Looking Down While Moving Up

Lynn Williams

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

I address my remarks mainly to the graduates amongst us. Please accept my congratulations for having qualified to receive a Brigham Young University degree. Over the past few years, you have devoted yourselves to study of the humanities. Depending on your chosen discipline, you will have been exposed to great art and magnificent architecture, read extraordinary books, examined the intricate workings of language, and explored distant cultures. In concert with this, you will have expanded your ability to analyze, synthesize, and express yourselves orally and by means of the written word, perhaps even in one or more foreign tongues. Briefly, you have gained knowledge, your intellect has been refined, and you have equipped yourselves with priceless skills. You are now ready to go out into the world and place your imprint upon it. It is our hope that the impression you make will redound to your honor, to that of your family, and to that of this university and the Church.

The ultimate root of the word graduate is the Latin gradus. For the Roman, gradus referred to a movement propelling the body forward and also to the support on which one places one’s foot in order to propel the body upward, meanings that coincide with those of the English word step. Properly arranged, steps can move us forward and upward at one and the same time. You are fortunate to have attended an academic institution that exists to promote just such a double movement.

The world in which we live, our society, is hierarchically structured. The education you have received will allow you to move through its various levels and, in all likelihood, occupy its upper echelons. Those of you who have studied French will recognize in the word echelons a close lexical associate of the French échelle, the equivalent of the English word ladder. As you begin your ascent, you will perhaps fix your gaze on the top rung of the ladder and become mesmerized by those who occupy this exclusive piece of social space. If this proves to be so, you may well forget to look backward and downward. The things that come to occupy your mind and your time are likely to be those that enjoy prestige in society: money, knowledge, power, recognition, even, perhaps, physical beauty. Permit me to issue a gentle warning. The word prestige derives from the Latin praestigium, which signifies both delusion and illusion. It passed into English from French, probably in the seventeenth century, and retained, in English, its original sense well into the nineteenth century. Even today, the Oxford English Dictionary gives, as its primary meaning: illusion, conjuring trick, deception, imposture; and as its secondary meaning: blinding or dazzling influence, ‘magic’, glamor, influence or reputation derived from previous character, achievements or success.1 The last of these suggests that, in popular parlance, the word has shed most of its pejorative overtones, much as has occurred with nice, the original meaning of which was, of course, ignorant. A process of semantic narrowing and change, then, has brought us to believe that prestige is something very desirable. All the more reason, I submit, to recall its origin.

In general, things deemed prestigious continue to lack substance and to involve some kind of deception, just as they did for the Romans. Because prestige is usually devoid of substance, it tends to be ephemeral so that what is esteemed today is often not so highly thought of tomorrow. We see this, for instance, in Britain, where the significance of noble ancestry is gradually being replaced by that of wealth. Without much exaggeration, we might say that, in the United Kingdom, aristocracy is giving way to plutocracy. Similar changes occur in language, where what is once thought prestigious is later often stigmatized and vice versa. For example, the linguistic variety designated as Vulgar Latin because it was so different from, and thought inferior to, the Classical Latin of Virgil and Tacitus gradually transformed itself: in the Spanish-speaking world, into the language of Cervantes and García Márquez; in the Portuguese speaking world, into that of Camões and Machado de Assis; in France, into that of Voltaire and Flaubert; and, in Italy, into that of Dante and Primo Levi. And to take an obvious, though very limited example from English, we may note that pronunciation of post vocalic <r>, in words like car, far, and star, which, in relatively recent history, has become prestigious in the United States, is not similarly valued in the United Kingdom, where the preferred pronunciation is [ka:], [fa:], [sta:].

As a final illustration of how social values may change dramatically over time, I turn to seventeenth century Spain. There we find that those who had at any time used their hands to put bread on the table, had been involved in commerce on a small scale, or had Jewish or Moorish blood on either side of their family over the preceding four generations were severely limited in terms of social advancement. For these reasons, it proved difficult indeed for the painter Diego de Velázquez to gain admission to the “prestigious” military order of Saint James. In fact, it required the intervention of the Spanish monarch himself. In response to the king’s prodding, the commission charged with inquiring into the purity of Velázquez’s lineage seemingly overlooked Jewish ancestry on his father’s side. Similarly, his occupation as an artisan was explained away by ignoring the fact that he had started out as a relatively humble painter who sold his wares as best he could and by arguing that as painter to the king, he was clearly not in the business of selling pictures. Great effort and influence, as well as some massaging of the truth, were thus needed in order for a man of immense natural talent, but the wrong social credentials, to be granted a knighthood and thus secure his place amongst the elite of his time. Ironically, today it is Velázquez who looms large, towering over the faceless palace officials in Madrid to whom, for most of his adult life, he was forced to submit, towering tooeven over the Planet king, Philip IV himself. Now, these examples merely underscore the simple, inescapable fact that what is considered prestigious shifts over time and, if we think of postvocalic <r>, may even vary markedly between otherwise fairly closely connected contemporary societies like those of Britain and the United States. In other words, prestige is, by nature, protean.

