Nicholas Ostler - Passwords to paradise : how languages have re-invented the worlds religions

For my daughter,

Sophia,

true to her name

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Empires of the World

Ad Infinitum

The Last Lingua Franca

Juan de Figueredo

For one who grew up in the mid-twentieth century, the attractive power of revealed religions in the present era has come as an utter surprise.

I should make my standpoint clear: I received a Christian education in the Church of England, with thorough attention to the clearer parts of the Bible and occasional access to the ecstatic during Billy Grahams London crusades. At school, without choice, I attended a formal service of worship every day. But ultimately, I was not converted. The spiritual crisis of my mid-teens receded like a fever overcome, and I relapsed, like most of Europe and northern Asia, into nonspirituality. If anything, I found Christianitys spiritual claims both incoherent, and rather arrogant. A little later, I found out that my fatherwho had sent all his children for a good Christian upbringinghimself lacked faith. Later still, through an inspired birthday present from my wife, I discovered a closer kind of spirit in poetry, myth, and ancient cults of nature. But in the secular society of the West, as much in U.S. universities as European ones, I found that God was no longer a serious issue. Devotion to a creed and regular worship were things of the past. Yet what a past they had given to us Europeans!

Today, however, religions are experiencing a fresh influx of energy and growth in every continent but Europe. The big winners are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, precisely the missionary faiths that I discuss in this book. The yearning to belong to a largescale holy community has trumped all other senseand sensibility.

This curious demographic success of religion makes it clear that its basis is not practical, scientific, or philosophical. Something else is drawing people in, showing that people have other motives for adopting a faith. But if religion is to be taken seriously regardless of reason, and even of ethics, it becomes doubly hard to refute the cults of shame and murder that have recently come to the fore in extreme sects within the ancient missionary faiths. If we must accept respectfully that some find their truth in scriptures, who is to distinguish between texts that are clear, beneficent, and fruitful, and others that are misleading, even disastrous, if taken seriously?

Missionary religion, consciously preached in order to gain converts, is nothing new in the civilized world: it is at least two and a half millennia old and seems to have the means to renew itself, even in a generation when science based on evidence has revealed an almost unimaginable depth in the worlds past, and the basis of all terrestrial life in genetic codes. Despite the profundity of these new discoveries, the creeds that missionaries put across are, in many cases, older than the languages that are now used to expound, spread, and celebrate them. (Language change is thus revealed as a faster process than religious change.)

But where do those competing and ever so serious creeds come from?

We cannot study the origin of any religious creed directly. But it occurred to me that a new path to understanding the development of faiths and religious communities might be found in examining how a religion is affected when spread from one language group to another. This is a requirement for any missionary religion that aspires to global status; and all of them do. Each, after all, proposes a universal truth of value to all humanity. Somehow, a faith must retain its charisma as it is recast in the languages of new communities, with no natural limit to this process, as it crosses one linguistic boundary after another.

This book is the result of that investigation. Writing it has not been easy, and it is hard for me to say why. A kind of structure did soon emerge to characterize the various kinds of effects to look for as faiths were converted to new languages. But the faiths themselves resist classification or outlining, each having a very different central message. To this, new doctrines may be added, but each faith refuses any admission that its essence has changed. While the past histories of converted populations, mediated through their linguistic memories, do color their new reality as parts of a global church, it is easier to see the social effects on the community than to be sure of lasting influence on the faith itself.

Still, while humanity holds to a bewildering variety of mother tongues, we can look for those tongues different resonances in the realm of the spirit. This is, after all, an aspect of human life not constrained by our day-to-day views of the physical and social world. The linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf contended that language conditions thought. If it is true anywhere, it should be true in our spiritual world.

At the same time, spiritual truths are felt to be more profound than anything else we know. And so when expressing religious claims, diversity comes up against unity: diversity of expression in language reflects the insights derived from peoples previous adventures before being converted, while unity of revelationinevitably delivered by a prophet in a single given language, whether it be Pali, Aramaic, or Arabicis the fundamental raison dtre of each of the great missionary faiths.

How have missionary faiths solved the paradox in order to present a single, universal truth, yet in so doing, persuade peoples so diverse in their thoughts? Could they, in some cases, have supplemented the unitary original with extra ideas favored by their new congregations? The reader will have to judge.

I owe many debts of gratitude for aid received in this quest over at least five years. The first germ of the idea came from my colleague in the Foundation for Endangered Languages, the computational linguist Steven Krauwer. Since the early days when the project was known as Swords of Faith, it has been discussed first with my agent, Natasha Fairweather, and later with publisher George Gibson, and has certainly benefited from their tempering fire and formative hammering, not to mention the occasional dousing in cold water. The steady, encouraging faith of my wife, Jane, and of my daughter, Sophia, have also sustained me, as the chapters took shape and the swords were drawn from the stone.