… And Not a Thought to Think
A recent issue of Boston College Magazine contained an article entitled, “Writing Catholic,” in which several Catholic writers were asked to describe how their faith affects their work. One of the respondents, Mary Helen Washington, noted toward the end of her contribution that, some years ago, an essay she had written for a magazine was returned to her by one of the editors with the remark, “Say something about your sex life or your readers will think you’re weird.” Ms. Washington responded:
I thought about my mother, about my high school teachers, my college teachers, confession, the sixth commandment; and I wrote these cryptic and evasive lines: “I’d like an alliance with a man who could be a comrade and a kindred spirit, and I’ve had such alliances in the past; even with the hassles they were enriching and enjoyable experiences.”
For anyone interested in the phenomenon of religious linguistics, that, I assure you, is truly a Catholic sentence.
These comments raise at least three interesting and important questions for us. First, is there such a thing as a “Catholic” sentence? Second, if so, just what elements would be required to make a sentence Catholic? Third, does Ms. Washington’s sentence contain these elements?
Before attempting to answer any of these questions, however, we should consider, first, why language is important enough to talk about at all, and, second, what sort of use we have been making of the English language in modern American society.
The Importance of Language
Although there are many reasons why language is important, two in particular deserve our special attention. The first of these is the relationship between language and reality. Language guidelines now in use in some universities begin with the remark, “Language reflects, reinforces and creates reality.” While not everyone would agree that language alone creates reality, most people would grant that language does express and influence the way we perceive reality.
Second, language is important because language is by its very nature communal. There is no such thing as a private language, any more than there is a private solar system. In the words of Catholic priest and theologian Romano Guardini, “Speech is not something added to a complete human existence. We exist in the word, in conversation, hence in relation to others and by the universal communality of life.” For this reason, American journalist Edwin Newman is right to insist that “The language belongs to all of us. We have no more valuable possession.”
Modern American Use of English
What use have we Americans been making of this precious possession of ours? The word which best characterizes how we use words today is, I think, abstraction. According to Webster’s, the three primary definitions of the adjective abstract are: “1. thought of apart from any particular instances or material objects; not concrete. 2. expressing a quality thought of apart from any particular material object; as, beauty is an abstract word. 3. not easy to understand, abstruse.” Abstraction, in other words, has the effect of removing from consideration the specific, the particular, and, perhaps most importantly, the material elements of anything about which we might be thinking. Abstraction therefore tends to eliminate from our thinking the limits, the boundaries which confront us in everyday experience. The beautiful sunset upon which we are gazing embodies beauty in a concrete, specific, material way. The word beauty, on the other hand, floats free of any such specificity, any such limits. And, because abstract thinking tends to float free of any specifications, it can easily and quickly become difficult to understand.
If you have ever taken a philosophy course, you know just how quickly discussions of such abstractions as “being” and “essence” can become entirely incomprehensible.
Our use of language in America today is riddled with abstraction — for several quite different reasons, two of which I would like to discuss here. First (and I deliberately want to give priority to this reason because I don’t think we generally understand just how important it is), our language is abstract because we simply do not know enough, either linguistically or culturally, to express the richness and diversity either in ourselves or in the people, places, and events of our ordinary experience. Consider the implications of the following statement:
[The English language] is huge, with over 700,000 words, and growing fast; it is also grievously under-used by its habituates. The average English-speaker’s customary vocabulary is only 600 words, and monitoring experiments carried out by the Bell Telephone Laboratory show that a group of 100 common words constitute over 75 percent of all conversations.
If I have only a few hundred words at my disposal to describe everyone and everything I know, the people and things I know will soon start sounding like reruns of one other. Perhaps this is why so many shows on television already give this impression, long before the reruns start. Perhaps this is why football viewers such as myself find ourselves assaulted weekly by monotonous comments to the effect that “this is a great game,” “that was a great pass,” “the quarterback is a great young man,” “that was a great reception,” “their coach does a great job,” etc.
