by Umberto Eco
I am indebted to Andrew White (1917: 2:189–208) for some suggestions on the way the mystical version of the monogenetic hypothesis was prolonged in the theosophical ambience of the late eighteenth century (in Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, De l’esprit des choses, for example) and among the French Catholic legitimists such as De Bonald (Recherches philosophiques, III, 2) and Lamennais (Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion). White also quotes Joseph de Maistre, an alluring clue, because Maistre represents a fusion of the themes of classic legitimism (of which he can be considered the initiator) and those of the theosophism hovering in the circles of Scottish and Templar masonry to which Maistre had at first belonged, though he broke with them for reasons of religious orthodoxy (reaffirming the authority of the Church and the pope against that of any clique of Illuminati).
In a debate on the subject, Raffaele Simone suggested that much of the search for a perfect language derived from a sort of neurotic uneasiness, because people would like to find in words an expression of the way the world works, and they are regularly disappointed. This is certainly true. In the legitimist tradition, the assertion of the sacrality of language aims not so much at reconstructing a primigenial language as at rediscovering the traces of our natural languages. The intent is first of all to question the materialistic claims of all the Epicurean, polygenetic hypotheses and then to reject every conventionalist theory as a way of separating language from the very source of Truth.
Since it is linguistically difficult to demonstrate that a relationship exists between words and the essence of things (not least because of the plurality of languages), the way followed by the monogeneticists does not differ much from that of the most fanciful etymologists of the past, Isidore of Seville at their head. The fact that many of these etymologies also reappear in some contemporary thought (in Heidegger, for example) only indicates the toughness of the dream, or perhaps an irrepressible need to have some contact with Being.
If we take a look at the text in which Maistre discussed at greatest length the nature of languages, his Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, we see that the first declarations simply repropose what is found even today among authors who hark back to tradition as the source of all knowledge, opposing the degenerate learning of a secularized culture, “modern,” “enlightened,” or “scientistic.”
Listen to what wise antiquity has to say about the first men; it will tell you that they were marvelous men, and that beings of a superior order deigned to favor them with the most precious communications. On this point there is no discord: initiates, philosophers, poets, history, fable, Asia and Europe, speak with one voice. Such agreement of reason, revelation, and every human tradition forms a demonstration that cannot be contradicted. So not only did men begin with science, but with a science different from our own, and superior to our own because it had a higher origin, which is what made it more dangerous. And this explains why science was always considered mysterious in principle, and why it was always confined to the temples, where the flame finally burned out when it could serve no purpose but to burn. (Second Dialogue 41)
But just when readers might expect proof of this theory, they always find themselves confronted by inconsistent, circular arguments. Maistre recalls that Julian the Apostate in one of his discourses called the sun “the seven-rayed god,” and he wonders where the emperor found such a singular attribute. His answer is that the idea could have come to him only from the ancient Asiatic tradition to which he recurred in his theurgic renovation. Maistre cites, for example, “the sacred books of India,” which speak of seven virgins gathered to celebrate the advent of Krishna when the god suddenly appears to them, inviting them to dance. When the virgins object that they have no dancing partners, the god divides into seven, giving each virgin her own Krishna.
There is really nothing so strange about Julian’s choice of imagery, inasmuch as the hebdomad, the mystique of the number seven, is found in many ancient cultures, and Julian could have absorbed it either from Indian sources or from others. But what indicates a strange disjuncture of thought is the series of examples that follows hard upon Maistre’s evocation of Julian. First of all, he notes, the “true” system of the universe was known from most remote antiquity, as is shown by the pyramids of Egypt, which are rigorously oriented according to astronomical criteria. Then, whether as proof or consequence of this fact, we observe that a people like the Egyptians, who could create colors that have lasted thirty centuries, raise boulders against every law of mechanics to a height of six hundred feet, carve in granite birds of all known species, could hardly fail to excel in every other art, and therefore they must have known things of which we are ignorant. Finally, in Asia, consider the ancient astronomical observations carved on the walls of Nimrud, which rose on land still damp from the Flood. All this drives one—notice the conclusion—to ask oneself, “So where will we place the so-called times of barbarism and ignorance?” (42).
We cannot see a direct rapport between the metaphor of the seven rays and the pyramids, unless it is to be found in the fact that different myths and archetypes tried to explain astronomical phenomena and furnished a pre-Galilean version of a world written in mathematical characters. But to confirm the existence of these trends Plato would again suffice, with his Timaeus. If anything, it is the knowledge that even more ancient images circulated in African and Asian culture that explains why Julian followed this tradition. Whether he followed it or revitalized it, however, this does not show that he was its direct and authorized heir or that the tradition spoke any truth.
But this reasoning had been typical of the same Masonic tradition that influenced Maistre: the fact that an association decided to hark back to the Templar tradition became a sign of direct descent.
