From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  If we were to interpret “forma locutionis” as meaning a fully formed language, why then, in saying that Jesus Christ spoke Hebrew, does Dante use at one time lingua and at another ydioma (while, right afterward, in DVE I, vii, 7, recounting the episode of the confusion of tongues, loquela is the term chosen), whereas the expression “forma locutionis” is used only for the original divine gift? Furthermore, if we were to grant that “forma locutionis” signified only the faculty of speech, it is not clear why the sinners of Babel would have lost it (while the Hebrews kept it), seeing that the whole of the DVE recognizes the existence of a plurality of languages produced (on the basis of some natural faculty) after Babel.

  Let us, then, attempt an alternative translation:

  And it is precisely this form that all speakers would use in their language, if it had not been dismembered through the fault of human presumption, as we shall demonstrate below. This is the linguistic form in which Adam spoke: all of his descendants spoke thanks to this form until the building of the Tower of Babel—which is interpreted as the tower of confusion: this was the linguistic form that the sons of Eber, who were called Hebrews after their father, inherited. To them alone it remained after the confusion, so that our Redeemer, who was to be born of them through the human side of his nature, should enjoy, not a tongue of confusion, but a tongue of grace. It was, then, the Hebrew language that the lips of the first speaker framed.

  What, however, is this linguistic form that is not the Hebrew language nor the general faculty of language and which was given to Adam as a divine gift but lost after Babel—and which Dante, as we shall see, is endeavoring to rediscover with his theory of the illustrious vernacular?

  Corti (1981: 46 et seq.) has suggested a solution to the problem, based on the principle that Dante cannot be understood if he is seen simply as an orthodox follower of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Dante appeals, depending on the circumstances, to various philosophical and theological sources, and there can be no doubt that he was influenced by various strands of that so-called radical Aristotelianism whose major representative was Siger of Brabant (whom Dante places in the Heaven of the Sun). But Boethius of Dacia too, one of the major representatives of the Modistae grammarians (and also in the Heaven of the Sun), was associated with the circles of radical Aristotelianism (and like Siger incurred the condemnation of the bishop of Paris in 1277). Dante is alleged to have been influenced by his De modis significandi. Corti sees the Bologna of his time as the seedbed from which these influences were passed on to Dante, either as a result of a personal stay there or through contacts between Bolognese and Florentine intellectual circles.

  If such were the case, it would become clearer what Dante meant by “forma locutionis.” It was the Modistae who argued for the existence of linguistic universals, that is, for a set of rules underlying the formation of any natural language. In the De modis, Boethius observes that it is possible to extract, from all existing languages, the rules of a universal grammar, distinct from either Latin or Greek grammar (Quaestio VI).

  What God gave to Adam, then, was not the mere faculty for language, and not even a natural language, but the principles of a universal grammar, the formal cause, “the general structuring principle of language both as regards lexicon and as regards the morphological and syntactic characters of language, which Adam will frame little by little, as he goes on living and giving names to things” (Corti 1981: 47).5 The forma locutionis given to him by God could be understood as a sort of innate mechanism reminiscent of the same universal principles studied in Chomsky’s generative grammar.

  It seems likely, then, that Dante believed that, with Babel, what had disappeared was the perfect forma locutionis—the only form that would permit the creation of languages capable of reflecting the very essence of things (the identity between modi essendi and modi significandi), of which the Hebrew spoken by Adam was the incomparable and perfect result—and that the surviving formae locutionis were incoherent and imperfect—just like the Italian vernaculars whose inability to express lofty and profound thought is pilloried by the poet.

