Human words and The Word (Part I): The Word at the heart of history
True enlightenment happens when the logos (speech) of man encounters the Logos (Word) of God and not in the development of functional reason, of science, of technology.
(reading time: about 20 minutes)
There is a sense in which spoken words are alive and written words are dead. We are conscious of this difference whenever we distinguish between the spirit of a word and the letter of that same word. Something in our subconscious whispers to us that the written word does not do justice to the word, Word.
In the written word—be it on paper or parchment or papyrus or in a text message in a digital device—the bodily vitality of the ringing word is absent. When a word is trapped or entangled in a lifeless page or in a device, it is incomplete—like a body that lacks the soul for which it was made or the material counterpart of a sacrament lacking its spiritual component. Water without the power to wash is not water, just like bread that lacks the power to stave off hunger is not bread. An artist may paint a glass of water so real that one is tempted to drink from it, and the latest A.I. model may design a hologram of a loaf of bread so real that one is tempted to eat it; still, no matter how close these imitations come to the real deal, they remain artificial. That is, they are the product of man’s artifice, not creatures who emerge from God’s creative act.
Only words formed by the human voice, i.e., speech, have the delicacy and power that is necessary to stir the depths of the emotions. Only words formed by the human voice are strictly speaking, Words. Words are a living reality that soar through space and time—between a speaker and a listener. Words feel most at home not on a lifeless page of a book but in the living heart of a living being. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is generally interpreted as having defined man as a zoon echon logon1 or “Word-Bearer”. By this, he meant that we call man “rational” because he expresses the depths of his experience in words. To put it more simply, to speak is to be human.
The aforementioned distinction between the written and the spoken word constitutes one of the major differences between Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity. According to the Protestant-Christian perspective, The Word is fundamentally the Bible. According to the Catholic-Christian perspective however, The Word is not first and foremost a holy book—a long text message from God to mankind. The Word is a Person, the second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. In the late Middle Ages—before Protestantism was a reality—Christians had to fight a similar semantic battle with the Muslims, who classified Jews and Christians under the category of People of the Book. Medieval Christians, basing themselves on the prologue of the Gospel of Saint John that spoke of “The Word that was in/from the beginning”, preferred to call themselves the people of the Word—a living and active Word, not a mute and dead one.
The saving God who came to us was the eternal Word. But that Word did not come in a blaze of spiritual illumination or as something suddenly appearing in a book. He was made flesh (John 1.14), flesh that could be seen, heard, grasped with hands, as St. John so graphically insists in the opening lines of his first letter.
Romano Guardini, The Word and Hearing, 1939.
When the aforementioned Word became flesh, He became the new locus of world history—not just for the Jews in particular or the Europeans in general but for people of every race and tongue. There is in fact a sense in which we can say that a people enters history proper, only in so far as it has had an encounter with this Word.
When a philosopher-historian like G. W. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831) made an attempt to interpret African history through his Enlightenment lens, he concluded that Africa had no history it could boast of. For whatever reason, it did not seem to strike such Enlightenment historians that the Africans they were encountering had native languages of their own or that the presence of speech signals the presence of a system of thought. Perhaps they were influenced by the prejudice that historical worth could only be ascertained by the presence of written words or of scientific inventions. Perhaps after 18 centuries, Plato’s prophecy about overreliance on the technology of writing was finally coming true.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
Plato, Phaedrus, 4th century BC.
The case we are trying to make here is that, by the time of the so-called “Enlightenment”, Western civilization had lost its true identity because they had lost its living memory. They had lost their capacity to relate with other Word-Bearers because they themselves had stopped bearing within themselves The Living Word.
In his book, Geographical Basis of World History (1820s), Hegel divided Africa up into three regions (based on racial differences): North Africa, Egypt, and “Africa proper.” About “Africa proper” he wrote;
Africa proper has no historical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living in barbarism and savagery in a land which has not furnished them with any integral ingredient of culture. From the earliest historical times, Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, forever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night.
Not only did the Enlightenment as a cultural movement relegate “Africa proper” to the dustbin of history (as can be glimpsed above in Hegel’s excerpt), it also spread a negative prejudice against whatever is or is supposed to be “medieval” in European history. According to the wisdom of that time, good things came with the Enlightenment; everyone who came before or did not fit into their mindset belonged ipso facto to a period of darkness. The purpose of this intellectual cultural movement was to reform society using pure reason, challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith and advance knowledge through the scientific method. Most sectors of society in the contemporary world—be they scientific, political or economic—can trace their roots back to the cultural soil of 17th and 18th century Enlightenment Europe.