Language such as this is abstract not in the scientific or philosophical sense, but in the repetitive and lackluster sense. Different qualities are not abstracted from concrete particulars, as the philosopher might abstract. Instead, the same qualities are applied to all concrete particulars because the speaker simply does not know any other qualities, any other words, to apply. Hence, people, places and events lost their specificity, their uniqueness, because we, the users of our language, simply do not know the words which would allow us to express the differences which are there.
Our use of language is also limited, as E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has recently pointed out, by our lack of cultural literacy. The sentence, “The lilies are blooming in the fields today,” is meaningless to people who don’t know the word lilies and the word fields. But the sentence, “She is one of the lilies of the field,” is equally meaningless to people who know all about lilies and fields but don’t know anything about the Bible. After reading Hirsch’s book, I conducted a short cultural literacy test in three of my classes and discovered, to my dismay, that not a single student in any one of them knew what “lilies of the field” means. Thousands upon thousands of the words we use not only have direct, specific meanings (denotations), they also carry with them whole ranges of associated meanings (connotations). If we do not know the connotations, something of the vividness of the word and of the thing the word signifies is irreparably lost.
Unless we consciously labor both to increase the number of words we know and to recover the associated meanings attaching to them, we can expect ordinary English usage to become even more tedious and lifeless than it already is. And it is already intolerably wearisome. As Edwin Newman observed a few years ago,
Much written and spoken expression these days is equivalent to the background music that incessantly encroaches on us, in banks, restaurants, department stores, trains, shops, airports, airplanes, dentists’ offices, hospitals, elevators, waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, pools, apartment building lobbies, bars, and, to my personal knowledge, at least one museum. It thumps and tinkles away, mechanical, without color, inflection, vigor, charm, or distinction. People who work in the presence of background music often tell you, and sometimes with pride, that they don’t hear it anymore. The parallel with language is alarming.
The second major reason our language has become so abstract is because science exercises such an enormous influence on how we think and on how we perceive reality. Theoretical physics holds the pride of place among the hard sciences, and no human being alive today is more intent on pursuing the abstract than the theoretical physicist. From Newton through Einstein to Hawking, each is seeking some grand unified theory which can be expressed in that most abstract of all languages, mathematics. For an Einstein, equations such as E = mc represent the highest pinnacle the human mind can ever hope to scale. Einstein himself made the point quite clearly when, in 1952, he declined the presidency of Israel on grounds that “Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.”
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking has set the tone for every discipline which makes any claim, valid or not, to being scientific. As a result, every scholar seems, at one time or another, intent on demonstrating that his subject matter can be rendered just as abstract as the most abstract grand unified theory. Under these circumstances, sociologists become, as Edwin Newman quips, “people who pretend to advance the cause of knowledge by calling a family a micro-cluster of structured role expectations or a bounded plurality of role-playing individuals.” Educational theorists produce one tome after another of incomprehensible abstractions which never, under any circumstances, suggest that education has anything to do with living, breathing human beings. Richard Mitchell’s several books, most especially The Graves of Academe, document well the absurdities spawned by this method. The following is just one example of the netherworld in which educational theory today dwells. Consider the following description of “instructional approaches”:
These instructional approaches are perhaps best conceived on a systems model, where instructional variables (input factors) are mediated by factors of students’ existing cognitive structure (organizational properties of the learner’s immediately relevant concepts in the particular subject field); and by personal predispositions and tolerance toward the requirements of inference, abstraction, and impulse control, all prerequisite to achievement in the discovery or the hypothetical learning mode.
If you want to know why American education has declined so strikingly in recent years, you could do worse than begin your inquiry right here. As Flannery O’Connor once quipped, if this is what “educators” do to the language, what do they do to the children?
Lest we think that such uncivil language is confined to academic discourse, we would do well to remember that what starts there sooner or later filters out, through the graduates of our colleges and universities, into government and business, into art and literature, into law and medicine, into newspapers and television, and, alas, even into our churches. A few examples, to which I am primarily indebted to Edwin Newman, will, I think, suffice. An investment company tells us, “We have exceptional game plan capabilities together with strict concerns for programming successful situations.” Making buses run on schedule translates into “schedule adherence with emphasis on hitting checkpoints within the targeted time.” Cemeteries are now “human interment space,” taxes have become “revenue enhancement,” and death is “negative patient care outcome.” A priest writes to Edwin Newman expressing the fear that his days as a pastor are numbered. “Unless the trend in language was reversed, he expected to be Coordinator of the Faith Community Dimension.”
