The Pope's airship

You may well be wondering at the title of this blog, and asking, ‘Surely Pope Benedict XVI does not have an airship at his disposal?’ And, ‘Has any previous pope possessed such a means of transport?’ Well, so far as I know, it is true to say that there has never been any significant connection between popes and airships. Moreover, given that this piece is actually about Pope Benedict’s Easter Vigil Homily, the connection between title and subject must seem either non–existent or absurdist — according to your cast of mind. However, what follows has to do with the Pope’s use of language in his Homily, and its relationship to reality or otherwise. And, just as the ‘productivity’ of language — the possibility of producing a near–infinite number of grammatically correct sentences, which may nonetheless describe impossible states of affairs — has allowed me to ‘invent’ the Pope’s airship, so too does the Pope’s Homily seem to me to contain a considerable number of ‘unsupported statements’. Statements, that is which seem to bear as little relationship to reality as the aforementioned dirigible! If, at least what he had to say is to be taken seriously. And, while I have no doubt of his sincerity, I find myself too often in a kind of mental vacuum while reading his words. To me, he is a master of unsupported statements, and bolsters these with the unsupported statements of others: as if stability was to be achieved by placing one cloud on top of another.


The Pope’s ninth paragraph begins:


The central message of the creation account can be defined more precisely still. In the opening words of his Gospel, Saint John sums up the essential meaning of that account in this single statement: ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

I have four questions here: 1) Who was Saint John? 2) Who vouchsafed him this highly abstract and deeply obscure notion? 3) Of what language did the Word consist? 4) What on earth [sic] does it mean?


I would suggest that it means absolutely nothing, and would have to wonder if the Pope himself had never woken up in the small hours — that time of ‘the nadir of confidence’ — and asked himself, ‘Do I really believe what I say?’... I doubt that we will ever know!