Words are the minted coinage of thought. Whether spoken or written, they are the medium of exchange of ideas. They range in power from the cheap little words of common chatter to the trumpet tones that can electrify a nation or change a culture. Words can sing with joy in victory, or shout defiance in defeat. They can mumble and cower in abject surrender, whimper or cry aloud in fear. They may rise like sweet incense in prayer, or burn with the acrid smoke of profane cursing. They may grow in stature, or they may shrivel away. They may become archaic and obsolete, and so cease to communicate thought to a living generation. Or they may simply lose their vitality and become empty casks, hollow shells, mocking the ideals for which they stand.
Disillusionment In Our Time
In one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms, set during the first World War, Ernest Hemingway gave expression to the postwar disillusionment of his generation, a disillusionment that has been very largely duplicated in our time. He puts into the mouth of the main character, young Lieutenant Henry, something of his own bitterness and cynicism when he says:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice … We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by bill-posters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory, and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.… Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage … were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers.…
It is not a new attitude, nor is it confined to a post-war generation, though it is more likely to afflict men living in such a period. Cynicism, the loss of faith in ideals and in the words they express, is a virulent disease that can attack any man when he becomes disillusioned. It is a loss of faith in the things one once believed. For there was never a cynic who had not been once an idealist.
Victims Of Despair
Hamlet, Shakespeare’s greatest character creation, was probably the embodiment of something of his own desperate anguish of spirit during the dark period of his great tragedies. His was a truly noble mind. He was a man of penetrating reason and kindling affections. When the play opens, a series of brutal shocks to his sensitive spirit have broken Hamlet’s faith in man, and especially in woman. The kingly father whom he deeply loved and admired has died suddenly under suspicious circumstances. His mother, whom he also loved, has hastily (within two months), married his uncle, a man he loathes; and this man has further, by clever machinations, usurped his rightful place on the throne. Then he learns from a ghostly visitation that his mother has been an adulteress, and, what he had already suspected, that his uncle has been the murderer of his father. He is surrounded by those whom he believes to be spies in the service of the usurper. And even the girl he loves, prompted by her father, has apparently turned against him in his most terrible hour of need for love and understanding.
And so his mind is defiled by the things that are rotten in the state of Denmark. The world has become to him an unweeded garden possessed by things rank and gross in nature. The brave o’erhanging firmament, the majestical roof fretted with golden fire has become nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. Man, once noble in reason and infinite in faculties, now seems to him merely the quintessence of dust. And woman has become synonymous with frailty and folly. Worse, the ideals of mother and wife have become defiled and corrupted in his imagination. The very words have lost their sacredness. At best they have become hollow, empty, meaningless. At worst they are full of gall and bitterness and poison.
Several years ago a sensitive teen-age girl finally found unbearable the bawdy and lewd atmosphere of her home where her mother and older sisters entertained men promiscuously on riotous Saturday nights. Escaping from the polluted environment, she secured sanctuary in a neighboring home where she worked part time for board and room while she continued her studies at the local high school. She suffered humiliation and loneliness, estranged from her classmates by the ill-repute of her background, and from her family by her purity and independent spirit.
One Mother’s Day, moved by compassionate love, she went back to the old home, bearing a gift for her mother and longing for reconciliation and understanding. But as she stood outside the door with the gift in her hands, she was greeted by a stream of profane abuse and hatred. Who did she think she was? Was she too good for the likes of her family? She could go back to her new home and stay there. Her mother wanted nothing more to do with her. The little gift of sacrificial love was refused, and the door was slammed in her face.
She went back to her new home that day, slowly and in desolation of spirit. But it was some time before they found her there. And when they found her, she was hanging in the barn, a suicide. Can one imagine what the sacred name of “mother” had come to mean to that girl?
There is a vast difference, of course, between that simple girl’s disillusionment with life and the profound heart-sickness of the noble prince of Denmark as Shakespeare portrayed him, brooding in terrible dejection above the sea of troubles that had overwhelmed and destroyed his faith while he painfully considered making his quietus with a bare bodkin. But the same great darkness engulfed them both when the ideals by which they had lived became empty, hollow words.
