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.