A DIFFERENT DISCOURSE: PART THREE The Origin and End

The beginning of all utterance is the worship of God, and this followeth upon His recognition. Sanctified must be the eye if it is to truly recognize Him, and sanctified must be the tongue if it is to befittingly utter His praise.

(Baha'u'llah, The Pen of Glory: 154)

Kerygmatic language, the language which proclaims God, sees words as spiritually creative, because it sees words in their proper station as related to the Word.  Kerygmatic language is the first language, born from the Word and learned from the gods, to lift humanity out from nature, to achieve their human nature, and now to bring forth their divine nature.  That the first language is praise of God and His divine Word is brought out in the Scriptures, starting with the opening quote above.  But there are others:

“It is clear and evident, therefore, that the first bestowal of God is the Word, and its discoverer and recipient is the power of understanding. This Word is the foremost instructor in the school of existence and the revealer of Him Who is the Almighty. All that is seen is visible only through the light of its wisdom. All that is manifest is but a token of its knowledge. All names are but its name, and the beginning and end of all matters must needs depend upon it.”(Baha'u'llah, The Pen of Glory: 94)

"The God of mercy hath taught the Qur'án, hath created man, hath taught him articulate speech." (Qur'án 55:1-3)

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (King James Bible, John 1:1)

Yet it also the last language, not just the Alpha but also the Omega of speech, both the origin and highest expression, seed and fruit.  And to say that it is the first language is, of course, not to assert anything as simpleminded as that the first word spoken is God, followed by Prophets, angels and saints.  No, it is, as in all things human, a process of discovering an essence as that essence is coming forth into more complex manifestation.  It is, then, the glue joining and knitting together the beginning when: “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech", (King James Bible, Genesis 11:1) and the end when God promised: “For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.” (King James Bible, Zephaniah 3:9)

Thus the kerygmatic is, as stated before, and in regards to human utterance, also an example of: “in truth there is a return and resurrection for every created thing” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 186-187); “that which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 140); and: “The highest essence and most perfect expression of whatsoever the peoples of old have either said or written hath, through this most potent Revelation, been sent down from the heaven of the Will of the All-Possessing, the Ever-Abiding God.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 87)

This is not to say that other modes of language are no longer useful or meaningful.  We don’t throw away arithmetic when we learn algebra, as if it was some sort of now useless scaffolding. Rather we learn more complex rules for the manipulation of number and quantity to bring forth what arithmetic cannot.  But we still use arithmetic to balance the bank statement.  But in mature kerygmatic speech an added religious dimension (religious in the etymological sense of reuniting all things) is reintroduced into language.  The language of the Word is heard in the heart, and when truly heard faith is enkindled, as stated by Paul: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (The Book of Romans 10:17)

Faith perfects the natural reason by virtue of the supernatural light of Revelation being received into the heart, allowing the intellect to assent to Revelation’s supernatural truths.  Faith is, as Saint Paul says in the Letter to the Hebrews, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1). It is, in other words, a form of knowledge that extends beyond the natural limits of our intellect, to help us grasp the truths of divine revelation, truths that we cannot arrive at purely by the means of the human natural reason.

The Bab adds: “Man’s highest station, however, is attained through faith in God in every Dispensation and by acceptance of what hath been revealed by Him, and not through learning; inasmuch as in every nation there are learned men who are versed in divers sciences.” (Selections From the Writings of the Báb: 88)

Because of its spiritual power and religious origin, the kerygmatic, or what I am calling the proclamation mode of language, and not just the more or less isolated proclamation (kerygma) of and about the Word itself, carries a moral authority that separates it from the purely metaphorical that is poetry and myth, making its metaphors more existential than literary, an ethical dimension that distinguishes it from the merely aesthetic and beautiful, a polysemous meaning that expands and resonates out from the more literal prosaic, and a transformative power that elevates it above the descriptive and discursive.  Yet it is, too, permeated with joy and punctuated with laughter.

