But God likes to break things. He broke the obelisks of Heliopolis and the arms of Pharaoh and the bow of Elam—and bread. And He broke the Tower. Human unity is a petition for divine judgment. When the kings of the earth rise up as one, or the scientists or philosophers, judgment is soon to follow.

Peter Leithart connects the modern desire to build this human unity with the words of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. The modern desire is one to shepherd the wind (in Hebrew, the alliterative ruah haruach), expressing our innate desire to rule what is not ours to rule.

We can no more bring the world under our complete control than we can guide the wind into a paddock for the night. We can no more give permanent form to the world than we can sculpt the evening breeze into solid shapes. Our projects are not sandcastles on the beach. That image, for Solomon, would suggest something far too solid and permanent. Our projects are cloud castles on a windy day.

But castles in the sky have enjoyed popularity for a long time now. You might even say Babel was such a castle in the sky. Community is dearly bought, and language is the mortgage payment, the means by which we maintain our commonality. The people would not have gathered to build at Shinar if they did not speak alike.
The psychology is convincing. You build your castle or your tower into the sky, and you think, this will last, this will make us as one. You have to.

Solomon asks, “Who knows the interpretation of a word?” and the modern believes the question not to be rhetorical. A word can be known. A word can be analyzed, parsed, spread out like a patient etherized on the grammarian’s table. The word, the basic building block in language, can be used to build to truth if—in its foundation—it is “perfectly known and incapable of being doubted.” Peace and unity can only be won if humankind can begin from these objective foundations of truthful language and build up an entire structure of Truth. Modernity lacked the advantage of those at Shinar; moderns live post-Babel, with many tongues. So modernity had to construct a new story of the language of Reason, the tongue which all men possess.

Again, the psychology rings true and human: we must find some commonality lest we be scattered abroad (Gen. 11:4) or lest we resort to religious bloodshed (Descartes’ Discourse). If we can’t find this ground for commonality, what profit hath a man of all his labour? If we cannot build our sky-castles, what is left?

III.
Traditionalists have made an honorable habit of lamenting the degeneration of language for many years. George Orwell wrote in 1946, “most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” Rather than stand by with Stoic reserve and proclaim the death of language, Orwell takes the stance of an activist: culture may indeed ruin language, but the way we view and use our words makes or breaks a culture. Cultural and political chaos, he argues, “is connected with the decay of language.”

It would be hard to argue against his point. But of course, one man’s linguistic decay might be another man’s differance.

Language is slippery like that. Which is unfortunate for the modernist, who would rather have it pinned down like so many insect specimens stuck to a board. Postmodernity would rather see words alive, wet, and slippery. Word, language, logos are not specimens to be analyzed, argued Jacques Derrida. “Logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. An organism: a differentiated body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet.”

Things with feet can scamper away when you’d rather them not. Or sometimes, they undergo a metamorphosis into something entirely unanticipated.

Derrida wants to embrace the two-edged nature of language, its slipperiness, its danger. Sure, he says, language can’t be pinned down. Why try? Why try to build your castle in the sky. Derrida never lifted a hand to help the Shinarites build the Tower of Babel. He was making dirty jokes in the pub the whole time.

IV.
In 1969, sociologist Peter Berger wrote, “we have come a long way from the gods and from the angels. The breaches of this-worldly reality which these mighty figures embodied have increasingly vanished from our consciousness as serious possibilities.” But not yet entirely, Berger allowed. He went on to tell of a priest working in the slums of a European city who was asked why he continued to work in such a place. The priest gave the answer: “So that the rumor of God may not disappear completely.”

The rumor of God seems an unwieldy thing. It’s like some childhood game of telephone which delivers truth over to falsehood and ends in a complete unraveling of language by the end of the line. Such is the way that men speak of God, say the postmoderns. One age delivers their myth to another age, which in turn shapes and distorts according to its whim. In the end, you have a god for urbanites and a god for trailer parks, a god for the rich and a god for the underprivileged, a god for any economic or political culture in which you find yourself. When God is only a rumor, when He has been presumed dead, you find not one, but many, to take His place. In short, postmodernism is polytheistic.

