Introduction

What is the foundation of civilization? Is it science, bloodline, technology, military? The sci-fi story Arrival, the book by Ted Chiang and 2016 film directed by Denis Villeneuve (Dune: Part One and Part Two), offers an intriguing solution to this riddle. The main character, Louise Banks (played in the film by Amy Adams), writes it in the introduction of her book. We catch word of it when the supporting character Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) cites a passage from the book to Louise when the two first meet in a helicopter flying to the location of an alien spacecraft.

Language is the foundation of civilization.
It is the glue that holds a people together.
It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict. 

But how can language be the foundation of civilization, and what does this mean? 

Twelve alien spacecrafts arrive on various locations on earth, posing an existential threat to all of humanity. The languages of earth are not strong enough to hold the people together. Without a shot fired from the aliens, people flee an elite university in dread. The symbolic center of human knowledge, in which Louise is a linguistics professor, is vacated. She walks the campus alone. The buildings remain, but the foundation of human civilization crumbles. In the presence of a more advanced race, humanity disbands. 

This trope is an echo of an ancient story found in the book of Genesis. At one point, humanity came together, speaking one language, and began constructing a great tower to reach the heavens. Then, the God of the Hebrews comes down to put an end to the project by scrambling their universal language, instigating a verbal flood that erodes their foundational power into a linguistic sea of multiplicity. As a consequence, humanity vacated their once great city, each group fleeing in factions to the far corners of the earth. We are the descendants of this fall of the Tower of Babel, speaking over 7,000 languages with 293 writing systems in the world today.¹

In Arrival, nations send their militaries, scientists, mathematicians, and linguists in a desperate attempt to make contact with the aliens. But how would we decide which of the possible 7,000 languages to speak with the aliens? When we distill all of the languages down to their primary categories, guess how many we have? Twelve language families.² One for each alien ship. 

Humans struggle to work together to understand why the aliens arrived before it’s too late. They can’t seem to get beyond their language barriers. The curse of Babel plagues them. Each interprets the situation from their own perspective and can’t come up with a unified plan. Meanwhile, Louise embarks to converse with the aliens, who are identified as “Heptapods,” to learn their written language called “Heptapod B” and what it could mean for humanity. 

It is to this mysterious Heptapod B language and its implications that we now turn our attention for this installment of a series of articles on Arrival. This present article is a bit of a spoiler in that it jumps around to explore various details of the story. For a more step-by-step breakdown of the plot, it would be worth reading the previous entry, “Arrival  & Exodus” — oh, and to read the book and watch the film.

Why is language the foundation of civilization? And if humans could learn a transcendent language, what would life be like? Could humanity regain a universal language? After all, if we spoke it once, we could speak it again, right? We will explore these questions using the Creation story in the first chapter of Genesis and other philosophical and scientific digging tools. To understand these enigmas of language, we must drill down deeper than the level of linguistic technicalities. When we arrive at the end of our excavation, we will have unearthed a most surprising discovery, bigger than the Arrival story, deeper than language itself. 

I. The Frame of Language

Language has a certain power to shape the world we see. Let us first consider what’s happening with words, the building blocks of language. Once we have learned the patterns at the small scale, we can better understand the complexity of an entire language. As Stephen Covey puts it, “The little things are the big things.”³

Words & Attention

Words shape what we see. They filter facts according to a particular identity, a point that you focus on, and block out the rest. Words act like little frames that select the images we see. They determine what we value, what we pay attention to.⁴ It’s impossible to separate the mind from attending to the words we say and hear. To demonstrate, let us conduct a simple exercise (don’t worry, it will be fun). Read the word below, pause, then continue reading the next paragraph:

“Kangaroo.” 

Be honest, before you read the word were you thinking of kangaroos? After you read the word, what came to mind? Perhaps you pictured images from a National Geographic magazine of the mammal with strong hind legs and an abdominal pouch cradling its young. Maybe you thought of the animated characters Kanga and Roo from the Winnie the Pooh stories you read as a child or with your child. Or perhaps you thought of a viral video of a muscular creature wrestling a man. In any case, your mind selected facts according to the meaning of “kangaroo” and left out the facts that didn’t. Words enlighten the facts we see and leave the ones we don’t in the dark. 