It is, as I said before, revelatory.  But by revelatory here I mean not a revelation from God, but a revelation of God, insofar as human speech can do that, a bringing forth of what God has deposited of His Being in His creation.  It describes God in His attributes, evokes His Presence, understands and explicates His purpose, and calls on His aid to accomplish these.  With this mode of language we may see that, in truth: “This is the Day whereon naught can be seen except the splendors of the Light that shineth from the face of Thy Lord, the Gracious, the Most Bountiful. Verily, We have caused every soul to expire by virtue of Our irresistible and all-subduing sovereignty. We have, then, called into being a new creation, as a token of Our grace unto men.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 29)

Let’s examine in greater depth the relation of the kerygmatic to the Word itself and to the expression of the divine nature latent within the human reality in order to bring forth that nature.

“The Word of God is the king of words and its pervasive influence is incalculable. It hath ever dominated and will continue to dominate the realm of being. The Great Being saith: The Word is the master key for the whole world, inasmuch as through its potency the doors of the hearts of men, which in reality are the doors of heaven, are unlocked.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 173)

What is human utterance?  “Human utterance is an essence which aspireth to exert its influence and needeth moderation.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah: 143) So we have these two powers and influences in relation.  First is the pervasive influence of the Word, the dominant force in creation, the master key for the whole world BECAUSE its potency can unlock the doors of hearts of human beings.  These doors of the heart lead not outwardly to earth or sky or society, but inwardly to heaven, the eternal realm of spirit.  And, secondly, we have human utterance which is “an essence” that aspires to exert its influence outwardly and needs moderating, else it will exert a pernicious influence.

The idea of moderation as a balancing, harmonizing power, leads of course to the image of the balance as the leitmotif of justice, the builder of civilization, the discerner of truth, the expression of courtesy, and the “best-beloved of all things” in His sight. As Baha’u’llah says about moderation in a social context: “Whoso cleaveth to justice, can, under no circumstances, transgress the limits of moderation. He discerneth the truth in all things, through the guidance of Him Who is the All-Seeing. The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men. Thus warneth you He Who is the All-Knowing. If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 342)

Balanced or moderated speech, then, is just speech; what we call in the public arena, “civil discourse.”  To be clear, just speech is, I believe, more than polite, mannered, cultivated speech. Rather, it is the result of a harmonizing into a creative tension of two of the most powerful forces in the universe, the all-pervasive Word of God, the king of Words, and that essence which is human speech that at all times seeks to exert its influence. The question is: How does one both tap the universal power of the Word of God to unlock the hearts of people to turn them toward the vastness of the spiritual realm, and also harness the powerful urge of human utterance so as to exert its influence in a non-egoistic and beneficent way, so that one does not cross over moderation into bombast, derogatory speech, or self-righteousness, or worse?  How, in short, to achieve that state He mentions: sanctified must be the tongue if it is to befittingly utter His praise?  

Baha’u’llah outlines some conditions and issues a warning in a celebrated passage often called the Tablet of the True Seeker.  We’ll get to that in a minute.  But let’s first pause and reflect that this essence called human utterance is a powerful drug, one that can miraculously heal or calamitously damage the heart and soul. To assist those reflections let us see what is the purpose of the organs of speech communication?  For example, Baha’u’llah speaks about the purpose of our sense of hearing, saying: “This lowly one entreateth the people of the world to observe fairness, that their tender, their delicate and precious hearing which hath been created to hearken unto the words of wisdom may be freed from impediments and from such allusions, idle fancies or vain imaginings as 'cannot fatten nor appease the hunger', so that the true Counsellor may be graciously inclined to set forth that which is the source of blessing for mankind and of the highest good for all nations.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 170)  That is, not until we have prepared the soil of the heart to receive the divine speech will He speak forth, else the Message will be drowned in the noise and clamor of ordinary egoistic chatter.  On the other side, He stated the spiritual purpose of the tongue: “Verily I say, the tongue is for mentioning what is good, defile it not with unseemly talk. God hath forgiven what is past. Henceforward everyone should utter that which is meet and seemly, and should refrain from slander, abuse and whatever causeth sadness in men.” (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 219-220)

