The Confusion of Tongues

In both Pulkava’s Kronika česká (composed in the fourteenth century and transmitted in fifteenth-century manuscripts) and the anonymous Dalimilova kronika (the first literary work in the Czech vernacular), the sons of men build the tower not out of pride but out of distrust of God: fear that another flood will come, despite the covenant with Noah. This original sin is not hubris but a fear of uncertainty. Punishment follows in linguistic form, and language becomes a marker of collective identity. In this account, slovo means “word,” slova “words,” and the people themselves are named Slované (Slavic)—the people of the word. These kinds of narratives function as retrospective world-building, integrating peoples outside the biblical horizon into that conception of history by locating their origins within Babel. As the peoples of post-Roman Europe adopted Christianity, they inherited a biblical framework that did not account for them. The Table of Nations listed seventy or seventy-two peoples descended from the sons of Noah, but the text “did not reflect the perceived reality of the world’s diverse communities well, even if it enjoyed the highest acknowledged form of authority”(Major 2018). The solution was what scholars call origines gentium myths: fabricated origin stories, often including genealogies that trace a people back to a name in the Table of Nations, grafting contemporary identities onto the biblical schema. The fourth-century bishop Saint Ambrose of Milan connected the Goths to the biblical Magog through the folk etymology—Gothus heard as Gog—importing the apocalyptic associations of Ezekiel and Revelation onto a people already despised as heretics. The thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew Paris applied the same mechanism to the Mongols; Wulfstan, Archbishop of York in the tenth and early eleventh-century, applied it to the Vikings (Major 2018).¹ Conversely, the ninth-century pseudo-Nennian Historia Brittonum traces the founding of Britain to the mythical exile king Brutus of Troy, then back through a fabricated lineage to the Table of Nations as a claim to classical and biblical grandeur. In each case, the Babel narrative provides a base of straining authorial support on which to build a burgeoning number of origin myths.

By the sixteenth century, biblical translation had become the primary site of conflict over the unity of Christian authority. Humanist and Reformist polyglot Bibles undermined claims of a single authoritative text, producing what the Catholic Church experienced as an authorial crisis. As Morra argues, this crisis “is quite simply the result of Babel,” which became its emblem (Morra 2007). Early modern Europe replayed the confusion of tongues at a political scale: the fantasy of a singular, unified biblical authority collapsed under translation. Philip II of Spain—ruler of the Brussels of Bruegel’s day—spoke only Castilian and refused to accommodate linguistic difference, delivering his inaugural address in Spanish to a multilingual populace. That refusal persisted throughout his reign and culminated in military occupation, a context Morra suggests Bruegel’s Babel paintings implicitly critique.

Political scientist Benedict Anderson identifies a deeper structure: before the age of nations, the great global communities—Christendom, the Ummah, the Confucian world—were imagined through sacred written languages. The ideograms of Hieroglyphic, Chinese, Latin, or Arabic, were, “believed to be emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it.” The Qur’an was literally untranslatable because Allah’s truth was accessible only through the “unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic.” There was “no idea here of a world so separated from language that all languages are equidistant (and thus interchangeable) signs for it” (Anderson 2006) Ontological reality was apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of representation: the truth-language of Church Latin, Qur’anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese. But these languages were not, in fact, emanations of reality. Their authority was institutional, maintained by literate castes whose monopoly on interpretation was inseparable from their monopoly on power. The fall from this condition—the discovery that sacred languages are not transparent windows onto the divine but historical products, translatable, debatable, plural—is a Babelian fall. It is the precondition for the emergence of national languages and, with them, imagined communities organized not by sacred truth but by the market and the printing press. The fantasy of a single, privileged system of representation did not end with the decline of the sacred languages. It recurs wherever the confusion of tongues is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be inhabited.