Editorial (04/03/08)

Tribute to Babel: On Tongues

Hissing as snakes, having laughing fits, babbling like one having some sort of seizure, howling like a dog, or making goo-goo ga-ga noises: all of these and more such frightening phenomena are easily performed in places of Catholic sacred worship (and in other less divine spaces) all in the name of “tongues.” What is one to think, if he neither hisses nor has fits nor seizures nor babbles? The self-styled “charismatic” community today largely considers this person unenlightened, and a good-intentioned charismatic will “teach” someone how to “speak in tongues.”

(...why teach it, if it supposedly comes from God? Anyway...)

And if the whole Church is essentially charismatic, starting with the charism of the Magisterium to which we must assent in the obedience of faith, what do these “charistmatics” mean when they distinguish themselves from the rest of Catholics with this epithet? Hmm… I’ll leave the whole “charismatic” question for another day. Let’s focus on “tongues” for now.

But first, a small apology to the Gentle Reader. It has been long since I have had a chance to sit and write, even if it is one of my preferred occupations. Holy Week came, and at our parish, for the first time in forty years, thanks to Pope Benedict’s liberation of the use of the old rites, all of the liturgical celebrations followed the ancient traditions. The preparation was intense, time-wise, and interior-life-wise; but the results were most amazing, to the glory of God and the great edification of souls. So now, recovering after Holy Week and Easter, I wish to get in touch with you again by this little article, hoping in provokes some thought and discussion.

I admit openly that I do not assent readily to these forms of noise-making as anything even remotely close to anything like a gift of tongues. Anyone with some imagination, and little human respect, can utter such things. Souls moved by demons can do so as well, and quite effectively. My reasons are seven, and they do not pretend to be exhaustive, but they quickly come to mind in this short time I have to write this article.

1. In the sacred scriptures and in the history of the Church, no such “babbling as tongues” has ever been part of our Christian experience. The Apostles received this gift – and I will offer some clarifying aspects in reason number two, below – but they didn’t babble like idiots. They preached the Gospel, and they were understood in the languages of the men who heard them. Or again, Francis Xavier went down to the wharfs on the coast of Japan to speak to Chinese fishermen about the Lord Jesus, and fluent Chinese came out of his mouth. He didn’t babble: he spoke words, real words. Catholicism isn’t a religion of babble… and to this point I will return in my seventh reason, below. Tongues as babble is an invention of Pentecostalism, probably from around the 18th century.

2. The Greek word for “tongues,” when St. Paul speaks about it in 1 Cor 12 (both in verses 10 and 28), he uses the word γλώσσα, which is the same as the word γλώττα. (Note there should be a circumflex over the omega, but that is an impossible character on the character set allowed by my computer, so an acute will have to do.) They are found in the genitive case, but that affects not this argument. It means tongue, but it also means language. When the apostles came out speaking tongues, they came out speaking languages, as the text testifies. To extrapolate that Paul here is speaking of babble goes against both the contextual witness of the scriptures and the experience of the history of the Church. Charismatics are often very ready to provide all sorts of definitions of what they think tongues are; they first quote some out-of-context verse from Paul, then apply their own home-made definition of tongues, then angrily insist that you give in to their opinions on the matter. I think starting with the definition of the word is a good first step.

3. Pope Benedict, in Bavaria, delivered a discourse about the rationality of God. (Click here to see the entire discourse.) For this he won horrible criticism from all sides. But his critics, simply put, are wrong. God is in fact a rational God. He is not chaotic or illogical, He isn’t a fuzzy feeling, but rather He is truth, He is logos, and all things are intelligible because of him. Babbling is the opposite of all these things, and profoundly irrational. I know of cases where tongues-speakers taught normal people how to “pray in tongues,” and it amounted to exciting one’s emotional states, overcoming inhibitions to act completely irrationally, and then proceeding to make oral sounds with lots of real feeling. None of this has anything to do with God or with the truth of the spiritual life. Such persons would do better to read the scriptures, meditate upon the liturgical prayers of the Church, read the writings of the saints, and then get down to the real, hard work of true conversion, and stop all this babbling.