You may be wondering why I have chosen to make these rather obvious points. It is certainly not to discourage you from soaring upwards and reaching your full potential in whatever field you choose. It is rather to invite you to see things as they really are and to encourage you, occasionally at least, to cast a glance backward and downward, just as Philip of Spain did as he endeavored, against all the social mores of his time, to promote his favorite painter. It is to urge you never to overlook the intrinsic worth of those whose chances of rising to the top of society are, for whatever reason, limited or even blocked.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World contains the following glorious declaration: “All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents,and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.” This affirmation has serious import not just for how we ought to see ourselves but also for how we ought to see others. And yet, for some reason, we—especially those of us who occupy privileged positions in society—are apt to forget this most basic truth. As Vice President John Tanner reminded colleagues recently, C. S. Lewis taught that our “neighbour is the holiest object presented to[our] senses,” and also that “it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. . . . it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

The most conclusive evidence that our divine nature is not on public display is surely to be found in the life of the Savior. Permit me to make eight brief observations, which are all too often forgotten or overlooked: first, Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger. However romantic that may now sound as a result of Luke’s beautifully crafted narrative, the unadorned truth is that the circumstances of the Lord’s birth could hardly have been more humble.

Second, his mother was a young woman of no particular social importance and his foster father a mere carpenter (assuming carpenter to be the most accurate rendering of the Greek teknon). Although there can be little doubt that Joseph was a descendant of King David, at the time of Christ’s birth, his station in life was anything but high.

Third, Matthew (1:1–17) includes in his genealogy of Jesus (which is really the genealogy of Joseph) four women. Two are gentiles (Ruth & Rahab); two are usually assumed to be harlots (Rahab & Tamar). The fourth is Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon. Matthew, of course, had sound reasons for including these women in the genealogy. Now is not the occasion to explore them. Suffice it to say that this was probably not the kind of pedigree that most orthodox Jews of the time would have prized.

Fourth, the Savior was not especially handsome. According to the words of Isaiah 53:2, “when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” We must ask ourselves whether we really believe Isaiah’s words. Most artists in centuries past appear to have embraced them and depicted the Savior accordingly.

Fifth, compared with Jerusalem, Nazareth—the place where Jesus was brought up and lived most of his life—was something of a backwater with a very poor reputation. This is why, when he is told of the Savior, Nathaniel’s response to Andrew is: “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”

Sixth, Jesus spoke with a regional, perhaps even with a lower social class accent. When Peter finds himself outside Caiaphas’s palace, he is recognized as a Galilean because of the way he speaks. Matthew 26:73 reads: “And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee.” I take this to mean “your accent gives you away.” Now, the chances are that the Galilean accent was not attractive to the inhabitants of the great city of Jerusalem. It may well have sounded to them as a broad Brooklyn or hillbilly accent might to you or a thick Glaswegian accent does to me; not altogether pleasant, certainly not prestigious, and possibly even difficult to understand. Jesus spoke in some such way.

Seventh, the name Joshua or Jeshua by which Jesus was known is clearly appropriate, even symbolic given the Savior’s redemptive role. But it was nothing out of the ordinary for the Jews of the time. In fact, it was probably quite commonplace.

And eighth, Jesus died the death, not of a hero, but of a convicted criminal. If we put these things together, it seems clear that the Jesus who walked the roads of Palestine in the meridian of time had little in common with the idealized portraits that today we so often see of him and with all that these suggest. Jesus was indisputably a man of unrivaled intelligence and perfect righteousness. He was literally the Son of God. But none of this was apparent from his background, his physical appearance, his accent when he spoke, his name, or the manner of his death. In most of these things, he was the very epitome of ordinariness; in a few, he was even less than that. Briefly, Jesus was in no sense part of his society’s elite. And I say this not in an attempt to diminish his stature, but rather to exalt it. In my view, it speaks to his true greatness, which was and is unparalleled. Jesus saw prestige for what it is: an illusion, a sophisticated conjuring trick. Not only was he not taken in by it, he also refused to join the conjurors who create the illusion or perpetuate it. He fixed his gaze not on the apex of the Jewish social world, but on that of celestial society and on those things that have real substance and everlasting value.

My challenge to you and to me is to resist the temptation of seeing God in our own image or in that of the world. It is to remember that the reverse is true, namely that we were created in the image of the Father. For this is what the scriptures and The Family: A Proclamation to the World declare. Let us not forget that our neighbor—regardless of intelligence, physical form, social background, or likeability—is in the image of God, is the cherished son or daughter of heavenly parents and, for this reason, possesses a divine nature and divine destiny.

In his recent communication to faculty, Vice President John Tanner also recalled Kierkegaard’s declaration that Jesus came to Earth “incognito.” In a sense, we are all here incognito. Our divine nature and our divine destiny are obvious to no one. As you continue to move forward and upward, may you occasionally take the time to look backward and downward and see the image of God in those around you. After all, you have been trained to look beneath the surface, to search for hidden meaning. What better discovery could you possibly make than to discern the divine even, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “in the dullest and most uninteresting”? In doing so, we align ourselves with those who saw it in Jesus some two thousand years ago.