In the book of Genesis, the first act of creation is light and the separation of light from darkness. Light gives the capacity to be; it gives life. Darkness is the absence of being; it is “nonbeing”. Words have this power of shining light, consciously and ontologically. In an absence of light, things don’t exist. A word can give life to something that did not previously exist in our consciousness. For instance, some cultures do not have a word for the color “blue”. They describe the sea as “wine-darkened” or another shade of green. But, once introduced to the word, they can learn to see the color blue.⁵ For another example, the Australian aboriginal tribes before the introduction of the western world did not commit suicide. The act of taking one's life did not exist. They did’t have a word for it. Westerners taught them the word and the practice of suicide came alive. Sadly, their suicide rates have grown exponentially since.

General Shang: Eighteen months ago, you did something remarkable. Something not even my superior has done.
Louise Banks: And what was that?
General Shang: You changed my mind…

Words shift how we see. Colonel Weber tells Louise the military board wants her to speed things up for fear of the alien’s potential attack. Louise responds by saying, “kangaroo.” The word disrupts his attention. Then she tells him the story of the unfortunate miscommunication between Australian aborigines and foreign Westerners, and the need for more time to establish accurate understanding. Her response causes Colonel Weber to see the situation differently. His perspective shifts from military strategy to linguistic methodology. Weber gives Louise more time to understand the alien’s language, what Louise calls “Heptapod B.” Like a neck swiveling the face, Louise shifts Weber’s attention to see the situation from her point of view. Also, in the climactic scene when Louise calls the Chinese General Shang, she redirects his intention from full military assault on the Heptapods to a peaceful resolution. She changed his mind, not with military might, but with the power of a whisper — his wife’s dying words.⁶ 

A metaphoric word constrains the vocabulary to focus the mind in a certain way. Alastair Roberts calls this phenomenon a “controlling metaphor”.⁷ The implicit structure of the metaphor’s definition will construct how one perceives a situation. 

Louise Banks: “If all I ever gave you was a hammer…” 
Colonel Weber: “...everything’s a nail.” 

The word “hammer” will arrange facts based on its purpose of driving nails. Its meaning will include things according to its kind, and exclude things that are not. The full proverb usually goes, “...all you see are nails.” The act of hammering will frame facts in terms of slamming, driving, pulling, securing everything that is nail-like and be blind to everything that is not. Louise and Weber discover that the Chinese are teaching the Heptapods how to play the board game Mahjong. The rules of the game will control the nature of their conversation based on winners and losers, outwitting the opposition, and conquering the enemy. Ironically, the Chinese are teaching the Heptapods to engage humanity with the military conflict they are so terrified of. For a meta-example, the author of this article chose an excavation controlling metaphor to help the reader approach the concepts layer-by-layer. 

Words set the focus. Like a camera lens, words adjust the depth of resolution helping us see things hiding in plain sight. Louise and the specialists reach a dead end when the communication lines are disconnected from the other nations. It is not the introduction of new facts, but of a new word being told to her by her daughter Hannah, non-zero sum game, that gives them the breakthrough. The word refocuses Louise’s perception of the situation. They aren’t one competing against the others; they are part of a whole: one of twelve. She can see the throughline connecting the facts together — the twelve language families need to work together to learn Heptapod B. As another example of words setting the focus, when Louise asks the Heptapods the big question "What is your purpose on earth?”, the team holds their breath as the Heptapods ink a logogram. At first, it is interpreted as weapon, which causes a defensive, militaristic reaction. Then, the same logogram is interpreted as gift and everything changes. Each word acts like a lens that brings to focus varying degrees of meaning from the same logogram. 

Words direct attention, shift perspective, and adjust perception. They shine light into the darkness. Words give us the ability to see physically, but more importantly, to see spiritually. Now let us follow these patterns of the small things to the bigger things. 