Such language is perhaps appropriate at a time when we are encouraged to walk about in a permanent state of open-mindedness, since these contentless words float easily in and out of such minds. G.K. Chesterton was not, however, much taken with modern notions of open-mindedness. In reference to the views of H.G. Wells, he was moved to remark, “I think he [H.G. Wells] thought the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” Chesterton is right. And it is impossible to have thoughts to think unless one has words upon which the mind can fix itself. If we fix our attention, for example, on the family, our minds can entertain real thoughts about husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, and the commitments, responsibilities, obligations, loyalties, and loves which bind them together. If, on the other hand, we fix our attention on “a micro-cluster of structured role expectations,” human thought grinds to a halt. All of us have had some experience with fathers and mothers, brothers, and sisters, but none of us has ever met a structured role expectation, not on our longest day or in our wildest dreams.
The Catholic Faith and Language
Edwin Newman characterizes the good use of language, or “a civil tongue” as he calls it, as “direct, specific, concrete, vigorous, colorful, subtle, and imaginative when it should be, and as lucid and eloquent as we are able to make it.” Common sense alone should be enough to tell us he is right. But if he is right, and if language is bound up with our perception of reality, then there must also be something about reality itself which allows us to perceive it more readily by way of specific, concrete words than by way of abstractions. To return to one of the questions raised at the beginning, Is there such a thing as a Catholic sentence?
If by that question we mean, are there sentences which convey, by their very use of language, a view of reality which is consistent with the Catholic faith, the answer must be an unmistakable yes. What kinds of sentences are they? They are precisely the kind Edwin Newman describes, “direct, specific, concrete.” Why? The answer is obvious and simple, and can be found in a single verse at the beginning of John’s Gospel: “and the Word became flesh.”
In the beginning, and by His Word, God spoke things into existence, and the things he spoke into existence were direct, specific, and concrete. They were, in short, materially embodied and materially bonded to one another. And God looked at what he had made and declared it to be very good.
Millions of years later, scientific man looked at God’s handiwork and asked what makes it tick. And he discovered that he could only find out by taking it apart. Thus began what we might call the great deconstruction of that world. And, to some degree, the deconstruction of man himself. The result, as Guardini has observed, is that “Man’s relations with nature have been altered radically, have become indirect. The old immediateness has been lost, for now his relations are transmitted by mathematics or by instruments. Abstract and formalized, nature has lost all concreteness; having become inorganic and technical, it has lost the quality of real experience.”
Abstracted or removed from his old direct relationship with the natural order, man has also abstracted himself from his own human nature, which is to say, from his own flesh. And just as he has come to see the whole order of nature, all of its powers, its forces, as rationally understandable and subject to technological control, so also he has come to see his own body, his own physical existence, in much the same light — as rationally understandable and technologically controllable.
This “demystification of the human body,” as British author Roget Scruton puts it, removes all of the traditional restraints which previous ages attached to the two most bodily events we know: sex and death. The result, Scruton points out, is that
The unborn child is no longer a human person, attached by indelible rights and obligations to the mother who bears him, but a slowly ripening deformity, which can be aborted at will, should the mother choose to cure herself. In surrogate motherhood the relation between mother and child ceases to issue from the very body of the mother and is severed from the experience of incarnation. The bond between mother and child is demystified, made clear, intelligible, scientific — and also provisional, revocable and of no more than contractual force…. In just the same way the sexual bond has become clear and intelligible, and also provisional, revocable and of merely contractual force, governed by the morality of adult “consent.” … It no longer seems to us that the merely bodily character of our acts can determine their moral value. Hence arises the extraordinary view that the homosexual act, considered in itself, is morally indistinguishable from the heterosexual act: for what is there, in its merely physical character, to justify the traditional stigma?
