Creation

I

IT is not the aim of this article to add to a popular controversy. It is rather to consider a doctrine which, whether it is sound or not, is worth respectful attention. The doctrine is not new. It has commanded respectful attention repeatedly in the past because its foundation is an obvious fact of experience which, when followed far, has the power to provoke the consciousness of things Spiritual. Creating itself the sense that something has been said which is both significant and profound, it may affect the mind as a revelation, calling for hearty acceptance and averse to doubting criticism. It has had that effect. There is about it a simple yet subtle beauty, which the imaginative are quick to appreciate and which even the dull may feel with a vague sense of a mystery too high for them. It is thus an accessible doctrine. It requires little learning to feel its force and may admit much learning with no diminution of its power. Its æsthetic quality is so high that a connoisseur in doctrines might wish to keep it a precious possession even when he did not embrace it as his faith.

As I have said, the foundation of the doctrine is an obvious fact of experience. Its expressions, consequently, have not necessarily been confined to any particular time, place, or people. One might be led to it independently, through reflection, without the bias of dogma or tradition. Scholars have traced its ramifications far. Yet for most of us, on account of our history and education, the most popular expression of the doctrine is found in the Bible and particularly in the first chapter of Genesis. ‘ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’

Few of those to whom these words have been familiar since childhood will recall any doubt or difficulty connected with their first hearing. I cannot trust my own memory of them. When I attempt to recover their first impression, I am acutely conscious that I am reading them in the light of subsequent study and reflection. Yet I venture to believe that I believed them, not because there was lacking in my knowledge and experience the ground for a competing belief, but because my experience supported them. It is, however, probably improper to speak of believing them at all, for speaking of them in that way seems to imply that they were subjected to scrutiny, made a matter of reflection, and then accepted because they seemed warranted. This, it is reasonably certain, did not happen. When I speak, as I just now did, of believing them, — not because there was no experience against them, but because experience was on their side, — I am speaking as a man trying to recover an impression of childhood and find a natural motivation for it. Very likely if I had been told with the competent authority of my parents something else about the beginning of things, I should have accepted it with a similar absence of questionings. Their business was, among other things, to instruct me. They were a living encyclopædia for children, lacking in patience at times and at times amused over questions asked in no sense of humor, but they were never inadequate in knowledge. They knew enough to name the animals when asked, so that a child could hardly be surprised at Adam’s similar skill. Their speech was creative. At their command things appeared and disappeared, doors were opened and shut, lights were lit and put out. They said, Let there be dinner: and there was dinner. Let us go for a walk: and we went for a walk. Let us make a house of these cards: and of these cards a house was made. They could do whatever they were willing to say they would do, and answer any question they were willing to answer. So while I might readily have accepted any answer they might have given to a question about the beginning of things, it could have been no surprise to learn that God spake and things were made. The creative power of speech has warrant in the experience of a child.

Whether this is a correct rendering of an experience of my own childhood — its reasonable psychology, so to speak — I do not know. But this I know, that repeated readings of the first chapter of Genesis in later years have progressively exalted its doctrine about God’s voice, so that when I now try to recover the impression which the first attentive hearing of it may have made upon me I find myself wondering at its doctrine, undisturbed by problems of natural history. Indeed, in this respect I must confess to what may be considered a prejudice, for I can neither hear nor read a controversy between Genesis and science without feeling that it is a perversion of something essentially sublime. In saying this, I would not be misunderstood. I cannot take the chapter as an equivalent or substitute for science. I can understand how the unintelligent might, finding a story instead of a doctrine. And I can understand how the unimaginative might, tying the doctrine to the literal details of the story. But I must confess again, and this time doubtless with a show of intellectual egotism, that for me a controversy between Genesis and science is one in which only the unintelligent or the unimaginative will engage. I could rejoice in all the trouble and perturbations of mind they will enjoy, were it not for the conviction that they are engaging in something trivial and absurd, and needlessly defacing something beautiful. The doctrine that speech is creative, that existence is evoked with words, that chaos commanded is order, is a doctrine so engaging that the first chapter of Genesis impresses me, not with puerilities in natural history, but with sublimity in spiritual insight.