It is obvious that in this reasoning there is no linguistic-etymological discovery, but only biased polemic against sick modern civilization: “Under skimpy northern dress, his head lost in the curls of deceptive locks, his arms loaded with books and instruments of all kinds, pale from long nights and work, the modern scientist drags himself along the road to truth, soiled with ink and panting, always bending his algebra-furrowed brow towards the earth” (43). Compared to that of our modern civilization, the knowledge of the origins reveals its obvious superiority:
In so far as it is possible to perceive the science of early times at such a distance, one always see it free and isolated, soaring rather than walking, and presenting in its whole being something airy and supernatural. Exposing to the winds the hair that escapes from an oriental mitre, an efod covering a breast uplifted with inspiration, it looked only to the heavens, and its disdainful foot seemed to touch the earth only to leave it. However, although it demanded nothing of anyone and seemed to know no human support, it is no less proven that it possessed the rarest knowledge. (43)
The proof of this primacy would lie in the fact that traditional science was exempted from the task imposed on modern science, while all the calculations that we base on experimentation are the most false that can be imagined. Whence we see that the thesis (modern civilization is inferior to ancient civilization) is reasserted as proof.
At this point the Greek myth of the golden age is proposed as proof that the state of perfect and luminous knowledge existed only in the civilizations of the origins (44). Thus the man who had written pages, truly beautiful from a literary point of view, on the revolution’s crime, rediscovers the root of every Jacobin degradation in the act (so remote that it can no longer be collocated in history) with which language fell away from the original tree (44).
Seekers after original Hebrew, even they could retrace its origin only into a past Eden (of which they had to make an effort, moreover, to offer, however fancifully, a chronology) did not therefore refrain from reconstructing its grammar. Compared with the efforts of a man such as Athanasius Kircher to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and study the generating of alphabets, the efforts of Maistre seem fairly puerile: “Here is the mystery, gentlemen: one generation s
aid ba, the other said be; the Assyrians invented the nominative, and the Medes, the genitive” (116)—which, if anything, would be proof not of a divine origin of languages but precisely of their slow evolution. Maistre asks himself why, in the languages of the ancient peoples, we find reflections of knowledge that those people could not have possessed. The correct question naturally would not be “why” but “whether.” In fact, Maistre goes on to illustrate not inconceivable knowledge but proofs of the fact, common among ancients as among moderns, that poets are capable of finding ingenious metaphors to name phenomena fundamental to human experience.
For example, from where did the Greeks, at least three thousand years ago, take the epithet Physizoos (giving or possessing life), which Homer sometimes gives to the earth? Or that of Pheresbios, very nearly synonymous, which he attributes to Hesiod? From where did they take the still more singular epithet of Philemate (amorous or thirsty for blood), given to the earth in a tragedy? Who would have taught them to call sulphur, which is the cipher of fire, the divine? I am no less struck by the name Cosmos given to the world. The Greeks named it beauty because all order is beauty, as the good Eustathius said somehere, and supreme order is in the world. The Latins encountered the same idea and expressed it by their word Mundus, which we have adopted by merely giving it a French ending, except however that one of these words excludes disorder and the other excludes defilement. Nevertheless it is the same idea, and the two words are equally correct and equally false. But again tell me, I ask you, how these ancient Latins, when they still knew only war and ploughing, thought to express by the same word ideas of prayer and torture? And who taught them to call fever the purifier or the expiator? We would not say that there is here a real knowledge of cause by which a people affirmed the correctness of a name. But do you believe that these sorts of judgment could have belonged to a time when they scarcely knew how to write, when the dictator spaded his own garden, when they wrote verses that Varro and Cicero no longer understood? These words and still others that could be cited, and that belong completely to oriental metaphysics, are the evident debris of more ancient languages destroyed or forgotten. (48–49)
Here we are simply demonstrating that every epoch had its poets, capable of naming things in an unusual and perspicacious fashion. Or, at most, we are repeating, in a simplified form, a thesis inspired by Vico on the metaphoric origin of language that is, if anything, a reflection of the perceptive freshness of ancient peoples, not of their presumed occult knowledge. It hardly seems that any profound learning was necessary for agrarian peoples to call the earth “life-giving” as they lived, in fact, on the earth’s fruits.
