HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was the first language a human convention, not a divine gift? (Gregory of Nyssa)

Related arguments: the origin of language — see also was the primordial language a divine gift? (name-realism).

Type: underlying argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — God gave the faculty of speech, but the words of every language are the mind's own devising; Genesis has God confounding an existing tongue at Babel, never authoring one, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is a settled observation. Against the strong claim that a specific human tongue is God's own institution the conventionalist has the better of it; the one limit is that this case, built to refute the whole-language thesis, does not by itself dispatch the narrow name-realism about revealed divine names (folded in below) · advanced by Gregory of Nyssa against Eunomius.

The claim

Beneath the quarrel over which tongue came first (Hebrew? Aramaic?) lies a deeper one: did God give humanity a specific primordial language — words divinely instituted — or only the faculty of speech, the words themselves being human convention? This page states the second reading, Gregory of Nyssa's, over against the divine-tongue / name-realism answer. It is the old Cratylus question (naturalism vs. conventionalism about names) answered on the conventionalist side, and mapped onto Genesis:

… not even there is God spoken of as creating men's languages, but as confounding the existing one … human language is the invention of the human mind or understanding.

— Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, "Answer to Eunomius' Second Book" §276 (conventionalism: God gave the capacity, men coined the words), ccel.org.¹

Who advances it

Gregory of Nyssa presses this as a positive thesis, answering Eunomius — for whom names were divinely instituted and encoded the true natures of their objects, making a particular tongue God's own institution.² Reading Genesis 11:7 — "let us go down, and there confound their language" — Gregory insists the text has God confounding an existing tongue, not authoring new ones; the words of every language are ἐπίνοια, the mind's own devising. He drives it home against Hebrew primacy: God is no Hebrew-speaker, Moses "who lived many generations after the building of the tower" writes in one of the later tongues, and the sheer multiplicity of words for one thing (Hebrew Samaim, Roman coelum, and the Syrian's and Mede's besides) shows no tongue to be privileged.³

The evidence for

Gregory's exegetical wedge is genuinely sharp. Genesis 11:7 says confound (Hebrew bālal), not create; the narrative gives God dispersing and scrambling a speech men already shared, never instituting a lexicon. Moses, writing Genesis in Hebrew, uses a Semitic tongue that sits among the world's languages rather than above them — so the very words he "puts in God's mouth" are his own vernacular, not a transcript of divine speech. And that one object bears countless unrelated names across the nations (coelum, Samaim, ouranos) is exactly what a conventional, human-coined vocabulary predicts and a single God-given lexicon does not.⁴

Adversarial assessment

Against the strong divine-tongue thesis, this case is strong. Gregory's target is Eunomius's claim that God instituted the words of a language, so that a particular human tongue is divine. "Confound, not create" is the plain sense of Genesis 11:7; Hebrew is demonstrably one Semitic language among cognate others (Aramaic, Arabic), sharing their grammar and drift, not a mother-tongue standing outside the family; and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign — that the same object is coelum, Samaim, ouranos with no natural link between sound and thing — is now a settled observation of linguistics (the arbitraire du signe), not merely Gregory's conjecture. On the origin of language, the conventionalist has the better of it.

The one limit: it does not reach the modest name-realism. Conventionalism over-extends if it is pressed to dispatch every rival at a stroke. That God did not author Hebrew does not entail that no word anywhere is divinely instituted. The narrower datum Origen presses — that certain revealed names (the Tetragrammaton, the titles of God) are given rather than coined, and are treated across Judaism and early Christianity as carrying a weight their translations do not — is not touched by Gregory's argument, which was built to refute the whole-language thesis. One can hold that language in general is human convention and that God revealed particular names with particular force. That modest name-realism is weighed as a live but unproven datum on its own page (assessment: plausible); it is a limit on how far this conventionalism reaches, not a defeater of it.⁵

Assessment

Sound. As an account of where language comes from, Gregory's conventionalism holds up. Genesis 11:7 has God confounding an existing tongue, not creating one; Hebrew is plainly one Semitic language among its cognates, not their supernatural mother; and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is a settled observation, not a conjecture. The strong divine-tongue thesis it answers — that God instituted the words of a specific primordial language, making a particular human tongue His own speech — does not survive it. The single caveat is one of scope, not soundness: because Gregory's case was framed to refute the whole-language claim, it does not by itself close off the narrow name-realism about revealed divine names, which must be weighed on its own (and there rates only plausible). Keep the two distinct: the concession that language is largely human convention costs conventionalism nothing, and the modest name-realism it leaves standing costs conventionalism little. Rated sound. Its rival, the divine-gift reading, is weighed on its own page (assessment: plausible).

Sources