II

Under the power of this impression, I can readily believe that, if we are to entertain a doctrine of creation at all seriously, it will be to the doctrine of Genesis that we are ultimately led. For we seek the adequate expression of existence. Like children bringing animals to parents to see what they would call them, we bring the items of existence to the wise to see how these items are most appropriately voiced. We would be told what they are. And the wise are supposed to be competent, for the telling. Their voice brings light. This is an experience so familiar and useful that we may ask questions, go to school, read books, write them, and spend a lifetime in inquiry with little wonder at the simple fact that all this enterprise of learning is an attempt to get existence into words — a faith that things are what they are ultimately said to be. They have names — such an astonishing variety of them when we consider the diversity of human speech, and such a preposterous jumble of them when their makers become extravagant, that we can easily assent to the opinion that names are conventional marks, ‘wise men’s counters,’ but ‘the money of fools,’ and yet, when we ask the astronomer what that bright star in the zenith is and he says it is Vega, the most intelligent among us enjoys the illusion that he has learned something. He has felt the evoking power of the voice. Even when words are so arranged that they mean nothing or are contradictory, it is hard to escape the impression that something has been said. Philosophers have invented subsistence for the round square, believing that, since the thing can be named, it must somehow be. The power of words is great.

We may deny them omnipotence. They are easily stilled, like Hamlet’s voice, by a scratch from poisoned steel. But Hamlet’s last words are the thrilling commentary on the fact — ‘the rest is silence.’ Rob existence of the voice, let there be no expression, no utterance anywhere, let nothing ever be said in the beginning; then the rest — is it even silence? The voice has to be evoked to name its absence. In a dumb world there may be power, brute and inarticulate. We have the habit of saying so even when it passes all our wit to tell what that power is, to name it otherwise than in terms of its expressions or in terms like ‘the unknowable,’ which imply no more than the obvious fact that without expression it is unexpressed. The ‘unknowable,’ the ‘infinite,’ the ‘absolute,’ ‘God,’ are all imposing words like ‘the rest is silence.’ They create in us the vast sense, ushering us into the presence of immensity. Unless, however, they carry with them the implication of possible expression and possible utterance, they are empty sounds, or leave us, like the Ancient Mariner, desperately aloof.

We may deny words omnipotence, yet without them omnipotence means nothing at all. Nor does anything else. The fact is obvious, as obvious as the questioning child who takes a dog to his father to see what he will call it. The power of words is evocation, and this power boasts omnipotence when it claims to tell in a book what heaven and earth are.

Perhaps the writer of the first chapter of Genesis did not have all this in mind, but the reader of it may. I like to think that he did. I like to think of him pondering over what happened in the beginning and being driven to say: ‘A Voice.’ That would make him a poet at least. He would then write a beautiful story of creation, telling how, in the beginning, God spoke and there was light, enough for evening and morning, enough for the first day; enough too, we may say, for God to see by to do what remained to be done as evening and morning came round again — a week’s work, naturally, with the last day to rest in and think it over. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. The last deed was man, made in God’s image, after His likeness, a second voice which would tell again and again to children how heaven and earth are made, and which will never be content with the telling until this vast scheme of things is adequately voiced in human speech. And God saw, by the light He had first created, everything that He had made, and it was very good. It is a story which children and poets can understand.

And I can imagine the poet’s consternation when somebody asked him, in earnest or in scorn, if he seriously thought that God had a voice-box with vocal cords in it. Did God speak to chaos in English? Evidently the poet had not thought of that difficulty. Forced to think of it, I can imagine that he became a little afraid for his story, foreseeing times when some men in fear and even in reverence would nickname the story itself God’s Word, while others would set it down as an interesting contribution to the mythology of the race. But, being a very great poet, he was willing to let it go its way. He knew it would be read, at least by children and poets, and that was a fairly large audience. He knew too that, as a doctrine of creation, it was sound.