The view of Africa as a land of childhood; removed from self-consciousness; wrapped in darkness, etc. was taught not only by Enlightenment thinkers like Hegel, it was picked up by anthropologists like Levi-Bruhl2(1857–1939), a Frenchman trained in philosophy and who furthered anthropology with his contributions to the budding fields of sociology and ethnology.
The common denominator in all these “enlightened” views is that, as a people, Africans are yet to come of age because they are still firmly embedded in their tribes or groups, wherein the common weal is more important than the well-being of the individual. The community still determines the individual’s values and social orientation. This strong community orientation also explains the perennial tribal confrontations we are so used to in our political debates.
The argument Hegel had made in his main historico-philosophical work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, (published in 1807) was that history is marked by the advance of Reason or Spirit (Geist in German) in time. Since Africans were still living on the level of Pathos (emotion) and Ethnos (ethnicity), they had not yet graduated to the levels of Ethos (Ethics) and Logos (Reason/Geist), they strictly speaking, had no history.
The counterargument we are making in this essay is that history proper is unveiled when the logos (speech) of man encounters the Logos (Word) of God and not in the development of reason understood in the Enlightenment sense. The nuance we are adding in our argument is that, by the time of the Enlightenment, the word “Word” had lost its original meaning. Indeed, this might also help explain its manifold interpretations and translations by this time in history: Spirit, Geist, Reason, Rationality, Meaning, Mind, Word, etc. From the time of the Renaissance and, in a fuller sense, since the time of the Enlightenment, the word “rational” had come to mean only that which can be proved by experiments. Logos had come to mean science, or technique, or pure functional reason. In other words, Logos had been reduced to logic. Only the skeleton of its former self remained. It had lost its moral energy. It had been drained of its soul. It, nay, He, had died, as Nietzsche would later say (much more clearly) in his The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
When the authentic Logos—who transcends time and place—engages a people in meaningful dialogue (dia-logos), He, not the Enlightenment’s abstract reason, sheds light on that people’s historical journey through time. The argument we make here is based on the philosophical assumption that man is fundamentally distinguished from all other animals (from all other embodied souls) through his possessing logos—which most translate as “reason,” but which we would prefer to interpret here as “speech.” If this (lowercase) logos of man does not encounter the (uppercase) Logos of God, an entire people risks remaining in existential darkness—and this is not a mere metaphor. The Logos is, in a very real sense, a type of living energy or fire. He, says St. John in his famous prologue, is the true light that enlightens the intellect of all men. What physical light is to our physical eyes, the true and ultimate enlightenment granted by The Logos is to our human intelligence.
Having clarified this, we can now declare that we are in a proper position to start (re)telling our story and history through this new lens. The systematic spread of The Word in the African continent took place in different phases:
The first centuries of Christianity saw the evangelization of Egypt and North Africa. A second phase, involving the parts of the Continent south of the Sahara, took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A third phase, marked by an extraordinary missionary effort, began in the nineteenth century.
Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia in Africa, 1995
Compared with the European continent, The Word arrived on the shores of sub-Saharan Africa relatively late. The first recorded inroad into sub-Saharan Africa took place in 1491, when Portuguese explorers entered the mouth of the Zaire River at a place called Pinda. The then king of Congo, Nzinga-a-Nkuwu asked for missionaries to proclaim the Gospel in his land.
A certain number of episcopal sees were erected during this period, and one of the first fruits of that missionary endeavour was the consecration in Rome, by Leo X in 1518, of Don Henrique, the son of Don Alfonso I, King of Congo. Don Henrique thus became the first native Bishop of Black Africa.
Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia in Africa, 1995
Even though the missions established by the Portuguese came to an end in the 18th century owing to various difficulties, the seed of The Word had already been planted in the soul/psyche of this people in Central Africa. The dia-logos had begun.
References
Guardini R. (1939) (1997 edn.), Preparing Yourself for Mass, Sophia Institute Press.
John Paul II (1995, September 14), Ecclesia in Africa [On the Church in Africa and its Evangelizing Mission], Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Plato, Phaedrus, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm
Contrary to common assumption, the phrase is not found in Aristotle in so many words, even if it is often cited as coming from him (see, for example, Arendt, H. (1998) (2nd ed.), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 27. Nevertheless, Aristotle clearly takes for granted some such definition of man: see Aristotle, Politics, 1253a10; Nicomachean Ethics, I, 13, 1098a1–20.
Levy said that the African’s primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality but uses "mystical participation" to manipulate the world. According to Lévy-Bruhl, the primitive mind does not address contradictions especially because they have little or no acquaintances with scientific institutions. African societies are pre-scientific. They operate collectively and mystically. They often introduce unrelated and irrelevant factors into explanations of experience.