 To both prepare the heart and to reinforce His warnings about the creative/destructive power of words, He states that the seeker: “must never seek to exalt himself above any one, must wash away from the tablet of his heart every trace of pride and vainglory, must cling unto patience and resignation, observe silence, and refrain from idle talk. For the tongue is a smouldering fire, and excess of speech (like the excess of civilization quoted above) a deadly poison. Material fire consumeth the body, whereas the fire of the tongue devoureth both heart and soul. The force of the former lasteth but for a time, whilst the effects of the latter endure a century.

“That seeker should also regard backbiting as grievous error, and keep himself aloof from its dominion, inasmuch as backbiting quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.” (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan: 193)

More conditions in next post.

A DIFFERENT DISCOURSE: PART TWO--KERYGMA

No man of wisdom can demonstrate his knowledge save by means of words. This showeth the significance of the Word as is affirmed in all the Scriptures, whether of former times or more recently.

(Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 172)

One of the major themes of these posts, and of the book of which these posts form the draft, has been that with the advent of every Revelation creation is both made new and renewed to demonstrate the interrelated principles of: “in truth there is a return and resurrection for every created thing” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 186-187); “that which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 140); and: “The highest essence and most perfect expression of whatsoever the peoples of old have either said or written hath, through this most potent Revelation, been sent down from the heaven of the Will of the All-Possessing, the Ever-Abiding God.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 87)

There are two other associated principles to remember: first, because of progressive Revelation, which is the power driving the unfolding of life in the universe, there is not just a simple return for every created thing, but a progress toward maturity and complexity in its form; and, second, the essential spiritual form of anything, what all manifest stages of growth come forth from, itself appears in manifest form as the “highest essence and most perfect expression” of that creation at the end of every universal cycle, for the transformation of any thing comes from reshaping itself from its own depths.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá supports this last notion, writing in regard to the relation between the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh and all previous Revelations: “(T)he rising of the Greatest Luminary was the condition of the perfection of the essence and of the qualities.” (Some Answered Questions: 124) And: (T)he words of Bahá’u’lláh are the essences of the words of the Prophets of the past.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 314)

Now all these principles can be brought out in regards to kerygma and catechesis, which is and has been the chief method of spreading the Good News of the coming of a new Message and Messenger from God and consolidating His community of faith.  We continue, then our exploration of the kerygmatic mode of language, perhaps the “different discourse” required today.  But the kerygmatic may also be the first discourse of humanity now appearing in its highest essence.

Kerygma is a Greek word used in the New Testament for "preaching" of a certain kind. It is related to the Greek other verbs keryssein, to proclaim, and keryx, herald.  Thus it means literally "to cry or proclaim as a herald".

Kerygma was the initial proclamation of the gospel message by the Apostles as recorded in the New Testament. Kerygma was considered the very heart of the gospel, the core message of the Christian faith, the irreducible essence of Christian apostolic preaching, that all believers are called to proclaim. More generally it is the mode of preaching, which we will get to in a bit.  The core message was that Jesus Christ, in fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament, was sent by God, preached the coming of the Kingdom of God, died, was buried, rose from the dead, and was raised to the right hand of God in heaven.  The kerygma, or preaching, was followed by the didache, or catechesis, the oral instruction of doctrine and moral teaching given before baptism to those who accepted the message.

The proclamation (kerygma) of the Gospel message is addressed not to the reason, but to the hearer as a self.  It was to proclaim Christ to the individual heart and to appeal for conversion and its promise of redemption.  The catechesis was addressed to the mind, and sought understanding of the Scripture in the light of what is taught.  For the early Christians, the full kerygma was to appear in the Age of Fulfillment, the “latter days”, which Christians associate with the second coming of Christ.  For some the latter days actually started with the resurrection of Jesus and would reach a consummation with His return.    

