The Curse of Babel and the Gift of Tongues

How to find God: Christianity as a language 2

The Gift of Tongues

I think Christianity is closely linked with multilingualism. I have long thought it was very important that after the resurrection, and the apostles are told to go out into the world to spread the gospel, they are given the “gift of tongues” - a miracle in which they can magically suddenly speak foreign languages. I think conversion is, necessarily, learning a second langauge.

Christianity has been accused of being a globalist force, an internationalist creed. A sneaky, parasitic doctrine that infects nations from the inside. I think something more specific and nuanced, is going on.

I do not think Christianity is a “middle eastern religion”, but a singular, universal religion, that happened, metaphorically, like a nuclear reaction resulting from smashing two atoms together of Greek and Eastern tradition. A specific thing that comes out of smashing those two particular atoms together, is the universal religion, philosophical universalism and transcendentalism. German idealism.

It's not a [arbitrary folk-tradition] Judaic covenant that was "opened up" to Greeks, Greek and Jew are co-eternal and Co-equal parts in something Greater than sum of its parts.

Continuing my interpretation of Christianity as language, I think a Divine spark happens when you perfectly grok Hebrew and Ancient Greek, somehow, and that we can in a small way partake in this discovery even in our vulgar languages, insofar as they are products of Hebrew and Greek, by experiencing small echoes of this event. I also think this intuition or remnant of a memory, is what today and in the past 200 years, have driven western, overly greek, men to search for supposed Chinese and Indian wisdom, intuitively trying to get back to Christ: The nuclear explosion of the unity of east and west. They just go too far east, overcompensating, and start worshipping witch doctors and weirdo Satanic cults.

The Christ, the collision of Greek and The East, is not merely a meeting not of east west, but of the Ancient and the Future, Animal and Human. It is temporal as well as spacial. The ultimate Cross across all variables, the perfect centre of Everything. We intuitively reach for the center of time and space, the center of Everything, which we once held, but have lost grasp of and dropped, and cannot seem to find again. Jesus Christ invented German idealism and Immanuel Kant is his prophet. I also unironically think this is the psychological drive of the western anime appreciation phenomenon.

The triangle is the first shape in nature and mathematics: Triangulating consciousness, or, our Being, our place in the world, requires a third point between mind and body to materialize - to “matter” - that is, to become 3d. And only the ultimate center of the universe will do: God. Pythagoras was waiting for Christ.

Language Games

Multilingualism, once a second langauge has been internalised, implies a knowledge of the malleability of language - not quite “arbitrariness”, that's going too far, but the existance of two seperate systems representing the same thing, opens your awareness in an intimate way, that cannot be replicated conceptually, (ie you Must learn a second language to Know it, it is not enough to try to conceptualise it abstractly), of, for lack of a better word, the validity of metaphysics as a category.

Put in psychological terms, multilingualism affirms the validity of the Other, affirming the Existence of the Other, which also in turn validates your own individuality, because what is affirmed is the distance between the two. The Other becomes Truly Other. The impassable cleft between minds. This is both intoxicating and hurtful - we learn we are not alone, and it is paradoxically increases out loneliness. The lover’s paradox: The closer we get to one another, to more it affirms the remaining distance between us. Even as we cling on to each other for dear life, naked, there is this profound feeling that it is not enough, that we are seperate in a way that cannot be transcended. Every act we take in connecting with one another, affirms that we are apart.

Jung describes western man as aiming to reach ever higher states of conciousness, at the cost of what we today call “alienation”, the affirmation of the Other as Truly Other. Loneliness is the price we pay for reaching a higher state of being. What we today call “individualism” and such. He opposes this with what he calls “more primitive” traditions, which do not aim for this, but rather aim towards full submersion into the collective unconcious.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: literally Jungian. The End of Evangelion is quite literally this fundamental Either/Or question illustrated. Do you want to become like Christ, or be submerged into the collective consiousness

And here enter Jesus of Nazarath, who's every action and breath is God speaking to us, personally, transcending time and space. But you have to have intimately understood the malleability of language, to learn the language and syntax God is speaking in. He is meeting us half way, but language requires an effort on part of both the speaker and the listener. There is no passive partner in speech.

In this way, like Christ is the “answer” to Abraham, so too is he an answer to the tower of Babel.

