Table Of Content£ The Languages of Paradise
The Languages of Paradise
S Race, R eligion, and Philology
in the Nineteenth Century
M a u r i c e O l e n d e r
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
1992
Copyright © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 98765432 1
First published as Les langues du paradis: Aryens et Sémites, un couple providentiel,
G Editions du Seuil, 1989.
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Georges Lurcy
Charitable and Educational Trust.
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen
for strength and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ölender, Maurice.
[Langues du paradis. English]
The languages of Paradise: race, religion, and philology in the nineteenth
century / Maurice Ölender ; translated by Arthur Goldhammer,
p. cm.
Translation of: Les langues du paradis.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-51052-6 (acid-free paper)
1. Philology—History— 19th century. 2. Language and culture—History—
19th century. I. Title.
P75.0413 1992
400—dc20 91-19996
CIP
fè
Contents
Foreword by Jean-Pierre Vernant xii
Preface xii
L__Archives of Paradise 1
'L__Divine Vowels
Richard Simon, Robert Lowth, /. G. Herder 21
3. The Cycle of the Chosen Peoples
J. G. Herder 32
4. _The Hebrews and the Sublime
Ernest Renan 31
3. The Danger of Ambiguity
Friedrich Max Müller 82
6. The Monotheism of the Ary as
Adolphe Pictet 23
7. Heavenly Nuptials
Rudolph Friedrich Grau 1D6
8. Semites as Aryans
Ignaz Goldziher 115
9- Secrets of the Forge 136
Notes 145
Index 189
£
Foreword
by Jean-Pierre Vernant
Where was Paradise? In what blessed region of the world did
God place the Garden of Eden, and what language did Adam
and Eve speak when they lived there? Did the first couple, at
the dawn of history, converse in Hebrew, as Saint Augustine
quite naturally assumed? Or should we, as Leibniz believed,
look for a more primitive idiom, the language of the Scythian
continent, supposedly the root of the various languages spoken
by the so-called Indo-European peoples and thus, in the eyes of
scholars, the original speech of humankind? The language of
Paradise— language in its original state, human speech as it
emerged from the pure state of language itself, the language of
God or of the world, of the nature that God created out of
nothing by the power of his Word.
The ancient Greeks, curious as they were, seem never to
have wondered what language men spoke in the golden age—
in that primordial time when mortals and immortals lived to
gether, feasting at the same table in the joy of everlasting
youth, without toil, disease, or suffering and without the need
to confront, for better or for worse, that other “race,” women.
But perhaps the answer seemed so obvious that the question
was never raised. The language the men of the golden age
spoke was of course the only language truly worthy of the
name— Greek— as opposed to the unintelligible stammering
of the peoples who, because the sounds they uttered were
senseless gibberish, were known as barbarians.
These stories make us smile, as though they came to us from
vii
Vlll Foreword
another age, from the childhood of human thought. The phi
losophers, linguists, historians, and anthropologists of my
generation all begin with a common conviction: in order to do
successful research in any field of study, they must abandon
nostalgic dreams of a primitive golden age and comforting
faith in history’s providential purpose. In my younger days,
when 1 assisted my teacher I. Meyerson in the task of editing
the Journal de psychologie founded by Janet and Dumas, I applied
to every article we received a rule that I had made my own,
first formulated in Article 2 of the charter of the Société de
Linguistique: accept no paper concerning the origins of lan
guage. On one side there was serious scientific inquiry into the
diversity of human tongues, thought, and civilizations; on
the other there were fables about the original language and the
ultimate purpose of the human adventure. There seemed to be
a sharp and definitive division between the strictly rational ap
proach and the naive fantasies of the mythological imagina
tion.
What was naive, however, was our self-assurance: we had
been all too quick to forget that, like Descartes’s common
sense, nothing is more widely shared than imagination. Mau
rice Ölender s book puts our ideas back in their proper context.
