Your Verbal Infrastructure

A noun is a glorious thing! In the mind of God (what iconographers call the Prosopon, the Divine Mind, or the Interior Life of the Trinity) everything that He would create existed – had being - before it was created.  His ideas took form within Him as the various Names of God.[1] Proper Nouns!  These weren’t just empty words, though, but words with power to become, to be fully realized in Creation.  Wow!  Nouns were the seeds of Creation, the archetypes of all Reality!

Then, spoken into the forms we know, Creation, already as real as could be within God’s being, was more fully realized as material forms through Christ, the Word, the One who voices the mind of God into the world of time and space. Real, MORE REAL,… Then what?

Then man was created – like an icon of the Divine Mind, meant to possess all of Creation within himself as (drumroll, please) NOUNS!  The first work God gave Adam was to KNOW and NAME the animals. As Adam took dominion over Creation, he gave it place within himself – he let it affect him deeply. What could be more real than skin, hair, fur, wings, smell, roaring, claws and such? How about all that resonating within someone who could see through it to the Person of the Creator?

“Adam, go and see Me through all the forms my NAMES have taken.  Prayerfully, write the icons of every animal in your being – a symbol that will recall to you everything you KNOW about each one, so you can take good care of them and see my glory shine through Creation. Love, God.”

Have you ever realized your own world more fully through the eyes of a baby, to whom it is all brand new? Isn’t it delightful to watch as babies begin to ‘NOUN’ the world?

Have you read the story of Helen Keller?  Blind, and deaf, she was locked into herself away from the world she wanted desperately to KNOW, to understand, to possess.  What was the key that opened the door?  A NOUN!  The word ‘water’ was the first one she understood her teacher to be spelling for her with sign language letters she could feel.  When she understood a THING in the dark, silent world could be connected to a WORD, a NAME, a NOUN, she went crazy wanting and collecting all the nouns she could get!  How many do you have?

G.K. Chesterton says that, in a way, a mere list can be a poem, because the nouns, the real things in our lives have such meaning and beauty and significance for us.  You could write a list-poem with your favorite nouns.  Here’s one:

Baby’s Head, Hair, Nose, Ear, Toesies, Belly Button, Chin, Eye, Fingernail, Cheek, Neck, Hand

Mmm... each one of those words is beyond beautiful when it brings the experience of touching, seeing, smelling a real baby vividly into memory. The stronger your lived experiences of the feel, the smell, the sounds of babies, the more these words will evoke in your being.  What nouns bring Reality to life within you?

Perhaps nouns could be considered the ‘first dimension’ of grammar- points of correspondence to reality. What would be the ‘second dimension’ – what corresponds to the dynamism and movement toward ends? I’m guessing VERBS.

The first order of verbs would be states of being – indicated in God’s own name: I AM. At the further end of a continuum from this ground of being are verbs that have effects outward, upon a Direct Object. The gerund form (verbs with -ing endings, or action in process) express the continual action of the middle, linking up into a full spectrum of act by which man’s first, second and third dimensions of freedom are realized through his own free action. Not only am I able to love because He first loved me, I am able to act because He first acted. As Fr. Giussani taught, my freedom increases by my every free act. My every act is judged by its correspondence to Truth, to reality, to the ultimate Actor. Your ‘verbs’ should give you lots of food for thought!

What do we get when all that action generates a radiant, or gravitational, or hopeful field around the Subject? Ahhh….qualities – the adverb as the quality of act and the adjective as quality of the noun are intimately related in the process of human becoming.  The free human person, by free acts, generates a whole ‘zone’ of attractive freedom that grows by his every free act. This zone, this sound emanating from him, this radiance around him in the midst of a darkened world, is an invitation to freedom. It is a new thing – behold!

J. R. R. Tolkien suggested that the adjective’s power to generate whole new things via the imaginative capacity of man as sub-creator is like an incantatory magic:

…how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. …incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. …new form is made…Man becomes a sub-creator.[2]

In the hand of God, or of His agent, You, Free, a noun becomes a window to glory, a verb becomes a two-edged sword having both transitive and intransitive effects, and their qualities (freedom, truth, goodness, beauty, ease, graciousness, appropriateness, power, radiance) drape the new forms that result from your becoming.

Oh, be free! You were made to en-word the world.

[1] This piece first appeared in 3d Freedom, Ostermann.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, Harper Collins, 2007, pg. 122