This is the problem in an age of self-proclaimed doubt, where the wisdom of modernity’s elders is distrusted. Truth, according to popular belief, has been cast out on the wind, and who can shepherd it home? This seems to be what Eliot had in mind when he wrote:

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter. It was not (to start again) what one had expected. What was to be the value of the long looked forward to, Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders, Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The deceit of the elders: a promise that our wrestling with words and meaning would not end in futility—that it would matter. They were wrong and they were liars, says Eliot. Their search for knowledge was “useless in the darkness into which they peered.” The moderns sought “knowledge derived from experience,” but time gave the lie to that sort of knowledge. We have learned that time imposes new patterns and experiences which dizzy us, disorient us. “Every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation.”

So it is with language. Logos birthed in chaos will engender uncertainty in culture (in a weird hybrid of Derrida and Orwell). Do we raise a cry of alarm, like Orwell? Or, with Derrida, do we slyly poke fun at the doddering old moderns as they try to summon Truth with the word “truth.”

V.
Modernity is the Tower. Postmodernity Babel. Afterwards? Pentecost.

VI.
If God is there, if He is not silent, what will He say concerning our modern project? Or, what has He already done to us and our words?

At the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher describes the death of man as a quiet passing into meaningless and impotency. “Desire fails,” and mourners wander about the streets (12:5). A handful of dust returns to the earth as it was (v. 7), and all the projects of man become as vapor (v. 8). In the end, every work will be brought into judgment (v. 14).

The wicked will be punished, the Preacher says. But what might be even more frightening to them is not the judgment of a future life, but the futility and absurdity of the present. Vapor of vapors. It is the death of their works which frightens them. For what purpose is a man’s life if when he dies he becomes a mere memory—a logos killed by a subsequent logos?

In short, each man fears he will become a mere rumor. Much better he go out, not with a whimper, but with a bang. The worst thing in life is to die and have no one notice—let alone go to another life. Better to have the wish of Camus’ Meursault fulfilled: “For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.” Better to be judged by men than by another life.

Ultimately, divine judgment is the removal of human language and—by effect—unity and purpose. When the nations gathered under Nimrod, their project was ruined by the dispersal of language. When Nebuchadnezzar boasted to heaven of his majesty, God drove him “from among men” (Daniel 4:32). In his madness, Nebuchadnezzar identified himself with beasts, eating like them, dwelling with them, and even adorning himself after their manner (vv. 32-3). His tongue was taken from him.

So what then? The Preacher of Ecclesiastes follows his dour pronouncement that all is vanity with the ironic explanation that his whole purpose was “to find words of delight” (12:11). One wonders at first whether the Preacher is indulging in one last frustratingly satirical gesture. Words of delight? If all the projects of man end in vanity, if words cannot be interpreted or last forever, what is there to delight in?

The ironic conclusion of the matter: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” The argument of the modernist was that it is was the fear of God which inhibited man from uniting together. But here, the final command is to fear God, knowing that He “will bring every deed into judgment” (v. 14). He has sworn it, this much is certain. The triune God swears by Himself, and His judgment is no rumor.

VII.
Language is elusive—in this Eliot agrees with Derrida. The idea that the real meaning of words can be found is a deceit—as Eliot says: a lie of the “quiet-voiced elders” of modernity. Logos is untrustworthy—a patricidal son, one who rises up to silence the language which preceded him. No one “Logos” can therefore be known to the postmodern. But of course, this opens a particular biblical criticism. John’s gospel in particular talks of the mystery of logos, and claims: no man has seen the Father (1:18). This is Derrida’s position, so far: Logos is invisible, unknowable. But of course, we also know from John’s gospel that the Father became known through the Son. Meaning is communicated through a Word. The Word was spoken and now dwells and tabernacles with us. The Word is spoken and written. And Jesus has the audacity to claim that if you have seen the Son you have seen the Father (John 14:9). You see the Word, and because He obeys the Father, you have seen the Father, too. Derrida knows only disobedient patricidal words. Jesus gives us another type: the obedient Word. Derrida’s theory of language is a tragedy. The Bible’s is not, though it is a mystery.