Language & Worldview 

A word is structured by its language. Language is the code that gives meaning and direction to the program of the word. It’s the stuff we don’t see that shapes what we do. Just as a word frames our immediate attention, language has the power to shape our entire worldview. Arrival introduces the claim that our consciousness is framed by the language we speak. 

Ian: If you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.
Louise: Yeah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s the theory that the language you speak determines how you think and...
Ian: Yeah, it affects how you see everything.

Edward Sapir was an anthropologist-linguist in the early 20th century who is considered to be the founder of the field of linguistics. Benjamin Lee Whorf was his student who extended Sapir’s work on how language influences culture, developing the principles of linguistic relativity or the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”. As Whorf wrote, “The grammar of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas.”⁸ The structure of the language we speak shapes our thoughts. It has the power to frame how we think and see in our mind’s eye. 

The language we speak is the lens through which we see the world. English shapes meaning in a different way than Chinese. In the film, the Americans and Chinese are the primary nations at odds with each other. This could be due to geopolitics or that both languages are the most spoken languages in the world.⁹ Given the focus of the story, it is more likely that it’s due to their grammatical differences. English consists of an alphabetic orthography, while Chinese is a non-alphabetic language. Chinese is made up of characters whose shape is associated with their meaning. English has letters that do not have meaning on their own, but only when they form words. They are on opposite sides of the grammar spectrum. Does this mean that they see the world differently? 

In the book, the Heptapods send a large screen called a “looking glass” down to each of the meeting sites. The term is likely a reference to Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which the genre known as literary nonsense is employed to communicate insight and perspective through humor and wordplay.¹⁰ In Arrival, it’s a way of showing that each language is a “looking glass” to the world, that each language causes us to perceive differently. In the film, we see a shot of twelve screens showing representatives of the twelve nations sharing their perspectives to establish contact with the Heptapods. Each nation is looking into the situation from a different angle. In a moment of fear, all the nations switch off their channels, pulling a dark veil with a word in red letters over the screen: “disconnected.” Like the Tower of Babel, the multiplicity of tongues halts their progress. Each of the twelve nations cuts itself from the collective knowledge of the other nations, reducing themselves to their own limited perspective and idiosyncrasies. 

Language is foundational to civilization because it gives a common lens by which to see the world. To bring it back to Sapir, he wrote in his book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.”¹¹ We cannot live by intellect alone, nor by mindless action. To speak the same language is to share a collective wisdom that is a blend of intelligence and traditional habits. Without a common language we will be on different channels seeing facts from incongruent perceptions. Language can provide a civilization with a singular vision, and where there is no vision the people will perish (Prov. 29:18). We would establish conflicting principles by which to live, like building a city with different sets of blueprints. All of this is wrapped up in our “medium of expression.” In order for a civilization to function, it must speak the same language. Without it, a civilization will fall apart. 

So far we have discussed the effects language has on attention and worldview. In the next section we will explore the machinery of language to learn how words and logograms are formed. We must drill deeper to see the inner functioning of a language to understand how it is the structural foundation of civilization. As C.S. Lewis wrote in the book Prince Caspian, “It is high time we turned to grammar now....”¹² 

II. The Structure of Language

Language starts in our minds above and moves to our bodies below. We think before we speak (on our good days at least…). An intended meaning arrives in our minds, and we express the meaning through our body. Out of our mouth breathe words; our hands manipulate materials to draw meaning into marks; our fingers code letters on a virtual screen. Language is the mediator of our unseen thoughts and the external world. To understand Heptapod B, we will need to look under the linguistic hood to learn its machinery. Before we go further though, let us take a moment to introduce the reference material that will help us move forward to the next level of our exploration. 

The book we are about to refer to strangely parallels Arrival. It resembles the cover and title page of Louise’s second book, The Universal Language. It arrived out of nowhere, mysteriously appearing on Amazon in 2018. The book contains an unusual arrangement of short text and map-like images (see figures below). It’s a “commentary on Genesis” unlike any other commentary before. It wasn’t associated with a recognizable school or institution. It lacks all of the typical sections in the back — no author bio, no works cited, index, or glossary. It was the first book self-published by an unknown author. Matthieu Pageau came to us like an alien visitor. When he unveiled his book, humanity didn’t know what to make of it; was it a dangerous weapon or a helpful tool that could unlock deeper knowledge? In this corner of the internet, The Language of Creation has helped open the eyes of many readers to see time, space, language, and existence in a deeper way. Let’s turn to its content. 

