, of the
average six-year-old in this culture: he knows by sight dozens,
at least, of corporate logos, can spot the Golden Arches from a
half mile away, but cannot name ten kinds of trees, or identify
ten kinds of wildflowers that grow in his neighborhood. He knows
the precise times of his favorite TV shows, but cannot tell you
which phase the moon is in if you ask. He could lead you to his
favorite video store but could not find the North Star at
night.
I use the child as an example, but it is equally true of
adults: we do not know the world in which we were created, the
one of which we are a part. I would guess that most modern adults
could not, if they saw a half moon, tell if it is waxing or
waning, or be able to say how far the night is spent by its
position in the sky. This is an astonishing thing, for the moon
is the dominant reality of the night: its cycles and shapes were,
to our ancestors, or even our grandparents, the familiar
realities beneath which they lived and moved.
Too, most adults can name only a handful of trees, and then
only by the broadest categories. The tree in the front yard is an
oak, they may tell you, but would be hard pressed to tell you if
it is a white oak or a red oak or a black oak.
I could go on listing such examples endlessly. We have, as a
society, forgotten not some esoteric knowledge, but the most
obvious realities of the real world. They have been forgotten
because they have been banished; we have come to love and dwell
in an artificial world of our own making.
As Cardinal Ratzinger said, a few years back, In the
world of technology, which is a creation of man, it is not the
Creator whom one first encounters; rather man encounters only
himself.
It is, of course, getting worse. There are children who spend
huge portions of their waking hours in solitary interaction
with machines, who become thus alienated from human community,
estranged from the natural world, and severed even from their own
natures. The source of their childhood stimulations are soulless
and illusory and the effects of the resulting brave new
consciousness are beginning to be seen in the social fabric (and
I am not even dealing with the content of such
stimulation).
And as virtual reality becomes increasingly
available we can only expect further dehumanization of the soul
as more and more people become enslaved to this ultimate
technological subjectivism. In the East, the term for the
illusory world which keeps us from enlightenment is
samsara. Virtual reality is, then, a sort of
samsara within samsara, where the soul may wander in the dreaming
machine, freed even from contact with the world and other
persons. The much-touted information age is well
named. It is not wisdom which is increasing, nor even for the
most part useful or necessary knowledge, but rather
self-generating and self-referring information.
Yet the modern world in its pride looks down on traditional
cultures as ignorant. How strange this is: the most primitive of
peoples possessed more practical knowledge about the world around
them than the most sophisticated moderns. They knew where they
were. Such tribes as the Paiute of the Great Basin, living in one
of the harshest environments on the planet and thus possessing a
very stunted level of cultural development, knew, for example,
the times of the solstices and equinoxes, the movements of the
planets, and knew the desert around them and its ways so
intimately that they flourished in a place where most of us would
die in a few days. The truth is the opposite: it is we, the
moderns, who are ignorant. Traditional societies, whether
Christian or pagan, developed or primitive, knew the created
world and lived within its cycles and limits. We are, on the
other hand, disoriented (literally: how many people know
instinctively the cardinal directions? But to traditional peoples
Which way is East? is no more difficult than our
Is it on the left or the right?)
It is not wise to persist in this unknowing, for the fact is
that we are every bit as much a part of the natural world and
just as dependent on it as the Paiute gathering his seeds. But we
certainly dont act like it.
I recently heard a preacher use the Scriptural phrase
the rain falls on the just and the unjust to
illustrate the fact that evil things happen to good people as
well as bad. While his conclusion is true, this is a misuse of
the Scripture: the meaning of the text is that good things
happen to the evil and the good. Rain, particularly to a Middle
Easterner, is a blessing. It is still (in moderation) a blessing,
though I daresay that if the weather were democratically chosen
it would be sunny and warm until we all died of starvation.
In fact, however much weve deceived ourselves, and
however much we dwell in the technological dreamland, we are
utterly dependent on the primal realities of earth and rain and
sun and sky. That we do not know this world and cannot name it
only means that we dont love it. It is a sign of how
profoundly we have persisted in the sinful refusal to respond to
our original calling. And because the structures of
technological modernity are fragile ones, subject to
natural cataclysm and terrorist attack and eventual
environmental dissipation, when our awakening comes it may
come rudely indeed.
