The Language that Remains
In a 1964 interview Hannah Arendt: “I realized… If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever. But: What can I specifically do as a Jew?” Asked “what remains and what is irretrievably lost” from her life before Hitler, Arendt answered: “The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you. What remains? The language remains.” (Interview with Günter Gaus, translated and printed in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (page 12).
Darkness took the lives of many men and women of faith:
- The Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis in a Berlin prison;
- the young Jewish woman Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz;
- the Orthodox nun Maria Skobtsova (proclaimed a saint by the Ecumenical Patriarchate) died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on Holy Saturday 1945;
- Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white racist in Memphis Tennessee;
- Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by right-wing death squad while he celebrated Mass in El Salvador;
- Father Alexander Men was murdered by a Soviet thug in Moscow.
I single these out among the many martyrs of the 20th century because they left behind precious words to live by. Hannah Arendt managed to get out of Germany and settled in the United States where she published many important books and articles.
“The language remains,” she said in that interview. In the film Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien and Father Francis are talking in the hospital where Tolkien is recovering from his injuries in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Father Francis is having trouble knowing what to tell widows and mothers who lost husbands and sons in the war. He concludes: “Words are useless. Modern words anyway. I speak the liturgy. There’s a comfort, I think, in distance. Ancient things.”
Words, language – very important, essential to humans as long as we remain humans! Language, words – not slogans, not tweets, not emojis. But our words, even our most solemn and ancient words, even the words of the liturgy on which Father Francis relies, fall short of the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. “The language of heaven is silence,” St. Isaac of Syria said many centuries ago. Silence; again, not slogans, not tweets, not emojis – not even liturgy or theology. Silence. And silence itself is a language – a language that very few of us ever learn. Perhaps the language of silence is also the language that the great theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler was striving for when he wrote: “To my mind there must be, at the bottom of it all, not an equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, so inevitable, that we will say to one another, “Oh, how beautiful. How could it have been otherwise?””
For 200 years, physics was dominated by the mechanistic theories of Isaac Newton. You know, the guy who sat under an apple tree and discovered gravity when an apple hit him over the head. But the 20th century completely revolutionized our understanding of gravity and the behavior of matter, thanks to quantum theory and Einstein’s theories of relativity. These theories and the discoveries that went with them have revealed a dynamic universe where everything is related, where particles can behave as waves, where the mere act of observing something will change the outcome, where even that apple that fell on Newton’s head could have been shaken off the tree by a gravitational wave that originated five billions years earlier in two colliding black holes at the edge of the universe. Einstein himself introduced the term “spooky action at a distance” to describe certain predictions of quantum theory. We have come a long way from Newton and his apple.
I see an analogy and a message for the church of today. The church is stuck in a Newtonian mindset. We have no language for relating to the universe on our doorstep, never mind the universe billions of light-years away! Most Christians still believe in myths. Even our conceptions of God are trivial, we hardly go beyond the old, bearded man on the clouds – who could just as well be Zeus on Mount Olympus! Indeed, that icon really represents the level of much Orthodox thinking. We spend most of our energies discussing traditions and antiquated, medieval rules. We are obsessed with what the Palestinian priest Elias Chacour called our differences and shrines, “holy stones and holy sands.”
Our language has not been updated in over a thousand years. I like Father Francis’ words to Tolkien. Indeed, modern words cannot compare with the words of liturgy, ancient words. No translation ever does justice to ancient texts. But we must nevertheless go beyond the ancient texts. They are beautiful, they are poetry. They are the foundation, Newton’s tree if you like. And yes, as Hannah Arendt tells us, the language remains. But in what condition does it remain, and does it still mean anything? And please understand, I’m not talking about translating the Liturgy. We’ve fought that battle and we’ve moved on. I’m talking about conceptual language, how we relate to the world and to the universe. What language do we have at our disposal? We don’t. And as we progress in the 21st century, we have even less language at our disposal to deal with the new challenges of technology and the evolution of human existence itself. Do I have the answers? Maybe some answers, maybe none; but I know there’s a problem – and that’s a necessary starting point.
In today’s Gospel reading, the Samaritan was the only one of the ten lepers who came back to say thank you. Not the way we say thank you – which very often does nothing more than stroke someone’s ego – but a thank you that originated from a transformed life, a transformed vision of God and self. That is why Jesus singled him out. “Where are the other ten? Only this one came back, this foreigner, this ξένος? … Your faith has made you well,” he told the man. The other nine were also made well. But it wasn’t their faith that made them well. It was purely the mercy and kindness of Christ. Jesus did not take away their healing because they didn’t come back to thank him. No, of course not. God does not act that way, only humans do – humans who are stuck in old ways of thinking, where everything is quid pro quo, tit for tat. No, this one came back as a transformed man. He wasn’t just healed; he was made whole. Jesus Christ brought transformation, forgiveness, complete renewal. “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome (Romans 12:2).
It’s even more true today than it was 2,000 years ago when Paul wrote those words. Today more so than ever the church – yes, the church, not just individuals – needs to be transformed by a renewal of mind and thinking. And this renewal, ἀνακαίνωσις, is not a reviving of something from the past – as we Orthodox usually mean, when we talk about going back to the Fathers. The renewal Paul is talking about is something entirely new. See it even more clearly in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Colossians. He uses the verb, ἀνακαινούμενον, which is just the verb of ἀνακαίνωσις. And so Paul says to the Colossians: Put off the old nature and put on the new nature, which is being renewed, ἀνακαινούμενον, in knowledge, ἐπίγνωσιν, after the image of its creator. It is being renewed – ἀνακαινούμενον, a present, passive participle – an ongoing process, not a one-shot deal as many Christians preach. It’s the beauty of transformation. And that, in the final analysis, is the language that remains – and the language that is the language of heaven – the language that is beyond words and equations – the language of pure simplicity, of unity with each other, unity with the cosmos and unity with God. Let me conclude with a powerful quote from the writings of Father Alexander Men.
Christ calls people to bring the divine ideal to reality. Only short-sighted people imagine that Christianity has already happened, that it took place, say, in the thirteenth century, or the fourth, or some other time. I would say that it has only made the first hesitant steps in the history of the human race. Many words of Christ are incomprehensible to us even now, because we are still Neanderthals in spirit and morals; because the arrow of the Gospels is aimed at eternity; because the history of Christianity is only beginning. What has happened already, what we now call the history of Christianity, are the first half-clumsy, unsuccessful attempts to make it a reality. (Quoted in Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church, page 234.)
Let us be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Let the church be transformed by the renewal of its mind!