Hymns, p. 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became Song Jean-Pierre van Noppen Université Libre de Bruxelles English Linguistics Dept. 1. Preliminaries : Language and the Sacred Whether as a tool of the sacred or a technique of the secular, language and its power have a history as old as our universe itself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1); “God said, Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3): God spoke, and the world came into being. From the very outset, language is represented as a divine idiom, which in God’s speech becomes the creative tool of the sacred underlying all existence, as well as the medium of divine legislation. In terms of Speech Act theory 1 , God’s first linguistic manifestations can be tagged as performatives (language used to carry out actions) and directives (language used to make others act according to one’s will, Searle Taxonomy). When God created Adam in his own image and breathed life into him – “in-spired” him–, the power of language was bestowed upon Man as well. This mythical narrative, however, tells only half the story: for just as breathing is a dual movement of inhaling and exhaling the air vital to life, the air (wind, ruach, spirit) breathed into humans is not retained but returned, and will, as it is expelled, strike the vocal chords to produce sound, voice, language, poetry, song; and thus, writes Wesley (Works 434), as “[the divine breath] inspired into the soul is continually received by faith, so it is continually rendered back (...) by prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.” At the edges of language, where human reference ventures beyond its familiar scope, the answer to the question whether human language can “establish an interconnection between the human and the ultimate” (Bellarsi) is bound to be modest, as the only thing the linguist can document and study is the human side of the Man/Divine relationship, in which Man addresses and/or tentatively describes a putative mode of supernatural being, or records in human words what may (or may not) be divinely given or inspired cognition. 1 In a book symptomatically named How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin has argued that the study of meaning should not exclusively concentrate on statements, but that a general account of all language functions should be formulated in terms of a theory of social activity. This is what John Searle has sought to provide in his Speech Acts, which constitutes a particular approach to the classification of linguistic utterances according to their purpose and function.