Early last century the term kerygma was reintroduced as kerygma theology and the movement is usually associated with the theologian Rudolph Bultmann who suggested that the gospels were of an oral and literary genre unique in the ancient world. However much it resembled the mythology contemporary with it, he asserted, this mythological cloak was a mere shroud—one that brings sneers from modern day minds which think to be the real message and thus on a par with similar mythologies of that time.  But the Gospels were actually another kind of message.

Bultmann explains, “This then is the mythical view of the world which the New Testament presupposes when it presents the event of redemption which is the subject of its preaching. It proclaims in the language of mythology that the last time has now come… All this is that language of mythology, and the origin of the various themes can be easily traced in the contemporary mythology of Jewish Apocalyptic and in the redemption myths of Gnosticism. To this extent the kerygma [preaching, proclamation] is incredible to modern man, for he is convinced that that mythical view of the world is obsolete. We are therefore bound to ask whether, when we preach the Gospel today, we expect our converts to accept not only the Gospel message, but also the mythical view of the world in which it is set. If not, does the New Testament embody a truth which is quite independent of its mythical setting? If it does, theology must undertake the task of stripping the Kerygma from its mythical framework, of demythologizing’ it.”(See Bultmann’s essay "New Testament and Mythology": 2-3)

Whatever one thinks of the theology of this, there can be no doubt that kerygma is highly-charged message addressed primarily to the heart not the reason.  The kerygma was mythical in design, poetic in shape and oracular in delivery.  It is addressed to the heart to bring it to recognize and accept the Manifestation of God.  It is a testimony or declaration of faith, a witnessing and observing, like the two shahada of Sunni Islam: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”  The didactic, catechistic was more intellectually disciplined, rational and discursive.  But, following the insight of Bultmann, but broadening it beyond the Christian Gospels, any Revelation of the Word of God is a different sort of message from myth, poetry, or moral philosophy, however much of these they may use, contain or are presented in.

I mean that, for me the kerygma and catechesis, which Baha’is know as teaching and deepening, are indicative of the principle that all Revelation is, first, an event to be experienced, (See in this regard Kenneth Cragg’s The Event of the Qur’an) and, second, a set of laws, principles and truths to be studied.  But the different discourse of today combines these into one.  That is, the kerygmatic is no longer just an unique genre of literary or oral creation, but the essential one for all others, the one they come out from.

The alert reader familiar with the Bahá’i Texts will no doubt see the parallel of the purpose of kerygma and catechesis with Baha’u’llah’s admonition/warning written in the opening paragraph of His Most Holy Book (Kitab-i-Aqdas): “The first duty prescribed by God for His servants is the recognition of Him Who is the Dayspring of His Revelation and the Fountain of His laws, Who representeth the Godhead in both the Kingdom of His Cause and the world of creation. Whoso achieveth this duty hath attained unto all good; and whoso is deprived thereof hath gone astray, though he be the author of every righteous deed. It behoveth every one who reacheth this most sublime station, this summit of transcendent glory, to observe every ordinance of Him Who is the Desire of the world. These twin duties are inseparable. Neither is acceptable without the other. Thus hath it been decreed by Him Who is the Source of Divine inspiration.” (The Kitab-i-Aqdas: 19)

A modern-day faith with a divine Herald and no clergy, where all believers are called upon to “teach” their faith at any moment to a spiritually starving humanity in desperate need of guidance and moral direction, it seems to me possible to expand the kerygma into the kerygmatic, from the special proclamation of the Word into a general form or mode of language: a language not only spiritually transformative of the human soul, but also unique in its capacity to reveal universal spiritual reality.  What makes it unique’?

