By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg
When I ask my classes “What is a cat?”, the inevitable answer is: “Whatever someone says it is.” Not long ago, any first-year high-school student knew what a cat was. Now that certainty has evaporated into subjectivity. Yet after a few months of instruction in logic, a kind of mass awakening occurs: the class discovers that “truth is not consensus, but the conformity of the intellect with reality.” That moment is a glimpse of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language, and of what is at stake when words lose their grounding in reality.
“Cat” is not the eternally correct sound for the sharp-clawed, purring mouse-hunter curled up in the corner. Nor is it an arbitrary noise, infinitely malleable, determined by our desires and consent. Somewhere between those two errors of excess and defect lies the elevated mean of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language. Anyone who educates and raises children today is immersed in the remnants of both errors; grammar, rightly understood, is the remedy.
Before any grammar lesson can be taught, however, three preliminary questions must be answered: What is the origin of language? What is the nature of a word? And what is the purpose of human speech? The answers to these vital questions are not principles that belong to grammar itself. They are taken from a higher science, just as a carpenter builds a house according to a set of principles that properly belong to the architect. Grammar is a subordinate building project ordered to reality itself.
The most important question about the origin of human language is: Does it come from man or from God? Scripture is explicit. In Genesis, God created the universe by His word. St. John tells us: “In the beginning was the Word,” and He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Man’s capacity for language proceeds from his creation in the image and likeness of that Word, and every true act of naming is a participation in the Logos through whom all things were made.
God grants man the power to name things fittingly. In Genesis 2:19, God brought all the animals before Adam “to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” The task of naming was entrusted to man as an act of vicarious authority, the exercise of a delegated power, freely assumed by man made in the divine image. (S.Th. I, q. 96, a. 1)
Adam named each creature according to what it truly was, not according to what he wished it to be. If we lose sight of this distinction, we drift toward an illusory desire about language and its proper use. But if we recover this distinction, we remember that language is a covenant, a gift bequeathed to a communion of souls bound, generation after generation, to hand it on faithfully.
So what is a word? A word is not merely a sound or a random collection of phonemes. A word has a material body, manifested in the syllables we pronounce, and a soul: the immaterial concept or intelligibility it conveys. St. Thomas calls this the verbum mentis, the interior word that the intellect abstracts from a real thing; the audible word is only the external sign of a form conceived in the mind.
When we say “cat,” the sound carries us beyond itself and beyond the particular cat to “catness,” an essence we recognize whether the animal before us is calico, Siamese, or Persian. The essence is one thing in a cat and another in a word about a cat. A word is an artifact of reason, bound to its concept not as a natural being, but as a sign is bound to what it signifies. A word is a small act of communion between the mind and the real. Because it is communion and not composition, the bond can be broken, but not without cost, and even abuse.
St. Thomas teaches that the purpose of speech is to convey reality in charitable service to one’s neighbor. Reality and truth are convertible. Truth is a virtue linked to justice, which is what we owe to the other. To speak falsely is to fail in justice. Conveying reality in service to one’s neighbor requires charity, exercised with prudence, so that truth and charity are attained, above good intentions.
If we fail in either purpose, we abuse the gift of speech. If we speak falsely, we have lied. If we tell the truth in exclusive service to ourselves, we withhold charity even while stating facts, and communion is replaced by manipulation. If our words no longer build up the other, we are working to control him.
Josef Pieper teaches that the corruption of a society begins long before its laws or institutions fail; it begins with the abuse of speech: when words are detached from their reality and new unrealities are deliberately attached to them, the abuse of power follows.
The archetype of this abuse of speech can be seen in the Garden of Eden, when the Serpent alleged three half-truths that turned out to be devastating lies. The first was to slander the Lawgiver, the second was a denial of the Revealed Truth about death, and the third was a promise: “You will be like God!” All of this constituted a rupture of the true meanings of the words that came from the mouth of God.
Those same lies are told today, only now they are proliferated and amplified by technology. The Serpent’s central themes remain: “you will be like gods” and “you can define reality.”
A man may proclaim, and everyone is expected to agree, that he can “identify” as a woman. The words used to describe him are meant to bend to his appetites rather than to reality. To consent to this is not compassion, but the oldest form of usurpation, disguised as virtue.
A society that abandons naming things in conformity with reality cannot be governed by truth, but only by the agenda of whoever controls the words. Our first task is not to catalogue every distorted word—that would be endless work—but to recover the single truth that underlies them all: that language comes from God, that the word is meant to convey reality, and that we owe the truth, spoken with charity, to others.
Today, most children enter kindergarten knowing what the word “cat” means. When those same young people graduate from high school, tragically, they may no longer be so sure.
About the Author
Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg directs City of Truth Educational Consulting for the Diocese of Charleston and writes at St. Isidore’s Artisan Academy, a newsletter dedicated to recovering authentic Catholic education through the wisdom of the Church’s 2,500-year intellectual tradition.