And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
—Genesis 2:19
In the beginning it might seem obvious to find Him, but in fact it isn’t. Because, unexpectedly, God the Creator is a God who listens. The paradox is that language, our distinguishing characteristic above all other creatures, is in the first book of the Old Testament a gift that confirms beyond any doubt our freedom and our creativity. The consequences of this are made clear. We read that God created us in His image, but no one has ever seen the face of God. So what does it mean to say that we are created in His image? This is where language comes in. Perhaps our resemblance to God can be perceived in realizing we are able to give names to things. That is, the Creator has made us in His image because He recognizes our creations; although they are made only of air and thought, they are nonetheless creations: names. And not just any names: these are the names we give to His other creations. In the Jewish tradition, the God who created Man is the same God who stops and listens to Man naming things.
This is a kind of embryonic linguistics—names, not sentences—maybe “atomic” linguistics, but linguistics nonetheless. This is because thinking of and giving a name are not trivial acts. Names, in fact, are not just conventional labels: except in a few exceptional cases, nothing tells is that a given sound is right for a given name. This is obvious if we compare different languages, but, even leaving sounds aside, names are not just freely given conventional labels. For example, look at your hand. You instinctively recognize a natural object that can be broken down into parts: palm, fingers, knuckles, nails; we also give special names to the different fingers, funny names, childish names, noble or scientific names. In every language there are names for the pieces of what we see as making up a hand. But there are no tattoos marking the borders of these pieces: the combination of the fingertip and the distal phalange of a finger is an object in the real world too. Also, it is a coherent object, in the sense that it is not made of discontinuous pieces, just like the ring finger in relation to the whole hand. The difference is that in the second case there’s a special name for the object, and in the first case there isn’t.
Fortunately, we don’t feel a need to give names to all the combinations of pieces of the world; sometimes it’s convenient to invent names for certain things, but not for every possible combination of things. This is lucky, because the set of pieces of the world borders on uncountably infinite, and it would not be easy for a child to find themselves confronted with a percept of a wall made up of infinite subwalls, all of which have to be given a name. This would separate us forever from the city, because it would separate us from language, from what makes us human beings. What we need instead is a catalogue, capacious and partly elastic, but not infinite: in other words, a dictionary.
It would be good to catch our breath here, but we can’t: talk of God and names leads inevitably to the endless tangle raised by the problem of His name. In the Jewish tradition, this is the tetragrammaton, a name that commands respect, whose pronounciation, never mind meaning, is unknown. We could perhaps leave the question aside, were it not for the fact that in the principal Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, which was based on a Jewish precursor, the name of God is immediately invoked. We say “Hallowed be Thy name”; that is, may the Lord’s name be recognized as holy and treated as holy. So we have a God whom we can’t (and wouldn’t know how to) name, whose name features centrally in a prayer. It cannot be an accident that in that prayer there is a constant interplay between the pronouns “thou” and “we.” Perhaps the name of God is to be found entirely in relation to us.
Continuing our ascent toward the name of God, we come across another, almost insurmountable obstacle. In the other tradition that forms the basis of our culture, the Greek tradition, the name (of the role) given to God is not “father,” but logos. The logos is not only the beginning of everything but also what is made flesh. This word has been translated in different ways at different times, except when it has not been translated at all. Sometimes we use the simple word “word,” sometimes the word by antonomasia, “verb,” sometimes “number,” sometimes “reason” (Zellini 2010). The only certain thing is that the root from which the word logos is formed originally alluded to the act of collecting, of putting chosen elements together in an organized way. Thus “anthology” is a “collection of flowers” and not “a discourse on flowers.” Having said this, logos is meant to be made flesh: flesh, not something else. That is, our bodies, a blend of laws of nature and of history, are not only compatible with language but also an inseparable expression of it, and this is not at all accidental. We are thus made of the same substance as words, and so is God, who in this sense made us like Him: free, free to give names to things. We are all words made flesh.
So right from the start we see that thinking about language is a complicated, stormy, and mysterious business. For now, however, one certainty is clearly striking: however much veiled in mystery, the ability to name things is, as far as we are concerned, the real big bang that pertains to us.