For one, the kerygmatic mode of speech, as I perceive it, sees all words as spiritually creative. “Every word is endowed with a spirit, therefore the speaker or expounder should carefully deliver his words at the appropriate time and place, for the impression which each word maketh is clearly evident and perceptible. The Great Being saith: One word may be likened unto fire, another unto light, and the influence which both exert is manifest in the world. Therefore an enlightened man of wisdom should primarily speak with words as mild as milk, that the children of men may be nurtured and edified thereby and may attain the ultimate goal of human existence which is the station of true understanding and nobility. And likewise He saith: One word is like unto springtime causing the tender saplings of the rose-garden of knowledge to become verdant and flourishing, while another word is even as a deadly poison. It behoveth a prudent man of wisdom to speak with utmost leniency and forbearance so that the sweetness of his words may induce everyone to attain that which befitteth man's station.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 172-173)

That is, He sees words as more than mere signs signifying something, or conveyor belts shuffling information from mind to mind, or builders of imaginative images poetically describing, however exquisitely, the beauties of nature or human beings.  Words are, of course, all of these things, performing all these various functions.  But to know where words get their spirit we must know what the Word is and its relation to this idea of kerygma, or proclamation of the Word.  That is the subject of the next post.

A DIFFERENT DISCOURSE: PART ONE

A different Cause, however, hath appeared in this day and a different discourse is required.

(Baha'u'llah, Tabernacle of Unity: 113-114)

Knowledge is the cause of spiritual, intellectual and social advance.  But this is not a straight linear advance along a continuum, an unbroken continuity stretching from antiquity to modernity.  There are revolutionary breaks in knowledge, discontinuities giving rise to new rules for the formation and generation of knowledge, to new methods of discourse about it, to new patterns of syntactical relations, which are not just linguistic but also perceptual and conceptual.  These are, or will be, the rules and principles, the patterns and processes, of ordering and arranging perceptions and ideas within language, the inner markings characterizing a new human psychology.  All these taken together represent a fundamental shift in the kinds of ideas that can be generated and discussed and the methods of discourse that embody and convey them.  But today, the discontinuity takes on the shape and character of reversal.  I mean that since the Revelation of Baha’u’llah the direction of growth inverts with the shift to spiritual awareness, the self-reflective subject built up through the Revelations of the Adamic Era becomes, through self-abnegation, reflective of divine attributes.  This is a universal growth of mind, like going from only black and white to full color.

Within language it is the framework which changes with each new universal revolution and not just the picture within the frame.  Hence two distinct phenomena are covered by the shift, the content of thought and the organization of thought.  The origins of such far-reaching change was stated by a great British historian, Herbert Butterfield, in the opening page of his classic study, The Origins of Modern Science: “We shall find that in both celestial and terrestrial physics—which hold the strategic place in the whole movement—change is brought about, not by new observations or additional evidence in the first instance, but by transpositions that were taking place inside the minds of the scientists themselves. In this connection it is not irrelevant to note that of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking cap for the moment.” (Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science: 1)  But that new thinking cap in any meaningful sociological sense is a new language that awakens within the hearer the new perceptual order discovered within themselves by the pioneers of thought.

It is a complex process.  The complexity of change over these vast stretches of time can be summed up, at least in the history of the “west”, as a shift from poetry to prose to proclamation (kerygma) as the medium of intentional, preserved communication; each change both evoked by and carried forward through the creation of a new syntax of verbalization.  The current change now underway is from prose to proclamation. That is, we may discern in the proclamation of the Word of God by the most recent Manifestations of God, the Word made flesh, a heightened spiritual language, that of Revelation, fertilizing and reconfiguring both the non-conceptual and conceptual to reveal the spiritual.