Of course these are my imaginings, literary devices to win the attention of a reader. But, dear reader, I have no desire to deceive you or trick you with pretty phrases. I would share my enthusiasm for a doctrine of creation which is the profoundest that I know, but I will satisfy no man’s curiosity as to whether I believe it or not. That is not an important matter. And I am not sure that any doctrine of creation is an important matter. What things become in the end is much more interesting and probably much more important than what they were in the beginning, as it is better to die well than to be well born. Perhaps heaven and earth were never created, but if they were — if there was once brought into being this solid and substantial scheme of things which all our science is now trying to render intelligible in human speech, fondly believing that, by saying what existence is, darkness gives place to light and chaos to order — by what name shall we call that omnipotence which wrought so great a work? Saint Thomas says: ‘This is what men call God.’ But how did God create? ‘He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.’ Otherwise how could it ever happen that, by man’s speech, what God had created would be called into the light of knowledge? Creation is response to a call. This is the doctrine of saints and poets and philosophers.

III

If one will not have a doctrine of creation, one need not therefore hastily dismiss the doctrine of the voice. For, whatever else the first chapter of Genesis may be believed to be, it is man’s speaking glorified. That is a matter worth attention. The greatest of all miracles is human speech, and he who is convinced of this one will rarely be tempted to ask for another. But we are so familiar with it that contempt is bred, leading us to say that silence is golden, while for speech we use the metaphor of the baser metal. The vain babblings of men, their silly talk, their absurd opinions absurdly expressed, their sentimental blessings and profane cursings, and the shrieking discord of unmusical voices ragtimed with the gear of eating, may drive us to take refuge in a silence which is really golden. But it is their silence, not ours. We escape to talk with more congenial souls or best of all, possibly, with ourselves. And who can fully confess this latter intimate conversation? I would not suggest that it is unprintable. At times it may be, but enough has already been printed by confessors to make further publication of that kind superfluous. I speak of a golden silence. The noises of the world are stilled. We are alone with ourselves. We speak. We listen. Beauty, truth, goodness, joy, terror, evil, anguish, despair, hope — desperately trying to say what it is to be, and this in a world where atoms combine by law — it is the miracle of the voice. I do not mean by this that we must set it down as an infraction of what we call the laws of nature. It is sheer wonder that from the world in which we are born and shall die, and in which we are such little bodies, we may escape into that private communion with ourselves in which we sense the limitless reaches of what might be said. It is our voice that speaks. It speaks with an egotism ridiculous, pathetic, and sublime — my wife, my children, my home, my neighbor, my doctor, my banker, my minister, my publisher, my country, my world, my life, my fate, my God! The privacy of our own voice is the possession of what it utters.

I talk with my neighbor. There is public conversation in which good taste would suppress egotism by translating the personal pronoun into the more objective article even when we distractedly say that the world is too much with us. But we would speak to our neighbor objectively. We would tell him the truth, or at least have him believe that the truth had been told; not my truth, but the truth unshadowed by any personal slant. That is what I am doing here. Dear reader, you are not at all at liberty to suppose that the words I have here set down are but the record of my own babblings. They are my words only because I am the agent of their utterance. The meaning they convey is not mine, but something quite independent of me. I discovered it and I am expecting you to discover it similarly. You are expected to understand what I am saying from the fact that I am saying it. If you do not, the fault may be mine because I am not clear, or yours because you are stupid. But neither you nor I believe that the truth of what I am saying is ultimately determined by your authority or mine, or, if you will forgive me, that your understanding has anything to do with the matter. Neither has mine. Both you and I may not understand what Professor Einstein has to say. Sometimes I am tempted to think he himself does not understand. But you and he and I are at least under the illusion that he has said something which we might understand and which may be true. Impersonal conversation, objective speech, makes its own startling claim. The writer of Genesis did not say, ‘It seems to me.’