  If this is how the DVE is to be read, we can finally understand the nature of that illustrious vernacular that Dante claims to be tracking down like a perfumed panther, “whose scent is left everywhere but which is nowhere to be seen” (DVE I, xvi, 1).6 It shows up here and there in the texts of the poets whom Dante considers major, but it still appears to be unformed, unregulated, unarticulated in its grammatical principles. Confronted with the existing vernaculars, natural but not universal, and with a universal but artificial grammar, Dante pursues the dream of a restoration of the Edenic forma locutionis, which is both natural and universal. Unlike many men of the Renaissance, however, who will go in search of a Hebrew language restored to its revelatory and magical powers, Dante’s goal is to recreate the original conditions with an act of modern invention. The illustrious vernacular is to be a poetic language, his language, and it will be the means by which a modern poet is able to heal the post-Babelic wound. The whole of the second book of the DVE is not to be read as a mere treatise on style, but as an effort to create the conditions, the rules, the forma locutionis of the only conceivable perfect language, the Italian of Dante’s poetry (Corti 1981: 70). This illustrious vernacular will possess the necessity (as opposed to the conventionality) of the original perfect language, because, just as the forma locutionis allowed Adam to speak with God, the illustrious vernacular will allow the poet to make his words equal to the task of expressing what they have to express, which would otherwise be inexpressible.

  This is why, instead of condemning the multiplicity of languages, Dante stresses their ability to renew themselves over time. It is on the basis of this faith in the creativity of language that he can aspire to invent a modern perfect language, without going hunting for lost models. If Dante had really thought that the Hebrew invented by Adam was the only perfect language, he would have done all he could to write his poem in Hebrew. The only reason he did not do so is because he thought that the vernacular he was called upon to invent would correspond to the God-given principles of universal form better than Adam’s Hebrew had. Dante, with characteristic chutzpah, steps up to the plate as the new Adam.

  7.2. Paradiso XXVI

  If we turn now from the DVE to Canto XXVI of Paradiso (several years have gone by between the two), it looks as if Dante changed his mind. In the DVE it was unambiguously affirmed that Hebrew sprang as a perfect language from the God-given forma locutionis, and that was the language in which Adam addressed God, calling him El. In Paradiso XXVI, 124–138, however, Adam says:

  La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta

  innanzi che a l’ovra inconsummabile

  fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta:

  ché nullo effetto mai razïonabile,

  per lo piacere uman che rinovella

  seguendo il cielo, sempre fu durabile.

  Opera naturale è ch’uom favella;

  ma così o così, natura lascia

  poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella.7

  Pria ch’i’ scendessi a l’infernale ambascia,

  I s’appellava in terra il sommo bene

  onde vien la letizia che mi fascia;

  e EL si chiamò poi: e ciò convene,

  ché l’uso d’i mortali è come fronda

  in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.8

  Adam affirms, not only that, born out of a natural disposition for speech, languages subsequently become distinguished from each other and grow and change thanks to human initiative, but also that the Hebrew spoken before the building of the Tower of Babel was no longer the same language that he had spoken in the Earthly Paradise. In Eden Adam had called God I, whereas later he was called El.

  Saying that, by the time of the tower, Adam’s Hebrew was a lost language might simply be a way to justify Genesis 10. But what is most striking is the odd notion that God might once have been called I, a choice that none of Dante’s commentators has ever succeeded
in explaining satisfactorily.

  It has been suggested that I stands for the Roman numeral corresponding to the Arab numeral 1, and that it symbolizes therefore the perfect unity of God, but elsewhere in Paradiso (XIX, 128), the Roman numeral I stands for the smallest of quantities and is opposed to M, which stands instead for 1,000; it does not seem likely, then, that the poet would decide to designate the divinity with a numeral that indicates a minimal value.