Maistre was a vigorous thinker, capable of historically based critical judgments (it suffices to look at his contestations of the Templar myth of the Scottish masonry). And he was not ignorant of the attempts made to construct an a priori philosophical language, from Bacon to Wilkins and beyond. He perceives the contrivances of the artificial languages proposed in the course of the previous two centuries, to which common sense would reply that natural languages seem more flexible in handling our experience. But then this position (which, thus enunciated, would prove disastrously “enlightened”) in Maistre’s discourse is radically transformed. To demonstrate the agility of natural languages Maistre cannot avoid recurring to another notion, born in the eighteenth century: that of the “genius” of languages. But the notion of genius recalls that of polygenesis, or at least of autonomous development, unreconcilable with any monogenetic hypothesis. Maistre thus finds himself entangled in a line of reasoning that leads to wild paralogisms:
I do not want to take up the question of the origins of language (the same, it must be noted in passing, as that of innate ideas), in the most refined of centuries, drew attention to this talent in nascent peoples, but what I can assure you of, for nothing is clearer, is the prodigious talent of infant peoples in forming words and of the absolute incapacity of philosophers to do the same thing. I recall that Plato, in the most refined of centuries, drew attention to this talent in nascent peoples. What is remarkable about this is that it has been said they proceeded by way of deliberation, in virtue of a determined system of agreement, although such a thing would have been rigorously impossible in every respect. Each language has its genius, and this genius is ONE, in a way that excludes all idea of composition, or arbitrary formation, or anterior convention. (49)
The notion of genius does not exclude convention, unless the former is understood as a kind of mystical insufflation that comes from outside the linguistic formative process. Maistre decides to isolate the “genius” specific to Greek and to Latin in some morphological characteristics of the two languages, an admissible method, without making any decision as to the precision of the analysis. Thus he observes that in Greek compound words can be formed in which the two parts generate a second meaning, without therewith becoming unrecognizable, whereas Latin tends to shatter the words in such a way that from their fragments, chosen and joined through some unknown and quite singular agglutinations, are born new words of surprising beauty, whose elements are no longer recognizable except to a trained eye (49). But here is the proof:
From these three words, for example, CAro DAta VERmibus they made CADAVER, flesh abandoned to the worms. From the words MAgis and voLO, NOn and voLO, they made MALO and NOLO, two excellent verbs that every language, even Greek, might envy Latin.… The French are not absolutely unacquainted this system. Those who were our ancestors, for example, knew very well how to name theirs by a partial union of the word ANCIien with ÊTRE, just as they made beffroi from Bel EFFROI. See how they worked with the two Latin words DUo and IRE, from which they made DUIRE, going two together, and by a very natural extension, mener, conduire. From the personal pronoun SE, from the relative adverb of place HORS, and the verbal ending TIR, they made S-OR-TIR, that is to say SEHORSTIR, or to put one’s person outside the place where it was, which appears marvelous to me. (49–50)
This passage displays two contradictions. In the first part, the fact that two languages evolved through different morphological rules is, if anything (as we have said), an argument against monogenetism. In the second part, with a specific quotation from Isidore, Maistre tries to play the etymological card. But at least the etymology of the seventeenth-century monogeneticists consisted of showing how the words of each language had developed from a single Hebrew root (the only one, for that matter, to have a presumed “iconic” or motivated relationship with the thing signified). Here, on the contrary, the game consists of demonstrating that within each language, and with quite different mechanisms, compound words can be created whose meanings are born from the sum of the meanings of their simple components, which is what happens in the natural languages when they compose terms like screwdriver, corkscrew, parasol, or when spontaneous agglutinations are born, as in the transformation of Mediolanum into Milan—though, alas, this never happened with the Latin word cadaver. Even if Isidore’s etymology of cadaver were plausible, and even if had the etymology attributed to it by Maistre, this would in no way prove any iconic and motivated relation between simple words and signified reality but rather, if anything, that new coinages are often born from the wordplay typical of the rhetors of decadence and not from an instinctive folk wisdom.
The fact that this aspect could escape Maistre is explained only by the religious—and not linguistic—exigency that he convince his readers (almost pedagogically) that language says originally the Truth. And we sense this from some expressions of outright joy with which he glimpses the action, within every human language, of this impulse to tell always the truth, no matter what: “It is a pleasure to be present, so to speak, at the work of this hidden principle that forms languages. Sometimes you see it struggling against some difficulty that impedes its development: it searches a form that it lacks; its materials resist it; then it will extricate itself from its embarrassment with a happy solecism, and it will say very effectively, ‘Rue passante,’ ‘couleur voyante’ ‘place marc
hande’ ‘métal cassant,’ etc.” (51).
No objection would be made as to the efficacy of these compounds, were it not for the fact that Maistre is not always fond of compounds (or of the hidden action a language forms in order to mint them), as if a language, in some of its vicissitudes, remained faithful to its own obligation to truth and in other instances degenerated. As examples of degeneration, he cites the fact that already in his own day (and in the St. Petersburg familiar to him) on visiting cards one could find titles such as Minister, Général, Kammerherr, Fräulein, Général-Anchef, Général-Dejourneí, Joustizii-Minister, and that on commercial posters words like magazei, fabrica, meubel, or that in the course of military drills commands were heard such as directii na prava, na leva, deployade en échiquier, en echelon, contre-marche, or that in the army functions should be named haupt-wacht, exercise hause, ordonnance-hause, commisariat, cazarma, canzellari.
Immediately afterward, he mentions terms considered “beautiful, elegant, and expressive” that presumably existed in “your primitive language”: souproug (bridegroom), which precisely means “he who is attached with another to a single yoke,” and he comments that “nothing more correct or more inspired” could have been found, just as “we must admit that the savages or the barbarians who once deliberated to form such nouns surely did not lack refinement” (52).
It is obvious that there is no reason (except the imponderable one of taste) to decide that place marchande is legitimate and contremarche is not. It is unclear why to describe the bridegroom as someone attached to the same yoke (which could be simply a carnival taunt) seems beautiful, whereas it is horrible to give an order for an army to deploy itself like a chessboard (an effective spatial metaphor). Perhaps here Maistre laments only the introduction of barbarisms and therefore the pollution of one language with terms borrowed from another. In any case, he seems to react according to his personal stylistic preferences, “by ear.”