This modern detachment of man from his body is most apparent in the abstract language which today in matters of sex and death replaces the direct, concrete expressions of earlier ages. Lust is free love, adultery is open marriage, homosexuality is a lifestyle, masturbation is safe sex, pregnancy is disease, abortion is termination of that disease, procreation is reproduction, birth prevention is birth control, natural mothers are surrogate mothers, unborn children are embryos, embryos are property, murder is mercy killing, mercy killing is assisted suicide, and suicide is death with dignity.
There was a time when I viewed this new language as euphemistic, that is, as a deliberate attempt to find pleasing ways to characterize nasty things in order to rationalize the doing of those things. Unfortunately, something much more ominous is abroad in the land. The people who use this language are not, from their point of view, speaking euphemistically. They are speaking quite accurately because they are operating with what Cardinal Ratzinger recently characterized as a “revolutionary vision of man.” At the heart of this vision, as Ratzinger points out,
The body is something that one has and that one uses. No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do; but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and even with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes. In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine or the feminine sex; the body no longer expresses being at all; on the contrary, it has become a piece of property.
When it no longer matters whether the body be masculine or feminine, then it no longer matters that language reflect the masculine or feminine character of human beings; hence the feminist insistence that we employ so-called “non-sexist” or “sex neutral” language. Men and women become persons, mothering and fathering become parenting, couples expecting a baby are encouraged to mouth such nonsense as “we are pregnant.” The abstractive character of such language achieves heights heretofore undreamed of in the expression “significant other,” which abstracts not only from sexual differentiation, but from every conceivable differentiation. My “significant other” can be literally anything from my pet rock to God Himself (though, of course, we are no longer allowed to refer to God as a “him”).
At the same time, if my body is my property, at my disposal, then there are virtually no limits to what I can do with it. I can rent it out for sex (hence current justifications of prostitution), rent out my womb for the bearing of someone else’s child, view my own children as diseases to be surgically removed, treat my own physical life as something to be ended when I wish. Women who talk about their rights to control their reproductive organs really do view their bodies, as the language suggests, in some fashion as machines producing goods, such that both the machine and the goods are at the disposal of the person who owns them. These women have abstracted themselves from their own materiality, and hence, when they speak of freeing themselves from their biology, they are not talking euphemistically, they are talking abstractly, and they are doing so because abstract language does accurately express their perception of reality.
The most alarming feature of such language is that, by abstracting from the concrete, the specific, the materially-embodied, we also abstract from the limits within which we must live our lives. Just as abstractions float free of any particular context, so human beings who perceive reality this way float free of any particular structure. The incessant use of the word liberation today expresses precisely the modern, abstracted perception of reality, which supposes human beings to be no longer constrained by authority, by irrevocable commitments, by tradition, by history, or even by God. Everything in creation, from our bodies to the furthest flung galaxies, now appears to us to be at our disposal. Everything is just so much Play-doh, to be manipulated at will.
Chesterton once observed that, “The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only things worth fighting about.” Battles about words are always battles about competing views of reality. And the battle today is about competing and mutually exclusive visions of man, a conflict which confronts Catholics with, in the words of Cardinal Ratzinger, a “truly fundamental opposition to Faith’s vision of man, an opposition which admits no possibility of compromise but places squarely before us the alternatives of believing or not.
Big Brother Is Really Big Sister
If the Catholic vision of man is correct, then the present and the immediate future bode ill. We know so, not only because we have been forewarned by our own faith, but because we have been forewarned from the pen of the secular writer George Orwell. In his brilliant satire on the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he tells us just how it is that modern abstractive thought takes its vengeance on us, and today in American society we can see that vengeance already upon us.
Big Brother and the Party operate on a very simple, but very effective, principle: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Big Brother realizes that effective control of the past, present, and future requires total control of language — hence Newspeak. As Roger Scruton has observed, “If you want to control the world, first control language: such has been the unspoken maxim of revolutionary politics in our century.”