Like Arrival, Matthieu Pageau breaks down the process of language formation based on the written sentence, rather than the spoken.¹³ It starts with marks. Like the primordial waters before creation, marks are a random pile of potentiality; they are meaning-less, that is, until a word comes. When the word alphabet is introduced, the marks come together to form letters. The letters are formed into an unordered set of words by vocabulary. Finally, the words are organized into an ordered sentence by grammar. This emergent process transforms many marks into one sentence. Those three italicized words — alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar — cannot be seen, or touched, or sensed. They are the principles of language that form the visible sentence “There was Light.” Physical marks now express the meaning by these guiding principles. 

The Heptapods forming logograms beautifully depicts this creative process. The process begins when the Heptapods secrete a substance from their seven-digit appendage that is something like dust yet also like squid ink.¹⁴ Like the primordial waters, the dark substance is without form or void or meaning — a multitude of marks. Then, the Heptapods arrange the ink cloud, their seven digits curling like a puppeteer finessing invisible strings. Behind the scenes, the principles of their language are at work. The marks are formed into a collection of words by vocabulary. The words are ordered into a blurry circle. Finally, the Heptapod B grammar arranges the words into a complete logogram, and the non-linear “sentence” comes into view like fine-tuning the resolution on a camera lens. The logogram journeys from the mind of the Heptapods and materializes as a physical logogram for the humans to view. Once the meaning is removed, it’s as if the logogram loses its breath. Blurring into dust, it vanishes. 

The process of Heptapods writing logograms is consistent with Louise and Ian writing English. Louise has a meaningful idea in her mind she would like to offer to the Heptapods. She grabs a whiteboard in one hand and a marker in the other. The ink contained in the reservoir of the marker is a little sea of potentiality. She shapes the ink into a letter, then another, and finishes a word, “HUMAN”. She flips the board and holds it up for the Heptapods while anxiously panting, repeating the word, and patting her chest — “HUMAN” — and then points to Ian — “HUMAN”. Interestingly, the first word given to the Heptapods by humans was the first word given to people by God in Genesis, adam, which can be translated to man (singular) or humankind (collective). After Louise has introduced a collection of vocabulary words, she orders the words using grammar to write sentences like “Ian walks.” 

In the scene called “The Nature of a Question,” Louise explains how complicated grammar can be. Even forming a simple question, like What is your purpose on earth?, can introduce many layers of possible connotations. Is “your” referring to one Heptapod, or two, or all? Does “earth” mean one of the heavenly bodies or the materials that comprise the surface of the planet — how would you describe it? And what if they don’t use punctuation in their language, like ancient Hebrew orthography? What if they don’t have interrogative sentences in Heptapod B? We haven’t begun to touch on the subtleties of language — sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, wordplay — as well as the nonverbal communication like gestures and facial expression. You can see why Louise said that she needed more time. And you can hopefully agree with why we need to turn away from the path of linguistic technicality and continue our excavation in the direction of the deeper, more metaphysical meaning of language. 

Language is a system of principles that materialize meaning with marks. It allows citizens in a civilization to convey inward intent in a visible way. It facilitates the exchange of meaning. As Louise says: “purpose” requires an understanding of intent. Language has the creative power to materialize the intended meaning of the mind in the physical world in an intelligible way for others to understand. Without it, civilians cannot work together under an identity with a unifying purpose. We have uncovered the foundation of civilization; however, we have not arrived at the end of our excavation. We must dig deeper if we are to reach the bedrock of this topic and discover the truth about a universal language. Language is the foundation of civilization, but what is the foundation of language? 

III. The Foundation of Language

Language is built on a more foundational structure that shapes the universe. To bring it back to the human level, language begins in the mind; it is formed by a certain type of cognition. As the American linguist John McWhorter wrote in his book The Power of Babel (2001), humans have a “symbolic kind of cognition which underlies human language.”¹⁵ The foundation of language is symbolism. 

