Words Are from God
In the beginning, God gave us language and told us to name things.
When we tried to build the Tower of Babel, he confused our language because we were using it to praise ourselves instead of him. Before this point, therefore, all of humanity spoke one language.
When God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, one of them was "Thou shalt not commit false testimony" because the gift of language was given to us to communicate truth, and to lie would be to blaspheme God---the giver of language and Truth himself.
John begins his Gospel by saying 'In the beginning was the Word ... ". God gave us language to better understand him. The Word is the Second Person of the Trinity. Language is one of God's distinct marks on humanity. The other animals do not have this mark. This is why Aristotle distinguished us as "rational animals" .The word for "word" in Greek is "logos", which also means "reason" in Greek. Our ability to reason, speak, debate, converse, write poetry, write stories, write computer code, do math equations, etcetera, these are all traits we receive from God.
Our ability to use words and numbers to communicate truth makes us sub-creators with God the Creator.
This integral nature of words has fascinated philosophers for centuries. Scholastic philosophy emerged in the 12th century, and it gave us many good things, but many claim that it also had the seeds of modern philosophy germinating in its depths. One of those seeds was nominalism, a philosophy which taught that there are no universal concepts, just particular things. Thus, it would say our names for things are nothing more than that: mere words to help us understand them, but having no substance beyond that. So, nominalism would say a forest full of trees is actually just a place full of things that our brains call trees, but in reality each tree is its own individual thing, and not subject to our concept of trees.
William of Ockham (1287-1347), widely known as the father of nominalism, sums up the philosophy in the simple statement, "No universal is a substance existing outside the mind" (Summa Logicae, Part I, Chapter 14).
This led many philosophers who came after him to imply that our words are nothing more than our personal interpretations of truth. After all, if even the most basic concepts we use to understand the world are only in our minds, then every thought and claim that anyone could have ever have---including those upon which we've built our civilization, like justice, love, and wisdom---are all just thoughts because none of them exist in reality. From this philosophy sprang relativism, subjectivism, skepticism and modern epistemology.
This philosophical foray may all be useless rambling to some people, but please understand that it has been critical for me as a writer. Words are intrinsically linked to the universals William was talking about. They have no substance by themselves, apart from the ink used to put them on a page. They never become more than words unless someone acts upon them. For years, this realization led me to despair as I struggled to do the things I wrote about, to give my ideas some substance. Failing to do so, I gave up on writing and, shamefully, I gave up on life. What else could a writer do?
After that phase came another better phase, though. I noticed that words take time to take root. They're seeds. The good writers of today will be called prophetic tomorrow because their great ideas either took time to take root, or the writers had the foresight to see where the ideas of their time would lead.
Those who master at least one language can see patterns in human behavior more keenly; they can see where things are headed. Subsequently, when we master words we can craft stories more easily since we can build our own believable, realistic events with even fictional characters.
Even in our culture where visual media reigns, words still have power. Every influential piece of media starts with words. All of the shows, movies, TV series and even many YouTube videos began with a script. Words are the DNA of all creative content, the code underneath every media production. Today, even many AI productions began as word prompts. Words can be useless when we don't use them right, but they have great power when we use them the way God intended.
They're not just the heart of the media we consume, either. They're also the key to learning better social skills. Those who master at least one language can see patterns in human behavior more keenly; words help us see the direction and trajectory of conversations, relationships, and even the future of society. Eye contact and body language are also important social skills, but words provide meaning like nothing else can.
The biggest crisis in our society today comes down to the battle for meaning. Words are at the very heart of that battle, because they are designed to convey the meaning of things. God gave us the gift of language so we can connect the things we experience with his universal truth.
The lack of appreciation for words has led to the lack of appreciation for meaning. That is why we see so many dystopian stories in our culture today. When we remove the love for words from a story, all we're left with is a hollow shell of a plot that we try to fill with special effects and attractive characters. But the settings of such stories often tell the real story: usually they take place in some nihilistic, apocalyptic or dystopian backdrop because that's all you're left with when you remove the love of words from storytelling.
I cannot help but think of The Lord of the Rings when I think of good storytelling. What was Tolkien so good at? What made his epic so epic? It was his mastery of words. He was a philologist, a studier of language who formed several languages of his own to give Middle-Earth deeper, more human substance. That's fascinating because it's very similar to what I'm trying to do. I'm just noticing this now. A philologist studies the philosophy of language, the underlying structures and concepts they may have in common. The common threads between languages provide the perfect analogy for demonstrating the common threads between all things.
This is exactly what I've been trying to do through my writing. I've been trying to show the common threads running through all things. All truth intertwines like a web or a net. This should be abundantly apparent today on the internet---or world wide web---where links connect us to one thing, then another and another. But we need words to draw the connections for us. Contained within the very nature of words, we can see the harmony with which every thing exists. Without words, that harmony and the very intelligibility of the world becomes foggy. This is why I believe our culture's depreciation of language is a result of our fallen nature. We were imbued by God with a divine gift to understand and share the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation with words. To not use words in this manner is to reject this gift, and spread the fog of fallen human nature that causes confusion. It's hard to find meaning in life when confusion reigns.
So, I am pleased to inform you that I have recently rediscovered meaning and purpose in my life: to provide clarity for people interested in the truth. To do that, I must improve my bumpy relationship with these little symbols I type on my screen. Finding their value is worth your time. Take my word for it.
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