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Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 128 Pages
Page 106
For when all lived together and were not as yet divided by various differences of race, the aggregate of men dwelt together with one language among them; but when by the Divine will it was decreed that all the earth should be replenished by mankind, then, their community of tongue being broken up, men were dispersed in various directions and adopted this and that form of speech and language, possessing a certain bond of union in similarity of tongue, not indeed disagreeing from others in their knowledge of things, but differing in the character of their names. For a stone or a stick does not seem one thing to one man and another to another, but the different peoples call them by different names. So that our position remains unshaken, that human language is the invention of the human mind or understanding. For from the beginning, as long as all men had the same language, we see from Holy Scripture that men received no teaching of God's words, nor, when men were separated into various differences of language, did a Divine enactment prescribe how each man should talk. But God, willing that men should speak different languages, gave human nature full liberty to formulate arbitrary sounds, so as to render their meaning more intelligible. Accordingly, Moses, who lived many generations after the building of the tower, uses one of the subsequent languages in his historical narrative of the creation, and attributes certain words to God, relating these things in his own tongue in which he had been brought up, and with which he was familiar, not changing the names for God by foreign peculiarities and turns of speech, in order by the strangeness and novelty of the expressions to prove them the words of God Himself [1120] .
But some who have carefully studied the Scriptures tell us that the Hebrew tongue is not even ancient [1121] like the others, but that along with other miracles this miracle was wrought in behalf of the Israelites, that after the Exodus from Egypt, the language was hastily improvised [1122] for the use of the nation. And there is a [1123] passage in the Prophet which confirms this. For he says, "when he came out of the land of Egypt he heard a strange language [1124] ." If, then, Moses was a Hebrew, and the language of the Hebrews was subsequent to the others, Moses, I say, who was born some thousands of years after the Creation of the world, and who relates the words of God in his own language--does he not clearly teach us that he does not attribute to God such a language of human fashion, but that he speaks as he does because it was impossible otherwise than in human language to express his meaning, though the words he uses have some Divine and profound significance?
[1120] A hit at Eunomius.
[1121] mede archaizein: therefore, if they are not the Divine language, a fortiori this is not. The word cannot possibly mean here "to grow obsolete."
[1122] hastily improvised. But Origen, c. Celsum iii. 6, says--"Celsus has not shewn himself a just critic of the differing accounts of the Egyptians and the Jews....He does not see that it was not possible for so large a number of rebellious Egyptians, after starting off in this way, to have changed their language at the very moment of their insurrection, and so become a separate nation, so that those who one day spoke Egyptian suddenly spoke a complete Hebrew dialect. Allow for a moment that when they left Egypt they rejected also their mother tongue; how was it that, thereupon, they did not adopt the Syrian or Phoenician, but the Hebrew which was so different from both these?...For the Hebrew had been their national language before they went down into Egypt:" And, i. 16--"I wonder how Celsus can admit the Odrysians amongst the most ancient as well as the wisest peoples, but will admit the Jews into neither, notwithstanding that there are many books in Egypt and Phoenicia and Greece which testify to their antiquity. Any one who likes can read Flavius Josephus' two books on the antiquity of the Jews, where he makes a large collection of writers who witness to this." And yet, iii. 7, he goes on to say (what Gregory is here alluding to) that while any way the Hebrew language was never Egyptian, "yet if we look deeper, we might find it possible to say in the case of the Exodus that there was a miracle: viz. the whole mass of the Hebrew people receiving a language; that such language was the gift of God, as one of their own prophets has expressed it, when he came out of Egypt, he heard a strange language.'"
[1123] kai tis. This reading (and not the interrogative tis, as Oehler) is required by the context, where Gregory actually favours this theory of the lateness of the Hebrew tongue: and is confirmed by Gretser's Latin, "Et nescio quis Prophetae sermo."
[1124] Ps. lxxxi. 5.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/against-eunomius-3.asp?pg=106