Symbolism is the process of throwing or lobbing two things together. In the Ancient Greek, a symbolon was an object broken in half and given to two parties as they departed. When representatives of the parties came together, the symbolon verified the authenticity of the union.¹⁶ We see this practiced today with friendship amulet necklaces, like two halves of a heart each worn by friends or couples. The scene of Louise and the Heptapod shaping a logogram together, each swiping their half of the circle, forms a symbolon. The union was verified. Louise passed the test and was given the Heptapod’s Word, the logogram that contains all logograms. 

In the biblical cosmology, a symbol is the coming together of the two primary sources of the cosmos: the unseen and the tangible, or to use the terms from Genesis 1, heaven and earth. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Matthieu Pageau writes, “On one end, spiritual reality [heaven] informs corporeal reality with meaning and purpose, and on the other end, matter [earth] expresses spirit by making it visible and tangible in the universe.”¹⁷ Written words are the union of meaning [heaven] and marks [earth]. Heaven is the source of spiritual meaning, and earth the source of physical expression. One you can see under a microscope and rub in your hands, and the other you cannot. Yet you must have both to have anything at all. “Thus,” Pageau writes, “everything in the universe is analogous to a written word in a divine language.” Genesis describes the universe as a language full of symbols — what Pageau calls “cosmic words”.¹⁸

Language is a symbolic process, but it is not alone. Louise begins a lecture to her university students on why Portuguese is different from the other romantic languages. 

Lousie: The story of Portuguese begins with the Kingdom of Galicia, in the Middle Ages, where the language was seen as an expression of art. The way it was written and spoken was rooted in aesthetics.

Linguists have expressed frustration with this scene, rolling their eyes at its technical inaccuracy, seeing it as a lost opportunity to showcase details of the field of linguistics.¹⁹ Yet if this scene can be understood beyond the technical level, one can get a glimpse of the bigger picture. It is tying a bridge between the visual arts and the linguistic arts. It is hinting at symbolism. 

An image, say a painting, is created using a medium like crushed stone, pigment, oils, egg whites, etc. and shaping it according to unseen patterns within a frame of focus. Art is the coming together of heaven and earth. It is symbolic. There’s much more to be said about the social and aesthetic aspects of art that we will table until later. For now, it is important to recognize the fundamental union that shapes language, art, and so much more. Science, especially the natural sciences like Ian’s field of physics, is the expression of unseen “laws” that govern how matter acts. Ian’s first question to Colonel Weber is whether the Heptapods have responded to shapes, patterns, numbers, or fibonacci. These are all empirical formulas. You cannot hold or see the fibonacci sequence itself, but you can hold the objects it shapes like pine cones, sunflowers, shells, your lover’s face. As scientists seek to reveal the hidden patterns of the physical world, they are revealing heaven in the earth. Language, art, science, math, all are built upon the substructure of symbolism. Matthieu Pageau writes that symbolism is “humanity’s most ancient and universal language.”²⁰

The Ultimate Symbol

The Genesis narrative reveals the central piece of the universe. Continuing with the week of creation, each day God makes more “cosmic words.” God speaks and things take shape according to their kind, the pattern of their identity. Categories progress — birds of the air, beasts of the earth, etc. — encompassing the center of the created world. And at that center we find the ultimate symbol, the final piece that crowned God’s work. 

On the sixth day… God created man. 

God created something unlike all the other things he made. Yes, man is like the other moving creatures, being made of dust, breath, and word. But something distinguishes man from all the other creatures on earth. And this one thing sets man apart. 

God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him. 

God as the transcendent other is foreign to creation. And because man was created in the image of God, man takes after the patterns and the qualities of the transcendent nature, of the strangeness. Man is a microcosm of God nested in the world. The soul of man is in the heavens and his body is of the earth. Man mediates the heavens and the earth. Man can speak comprehensive systems of language, discern complex patterns, and articulate abstract concepts. To the animals, man is alien. 