  A second interpretation appears to be inspired by a curious case of linguistic ethnocentrism—the conviction, that is, that there exists only one language and it is the most perfect one. The last thirteen cantos of Dorothy Sayers’s English translation of the Comedy were completed after her death by Barbara Reynolds. Lines 133–136 of Canto XXVI in Reynolds’s version read as follows:

  Ere I descended to the pains of Hell

  Jah was the name men called the highest Good

  Which swathes me in this joy. Thereafter El

  His title was on earth.…

  Clearly, if Dante’s I had been preserved in the English, it might have been mistaken for the first person singular pronoun. It is understandable, then, that the translator should have changed it to Jah. We might be tempted to believe that Jah is simply the first syllable of Jahveh, if it were not for Reynolds’s footnote, which suggests that Dante must have been thinking of Psalm 68:4, which she naturally cites in the King James Version: “Sing unto God, sing praises to his name; extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah, and rejoice before him.”9

  What makes this explanation “suspect”? The twin facts that unfortunately Dante did not know Hebrew and that neither was he especially conversant with the King James Version of the Bible.10 The Bible Dante knew was the Vulgate, in which the verse in question is translated as follows: “Cantate Deo psalmum, dicite nomen ejus, iter facite ei qui ascendit super occasum Deus est nomen illi. Exultate in conspectus ejus.” So the name of God Dante knew was Deus (for what it’s worth, Luther’s German translation also has, not Jah, but Herr).

  For the same reasons we must exclude the hypothesis that Dante was influenced by Exodus 3:15, because in that case the Vulgate speaks of “Dominus Deus.” As for the theory that Dante may have taken his I from the frequently used abbreviated Florentine form i’ of the pronoun io—it is true that in Exodus 3:14 God says to Moses “Ego sum qui sum,” but what he is saying is that his name is “Qui sum,” in Hebrew Ehyieh.

  There is yet another hypothesis. In the seventh book of his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville lists the traditional names of God in the Hebrew tradition and, along with El, Eloi, Eloe, Sabaoth, Elion, Eie, Adonai, Tetragrammaton, and Saddai, he also mentions Ia (“which is only applied to God, and which sounds as the last syllable of ‘alleluia,’ ” Etymologies, p. 153). But if Dante had followed Isidore, whom he certainly knew, why did he use I and not Ia? Certainly not for metrical reasons (the only consideration that could justify the abbreviation), since his hendecasyllabic line would have scanned correctly in either case.

  The mysterious appearance of this I can only be explained by concluding that Dante had changed his mind about Adam’s original Hebrew, and that he had done so on the basis of information directly or indirectly acquired, just as we hypothesized that he had taken his idea of the forma locutionis from Modistae sources. We must therefore take one step, if not backward, at least to one side, and see what was happening at more or less the same time in Hebrew circles.

  Let us take a look, then, at the principles of the Kabbalah of names, or ecstatic Kabbalah, theorized and practiced in the thirteenth century by Abraham Abulafia.11

  The Kabbalah of names is practiced by reciting the names of God hidden in the Torah, playing on the various combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The so-called theosophical Kabbalah, while making occasional recourse to practices of numerological reading through acrostics or anagrams, remained basically respectful of the sacred text. The Kabbalah of names, on the other hand, alters, rearranges, dismantles, and recombines the surface of the text and its syntagmatic structures, all the way down to the linguistic atoms constituted by the individual letters, in a process of continuous linguistic re-creation. If, in the theosophical Kabbalah, the text still stands between God and the interpreter, in the ecstatic Kabbalah, the interpreter stands between the text and God.

  The practice of reading by permutation tends to provoke ecstatic effects. As Abulafia himself says:

  And begin by combining this name, namely, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel returning around, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination, and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask [it] until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it. Afterwards go on to the second one from it, Adonay, and ask of it its foundation [yesodo] and it will reveal to you its secret [sodo]. And then you will apprehend its matter in the truth of its language. Then join and combine the two of them [YHWH and Adonay], and study them and ask them, and they will reveal to you the secrets of wisdom.… Afterwards combine Elohim, and it will also grant you wisdom. (Hayyê ha-Nefes, as cited in Idel 1988b: 21)

  If in addition to this we consider the breathing techniques that are meant to accompany the recitation of the names, we can see how the adept may progress from syllabification to ecstasy and thence to the acquisition of magical powers, because the letters the mystic combines are the same sounds with which God created the world. This aspect will become still more evident in the fifteenth century. Apropos of Yohanan Alemanno, the friend and inspirer of Pico della Mirandola, Idel (1988a: 205) remarks: “the symbolic cargo of language was transformed into a kind of quasi-mathematical command. Kabbalistic symbolism thus turned into—or perhaps returned to—a magical language of incantation.”

