‘Respect for the word’

     
I get the feeling there isn’t a book by Owen Barfield that isn’t thoroughly lovable for the way they smoothly hum with the electricity of learning. His History in English Words unlocks the system of the world that is language, its structures and its evolutions. Barfield, the reluctant lawyer, passionate professor, Inkling, and Anthroposophist, published the book in 1953.

This book’s foreward, written by none other than W.H. Auden, begins:

Many who write about ‘linguistics’ go astray because they overlook the fundamental fact that we use words for two quite different purposes: as a code of communication whereby, as individual members of the human race, we can request and supply information necessary to life; and as Speech in the true sense, the medium in which, as unique persons who think in the first and second person singular, we gratuitously disclose ourselves to each other and share our experiences. Though no human utterance is either a pure code statement or a pure personal act, the difference is obvious if we compare a phrase-book for tourists traveling abroad with a poem. The former is concerned with needs common to all human beings, hence, for the phrases given, there exist more or less exact equivalents in all languages. No poem, on the other hand, can be even approximately translated into any other language. A poet, one might say, is someone who tries to give an experience its Proper Name, and it is a characteristic of Proper Names that they cannot be translated, only transliterated.


The foreward moves forward brilliantly for five more pages and concludes with a quotation from Dag Hammarskjöld:

Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity—intellectual, emotional, and moral.

Respect for the word—to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth—is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.

To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.

(Hammarskjöld, of course, was secretary general of the United Nations from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in 1961. Freemasons, among others, should appreciate him for, among other things, creating the Meditation Room inside the UN headquarters in New York City. Hopefully the room is open again, having been off limits in recent years due to construction nearby.)

We know Freemasonry communicates very special meanings with certain impressive words. Just as Auden says, these terms are employed to “request and supply information necessary to life,” and they permit us to “disclose ourselves to each other and share our experiences.”

Deep into History in English Words, Barfield unpacks vocabulary important to Freemasons.

We have adopted from Latin the word initiate, which meant ‘to admit a person to these Mysteries,’ and the importance attached to secrecy is shown by the fact that ‘muein,’ the Greek for ‘to initiate,’ meant originally ‘to keep silent.’ From it, the substantive ‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium,’ and so the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances, and secondly, that the ‘initiate’ attained immortality in a sense different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through symbolized dying in order to be ‘born again,’ and when it was over, he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what had risen again was immortal and eternal.


And later:


Let us try to trace the origin of some of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word love. As in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid behind external phenomena. Out of this, Plato’s lucid mind brought to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual ‘types’ or ‘ideas’—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions, are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away. The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality. The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the invisible and eternal.


From my early years in Freemasonry I encouraged anyone who would listen to use their lodge’s ritual as a map. More than memorize, examine it for content, including using a dictionary to learn the vocabulary that is unfamiliar, at the very least.