It’s not that humans are the only beings capable of communicating. Other creatures communicate, but at a much lower resolution. One could hardly say that they are speaking a language, not fully at least. To return to Edward Sapir, “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”²¹ Man’s linguistic capability opens us up to interacting with higher levels of meaning. After all, animals don’t study man; man studies the animals. Similarly, the Heptapods didn’t arrive to talk with kangaroos or canaries; they came to connect with humans. Why? The Heptapodian language is intelligible to humans alone. They are capable of understanding the transcendent language that unlocks nonlinear time. 

What sets man apart from all the other creatures is his ability to speak not just a language, but the language — the universal language of symbolism. Man can go meta (as people say nowadays). Man acts in creation and can talk about creation. Man can perceive the patterns and formulas that constitute reality, seeing the world symbolically. God’s “cosmic words” are intelligible to man. He can read and speak the language of creation. 

If we zoom in, we see that this pattern is consistent to the finest level of our perception. The human person is a cosmic word composed of heaven and earth. Up above, the mind receives and produces thought, ideas, and meaning. And down below, the body materializes the meaning from the body. The mind guides the body with purpose and direction. In turn, the body supports the mind with physical expression and action. Just as the center of the cosmos is man, so too the center of man is the heart. The heart mediates between the mind and the body, between the heavenly and earthly components of man. It’s language all the way down. The pattern remains consistent in every scale of reality. 

For a scientific example, from the lens of molecular biology, a microscope will show us the building block of the human body — the cell. At the center of each cell is a genome that contains a genetic code called DNA. Zooming into the DNA we find the most fascinating discovery. DNA contains regularly repeating patterns of four types. Scientists depict the patterns as adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Essentially, the four letters are an alphabet with millions of combinations. Each cell has a sophisticated composite of letters. By definition, we call such occurrences words. Though microscopic, cells, like words, have an identity or definition and are imbued with purpose. Some are builders, others movers, and some guardians. The core of our cellular biology is linguistic. We are encoded with a genetic language. Whether you look at it through the spiritual or the scientific lenses, we learn that we are living words. 

Even the things we create are an extension of this linguistic pattern. Computers are a combination of hardware and software, code and content. If you are reading this on a computer or device screen, the page you see is created in the mind of its web designer structured by an unseen coding language (HTML, CSS, Python, C++, Javascript, etc.) and expressed by a visible virtual display on an app or browser (Chrome, Kindle, Firefox, etc.). For a fun exercise, right click and select “View Page Source” to unveil the hidden grammar that makes reading this page possible. 

When many of these living cosmic words we call people come together they make sentences that we call families and communities. Many communities form paragraphs we call cities. Cities come together to form chapters we call nations. And nations come together to form the story we call the world. The scale changes but the pattern remains. The universe is a language filled with cosmic words. We live in a symbolic world telling a cosmic story. 

We can begin to see how a universal language is possible. 

The Universal Logos 

When Louise and the Heptapod complete the symbolon logogram, each writing their half of the amulet, the Heptapods deliver their “weapon” in the form of thousands of logograms. The totality of their language within one frame — all of the grammar and principles that Louise needs to know Heptapod B. You can think of it as many words, all of which are recapitulated in one Word. 

The world is composed of organizing principles — what St. Maximus the Confessor called logoi. The logoi are like the cosmic grammar that shapes visible things according to unseen principles. All of the logoi are compiled into a universal principle, the Logos. Maximos writes, “The many logoi are the one Logos to whom all things are related ... without confusion.”²² 

The Logos is the source of symbolism. 

The Logos orders physical stuff from scattered randomness into distinct, meaningful identities, according to its logoi. All things flow through the Logos. Louise’s grammar, vocabulary, and alphabet can be summed up in a single word — English. And all of the graphemes and logograms can be summed up in “Heptapod B.” In Biblical terms, all of the principles, formulas, and patterns are encapsulated in the Logos. The Heptapod Word contains more than just vocabulary words. Ian deduces patterns of geometry, mathematics, and coded repetition. The principles are within one Word and are related, without confusion or contradiction — a unity in the multiplicity.

