David Parry continues his Scholar’s Call series on communication and language. See Part 1 here.
This is the first mention of human speech in Scripture – Adam speaks to name the animals. In this instance, speech is a way of classifying the world, of distinguishing one creature from another. This use of speech to classify things was seen by early modern commentators as the origin of natural philosophy, approximately equivalent to what we know as science, as well as the origin of human language.
Great big furry back and furry hair.
It continues in like manner. The question this raises is on what basis the man thinks he’ll call this creature a “bear”. Is it just because he chooses to use this word to refer to this creature, or is it that the word “bear” (or whatever the actual Adamic word for “bear” was) corresponds in some way to the essence of bearness? While Thomas Hobbes thought that Adamic language was arbitrary,7 Milton and many others thought that Adamic language had a perfect correspondence to the nature of things.
It was commonly supposed that when the text says that “whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name”, it was not that the man arbitrarily chose a name that he liked, but that he perceived the essence of the creature, and named it with a fitting word, a word that corresponded to the nature of the creature.
To name is to gain power over something – this is an idea to be found both in magical and in scientific modes of thinking. To place a curse on someone is thought to be more effective if the person’s name is used. To be able to name the sequence of the human genome is to gain the ability to do things with that information. To classify is to control. In the seventeenth century, there was not so much space as we might like to think between esoteric, sometimes occultic, modes of thinking, such as numerology and the Kabbalah,9 and the modes of thinking that have developed into modern science – Isaac Newton was an alchemist, after all, as well as a mathematician.
But was there ever a language in which the totality of a thing in its essence was communicated fully in words? We will consider this question further next time.
In Part 3 we explore how, although human linguistic diversity is affected by the Fall, it remains part of God’s good purposes for his creation.
1 See especially John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), and Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) [first published in Italian in 1993]. Much of what follows is taken from Leonard and Eco.
2 Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 15.
3 Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, pp. 96–97.
4 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele (1641–49), cited in Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 99.
5 Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 97.
6 Bob Dylan, ‘Man Gave Names to All the Animals’, from the album Slow Train Coming (1979).
7 Leonard, Naming in Paradise, pp. 12–14.
8 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (2nd ed.; Harlow: Longman,. 1998), book VIII, lines 352–4.
9 On the convergence of radical puritanism and esoteric hermetic thought, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).
10 Leonard, Naming in Paradise, pp. 17–18.
11 See, for instance, Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (London: Athlone, 1982).
12 Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, passim. Eco’s best-known novel is The Name of the Rose (1980; Eng. trans. 1983), which was made into a film starring Sean Connery in 1986.
Image credit: Adam naming the animals – St. Nicholas Anapavsa Monstery, Meteora – Theophanes of Crete, 16th c. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
David Parry currently teaches early modern/Renaissance English literature and practical criticism for various colleges of the University of Cambridge, where he pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies. He greatly enjoyed a year’s postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto before returning to Cambridge, and appreciates the ongoing friendships forged there. He is currently writing a book entitled Puritanism and Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Conversion and the Conversion of Rhetoric, and has published articles on various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topics. He is an Associate Editor of The Glass, the journal of the Christian Literary Studies Group (UK). He is also involved in the Cambridge University Christian Graduate Society and in Christians in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHAS), an informal group of Christian graduate students and academics interested in relating their faith to their studies. Some of his academic work can be viewed at https://cambridge.academia.edu/DavidParry.