We may test the effect of objective speech by the simplest experiments. ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.’ Wordsworth’s heart, yes — but how about yours and mine? Change ‘ my ‘ to ‘ the’ and ‘ I ‘ to ‘anybody’ with the appropriate verb to follow — the line then loses in poetic form, but it gains a power it did not have before, the logical power of objective speech. It is unimportant who said it. It is important only if true. If true, its truth may be enhanced by the personal form, winning thereby a lyric outburst, but if it is not true the personal form expresses only an idiosyncrasy. Here, then, is the miracle of the voice a second time. Changing Aaron’s rod into a serpent pales before changing ‘my’ into ‘the.’ The former smacks of magic, for the Egyptians could work a similar miracle; and, although Aaron’s serpent swallowed theirs, the change from ‘my’ to ‘the’ swallows his and forces us to look for truth. It does not matter what our tests of truth may be. Let us be as pragmatic as we will, the fact still stands that the objective world is called to our attention by the voice. By simply dropping personal forms of speech we find ourselves transported into a world which we dare no longer call our own. It is The World. It possesses us. From it we came and to it we shall return. It holds our family, our doctor, our country, our fate, our God, in the hollow of its hand. I speak truthfully with my neighbor, and he becomes no longer mine and what we say is no longer ours.

I speak to the world; in questions, to be sure, but in the confident belief that, if these questions are properly framed rightly to guide my eye and hand and thought, the world will answer in its own way and with singleness of meaning. It is the common belief of men. They seem never to have been taught it and never to have acquired it. It is simply the voice operating. They evidently acquired, during their natural history, the human sounds and particular words they use, as we acquired the speech of our ancestors or learn a foreign tongue; but the power to make a noise is not the expectation of an answer to a question. It is not the interrogative mood. Inquisition is as natural to the voice as oxidation is to the air. Our first words and even our first inarticulate cries are explorations calling for something quite different from their own echoes. Answers will come to them either as yes or no. And the answers that have come to man’s questions — his science, his literature, his art, his institutions, his religion — have eventually determined his excellence and his power. Through them he comes into and justifies his dominion. This is a platitude of his pride, but it suggests again the miracle of the voice.

But that he should believe it! Although that belief is natural, untaught, and unacquired, although it is simply the voice’s operation and effect which we habitually accept without scrutiny or surprise, it is the belief that the whole of existence might be rendered in words, that there is possible an adequate utterance of what all things are. The change of ‘my’ into ‘the’ is perhaps far less wonderful than the change of things into words and of words back again into things. Or if we will have it that words themselves are things, since they are either sounds in the air or the equivalents of these in our bodies, we still face the fact that, among all the sorts of things there are, there is one sort which presumes to dictate to all the rest, to tell them what they are. Adam’s success in naming the animals was a trivial achievement compared with that which he would come to believe was in his power. He would name everything else — the flowers of the field, the stars in the sky, the minerals in the earth, elements, ions, protons, complexes. His chief interest, however, would continue to be in the animals. Brooding over the chaos of living forms, he would speak, expecting light and order. He would put into words a story of how these forms came to be and call it ‘The Origin of Species’ or ‘The Descent of Man.’

IV

It would seem, therefore, that words deserve metaphysical as well as literary and rhetorical cultivation. At least they deserve moral respect. I gladly give them that because, as the president of the Canadian Pacific once reminded me, I have made my living by them. They have economic value. The vendor of them, he who sells this food of the soul, usually enjoys a much higher social recognition than he who sells the food of the body. Writers have always been more preciously esteemed than farmers, butchers, or grocers, in spite of the fact that without these latter the former could not live. And yet an immortal butcher is a contradiction in terms. This might very well be cited as another illustration of the miracle of the voice. The wonder of it grows. But I am now trying, as a scientist ought, to strip the voice of its wonder, explain the miracle, and reduce it to the simple fact that it is. We are done with poetry and are coming to sense. So we stress the economic value of words as a first step in the direction of sanity.