In biblical terms, the Word brings things from nonbeing into being. At a simple level, an unspoken word is in a state of nonbeing. Once it is spoken, it comes into being. An uninked logogram is in a state of nonbeing. When inked by a Heptapod it moves into a state of being. In both cases, there is an agent that creates a word out of nonbeing. Consistent to this pattern at the cosmic scale, the Word moves things from the realm of nonbeing into being in the world. The Logos is more than an abstract function, however. The Logos is an agent of creation in the origin of the world. 

In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with God… All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be (John 1:1, 3).²³ 

By his Word and by his Wisdom he made all things (Wisd. of Sol. 9:1–2).

Let’s not overlook the obvious. When we see a word, we assume that it came from the mind of a writer, or when we see a written formula, that it came from a scientist or mathematician. We know a painting came from an artist’s mind. When we see a logogram, we assume it came from an intelligent mind. So too the author of Genesis looked at the world filled with “cosmic words” and presupposed they came from a cosmic mind. Arrival was created from the mind of Ted Chiang. He is ever present in the story. Yet as a secondary creation, Arrival cannot possibly measure up to Chiang in his nature. Similarly God is the source of and is present in all things, yet He is of His nature wholly other than all creation.

God spoke and things came to be. Speaking is the combination of mind and word and breath. The Logos existed before time and physical creation began. It was through the one Word that all things came into being. All meaning, purpose, identity, formulas are contained in the Logos and come through the Logos into the world. And the Logos does not act alone. The universe is structured by the Mind, the Word, and the Breath — the three in one.²⁴ Unseen meaning is manifested into life in the world. Universal categories become living particulars. 

The eternal and universal Word becomes a single word inside creation. The Word moves into time and space as a particular person with a breath and a name, Jesus of Nazareth. St. Athanasius describes the connection of Jesus Christ with the creation of the world in Genesis in his fourth-century text On the Incarnation:

There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.²⁵

And so we have arrived at the end of our excavation. We have drilled all the way down, and what we have found is a paradox. At the bottom of our excavation is what is above all, the Universal Logos. We have discovered the foundation of civilization, of language, of symbolism: the Word that contains all words and all things. This has been an exploration of abstract principles, the patterns that we cannot see or hold with our hands. Arrival tells us that beginnings and endings are not as distinct as we think, but more of a paradox. You get to the end of something and find its opposite. We found the Universal Principle, the highest most encompassing abstraction, and yet, we found it to be the most particular unit, a flesh-and-blood person. St. John writes: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). And again in the epistle: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life (1 Jn. 1:1). The Logos condescends from the eternal realm of formulas, definitions, and grammar to dwell in the concrete realm of the senses. God becomes man. Logos becomes flesh. It points to the great mystery of the incarnation: how the agent of creation could be enfleshed inside of His creation. 

We have completed our journey of the abstract topics of universals and have arrived paradoxically at the particular. The end of this essay is where the next essay will begin. As we learn from St. Athanasius: God became man so that man might become God.²⁶ The next part begins where we have concluded, at the particular level, following Louise’s transformation to become like the Heptapods. 

Conclusion

Humanity spoke a universal language once. In Arrival, for humanity to speak a universal language once more, the language must come from a transcendent source to give us a higher perspective, not just another perspective, otherwise we would compete for whose language should be the best one. Heptapod B has the power to unlock time and change perception. With Heptapod B as the foundation for civilization, the idea is that it could end our zero-sum games of war. Such an argument provokes speculative questions like “would people find a way to weaponize the prescient powers of Heptapod B for military purposes?” or “What if people decide not to learn the language?” or “Can people who can’t read or write, like in the case of people who are blind, participate in Heptapod B?” These questions open many thought-provoking discussions. However, I think our attention moving forward would be better served focusing on the story’s analogical potential to unlock deeper insight and saving such speculations for another space. I would much rather make the most use of the opportunity afforded us by the story to explore the metaphysical implications of learning Heptapod B. 