How, then do we encounter the Word through words?

We are only able to find this meaning, says Eliot, when we find ourselves in Dante’s “dark wood, in a bramble, / On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, / And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment.” We see light in darkness. We proceed through to heaven only after making the trek through the monsters and chaos and insecurity of hell and purgatory. Therefore, postmodernity is purgatory.

VIII.
So, in the end, after we’ve wrestled with a word all night and have at last bested it—then, as the darkness begins to break you come face to face with this Word. And He says: “Let me go.” And we say, “Not until you bless me.” You present Him with your most difficult problems (the problem of evil, the problem of the meaning of life), and all He does is answer you with another riddle. Even when you have Him pinned—physically— you can’t win. And then, in the middle of this stalemate, the Word turns to you and He gives you a new name and blesses you because you wrestled with Him all night—and that is enough. What more can you require of God in language? He extricates Himself with a Word. But that’s all you needed anyway.

T.S. Eliot said that ours is an age of moderate virtue and moderate vice—we are a decent, godless, lonely people whose only monument is “the asphalt road/And a thousand lost golf balls." But even after the gradual loss of community and pleasure and language, Eliot holds out a quiet hope. In “Little Gidding,” he presents us with an iconic figure. This figure is a poet who has come to pray at a monastery in order to arrive at “the intersection of the timeless.” The poet awakes in the morning and is met by a ghost who grants him the burden of wisdom and reveals to the poet how the world has become impotent, passionless—how it indulges in empty laughter and the pursuit of beauty which will never be attained. The scene changes in the middle of the poem when a dove descends with a “flame of incandescent terror,” holding the promise of redemption “from fire by fire.” The poem concludes with a reflection on how the timeless is joined to the time-bound, how history and the dead saints of the past are still with us and remind us that for all our dreams of progress and greatness, we will always end up right where we began. And it is at this point, when we humbly acknowledge the vanity of all our work, that the fire of hell’s judgment transforms into the Rose of Dante’s Paradise. The poem concludes:

And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

In the end, the crowned Trinitarian knot transforms judgment into blessing. God humbles in order to exalt. We kneel in order to rise absolved of all sin. Fire purifies our tongue, like Isaiah, so that we might be restored to salvation.

IX.
Modernity builds towers to heaven. Postmodernity lives in the shadow of death.

Over one hundred years ago, Nietzsche’s postmodern madman called the empty churches and cathedrals of Europe the tombs and sepulchers of God the Word. Orwell tells us we have destroyed our world with words. Derrida says that the very foundation of our world is based on the violence which one logos does to another. The glory of the Lord is long departed, the prophets say.

Experience teaches us dead things usually stay dead. Dead stones aren’t supposed to come alive to speak the good words of salvation (Luke 19:40). A dead God isn’t supposed to hear the words of the living, nor take up His dwelling among men and their works (and if He did, wouldn’t He destroy them and babble their tongues?).

But on the other side of Babel and Babel’s judgment, there is another divine act: “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them” (Acts 2:3).

Heaven came down to Babel and divided tongues and dispersed the peoples. Heaven came down on Pentecost and gave divided tongues of fire to unite the people. Fire purifies the tongue, we know (Isaiah 6:7). And the pure-burnt tongues of Pentecost made God’s people as one to hear His Word, and still the audience was confused (Acts 2:6; cf. Genesis 11:9). But perhaps that condition of uncertainty was the very beginning of faith.

Postmodernity is like a child who loves to be told beautiful stories, but has trouble imagining any of them to be true. All that remains is to show him a true story. Give him a Father who is not a passing rumor, a Word in the flesh, and a Spirit who descends in tongues of fire.