Big Brother’s strategy to control language is four-fold. First, replace Oldspeak with Newspeak and impose this change on everyone. Second, see to it that Newspeak operates with a much smaller vocabulary than was available in Oldspeak. This strategy has two ends, that the range of thought might be narrowed and that whole categories of words might be destroyed.
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatsoever.
Third, control people’s consciousness and memories by mandated hate sessions, lectures, and assorted activities all conducted in the language of Newspeak. And finally, and most ominously, see to it that all records of the past are translated into Newspeak and continually revised, such that the collective memory of the community, contained in its documents, can never contradict Big Brother’s current agenda.
Big Brother is already present among us, and he is Big Sister. It takes very little effort to discover that what the feminist movement is up to bears an uncanny and fearful resemblance to the machinations of Big Brother. First, feminism would change the “language of the body,” as John Paul II calls it, into “sex neutral” language, and feminism would have this new way of speaking imposed on everyone. Already dictionaries analogous to the various editions of the Newspeak dictionary have appeared in our midst. But that is not all. The language guidelines to which I made reference earlier are explicitly entitled, “Guidelines for Non-Sexist Language” and the copy I have of them is one imposed on graduate students in the Yale University Divinity School. These guidelines, among other things, instruct the students to avoid the generic use of man and of male pronouns, to avoid masculine or masculine-only pronouns for God, and to avoid the use of feminine pronouns in reference to Israel and the Church. The student is told at the outset that “language reflects, reinforces and creates reality. It is important that language in term papers represent as full an understanding as possible of human reality. For this reason, linguistic sexism … is to be avoided.” Clearly only one view of reality is going to be permitted under these circumstances, and that view is not going to be whatever one the student happens to bring with him to Yale’s Divinity School.
Second, this new way of talking diminishes vocabulary, in order to diminish the range of thought and in order to destroy words and/or their secondary meanings. With regard to this second strategy, let us first note that our society as a whole is paving the way to such reductionism because we already restrict our own vocabulary and we already blind ourselves to the connotations or secondary meanings of words. In our society, Big Brother would find half his task accomplished for him.
With the vocabulary that we continue to use, however, words are already, in non-sexist language, being destroyed. Man and woman are not necessary if person can cover both. Fathering and mothering give way to parenting. And significant other, as previously noted, could half empty our dictionaries in a single stroke. Secondary meanings also go by the board. The Non-Sexist Communicator, one of those handbooks instructing us on how we are to conform ourselves to feminist Newspeak, provides us with an appendix entitled, “Alternatives to Sexist Usage” and instructs us therein on how secondary meanings of words, when applied to women, must be “eliminated” (that is the text’s word, not mine). To give you a sample, the following words beginning with the letter B are now, in their secondary application to women and in the parlance of 1984, to be regarded as Oldspeak and crime thought: baby, baby doll, bag, ball and chain, bastard, bat, battle-ax, bearcat, beauty pageants, beauty queen, better half, bitch, boy, broad, brood mare, built, and bunny.
Third, the control of people’s consciousness in 1984 bears an uncanny and chilling resemblance to feminist consciousness-raising sessions and Womanchurch liturgies — mandatory activities, it would seem, for those who seek to be truly feminist. Like the inner Party members in Oceania, whose indoctrination in double-think is absolute, so too those in the inner circles of the feminist movement all share in similar forms of the same feminist consciousness, maintained and reinforced by activities conducted in the language of feminist Newspeak.
Finally, the altering of past documents, the collective memory of the community, is already upon us in the Christian churches, where the translation of the Bible and liturgical texts into the new language is even now well underway. If this process is carried to its logical conclusion, the day could come when nothing in the documents of our past will be found that contradicts what Big Sister says. If you have ever read the feminist revision of the Nicene Creed in use at the Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, you know that God the Father cannot be found anywhere in it. As William Oddie observes, “The resulting document reminds one of nothing so much as a new edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia, from which all mention of some luminary who has suddenly become a non-person is unaccountably discovered to be eliminated.” Or, as O’Brien, the Party rep, says to Winston in 1984, “Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history.”