Civilization is founded by language. The ways in which we think, see, and act are tethered to what we speak. Language can shift our perspective, shine light on our perception, and shape our worldview. The work of Matthieu Pageau helps us uncover the machinery of language to find the unseen principles that shape physical marks into words and smoky ink into logograms. Language has the creative power to materialize the intended meaning of the mind in the physical world in an intelligible way. If we dig deeper, we find that the foundation of language is symbolism, which underpins not only language but mathematics, geometry, and physics. The earth is filled with symbolic “cosmic words” with the ultimate symbol being man, the composite of heaven and earth. Hence when the Universal Word (Logos) — that which is highest and contains all grammar (logoi) and from which all “cosmic words” come into being — mysteriously takes on flesh and becomes man, acting in history, Jesus of Nazareth, we find a surprising paradox at the bottom of our excavation of language. Something high, foreign, and transcendent is embedded in that which is lowest, local, and most imminent.

Knowing about a foreign language is one thing, however; learning to speak the language is another. Now that we have drilled all the way down, it is time to climb back up. In the next installment, we will join Louise on her arduous journey to learn the truly foreign language of Heptapod B. The process of learning the transcendent language changes more than her perspective; it transforms who she is. She climbs the ladder of ascent and grows in the likeness of the Heptapods.

1.  For language facts, see Ethnologue, at www.ethnologue.com/insights/how-many-languages/, and World’s Writing Systems, at www.worldswritingsystems.org/index.html. The Tower of Babel (from Gen. 11), meanwhile, is the setting for another short story by Ted Chiang called “Tower of Babylon,” which was published with “Story of Your Life” in the book of collected works called Arrival (Vintage Books, 2016).

2.  Many lists are out there, some ten or fourteen or even 147. We felt that twelve was the best average based on the data. See the “Language family” Wikipedia page for various lists: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family.

3.  Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).

4.  For more on the process of story filtering facts, see Derek’s article on the Symbolic World Blog “The Symbolism of Story.”

5.  See Kevin Loria, “No one could describe the color ‘blue’ until modern times,” Business Insider website, February 27, 2015, www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2: “Without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it.”

6.  The Chinese words translate in English to “In war, there are no winners, only widows.”

7.  Alastair J. Roberts, Echoes of Exodus (2018). See also Derek’s video on the topic, “Reading the Bible 'Musically'? - Echoes of Exodus by Alastair Roberts,” YouTube, February 20, 2021.

8.  Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (MIT Press, 1956), p. 212.

9.  See www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world.

10.  Matthew A. Burke, “Through the Looking-Glass: Finding Light at the End of the Rabbit Hole,” singerburke.com/looking-glass-finding-light-end-rabbit-hole/.

11.  Quoted in Mladen Stojak, “How Does Language Shape the Way We Perceive the World?”, multilingual.com/issues/november-2022/how-does-language-shape-the-way-we-perceive-the-world/.

12.  “Dr. Cornelius said in a loud voice, ‘and after that it was all nouns and verbs till lunchtime.’” C.S. Lewis, The Complete Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian, HarperCollins Publishers (1998), p. 229.

13.  Matthieu Pageau, The Language of Creation (2018), p. 22.

14.  You can thank Colin Miller for using the term “squid ink” during a conversation with Derek when the two revealed their Symbolism of Arrival deluxe hardcover book project, February 20, 2024.

15.  John McWhorter, The Power of Babel (Harper Perennial, 2001), p. 7.

16.  See the etymology of symbolism on Etymonline.com: www.etymonline.com/word/symbolism.

17.  Pageau, pp. 18–19.

18.  Ibid., p. 25.

19.  See Dan Koboldt, “Linguistics in Arrival,” dankoboldt.com/linguistics-in-arrival/. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around why the screenwriters — or anyone — would think the inclusion of this tidbit [Portuguese uniqueness] would do anything other than showing us how little homework they did.”

20.  Pageau, p. 31.

21.  Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), p. 8.

22.  St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7.2, in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), p. 54.

23.  David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: a translation (2017).

24.  For more on the Mind, the Word, and the Breath, see Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao, Chapters 2–4 (Valaam Books, 1999).

25.  St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 1 (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), p. 26.

26.  See ibid. 54, p. 93.