4. St. Paul refers to the “tongues of angels,” on a couple of occasions. The tongues-babblers are always ready to claim that they speak such languages, and that these languages are in fact “tongues.” He says, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor 13:1). The hypothetical, “if I speak in the tongues of angels,” is no declaration of fact, but an assertion pertaining to the argument. St. John of Damascus says angels communicate directly by thought and not by words. Dionysius discusses “illumination,” which in some sense was adopted centuries by St. Bonaventure when addressing how man knows the truth; by this, the choirs shed light upon one another, in a hierarchical way, communicating their minds. Angels can condescend to speak to men, as we have seen in scripture. They didn’t bellow, “hala mandaya muhaha” and other such ridiculous nonsense, but they spoke in real human languages, which the scriptures often report. St. Paul, by the way – which few of the self-styled charismatics wish to point out – makes a hypothetical study of using words others don’t understand and those which they do, and he completely disapproves of using words others don’t understand.

5. There are such things as extraordinary gifts in the Spiritual life. It is generally held that the first Christian community had many special gifts which are now gone, special aides for the unique period of the life of the Church; and they were exercised, as the New Testament reports to us, by the Apostles. St. Peter struck Ananias and Sapphira dead with a word (cf. Acts 5). Stephen saw the heavens open, while Saul assented to his stoning. John and Peter made a lame man walk, and Peter rose a woman from the dead. When I see self-styled charismatics not babbling, but striking dead the wicked and bringing the just back to life, I’ll take them a bit more seriously. But even in our day, extraordinary gifts exist. No, I don’t think that every person who claims to see demons or angels actually sees them, nor that as many people can see souls or see the future as who so claim. But the children of Fatima saw Mary, and Padre Pio had the stigmata of our Lord. With the extraordinary graces of the spiritual life, those who have them often have no idea that they are extraordinary: they are fact. And when interior souls are most perfectly illumined by God’s grace, they usually don’t realize it (cf. Lagrange, Three Ages, vol. II, p. 389). Then they take their unusual experience and put it, obediently, at the judgment of the Church.

Another threat that exists by these who chase after and claim unto themselves these extraordinary phenomena of the spiritual life is not only pride, but spiritual retardation. Instead of progressing with suffering, abandonment, the dark nights of sense and soul, instead of converting from sin and growing in union with God, they consume their lives and time doing things like… well… babbling in the mirror.

6. It is far from unknown that people who have been “speaking in tongues” were, yes, in fact speaking in foreign languages which they did not know; yet they were not speaking any praise of God, but blasphemies. For when a soul, in pride, wishes to claim to itself an extraordinary grace of the spiritual life, or pretends to have it, opening his soul to some spirit, he opens himself up to the influence of whatever spirit there may be, including evil ones.

7. At Pentecost (Acts 2) we see the Apostles going out to preach, as I mentioned above. They speak in languages, and they don’t babble gobble-gook. I have all through this article used the word “babble” quite on purpose: for the word is etymologically related to Babel, and Pentecost reversed what Babel did. Babel made men not understand one another; the cause was pride and arrogance. Can anyone dare say, without blaspheming the Holy Spirit, that he is like that pride and arrogance which caused the unintelligibility of tongues among men? Tongues-speakers seem to me more to glorify Babel and to promote the exact opposite of the gift of languages at Pentecost.

Well, this is long enough. I propose here only opinions, and among the seven reasons here – again, not exhaustive, but indicative – some are admittedly stronger proofs than others. I also apologize to the Gentle Reader that I have not had time to re-write this article, as I prefer to do, as time is short and I won’t have time to get back to my web site for at least a week. I say this all in order to help the Gentle Reader weigh prudently the weight of today’s article, that’s all.

My advice? Stop babbling and start converting: the latter would be far more pleasing to the Sacred Heart, now risen from the dead.