Theos, the Fetzer Institute and LSE’s Faith Centre recently held an event at the RSA on ‘Exploring Sacred Stories in a Secular Age’, to mark the publication of the Fetzer book Retelling Sacred Stories. Senior Fellow, Nick Spencer opened the event with an exploration of what it means to “speak” human.
Daniel Everett is one of the world’s leading scholars of language, but he started out as a missionary among the Pirahã people, a small, indigenous group living in an extremely remote part of the Amazonian rainforest.
Everett was an SIL missionary, SIL standing for Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical nonprofit organisation whose main purpose was to study, develop and document languages, so they can translate the Bible into them. That meant that, unlike the popular idea of the missionary, Everett’s role was not so much to speak to the Pirahã people but to listen to them. He, and SIL, worked on the principle that if you really want to understand, communicate, connect with – and ultimately help – other people, you must spend your time and energy among them and in particular listening to how they use words. The experience, as he discovered, can be both enlightening and disturbing.
Now, let me beg your indulgence and ask you to imagine a cosmic missionary, a kind of Martian anthropologist, who wants to do for the human species what Everett did for the Pirahã people. It – because I don’t want to speculate about how many Martian genders there are – does a bit of research first. It discovers, courtesy of reading some of the academic work – our Martian is a big fan of Robert Bellah, Robin Dunbar and Neil MacGregor – that our species has long, indeed always, been, for want of a more precise phrase, “spiritually engaged”. For almost as long as we have records of our species, those records show our preoccupation with the sacred.
It shows up in our material culture, in the statues, temples and votive offerings that can be found the world over. It shows up in our fascination with ritual, prayer and meditation. But above all it shows up in the way we talk. Wherever you go in the world, whatever age it looks at, the Martian finds words like “soul”, “spirit”, “sacred”, “presence”, “holy”, “eternity”, in texts it looks at. And it also notices that humans tend to use words like love, mercy, justice, compassion not as if they are contingent and malleable things in the world, but as if they had some kind of permanence to them and some kind of authority over us; as if, in short, they were transcendent phenomena.
And so, just as Daniel Everett learned to speak Pirahã in order to connect with that people, so our Martian realises that if it wants to connect with this species, it’s got to learn to use these terms, to speak “spiritual”.
But our cosmic anthropologist is not naïve. It realises that some parts of the world appear at least to have abandoned the religious infrastructure that supported this spiritual language. And it also realises that attempts to define and determine the meaning of these spiritual words has proved largely fruitless. Our Martian is well aware that certain philosophers have tried to define the ‘soul’, and certain anatomists have tried to locate it, and certain cranks have tried to weigh it – and none of them has met with much success. So perhaps, our Martian anthropologist thinks, the human species is seeing a gradual evolution of language and that maybe, as TS Eliot wrote, “last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.”
But then the Martian looks again. Are we really losing our religion as a species? Our Martian finds out, courtesy of the Pew Forum, that around 84% of the species today is “religious” and that this is forecast to increase to about 87% by 2050.[i] And – and this is a crucial fact – even in those places where that religious infrastructure appears in a state of decay, people still speak spiritual.
Listen to what people say, what they write. They still use the language of soul, spirit, sacred, presence, holy, eternity, transcendence – even the most non–religious of contexts – as if nothing has changed. Moreover, this isn’t simply a hangover from the past, in the way the language of “sunrise” and “sunset” is a hangover from a geocentric cosmology, because the way we use such terms today was the way we always used to: figuratively, imaginatively, and above all narratively.
When we say today that my yearns for something, we are not making a poorly–phrased statement about how hungry we are. When we say, we feel the inexorable pull of compassion or mercy, we are not making a statement about Newtonian mechanics. When we say someone has a sacred aura about them, we are not talking about a smell they emit. Rather, we are reaching for a language that reflects the deepest, most heartful, most stubborn, most important ideas and experiences we have of being human.
Some of the earliest human documents we have are about trade and tax – and that surely says something about us. But many of the others relate to offerings to the gods, to rituals, to priestly records, to hymns, to funerary formulas. And many of these, from at least 4000 years ago, are narrative in form. Very often, though by no means universally, our spiritual language is embedded in stories. Our Martian anthropologist realises that not only must he learn the language, but also their narrative grammar.
I’ll drop the analogy now but you will, I hope, understand the point I was trying to make. 240 years ago the great Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote the glorious–entitled verse “To a louse”, which contained the lines:
Oh, would some Power the gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
That is what viewing our species through the eyes of a cosmic anthropologist might help us do. And in doing so it should help underline two points that are central to what it means to be human.
First, we are a spiritual species. Largely irrespective of what we actually believe in any formal sense, and entirely irrespective of what is actually the case – human beings and culture naturally and always gravitate to “spiritual” language. It’s just what we do. We might not be making a religious, let alone doctrinal point, but we need this language – the language of soul, spirit, prayer, sacred, holy, eternity, presence, etc – just to describe the basic human condition and everything that comes with it.
And second, we are a narrative species. Since long before we started writing them down, we told each other stories, as a way of making sense of time, or ourselves, or our world, and yes, of our nagging sense that this is not all there is. Just as the English speak English, and the Pirahã speak Pirahã, humans speak spiritual and we speak narrative. If we are at all serious about understanding, communicating, connecting, helping our species, our selves, we need to do that too. As Retelling Sacred Stories puts it “the elimination of the Sacred severely distorts the human family’s chances for shared flourishing.”
Let me end, by going back to where I started, with a coda which is also a warning. Daniel Everett spent his time among the Pirahã people learning their language so he could translate the Bible for them. In the process, he did end up having conversations with them and in the process he discovered that as soon as he admitted to the Pirahã that he had not personally met Jesus, they were not interested. So much authority did they place on experience or eyewitness testimony that they were not interested in the fact that the evangelists might have met Jesus. Daniel Everett hadn’t & that was enough for them. In one sense their universe was straightforwardly immediate and proximate.
But in other sense it certainly wasn’t. Everett was clear that the Pirahã were not “nonreligious.” They talked all the time about spirits, beings in the forest, supernatural presences, dreams and visions. Everett had to learn that to communicate properly with the tribe he really had to listen, even if it was a disconcerting experience. It’s a good lesson for us today.
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