Words of the Day: sublunary, postlapsarian, …

Perhaps the first word we heard, ourselves still children, which, rather than simply denoting something new (like a previously unencountered animal), designated something old in a new way, and thus reframed us, was:   Earthling.   In terms of reference, the word is synonymous with people;  but its intension  (with an -s-, not -t-; a term of art among linguistic phillsophers, referring to the way it picks its reference out) is different.  (Thus likewise morning star and evening star, both referring -- though from different lookouts -- to Venus.) 

We meet this first in science fiction, and it permanently expands the mind.   When the exploits of the spacemen are forgotten  along with other tales of the nursery, we yet retain the spaciousness of the new view.  “I went to the mall with three of my friends”;  “I went to the mall with three…. fellow Earthlings”:  we sense the wider world beyond our plankboard stage.

(We just came across a mirror-term to earthling:

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space  were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings.

-- Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1991), p. 172 )

Another take on the same referents (namely, our earthly selves) is human.  Though the word is of course by now quite common, it was not always so, being a scientific word, borrowed from Latin (humanus, from homo; if there be a further relation to humus, then we have an interesting parallel -- again ‘earthling’, but now in the sense of ‘sons of the soil’).   By this term we are distinguished from animals;  but as everyone learns that perfectly well from an infant age, we do not need this word to teach us the species perspective.

Rather otherwise is mortal -- again from Latin, from the word for ‘death’.  In this secularized age, the average reader might think of this as a kind of moldy Sunday-school word, but the original sense among the pagan Greeks and Romans  was as opposed, not to God, but to the immortals -- the gods.  This is the sense that survives in the phrase “What fools we mortals be” (in Shakespeare’s most robustly pagan play).
An unexpected limitation in this word immortal  is evidenced by the following splendid epigram:

The actual infinity of a Platonist  is as seen by a mathematician who is eternal;

The potential infinity of the Intuitionists  is as seen by a mathematican who is merely immortal.

This is brilliant.  We expect the distinction to be between an idealized immortal mathematician, with all the time in the world to count to infinity, and a mortal one, who feels time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near, though he might make do with Supertasks:  accordingly, we initially take eternal simply as a stylistic synonym for immortal, before the second strophe brings us up short.  The Cumaean sibyl was merely immortal -- and consequently longed for easeful death.   Whereas the Platonist beholds the world of Forms  sub specie aeternitatis.  

(The epigram above comes not from a treatise of theology, but from a book of set theory and its logic.  I am quoting from memory, and possibly amiss, since Google finds, not that, but mostly philosophical and theological works.

-- Ha!  wait, found it, nestling on my shelves.   It is from Understanding the Infinite, by Shaughan Lavine.  He states it thus:

The idealization of experience that yields the actual infinite of classical mathematics  is that of the Eternal Mathematician, while the one that yields the potential infinite of intuitionistic mathematics  is that of the Immortal Mathematician.

But I like my misquotation rather better, and so shall leave it.)

~

A particularly delightful word,  containing, as were it a microcosm, a whole philosophy, is the word sublunary:  meaning, in the old cosmology, all that is to be found beneath the Sphere of the Moon.   (The allusion is not to the Moon’s own sphericity, wonderful though that be,  but to the celestial shell whereon that glowing queen is constrained to move  in regal splendour.)  Which is simply to say:  our everyday world;  except that now, instead of moving about in it like a tadpole in a pond, taking it all for granted, our thoughts now float upwards, and our hearts do yearn.

A simple swain -- yet fain to peer, beyond the sphere

The sublunary world is, in other words, this life Here Below.  And this brings us to a curious etymological fact:  for in Arabic, there are two common words meaning ‘world’:   al-`âlam, which is neutral, like world;  and al-dunyâ, which adds the notion of a contrast:  though now, not to any physical supralunary realm, but to al-âxirah ‘the hereafter’.   Morphologically, dunyâ is a feminine elative adjective, meaning ‘lower, nearer’:  thus precisely encapsulating the notions expressed by sublunary and Here Below, but in a single morpheme.

(The term sublunary has joined its age-mates in the medieval museum;  yet we still retain a kindred metaphor, "everything under the sun".)

~

At last we arrive at the final word of our title, postlapsarian :  a word that contains multitudes.  It refers to life subsequent to the Disaster in the Garden -- the only life that any of us ordinary folks have ever known.

In Adam’s Fall

we sinned all.

Our earliest ancestors, rueing the day

*

For a portrait of Grace and Reprobation,

try this:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

 *

Once again, it is a word that picks us out, every one of us (for even Eve and Adam were postlapsarian at the end), but in a new way, thus differing most starkly from the bland philosophical agnosticism of the coreferential but non-synonymous term human.   It bears within it a deep and stark perspective -- one which we are inclined to disregard, as we scramble for sales at the mall, or lounge back glassy-eyed before the goggle-box (the behavior, however, belying the complacency).  

Yet in a better age, it was borne well in mind;  as when Condillac, in the preface to his L’art de penser (1780), though that work is seen in retrospect as having paved the way to atheism, yet was careful to remark,  that his analyses apply only to the postlapsarian soul:  much as a myrmecologist  (one more modest than Edward Wilson), should preface his monograph with the caveat that the generalizations made therein  might not apply to the world outside the termitary.   Our favorite Neothomist speaks of

… la précaution qu’il prend,  au début de son Art de penser, de rappeler qu’il va décrire l’âme telle qu’elle est à présent, après le péché originel.  Avant le péché, elle avait des idées  antérieures à l’usage qu’elle fait des sens,

«mais les choses ont changé  depuis sa désobéissance».

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 28

 Condillac, perhaps having second thoughts about what he unleashed 

We are, thus, all of us, earthlings, mortals, sublunary and postlapsarian.   Each of these words picks us out from among all else in the Creation, yet each from a different angle, in a way that enlarges our humanity.

~

Linguistic footnote:  We have chosen these philosophically rich words for the fun of it; but the basic phenomena here under discussion  occur more widely.  Thus cordate and nephrophoric (in their somewhat specialized use among philosophers) ‘having a heart’ and ‘having kidneys”:  non-synonymous but co-referential.

Or, to take an example quite similar to that of sublunary:

The expression dry land evokes the ocean in a way that land itself does not,  and by this very fact seems filled with sea breezes -- or rather, tempests, since the particular light in which the land is thereby set, is as a place of safety, reached at last after perilous voyages.  Likewise terra firma:  it’s a place where you can finally find your foothold, after your return -- O Earthling -- from your voyage to outer space.