In recent months I have had several causes to doubt, as I never really have before, my faith in language as an effective force for good. For the first time it has crossed my mind that words — for which I was given a great love; whose power to shed light, to bring joy, to console, always seemed obvious to me — perhaps do little or nothing at all for others. I had always thought that if one put down one’s thoughts in careful enough words, and if they were read attentively and honestly enough, and if one read others’ words with the same good faith, then common understanding could be reached, and with understanding the beginning of the way to agreement. I had thought that attentiveness to language, my own and others’, was a principal and reliable way to work towards truth.
But so many people are not really interested in listening or understanding. Consider the reception given to those figures either in public life or known to us more personally who might quietly and reasonably have put their case, sometimes over the course of many years, but who are persistently misunderstood and mischaracterised, and in a way which goes far beyond anything attributable to weaknesses or flaws in their own speech. For Catholics the late Pope Benedict is, perhaps, the most obvious recent victim of this injustice; a more general example is the pro-life movement as a whole. Whatever concessions they make, whatever nuances they acknowledge, whatever good will they accord to their opponents, they are either misinterpreted or ignored.
This is also an age in which language has, quite simply, been cheapened. In my work as an archivist I am often struck by the contrast between the invariably careful and well-constructed letters even of the relatively recent past, which are often actually pleasurable to read, and the thoughtless, careless, lifeless character of much of what is written and published today. It can’t just be explained by poor teaching of grammar at school, say, or the fact that in the past, for reasons of sheer practicality, making oneself clear the first time round would save two days and a stamp. I think there is a problem of attitude, or at least of formation. Something has gone wrong in our culture which has resulted in a deafness to any serious or heightened language. It seems no longer possible to speak so as to be heard: speech no longer resonates. (This is one reason why poetry is in the doldrums at the moment; the attentive silence or space which is a precondition for all poetry is hard to come by.)
Allied to this is a lack of respect for (or perhaps awareness of) the direct effect that language has on our understanding of the truth. Language is a tool — an effective tool, I had always thought — with which to strive for truth, and then to communicate it. But I think many people are, or have been made, cynical about this. Either they decide they can use it to exert power over others, or they suspect others are merely using it to exert power over them. The assumption that language might be the common tool of participants in a mutual and sincere enterprise for truth and understanding seems to me, in my present mood, to be waning. I have become aware of various failures of my own to make myself understood, my attitudes and character as much as my thoughts; I have also come to realise how common this is in our world, and wondered how many people I myself have misunderstood or misjudged. All around us, in all sorts of spheres of life, I notice a refusal to listen, a determination to make certain interpretations — to think of language as a weapon for power, or to hold it in contempt even when it is being used sincerely, in love and truth.
And so we come to Holy Week, when, it is interesting to notice, one of the salient aspects of the unfolding nightmare of the Passion is precisely the misuse of language. The tendency of people, observed time and again through His ministry, to question Jesus not so as to hear the truth but ‘in order to trap him’, as the Evangelists repeatedly note, rises now to a climax. Jesus’ words go unanswered or ignored; questions are answered only with more questions; people say things they do not mean or will later betray. “My soul is sorrowful to the point of death.” Nobody replies. “Am I a brigand that you had to set out to capture me with swords and clubs?” No answer. “Could you not watch one hour with me?”. Shoulder-shrugging and shifty glances, I assume; certainly no apology. And worst of all: Judas’s own “Surely not I, Rabbi?”. “It is you who say it,” Jesus can only reply if he is not to be trapped. Body language, too, in that a kiss signifies the worst betrayal.
Here in Gethsemane, the second of the three gardens in the story of salvation, as in Eden, the first, the plants and trees all around are expressing themselves according to the grammar of their Creator, to their very roots and stems. But, also as in Eden, the human beings are doing something different; seizing language and wielding it for their own purposes. Is it any coincidence that of all the ways in which Peter could have wounded the high priest’s servant, he cuts off his ear? Even in trying to defend Christ, he is destroying the means of dialogue by which Christ comes to be known in heart and mind.
In the coming days we are to see the limits of language reached and surpassed. Jesus, under a deluge of false accusation, condemned by a mob so avid with hatred that it scarcely knows what it is screeching, is silent, to Pilate’s astonishment and ours, though we, too, are the mob. Our Lord knows that whatever he says will be twisted and used against Him; He, being in Himself the Word of God, and indeed about to define and demonstrate once and for all the full meaning of that Word, speaks a different language. He is a different language, God’s sincere and uncomplicated promise. But we, until Good Friday, when it is too late, will not listen.
Thomas Tallis (1505–1585), ‘If ye love me’, sung by the King’s Singers in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.