Ölender has followed, step by step, the founding fathers of
such important disciplines as philology and comparative my
thology, tracking their digressions, doubts, and errors as well
as the successes that led ultimately to the human sciences as we
practice them today. Quietly and seemingly without effort,
Ölender destroys the illusion that science made continuous
progress guided solely by the sovereign power of reason, much
as the Almighty through divine Providence was once supposed
to direct from on high the course of human affairs.
After reading this book, one begins to understand that rea
son does not exist until human beings attempt to understand
some aspect of reality and to apply what they learn. Scientific
Foreword ix
rationality defines itself as it constructs the subject matter and
methodology of each new discipline. In the human sciences,
moreover, there is no virgin territory to explore; the fields of
investigation are continents mapped by tradition and explored
by religious thought. Trails have already been blazed, itiner
aries set out. Then, too, the problems that arise in any new
field of study are always in some sense echoes of current social
concerns, questions of identity: society seeks to know its roots
in the past, its responsibilities in the present, and its fate in
the future.
Twenty-five years ago, when I first attacked the problem of
the origins of Greek thought and investigated the conditions
under which critical intelligence and positive knowledge could
develop, I used the formula “from myth to reason.” The prob
lem with this formulation is that it suggests that, in the minds
of the pioneering sixth-century B.c.E. Milesian philosophers,
the issue was one of a necessary choice between two incompat
ible mental attitudes. Subsequently, of course, the dividing
line between mythos and logos became much sharper, but in the
archaic Greek culture from which the “physicians” of the Mil
etus school sprang, there was no clear demarcation between
reason on the one hand and religion, superstition, and myth on
the other. Rationality and traditional beliefs coexisted, at
times in conflict but always in one way or another intertwined,
in a context that was various, to be sure, yet always integrated,
because it was a product of the polis. In later centuries one part
of this originally integrated whole would impose itself as a
model of intelligibility, whilç another part would be portrayed
as an absurd fable; but at this stage the two components still
supported each other, by which I mean they were complemen
tary and mutually reinforcing even in their divergence.
To our delight and instruction, Maurice Ölender brings to
light through his unanachronistic readings of Herder, Renan,
Max Müller, Pictet, and Grau this paradox: that the nine-
X Foreword
ceench century, the heyday of positivism and scientism, also
produced, in a field where research was most original and in
tellectually fruitful, what can only be called a tissue of schol
arly myths. These myths were steeped in erudition, informed
by profound knowledge of Hebrew and Sanskrit, fortified by
comparative study of linguistic data, mythology, and religion,
and shaped by the effort to relate linguistic structures, forms
of thought, and features of civilization. Yet they were also
myths, fantasies of the social imagination, at every level. The
comparative philology of the most ancient languages was a
quest for origins, an attempt to return to a privileged moment
in time when God, man, and natural forces still lived in mu
tual transparency. This plunge into the distant past in search
of “roots” went hand in hand with a never forgotten faith in a
meaningful history, whose course, guided by the Providence of
the one God, could be understood only in the light of Christian
revelation. As scholars established the disciplines of Semitic
and Indo-European studies, they also invented the mythical
figures of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a providential pair
which, by revealing to the people of the Christianized West the
secret of their identity, also bestowed upon them the patent of
nobility that justified their spiritual, religious, and political
domination of the world. The balance was not maintained,
however, between the two components of this couple. The He
brew undeniably had the privilege of monotheism in his favor,
but he was self-centered, static, and refractory both to Chris
tian values and to progress in culture and science. The Aryan,
on the other hand, was invested with all the noble virtues that
direct the dynamic of history: imagination, reason, science,
arts, politics.
The Hebrew was troublesome, disturbing, problematic: he
stood at the very foundation of the religious tradition with
which the scholars in question identified, but he was also alien
to that tradition. Wherever he lived, under the name of Jew,
Foreword xi
in a specific place among a specific people, he remained an out
sider, aloof, different. On him, therefore, focused the tensions,
repudiations, and hostilities that the image of the Other elicits
from individuals as well as nations.
In these two linked but asymmetrical mirror-mirages, these
projections in which nineteenth-century scholars attempted to
discern their own image, we cannot today fail to see looming
in the background the dark silhouette of the death camps and
the rising smoke of the ovens.