Again this collective change is associated historically and psychologically with an emerging mode of understanding that these languages and syntaxes denote, i.e. from sensory to intellectual and now from intellectual to spiritual of the heart.  When the intellectual, or better conceptual, replaced the sensory it was through the creation of a language form wherein the abstract replaced the concrete.  It was more than simply the invention of an abstract version of what had previously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions, however much it may have been that at the beginning of the transformation. But to see the change of language in its fullness, such terms as “concept” or “abstraction” must be seen in their end-forms—i.e. as the end result of the transformation. The transformative changes for classic Greek society in particular and for western culture in general are fully documented in Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato.  But in his article, The Alphabetic Mind, he stated the linguistic change concisely: “Critics and commentators are fond of calling attention to the presence of what they call abstractions or abstract ideas in Homer. This at bottom is a mistake, the nature of which can be clarified by giving an example of what the abstractive process in language involves, as opposed to Homeric idiom. The poet Homer begins his Iliad by addressing his Muse: 'Sing I pray you the wrath of Achilles, the wrath that ravages, the wrath that placed on the Achaeans ten thousand afflictions.' Suppose we render these sentiments into prose and translate them into abstract terms; they would then run somewhat as follows: 'My poem’s subject is the wrath of Achilles which had disruptive effects and these caused deep distress for the Achaeans.' A series of acts signalled in the original by appropriate transitive verbs and performed by agents on personal objects is replaced by abstractions connected to each other by verbs indicating fixed relationships between them.”

Too, verbs within concept language can also be intransitive, denoting no specific object but focusing on the action indicated by the verb itself.  Havelock continues: “Concept language is based upon the abstract language of permanent and fixed relations.  Complete “conceptuality” of discourse (if this be the appropriate word) depends not on single words treated as phenomena per se, but on their being placed in a given relationship to one another in statements which employ either a copula or an equivalent to connect them. The growth of abstractionism and conceptualism in the Greek tongue is not discoverable by a mere resort to lexicons, indexes, and glossaries, common as this practice has become. Single words classifiable as abstract like ‘justice’ or ‘strife’ or ‘war’ or ‘peace’ can as easily be personified as not. What is in question is the ability of the human mind to create and manipulate theoretic statements as opposed to particular ones; to replace a performative syntax by a logical one.”

But a different discourse is required in this Day when “He Who is both the Beginning and the End, He Who is both Stillness and Motion, is now manifest before your eyes.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 168)

A process language is being born, a language where all relations are a vibrating influence, because all things reflect and embody the archetypal principle of the universe: “That which hath been in existence had existed before, but not in the form thou seest today. The world of existence came into being through the heat generated from the interaction between the active force and that which is its recipient. These two are the same, yet they are different. Thus doth the Great Announcement inform thee about this glorious structure.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 140)

A process language favors grasping the structure of movement of all kinds, and perhaps the mathematics of quantum mechanics is as close to that as we have come.  It is one where not fixed relations are seen, but dynamic ones.  It is a language of metamorphoses and transformation, of growth and development, of alteration and modulation as the permanent aspects of the things.  Such innovations in language as Hopkins “sprung rhythm” or the more popular free verse may be poetic attempts at it. Whitehead’s Process and Reality is a philosophical analysis of it. 

Others have seen the language of scripture as a model.  Northrop Frye in his magisterial Words with Power speaks of the kerygmatic mode of discourse found in the Bible.  For example: “The implications for the conception of the kerygmatic are, first, that kerygmatic writing normally demands a literary, that is, a mythical and metaphorical, basis; second, that the kerygmatic does not, like ordinary rhetoric, emerge from direct personal address, or what a writer ‘says….

“In poetry anything can be juxtaposed, or implicitly identified with, anything else.  Kerygma takes this a step further and says: ‘you are what you identify with’.  We are close to kerygmatic whenever we meet the statement, as we do surprisingly often in contemporary writing, that it seems to be language that uses man rather than man that uses language.” (Words with Power: 116)  This last sentence points to the self-abnegating subject open to being inspired.  A little later he remarks: “…if the word inspiration means anything at all, it means the point at which the cleavage between active speech and reception of speech merges into a unity.  At this point we are in a genuinely kerygmatic realm.” (Words with Power: 118)  Here we hear echoes of the “B” and “E”, active force and recipient, joined and knit together.

