Madeleine L'Engle wrote a sequel to her award-winning story, A Wrinkle in Time, called A Wind in the Door. It is mainly about the power and importance of Naming (a topic I explore in Beauty in the Word in the chapter on Grammar/ Remembering). In L'Engle's story, the universe is threatened with nothingness by the fallen angels, and the only way to save it is by Naming things and people back into reality – and you can only Name things if you love them.
When something is named we say that it is "called" such-and-such. Would that we paid more attention to the implication of the word! To call is not just to attach a label to something, but to summon it, to invite it. This is an echo of the primordial act of creation, when God calls things out of nothingness by appointing them a place in the cosmos.
Interesting, too, in the first Genesis account of creation, that God creates each living creature "according to its kind". I would like to know more about the Hebrew word translated here as "kind". it seems to me that it must refer to the archetypes of each species, which are forms in God's mind (although a friend assures me that the Septuagint translation gives no hint of this). These forms are causes, but not the kind of cause that science searches for. Archetypal causes are what a thing is supposed to become, or why it exists – the thing it is called to be. (There is an intimate relationship between formal and final cause.)
Of course, it is true that the meanings of words are determined in large part by (as the Oxford philosopher would say) their "use" in the language. We learn words by associating them with the context and the way they are used in our hearing, and they accumulate further associations and connotations as we move through life. Nevertheless there is a faculty of "naming" by which we identify the essence of a thing, and that is evident in poetry and myth. It is the "use" of words according to our own highest nature and purpose – as Adam named the animals. In my book I call it the "first human task".
Of course, it is true that the meanings of words are determined in large part by (as the Oxford philosopher would say) their "use" in the language. We learn words by associating them with the context and the way they are used in our hearing, and they accumulate further associations and connotations as we move through life. Nevertheless there is a faculty of "naming" by which we identify the essence of a thing, and that is evident in poetry and myth. It is the "use" of words according to our own highest nature and purpose – as Adam named the animals. In my book I call it the "first human task".
