In a 1980 article in the Journal of the History of Ideas Margret de Grazia helpfully described what she calls the “secularization of language” that occurred during the 17th century. Her contribution is to show that the often-noted “linguistic pessimism” of the century arose from the destruction of “the traditional connection between human and divine language.” By the time the dust cleared, “God’s language was no longer considered to be primarily verbal; human words ceased to be related both in kind and quality to the divine Word.”
There were a number of steps to the process.
Prior to the seventeenth century, it was axiomatic that God had written three books - Nature, the Bible, and the human soul. During the seventeenth century, the image of the triple “book” changes dramatically. The “book” image remains in many writers, but the notion that there is an analogy between the way the three books are written collapses.
The process starts with the de-verbalization of Nature. Galileo still talks about the “great book of nature,” but insists that it is written in a quite different language than any text: “It is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.” Mathematics becomes the model of pure and precise communication, and many philosophers searched for a philosophical language that would replicate the characteristics of mathematics. Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society, urged his colleagues to keep “all things as near to Mathematical plainness, as they can.”
(We may note here that the assumption that nature consists of mathematical formulae and geometric shapes is, on the face of it, wrong. The only geometric shapes I see at the moment are shapes of human products - computer screens, pages of books, the circular top to my coin sorter. One sees nature as geometric only by pressing geometric shapes on it. Galileo and his many disciples are already, though unconsiously, Kantian, their categories derived from Euclid.)
Conversely, de Grazia notes, “The less verbal a discipline, the more it can be trusted to correspond to nature.” This, of course, puts a question mark over the precision and truth of the Bible, which is obviously verbal. And in the 17th century, when there is a conflict between the verbal Scriptures and mathematical Nature, Nature wins out: “The Book of Nature was the authoritative text. The interpretation of the Bible’s words must be modified by the mathematical truths of nature’s book.” The Bible is the product of God’s accommodation to the simple and vulgar who can’t do algebra and calculus.
Perspicuity also transfers from the Bible to the Book of Nature. This is a reversal of the earlier claim, made by Calvin and many others, that Nature could be read rightly only when viewed through the spectacles of Scripture. Bacon says that God placed “before us two books or volumes to study, if we will be secured from error; first the Scriptures, revealing the will of God, and then the creatures expressing his power; whereof the latter is a key unto the former.” (Note the implications for theology proper: Nature reveals God’s power , while Scripture reveals His will and grace. If Nature is the key to Scripture, then power becomes the keynote of the doctrine of God. Perhaps God’s “softer” attributes are finally reducible to power.)
Perspicuity was also transferred to the third book, the book of the soul. For earlier poets and mystical writers, working in the tradition of Augustine, the soul is a labyrinth, elusive, and cannot be rightly understood without, again, Scripture. Calvin’s idea of double knowledge expressed at the beginning of the Institutes is part of this tradition. During the 17th century, writers began to claim that the soul is the “superior” book (this is Milton’s term, writing in his anti-Augustinian On Christian Teaching ). Spinoza was skeptical about the Mosaic texts, but believed God’s word was “divinely inscribed on the heart and mind of man.”
In sum: While the seventeenth century retains the “three book” image, it “changes their form and contents: the Book of Nature is mathematical; the imprint within is transverbal or intuitive; and while the Bible cannot but be in words, its message must be supplemented and modified by more authoritative readings.” (Note how this shift already prepares for, or even arrives at, the experiential-expressivism of Schleiermacher: the text of Scripture is filtered through the more authoritative sifter of religious experience.) The result is that “the more abstracted from ordinary language, the more reliable the text. God can no longer be assumed to have expressed himself through a medium resembling ordinary language; non-literal interpretations must be applied to His Word.”
Alongside this “de-verbalization” of God’s communication, the seventeenth century also began to detach language from any idea of divine origin. Earlier writers believed not only that the three books came from God, but that language itself was a divine creation. They saw the story of language as part of the story of redemption: Adam was created with the divinely given capacity for language, and His language had, in the words of John Dee, the capacity to “stir up” creatures: “when they hear the words wherewithal they are nursed and brought forth.” Language was a central feature of the imago Dei . Man’s capacity for language was damaged by the fall, and languages were confused at Babel, but human speech retained a similarity to divine speech. Language was redeemed at Pentecost, long recognized as the reversal of Babel.
Seventeenth-century thinkers gave a very different account of the development of language. For Hobbes, Babel still played a central role, but for him Babel left language with no vestiges of its original divine character: Babel left man “with an oblivion of his former language.” Separated from the divine origin, human language became a purely human invention. Not only a human language, but an invention of the most “vulgar” sorts of humans. Locke claimed that “those more or less comprehensive terms have for the most part, in all languages received their birth and signification from ignorant and illiterate people.” (The class snobbery of this account is pretty appalling.)
Hence the need for philosophers to create a language of their own, which would, in the words of one writer, represent in a way “parallel with the course of things.” Language would become an exact picture of reality. Intriguingly, this development also involved a controversy about the antiquity and superiority of Hebrew, long thought to be Adam’s original language. Hebrew becomes just one language among many, and not a particularly efficient language at that.
De Grazia puts the key question: “If God’s expression becomes less like man’s, and man’s has lost its affinity to God’s, how can communication take place?” This is linked with the general crisis of representation because 17th-century writers still considered God’s communication to man the primary question for humanity. As de Grazia concludes, “Without any prerogative to reproduce or translate God’s Word as impinted in nature, in the Scriptures, and in the heart, words were of limited use and value.”