Illuminations
Loosened Tongues Employed
When the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil are about to leave the circle of fraud, they come to a wide, cold plain, whose center drops precipitously to the very bottom of Hell, the icy sinkhole of all evil. In this plain they encounter giants, chained to stone wells, whence they tower from the waist up. Of the five who are named, four are Titans from Greek mythology: Ephialtes, Typhoeus, Briareus, and Antaeus. That last is the one who will, without a word, and rather grudgingly, serve as the elevator to take Dante and Virgil and set them down on the ice far below. The fifth, and the one who defines this strange place, is that mighty hunter before the Lord, Nimrod.
We are at the brink of unmeaning, approaching the Word-denier Satan himself, speechless at the center of Hell, frozen to his waist. That Titan is the moral and the efficient cause of his own imprisonment. He flaps his six bat-wings incessantly, like an automaton, raising the gale winds that freeze the River Cocytus and lock him and the rest of the traitors in the ice. Heave a rugged mountain to crash upon that ice, says Dante, and even the surface would hardly make a creak. Some of the cold-hearted souls can never speak even if they so desired, because they are submerged in the ice, kept fresh like flies in amber.
We speak because we reason and we wish to share the truth. We sing because we love and we wish to proclaim and praise the beauty we see. Sin cramps the heart and ties the tongue, and so we find Nimrod, who knows only wrath and sputters only a kind of Semitic gibberish: Raphel mai amecche zabi alme! That is appropriate for Nimrod, considered as the neighbor-dominating builder of the Tower of Babel. He and his fellows sought to climb to God by clever bigness rather than by the humility of the intellect in wonder. So they are justly punished by the binding of the tongue. Any similarity between Nimrod and the jabberers of popular music or politics is, of course, coincidental.
Pentecostal Answer
Christians have justly seen in Pentecost God's definitive answer to the Tower of Babel. The crowds below the portico of Solomon, the Jews of the Scattering who among them speak all of the tongues of the Mediterranean world, are gathered again into one flock, one understanding. They hear the apostles speaking, not from the skyscraper of politics and power-playing, but from the upper room of Christ's self-giving and prayer.
"Be of one mind," says St. Paul, and how can we be of one mind, unless we speak one word and sing one hymn? So the Word would go forth upon the waters—the tempestuous seas upon which sailed the apostle, who brought to his disciples no fables or clever rhetoric or words of his own, but only that gospel which had been handed on to him.
Return to that room before the morning of Pentecost. It is hushed in prayer. The apostles have seen the risen Christ. Their hearts burst forth with a good word, but it is a word they do not yet know how to utter. They are tongue-tied. If they tried to speak, they would stammer, as those who are deaf from birth. Their hearts are full, but they are cramped by fear, and they seize up. They are like long-overborne servants, their backs bent, who cannot imagine what it is like to be free. If they show their heads where they do not belong, they expect to be beaten. For three years they lived with the Lord; they heard his preaching; they witnessed his miracles; they broke bread with him; they saw him die; they saw him risen again; and Thomas could yet feel in his fingertips the warmth of his risen flesh. Yet they could not speak.
A week of weeks dissolves the knot. On the fiftieth day, the day of Pentecost, the new jubilee arrives, and the Spirit descends upon them in tongues of flame: we might say, in languages of love. That gave them the gift of speech, because it gave them the gift of love. We might suppose not only that they spoke in Greek to Greeks and in Latin to Romans, but also in that secret language of the individual human heart that the Spirit alone searches, the language in which the wisest of us can speak no more than the baby who wets his tongue at his mother's breast.
Pentecostal Prayer
The Pentecostal question is this: Do we love the Lord enough to speak freely about him? Do we love that person beside us to speak to him freely about the Lord? Enlarge our hearts, Spirit of love, and loosen our tongues.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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