The Curse of Babel

The curse of Babel is losing the ability to communicate. We have the word “babble” as in “mindless babble” from here. The tower of Babel is a universalist project of piercing the Heavens by utilizing the industrial capacity of the entire human race under one banner, and they are cursed with the curse of Babel for their crime: Mankind is seperate into different languages, and lose the ability to speak with one another, and thus to co-operate on the building of the tower.

Now if we approach it from the other end: what happens to language as you expand it from monologue, to dialogue, to speaking to a group? It loses specificity and accuracy. It loses nuance. The bigger the audience, the lower your common denominator must become, to be intelligible to every member of the audience. An in-joke between you and your friend can contain multitudes of unsaid meaning, but an in-joke between you and 20.000 friends is by mechanical necessity, much simpler.

Put another way: for everyone to understand, it must be intelligible to the dumbest person in the room. Mathematically: as you expand the group you are talking to, you approach ultimate stupidity. And once you speak to a group encompassing the entire human race, and try to organize them into an industrial force, you are left with the ultimately most primitive language possible: Which, incidentally, is the end which Wittgenstein’s examples in Philosophical Investigations start from. He explains language as “factory instructions” - a man points to a slab of metal, says “slab”, and you understand this as on order to bring him the thing.

Now, lets ask a different question. What is the simplest language game? Luckily for us, the american military industrial complex and intelligence agencies have already done extensive work on this question.

The mind virus, the nameless-faceless thing, the great enemy of our time, that is just as slippery and un-graspable as Christ to our dirty hands. The negative behavior of todays neo-communists, the same little game that is played over and over every day on the internet, and has been for over 10 years now. The simplest social language game. It is revealed as an ancient enemy: it was the Sophism all along. Rhetoric. “I know X means Y, but I also know what X can be used to mean Z”, and using this antagonistically, knowingly, willingly, to achieve your ends. Sacrificing Language as a means to a worldly end.

The force acting in the world today, causing most of our problems, is quite literally the Curse of Babel. It’s an old testament curse returning in our modern era. An ancient, eternal, unsolveable problem, a necesseray development of forcing people into large enough groups: this will innevitably happen, and language will break down, and the world decends into madness and war, because the contradiction cannot be resolved otherwise.

Except, christianity as a language.

Christianity as a language, is the only way of avoiding this problem in human organisation across Scale, crossing ethnic-cultural barriers. Not “translating christianity into the local language and customs”, but approaching Christinaity as a seperate, third language and custom, which both parties internalise the forms of, and are initiated into the mysteries of, they have a shared point from which to triangulate their positions in the world harmoniusly. By means of this mystery, we can avoid the curse of Babel, and touch the Kingdom of Heaven. Christianity is at once the anti-globalist project, or rather more precisely, what we call “globalism” is anti-christian. Yet, paradoxically, it is the only way we can approach human organisation at scale, that is not doomed to collapse under the inherent contradictions in our nature. A miracle. A paradox.

When you talk down to someone, when you patronize someone, you are quite literally making them smaller. When you speak “up” to someone, you are ever so slightly bringing them closer to God.

Becoming like Christ, taking part in he Christ-life, is a higher state of jungian consciousness, where you grok that although translation is always ad-hoc and never truly complete, we can have mutual intelligibility, and neighborhood, love, incrimentially extending brotherhood. Where instead of trying to articulate yourself to a hypothetical amalgamation of a group, you speak directly to one person, and in so doing, you raise him up ever so slightly, towards a higher state of Being.

Compare this to the factory language of todays polical slogans and nonsense: I will not even write the words here, because you know them all by heart, and I believe that every time you utter Their Words, you are making yourself Lesser. The meaningless nonsensical Ba Ba Ba gutteral speak and mindless repetition of slogans and buzzwords. You can feel it if you pay attention. It makes both the speaker and the listener worse, for every time they are uttered. Curse-words are in this sense real.

Are we brothers Francis?

A final clarifcation, or possibly digression.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the “atomic bomb” is a kind of inversion of Christ. Where Christ is the perfect meeting of perfect purpose across all variables, space and time, creating the perfect ultimate centre of all meaning, expanding and creating infinite life, the bomb is an arbitrary collision of the most arbitrary smallest parts, which creates untold death and destruction.

When the apostles are given the Gift of Tongues, I think we can understand this as having become christ-like enough to be intelligible to every man, by simply not talking down to him. And I don’t think that’s anything less than a miracle.