Sacred Signs
by Romano Guardini

THE NAME OF GOD

HUMAN perception has been dulled. We have lost our awareness of

some deep and subtle things. Among them the zest for words. Words

have for us now only a surface existence. They have lost their

power to shock and startle. They have been reduced to a fleeting

image, to a thin tinkle of sound.

Actually a word is the subtle body of a spirit. Two things meet

and find expression in a word: the substance of the object that

makes the impact, and that portion of our spirit that responds to

that particular object. At least these two ought to go to the

making of words, and did when the first man made them.

In one of the early chapters of the Bible we are told that "God

brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them..."

Man, who has an ability to see and a mind open to impressions,

looked through the outward form into the inner essence and spoke

the name. The name was the response made by the human soul to the

soul of the creature. Something in man, that particular part of

himself that corresponded to the nature of that particular

creature, stirred in answer, since man is the epitome and point

of union of creation. These two things, (or rather this double

thing) the nature of things outside and man's interior

correspondence with them, being brought into lively contact,

found utterance in the name.

In a name a particle of the universe is locked with a particle of

human consciousness. So when the man spoke the name, the image of

the actual object appeared in his mind together with the sound he

had made in response to it. The name was the secret sign which

opened to him the world without and the world within himself.

Words are names. Speech is the noble art of giving things the

names that fit them. The thing as it is in its nature and the

soul as it is in its nature were divinely intended to sound in

unison.

But this inward connection between man and the rest of creation

was interrupted. Man sinned, and the bond was torn apart. Things

became alien, even hostile, to him. His eyes lost the clearness

of their vision. He looked at nature with greed, with the desire

to master her and with the shifty glance of the guilty. Things

shut their real natures from him. He asserted himself so

successfully that his own nature eluded him. When he lost his

child-like vision, his soul fell away from him, and with it his

wisdom and his strength.

With the loss of the true name, was broken that vital union

between the two parts of creation, the human and the non-human,

which in God's intention were to be indissolubly joined in the

bonds of peace. Only some fragmentary image, some obscure,

confused echo, still reaches us; and if on occasion we do hear a

word that is really a name, we stop short and try but cannot

quite catch its import, and are left puzzled and troubled with

the painful sensation that paradise is lost.

But in our day even the sense that paradise is lost is lost. We

are too superficial to be distressed by the loss of meaning,

though we are more and more glib about the surface sense. We pass

words from mouth to mouth as we do money from hand to hand and

with no more attention to what they were meant to convey than to

the inscription on the coins. The value-mark is all we notice.

They signify something, but reveal nothing. So far from promoting

the intercourse between man and nature they clatter out of us

like coins from a cash register and with much the same

consciousness as the machine has of their value.

Once in a great while we are shocked into attention. A word,

perhaps in a book, may strike us with all its original force. The

black and white signs grow luminous. We hear the voice of the

thing named. There is the same astonished impact, the same

intellectual insight, as in the primitive encounter. We are

carried out of ourselves into the far depths of time when God

summoned man to his first work of word-making. But too soon we

are back where we were and the cash register goes clicking on.

It may have been the name of God that we thus met face to face.

Remembering how words came to be, it is plain enough to us why

the faithful under the Old Law never uttered the word, and

substituted for it the word Lord. What made the Jews the peculiar

and elect nation is that they with more immediacy than any other

people perceived the reality and nearness of God, and had a

stronger sense of his greatness, his transcendence and his

fecundity. His name had been revealed to them by Moses. He that

is, that is my name. He that is being in itself, needing nothing,

self-subsistent, the essence of being and of power.

To the Jews the name of God was the image of his being. God's

nature shone in his name. They trembled before it as they had

trembled before the Lord himself in Sinai. God speaks of his name

as of himself. When he says of the Temple, "My name shall be

there," he means by his name, himself. In the mysterious book of

the Apocalyse he promises that those that come through

tribulation shall be as pillars in the temple of God, and that he

will write his name upon them; that is, that he will sanctify

them and give them himself.

This is the sense in which we are to understand the commandment,

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain. This is

how we are to understand the word in the prayer our Savior taught

us, "Hallowed be thy name," and in the precept to begin whatever

we undertake in God's name.

God's name is full of hidden power. It shadows forth the nature

of infinitude, and nature of him who is measureless plenitude and

limitless sublimity.

In that name is present also what is deepest in man. There is a

correspondence between God and man's inmost being, for to God man

inseparably belongs. Created by God, for God, man is restless

until he is wholly one with God. Our personalities have no other

meaning or purpose than union with God in mutual love. Whatever

of nobility man possesses, his soul's soul, is contained in the

word God. He is my God, my source, my goal, the beginning and the

end of my being, him I worship, him I long for, him to whom with

sorrow I confess my sins.

Strictly, all that exists is the name of God. Let us therefore

beseech him not to let us take it in vain, but to hallow it. Let

us ask him to make his name our light in glory. Let us not bandy

it about meaninglessly. It is beyond price, thrice holy.

Let us honor God's name as we honor God himself. In reverencing

God's name we reverence also the holiness of our own souls.