“Truly a Catholic Sentence”
Let us return, here at the end, to those three questions raised at the beginning. Is there such a thing as a Catholic sentence? Yes. What are the elements of such a sentence? The elements are those good words which, like God’s own creative and salvific Word, seek to become flesh, that is, seek to speak the truth about a world which is concrete, not abstract, and about human beings who are ensouled bodies, not souls possessing bodies.
Is Ms. Washington’s sentence truly a Catholic sentence? Let’s run it by again: “I’d like an alliance with a man who could be a comrade and a kindred spirit, and I’ve had such alliances in the past; even with the hassles they were enriching and enjoyable experiences.” It is hard to understand how anyone really familiar with the Catholic faith could think of that as a Catholic sentence. Of course, Ms. Washington appeals not to the Catholic faith, but to the phenomenon of “religious linguistics,” a phenomenon with which I personally am not familiar and, if this be the sort of conclusions it yields, a phenomenon with which I hope never to become familiar.
What is an “alliance,” and what does that have to do with Ms. Washington’s sex life (remember, this sentence is aimed at readers who will think she is weird if she doesn’t say something on that subject)? What does she mean by “comrade” and “kindred spirit”? All we know for sure is that these alliances she has had with comrades and kindred spirits did involve men. What is an enriching experience? Eating a hot fudge sundae is an enriching experience, when one considers that sundae from the point of view of fat, cholesterol, and calories. “Enriching experience” is to activities what “significant other” is to relationships: almost anything can qualify.
Ms. Washington  characterizes this sentence as “Catholic,” but let us not forget that she also characterizes it as “cryptic and evasive,” which it most certainly is. Why does she think a “cryptic and evasive” sentence is also a “Catholic” sentence? I must confess I have no idea why. There is only one sense in which I could regard this sentence as Catholic, and that is the sense in which it is quite proper to wax cryptic and evasive when perfect strangers start nosing about in one’s sex life, in this instance, the readers of Ms. magazine. In such situations, however, an even better Catholic response would be to tell such readers, directly, concretely, specifically, vigorously and, if necessary, colorfully, that such matters are none of their business, followed by a firm resolve never again to write essays for magazines whose readers think such matters are their business.
I have said so much about what isn’t a Catholic sentence that I think it only fair to end with an example of a sentence that truly is Catholic. And since I’m not sure that any of my own sentences qualify, I am going to turn to a real expert on the subject, Walker Percy. He is a Catholic who knows what the Catholic faith is. He is a novelist who knows what words are all about. He is a medical doctor by education and thus knows all about diseases and how to recognize them in their symptoms. And he is an astute physician of our age, having diagnosed the “modern sickness” as “the disease of abstraction.” Happily, he also contributed to the “Writing Catholic” article and has supplied us therein with not just one but two truly Catholic sentences I cannot resist sharing, as we say these days, with all of you.
The major point of his contribution is that the Catholic faith better serves the novelist than any other religion or philosophy because of its recognition that man is a pilgrim journeying through a world which is both sacrament and mystery, rather than an ego absorbed with itself in a world of abstractions and illusions. What, concretely, does this mean? Percy tells us what it means.
Show me a lapsed Catholic who writes a good novel about being a young Communist at Columbia and I’ll show you a novelist who owes more to Sister Gertrude at Sacred Heart in Brooklyn, who slapped him clean out of his seat for disrespect to the Eucharist, than he owes to all of Marxist dialectic.
Now there’s a Catholic sentence — direct, concrete, specific, vigorous, and colorful. And every one of us, even those of us who have never been to Brooklyn or indeed have never been in Catholic schools, knows all about Sacred Heart and Sister Gertrude and just what she’s capable of meting out when her high standards of respect for the Eucharist are violated. And we all know just as well how deeply indebted we are to her today for whatever reverence we have been able to retain for the Eucharist through the many intervening and difficult years in which we have had to endure that abstractive process known as “liturgical renewal.”
As for the second sentence, Walker Percy tells us that “In the end, 10 boring Hail Mary’s are worth more to the novelist than 10 hours of Joseph Campbell on TV.” For those of you who know anything about the phenomenon of Joseph Campbell, you will recognize that to be “truly a Catholic sentence.”