  All of this was possible because for Abulafia the atomic elements of the text, its letters, had meaning in and of themselves, quite apart from the syntagmata in which they occur. Every letter is already a divine name: “since for the letters of the Name each letter is a Name in and of itself, be aware that the Yodh is a name and YH is a name” (Perush Havdalah de-Rabbi ‘Akiva).

  The notion that the name of God can be expressed by a single letter of the Tetragrammaton is also confirmed by the way in which the divine name is written in many manuscripts. I am referring to Perani and Sgradini (2004: 131–143), where we see that it was the custom in medieval Hebrew texts to represent the divine name with a calligraphic arrangement of a series of three or four yodhs. The fact that these manuscripts were produced in an Italian context encourages us to entertain the hypothesis that Dante was aware of this tradition.

  If we transliterate the yodh to an I, as Dante may have done, we have a possible source for the poet’s volte-face. But this notion of the divine name is not the only idea that Dante seems to share with Abulafia.

  According to the ecstatic Kabbalah, language is a universe unto itself, and the structure of language reflects the structure of reality. Already Philo of Alexandria had attempted in his writings to compare the intimate essence of the Torah with the Logos, the World of Ideas, while at the same time Platonic concepts had filtered into the Haggadic-Midrashic tradition, in which the Torah was perceived as the schema according to which God had created the world. The eternal Torah was therefore identified with Wisdom and in a number of passages with a world of forms, a universe of archetypes. In the thirteenth century, adopting an unmistakably Averroistic approach, Abulafia will postulate an equation between the Torah and the Active Intellect, “the form of all the forms of the separate intellects” (Sefer Mafteah ha-Tokhahot).

  Nevertheless, for Abulafia, this matrix of all languages (which is one and the same as the eternal Torah, but not necessarily the written Torah) does not yet coincide with Hebrew. It appears that Abulafia makes a distinction between
the twenty-two letters (and the eternal Torah) as matrix and Hebrew as the mother tongue of humankind. The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet represent the ideal sounds that must preside over the creation of each of the seventy other languages in existence. The fact that other languages have a larger number of vowels is a result of variations in the pronunciation of the twenty-two basic letters (the other foreign sounds would be called, in modern linguistic terms, allophones of the basic phonemes).12

  For Abulafia the twenty-two letters represent all of the sounds naturally produced by the organs of phonation. It is the way the letters are combined that makes the creation of the different languages possible. The word zeruf (combination) and the word lashon (tongue) have the same numerical value (386): to know the laws of the combinatorial system is to possess the key to the formation of every language. Abulafia admits that the choice of representing these sounds by certain graphic signs is a matter of convention, but he speaks of a convention established between God and the prophets. He is perfectly familiar with the current theories of language according to which the sounds for certain things or concepts are conventional (because he found this Aristotelian and Stoic idea in authors like Maimonides), but he seems to overcome his embarrassment with a rather modern solution, implicitly distinguishing between conventionality and arbitrariness.

  Hebrew had its origin in convention like all languages (Abulafia rejects the idea, endorsed by other scholars, some of them in the Christian camp, that a child left to itself from birth would automatically speak Hebrew), but Hebrew is still the Holy Mother Tongue because the names given by Adam were in accord with nature and not chosen arbitrarily. In this way, Hebrew was the protolanguage, and as such it was necessary if all the other languages were to be created, for “if such a language did not precede it there couldn’t have been mutual agreement to call a given object by a different name from what it was previously cald, for how would the second person understand the second name if he doesn’t known the original name, in order to be able to agree to the changes?” (Sefer ‘Or ha-Sekhel, in Idel 1989: 13–14).