Certainly not all who suffer the loss of ideals plunge so deeply into the night of despair. Some cynics laugh rather in affected bravado, or in supercilious mockery. They protect themselves by satire and irony. But in either case, the great words for these people have become sounding brass, hollow vessels, broken and empty cisterns, cracked facades, or great courts lying empty in the sun.
What All Cynics Forget
However, what all cynics forget is that every abstract word is hollow until we pour life into it. Honor, glory, sacrifice, loyalty, love, joy and peace, courage and endurance, faith and faithfulness, chastity and sobriety, democracy and brotherhood, justice and mercy—what are these? Words! Abstract words. Hollow words—until we fill them with deeds, with life, and thence with meaning.
Cynicism as an easy attitude for disillusionment is a common experience. Indeed it is always a part of the process of maturing into manhood and womanhood. Truly no thoughtful person has ever escaped a period of storm and stress when the sure foundations of the earth seemed to tremble and the sky threatened to fall. If life itself does not cause us to question the age-old words, the ancient ideals, then certainly an honest reading of the world’s great literature must cause us to do so. No education can be truly liberal, and truly liberating, that does not confront the youthful mind with the awful alternatives to an easily accepted, lightly held and naively comfortable faith.
The first adventures of the mind with the city of dreadful night, the first voyaging upon strange seas of thought alone, the first descent into the black depths of evil in man, the first face-to-face colloquy with the mystery of death, may well shake the most secure soul. But faith can exist only in an atmosphere of doubt. And the word cannot be filled full until the soul has wrestled with the dark angel.
Browning suggests the experience powerfully and poetically for us in his narrative of Childe Roland, the youthful knight in his first grim mission into the land of the Dark Tower. It is a dreadful land, as Browning describes it, with one stiff, blind horse, every bone astare, and the grass scant as hair in leprosy, and a palsied oak with a clift in it like a distorted mouth. A great black bird sails past. There are rats and toads and dead men’s bones. It is the Waste Land of T. S. Eliot. It is a nightmare landscape by Salvador Dali. It is the world without God and without hope.
And suddenly there in the midst of the reek and decay, with a dying sunset kindling through a clift in the hills, he sees the round squat Tower, “blind as the fool’s heart,” the castle of Giant Despair. And he puts the slug-horn to his lips and blows his resounding challenge toward the castle, confronting in faith the worst that life can throw at him.
Thomas Carlyle recounted his experience more directly in the poetic prose of that strange book, Sartor Resartus. Brought up in a devoutly religious Scottish home, he had found his first adventures away from the lee shore overwhelming. He struggled in a vast sea of materialism. “Doubt,” he says, “darkened into unbelief.” Shade after shade went grimly over his soul. There was no Pillar of Cloud by day and no Pillar of Fire by night. “To me,” he continued, “the universe was all void of life, of purpose, of volition, even of hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.”
Carlyle came out of that period of “the Everlasting No,” as he calls it, the basic and fundamental denial of spiritual reality, but he lay for a time in “the Centre of Indifference,” when he tried, like Wordsworth, to yield up moral questions in despair. He came eventually into “the Everlasting Yea,” when the affirmation of faith in God and concern for man welled up within him, and the great words sang again with meaning, as they did for Beethoven when he composed the last movement of the massive Ninth Symphony.
Cynics And The Great Words
The great words can never be filled by men of little faith, nor by those who have never confronted the horror of the world, who have closed their eyes or looked the other way. Dostoevsky, in some respects the greatest novelist in world literature, said that his hosanna rose out of the fiery furnace of suffering. No one can read The Brothers Karamazov and not sense that here was a man who had plumbed the dark depths of human evil and human suffering, but who saw at the same time the sunlit heights of man’s noblest aspirations. Saint and sinner are both real to him. By contrast, one can read Faulkner and Hemingway, our contemporary “greats,” and some of the lesser naturalists of our time, and not gain from them any true sense of the grandeur, dignity and beauty of human life at its best. The great words for them are hollow, for they have emptied them of life.
The Christian view of man sees sin and degradation as tragic realities. But it sees also grace and forgiveness and redemption and renewal as forever possible and equally real. Yet the great words of the Christian faith are hollow and meaningless until we have experienced them. Until we have recognized our sin and grieved for it, until we have sought forgiveness and showed it, until we have been cleansed and renewed by divine grace, we cannot truly sing, nor can we even comprehend, the song of the redeemed.
