Divine details

Christian Century, August 24, 2004

DIVINE DETAILS: Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, & Leaves (Gotham) deserves its place on best-seller lists for its hilarious insistence on punctiliousness in punctuation--no small order for those who never even learned the proper rules for punctuation. In the fourth century St. Basil the Great made a similar plea--on theological grounds--for careful use of the smallest building blocks of language: "Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary, together with attempts to search out the hidden meaning in this phrase or that syllable, but those conscious of the goal of our calling realize that we are to become like God, as far as this is possible for human nature.

But we cannot become like God unless we have knowledge of Him, and without lessons there will be no knowledge. Instruction begins with the proper use of speech, and syllables and words are the elements of speech. Therefore to scrutinize syllables is not a superfluous task" (On the Holy Spirit, 1, 2, translated by David Anderson for St. Vladimir's Press).