The Beauty and Achievement of Language

We communicate because God has communicated to us. He did this in creation by providing space in which to make himself known. In a definite sense he has spoken to us in the sending of the Son. We know this because the Bible tells us so. Holy Scripture testifies to the Eternal Word sent from the Father and tells a message of broken communication, the darkness of the Fall, and communication restored, the light of eternal glory brought about through redemption.

Consider this quote highlighting the mystery we participate in when we engage in reading. Reading is a unique gift of God.

The mode of being of literature has something unique and incomparable about it … There is nothing so strange and at the same time so demanding as the written word … The written word and what partakes of it - literature - is the intelligibility of mind transferred to the most alien medium. Nothing is so purely the trace of mind as writing, but also nothing is so dependent on the understanding mind. In its deciphering and interpretation a miracle takes place: the transformation of something strange and dead into a total simultaneity and familiarity. This is like nothing else that has come down to us from the past … a written tradition, when deciphered and read, is to such an extent pure mind that it speaks to us as if in the present. That is why the capacity to read, to understand what is written, is like a secret art, even magic that looses and binds us. In it time and space seem to be suspended. The man who is able to read what has been handed down in writing testifies to and achieves the sheer presence of the past.

Truth and Method, 1975 in Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology, Andrew Louth, 1983, p.34.