WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

outside “natural” attributes, openly manipulating their former home to prevent the entrance of the
waters in it. That is, they use the tools of God to exert a type of authority over other men—
through figures like Nimrod—yet their actions are those of open affront to the divine will. In
essence, human beings distinguish their place from the world by taking God’s place as creators
without wishing to transmit the experience of a Divine Will to one another.
In creating the Tower, these early humans write a type of fiction of God’s authority,
which thinks that sovereignty could be placed upon the earth without a colonial imperative; a
fiction that, although repeating God’s creative gestures, does not seek to replace him as an
oppressive or disseminating force. As a consequence, when God descends from the heavens to
see their works, he does not destroy humanity once again but merely foils their “mad” designs:
When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they
were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them
by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that through the multitude of those
languages, they should not be able to understand one another…The Sibyl also makes mention of
this tower, and of the confusion of language, when she says thus: “When all the men were of one
language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the
gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and
for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon.” 439
For Josephus, God produces diverse languages because humanity’s sin does not warrant yet
another type of destruction. In other words, the presence of multiple languages is not a witness to
the effective challenge of mankind to the divine purpose—the sinners had “not grown wiser” by
the destruction of their brethren and posed no risk to God’s power. Rather, the multiplicity of
tongues is the direct exertion of God’s authority to cause tumult even against the unification of
man, and as such, it is an explicit portrayal of the greater strength of the divine power.
Whereas man presents his authority through unification, through a purposeful gathering
of hands to arrest time, God presents his authority through dispersal and confusion. Following
Josephus, we may even wish to repeat alongside John Gower that “Cristes word may noght be
439 Ibid.
265