Eric Voegelin, in his book, In Search for Order, the fifth and last volume of his five volume Order and History, goes back to Genesis to find the kind of language needed to convey spiritual processes associated with the creative Word: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” or, in the more literal Buber-Rosenzweig translation, “God spoke: Light be! Light became.” The reality light appears in this verse when the divine command calls it forth, into its existential luminosity, by calling it by its name. The spoken word, it appears, is more than a mere sign signifying something; it is a power in reality that evokes structures in reality by naming them.…The It-reality is symbolized as the strong movement of a spiritual consciousness, imposing form on a formless and nonforming countermovement, as the tension between a pneumatic, formative force (ruach; in later Greek translation, pneuma) and an at least passively resistant counterforce. Moreover, the tension in the It is definitely not the tension of a human consciousness in its struggle with reality for its truth; it is recognized as a nonhuman process, to be symbolized as divine; and yet it has to convey an aura of analogy with the human process because man experiences his own acts, such as the quest for truth, as acts of participation in the process of the It. When the authors of Genesis 1 put down the first words of their text they were conscious of beginning an act of participation in the mysterious Beginning of the It.” (In Search of Order:19-20)

A secular and modern model of a new language mode, called rheomode, was created by physicist David Bohm. He believes that his new language form is necessary both to counteract the fragmentary world view characteristic of modern times—a view embodied and perpetuated by a language structure that presents subject and object as separate things related by some sort of verb copula (i.e. abstract, concept language discussed by Havelock)—and to embody the new scientific ideas of wholeness and undivided movement.  He writes: “(T)he world view implied in the rheomode is in essence…(and)…expressed by saying that all is an unbroken and undivided whole movement, and that each ‘thing’ is abstracted only as a relatively invariant side or aspect of this movement. It is clear, therefore, that the rheomode implies a world view quite different from the usual language structure.  More specifically, we see that the mere act of considering such a new mode of language and observing how it works can help draw our attention to the way in which our ordinary language structure puts strong and subtle pressure on us to hold to a fragmentary world view.” (Wholeness and the Implicate Order: 60)

Poetic language before the advent of the language of abstractions in their fixed linguistic relations presents a series of sensuous events with no necessary inner connectivity.  The abstract conceptual is an architectural language grasping, connecting, and holding these events by inner mental laws and forms.  But the spiritual is animating energy and movement, of melody and harmony, of fertilizing idea, the motion of water flowing and rhythmic winds and pulsating fires, like a Whitman poem.  Hence its concepts must also be percepts, by incorporating some of the ever-changing fluid nature of percepts, which change as the light or rhythm does, which awaken new powers, which upset equilibriums of thought, which advance and retreat, but overall form an ever-advancing comprehension through the spiritual dynamics of crisis and victory.  It is, simultaneously, the action of unifying yet inverting and reversing, a seeing of oneness in mutual mirroring.  It is transforming and transcending, particularizing and universalizing as opposite responses to the same Impulse, when Paradise is brought nigh hell blazes up.  It speaks of the reciprocal actions of the twin Plans of God, and of spirit and matter.

That is, such “concepts” are really symbols throwing together and fusing opposites in the mind and in language, always the inner and outer acting together creating an universal transformational effect upon the behavior of the mind and language which determine the kind of things that can be said and the things that can be thought.  “And yet, is not the object of every Revelation to effect a transformation in the whole character of mankind, a transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions?” (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan: 240)

Yet, there is an adamantine structural quality to it, as movement comes forth from stillness, and water flows beneficially between the firm banks of the river.  For, though all creation advances by the unfolding transformational knowledge in progressive Revelation, the universe and the Kingdom of God remain the same in their essential structure, their eternal principles, and in their single purpose.  “All beings, whether large or small, were created perfect and complete from the first, but their perfections appear in them by degrees. The organization of God is one; the evolution of existence is one; the divine system is one.” (Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions: 199)

More on this in next post.