We must rate it high, but high now as a matter of economics and not as a matter of morals or social estimation. The exact computation of it has, so far as I know, never been made, but it is clear that it would run into billions and exceed that of any other commodity. Writers have the false impression that publishers get most of it because publishers are able to pay writers and still have a good deal left for their own consumption. But it is bankers and financiers generally who profit most. That is why there is so much popular criticism of them. They eventually get the money. And it is natural that they should. For all this dealing with words, this buying and selling of them, this asking and paying for a loaf of bread at the baker’s, is in the last analysis a dealing in promises. It is a mistake to suppose that the banker makes money by dealing in money. He often has very little of that commodity. He deals in promises, and promises sometimes come very high and can be negotiated with only a promise to secure them. We are wont to say that a man’s word is as good as his bond, forgetting that proverbs so often reverse the order of experience. A bond is only as good as a word somewhere. If a man has command of that word, only then does he have a bond. This is a natural fact by which bankers profit. They profit by it so enormously — winning, apparently, command of both industry and civilization — that it is not surprising that the rest of us should so often look at them in envy or in fear.

A promise is a promise either to pay or to do. Unless the something promised is either paid or done, or unless there is belief that it will be paid or done, the promise is worthless. This fact, however, should not make us blind. It should not lead us so to exalt the things promised that we forget that their viability, their passing from hand to hand, their going here and going there, their proximate and ultimate exchange, are all effected through an elaborate machinery which would crumble to pieces if promises were not kept. It does crumble in part at times, so that men may suffer panic and disaster although nothing whatever may have happened to the material riches of the earth. Men may starve in the presence of plenty simply because a promise has not been kept. The reason is that words are the prime medium of exchange. Economists have a habit of saying that money is that, although they know well enough that a dollar may be printed as well as coined. They ought not to be surprised at the childlike faith of the buncoed rustic who, believing that he has bought from his swindler a genuine plate from the Bureau of Engraving, believes also that bills printed from it are not counterfeit, but genuine currency, so that his own moral fault is negligible compared with the benefits he can confer without really harming anybody. Governments in their despair often fall back on this faith as their last financial resource. And it is quite clear that if promises were always kept we should need no other money than recorded words, so evidently are they the medium of exchange.

Their economic value is but one instance of their logical power. When they are literally bought and sold, like commercial notes, or even this article, they are more than ink and paper. They effect first of all an exchange of ideas. There is no need of deep philosophical insight to see that this power of them is behind and fundamental to their economic value. It carries us out of the market place into metaphysics. All things are exchanged for words and words for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. Old Heraclitus said it long ago. He spoke of fire, using that element as the glowing symbol of the word, so convinced was he that existence is consumed in speech. We seem unable to get away from the miracle after all. But we should try. Our spiritual business, the enterprise which we put on top of our buying and selling in the market, on top of our producing things to be bought and sold there, and on top even of our loving beauty and fearing God, is to render the world intelligible. But how can the world be rendered intelligible if it is not intelligible in the beginning? Who simply by speaking can create the logic which so holds his words together that his neighbor can understand them and translate them back into their powerful intent? Who creates the intelligibility of the world by talking to it? Surely neither you, dear reader, nor I. Neither you nor I made understanding, even if both you and I are egotistical enough to believe that we can promote it.

There seems to be but one conclusion. This exchange of things for words and words for things is a very real exchange. The world is evidently composed in a manner congenial to it. It is put together on the principle of exchange: oxygen and hydrogen for water and water for oxygen and hydrogen, goods for money and money for goods, food for growth and growth for food, life for death and death for life, things for words and words for things. In this exchange we speaking things are caught. We are examples of it — fleeting examples, to be sure, but in that fleeting moment darkness gives place to light and chaos to order through the power of articulate speech. Only then can it be said with any sense that heaven and earth are. In the language of metaphysics, being is a predication. To be is to be something, to be something is to be expressed, and to be expressed is to be exchanged, one thing for another, with the one intelligible and illuminating medium of exchange, the voice. Heaven and earth may never have been created. That may be left as it was. But this remains. Whether or not they were once evoked by speech in the beginning, in the end and always they are evoked by nothing else.