Back in 1901, Amy Carmichael, a little Irish woman who went by faith as a missionary to India, despite the warning of doctors that her health would not permit her survival there, found herself one day drawn into personal contact with a horror she had not known, the dedication of children to the evil service of prostitution in the Hindu temples. A little girl of nine had escaped from one of the temples and was brought to her. “The child,” she writes, “told us
things that darkened the sunlight. It was impossible to forget these things. Wherever we went after that day, we were constrained to gather facts about what appeared to be a great secret traffic in the souls and bodies of young children, and we searched for some way to save them, and could find no way.”
Eventually she did find a way to help deliver and redeem some of them from their sordid fate. But first she had to go through redemptive agony in her own soul. She learned to pray the words of F. H. Meyers, “Yea, Lord, I know it, teach me yet anew with what a fierce and patient purity I must confront the horror of the world.”
“There came a day,” she writes, “when the burden grew too heavy for me; and then it was as though the tamarind trees about the house were not tamarind, but olive, and under one of those trees our Lord Jesus knelt, and He knelt alone. And I knew that this was His burden, not mine. It was He who was asking me to share it with Him, not I who was asking Him to share it with me.”
And so by faith she created the Dohnavur Fellowship, a place in South India where rescued children could be brought up in the rich, full, clean life offered in Christ. And E. Stanley Jones said of Dohnavur that it was the nearest thing to the kingdom of God that he had yet seen.
The great words of the Christian faith—grace, forgiveness, redemption, faith, hope and love—are all hollow words until we pour our Christian experience into them, until we see that God has poured his own divine life into them.
John, the beloved disciple, knew this when he referred to the incarnate Son of God as the Word made flesh. “We beheld his glory,” he wrote, “the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” He was the Word of God to man, fulfilled and filled full. And Paul understood this also when he wrote of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
One of the most memorable and terrible reminders of the Nazi perversion is a painting of Hitler in the early days of his movement. The artist has portrayed Hitler addressing a group of people in a beer cellar in Munich. There are only a few folk gathered about him as he speaks, but the intensity and passionate longing in their faces suggests the fierce and fanatical devotion that was soon to sweep the nation and threaten the peace of the world. The picture was titled by the artist, “In the Beginning Was the Word.”
Most Powerful Instrument
That seems to us a blasphemous caricature of the words of John’s Gospel, but it illustrates paradoxically the same profound truth. The word, spoken or written, can be the most powerful instrument in the world for good or for evil.
Because some men fail the great words (and we all do at times), because some betray them, deny them, deride them, it is easy to become cynical about ideals. In some colleges and universities, cynicism is the attitude not only of a majority of the students, but of some of the faculty as well. It is supposed to be smart to be cynical about virtue and honor and integrity, about faithfulness and sacrifice and love. But the person who truly observes life will discover these great ideals here and there alive in some man or woman, boy or girl. And so long as an ideal is incarnate in a single life, the word describing it will stay alive and it may begin to recover its meaning and walk about among us.
Yes, the great abstract words are hollow, and yet, filled full of life, they could shake the world. But there seems to be no hope for a general recovery of the great words in the life of our Western society until the Word of God to man is heard afresh, until the incarnate Word, the speaking and spoken Word that so perfectly reveals God, is seen in his transcendent glory as the ultimate answer to our human need. Until that Word is seen, until that Word is heard, all our best words, all our great words, will remain unfilled and unfulfilled.
The Christian faith should deliver us from cynicism. It should deliver us also from a blind and comfortable optimism. It enables us to see the beauty and wonder of the world, and it confronts us too with the evil and the horror of the world; but it challenges us to transcend our world and transform it with the “fierce and patient purity” of the redemptive love that was in Christ.
END
J. Wesley Ingles is Professor of English at Eastern Baptist College in Philadelphia. He is author of five novels, best known of which is The Silver Trumpet. Born in Dunoon, Scotland, he holds the A.B. from Wheaton College, Th.B. from Princeton Theological Seminary, M.A. from Princeton Univ. and D.D. from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
