By Francesco Rahe
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Gen. 1: 1-3)
God creates the world by speaking. He creates the ocean, the sky, the stars, growing things and even humanity itself simply via his voice. This makes sense, given that, according to John 1, God literally is the Word. Word, in the Greek, is logos, which alternatively can be translated as thought, principle, or speech. What logos implies is an involvement of reason, of intentionality; this involvement of reason marks the distinction between babble and communication, between sound and speech. When God spoke the world into being, He did not merely make sounds; He communicated something. From that perspective, God is the creator–but He is equally a communicator. The two do not merely coincide but, I would argue, are intrinsically linked. Creation is fundamentally an act of communication.
Why do we communicate? In Book I of Augustine’s Confessions, he describes his infant discovery of the power of speech. As Augustine puts it, he developed speech out of a desire to communicate his wishes to others so that they could fulfill them; in other words, the infant Augustine moved from sound to speech because of a fundamental disconnect between himself and others. When he was hungry or lonely, others did not know—and Augustine needed them to know if he was to survive. Augustine’s need for others to understand his will reflects a larger theme about the nature of man. Namely, man needs others to survive.
However, this goes further than just material needs. As Aristotle put it, man is a political animal. Human nature rests on a need to interact with other human beings, to discover through other human beings. It’s no accident that Plato wrote in dialogues, not treatises–the point being that often the best discoveries are made via communication. If communication did not aid education, then there would be no need for seminar classes. Frankly, there would be no need for classes at all. However, the human’s need for others stretches beyond even the intellectual.
We need others when we are sad or when we are lost. We need others equally as much when we succeed. Our triumphs feel less sweet if no one else cares, and our sorrows feel vaster and more lonesome if there is no one to tell of them. There is a reason the word confidante means friend—we are closest to those whom we can confide in, that is, communicate our troubles. Anyone who has ever had a birthday pass unacknowledged, or hosted a party to which no one else came, or lost a family member, or been rejected, knows exactly how deeply we ache when such communication is thwarted. Our longing for it goes deeper than Augustine’s description of the baby seeking more milk. There is in each of us an enduring desire to bridge the gap between ourselves and another; we are all terribly afraid of being left alone.
Unfortunately, this solitude lies at the heart of the human condition. For every John Donne, crying out that no man is an island, there is a Joseph Conrad to point out that we “live as we dream–alone.” There are countless examples of this loneliness, this ultimate alienation from the rest of our species–that we exist in separate bodies, come from separate backgrounds, even speak different languages. Perhaps most of all, that when we die, we cannot die with others; that last step we take into the darkness, and we take it alone. And however much words might try to bridge that gap, they fail comically. Marlowe cannot really carry across his experience in Heart of Darkness, however much he might wish to. As Tennyson’s grief-stricken narrator points out in “Break, Break, Break,” his tongue is incapable of really making manifest the thoughts that arise within him. If even one of England’s greatest poets cannot create a castle of words vast enough to house all his grief, then what hope exists for the rest of us? In the gap between two individuals, something is always misunderstood, and that misunderstanding engenders a pain no less agonizing for its inevitability.
In creation—which is communication—we reveal our need for something beyond mere education, or assistance, or friendship. We reveal our need for an experience of understanding which will not disappoint us. For a companion who will never misunderstand us, never ignore us, never leave us. In Book 4 of Confessions, Augustine discusses the agony of his best friend’s death–a sorrow which hits him all the harder given how much he’d loved that friend. That is, Augustine had loved his friend so much he’d believed his friend would not die. Of course, all human beings die. The need Augustine had—the need we all have—is for a union greater than any mortal can ever provide. In Brideshead Revisited, the Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh describes eloquently this search for union, as it relates to God:
“…perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us” (Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 303).
What we search for when we communicate is not just another human being, but God Himself. We search endlessly for the Creator-Communicator, and in the moment when we at last encounter Him, this strange sadness brought out by misunderstandings will cease. We will no longer suffer, no longer yearn, no longer be restless. We will no longer speak because we will no longer need to. As C.S. Lewis writes in Till We Have Faces, we will no longer be trapped in “the babble that we think we mean.” We will experience at last what we have always longed for: that eternal ever-present instant of communion.
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