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Our Letters to You fans have come in with their verdict: you all loved last week’s cliffhanger!

Click here if you want to learn about one of the most fascinating old Italian guys you’ll ever know––Giacomo Leopardi. He lived in the early 1800’s and was like Paulie Walnuts, plus really smart.

Leopardi was a massive autodidact, as evidenced by the fact that his Zibaldone contains extended passages in a wide array of languages: Italian (his native tongue; both medieval and modern), Latin (of course), ancient Greek, ancient Hebrew, English, French (which he amusingly despised), German (now he’s just showing off), and even Chinese (!!!). Dude knew words good.

But that’s not all! Leopardi not only understood these multiple tongues but also was a keen linguist and wrote extensively on philosophy of language. (Concertingly for me to know, however, is that Leopardi apparently wasn’t at all fun at parties. Point: Angehr. So much winning!)

Here’s a Giacomo gem that got me going: “For an idea without a word or a way to express it is lost to us, or roams about undefined in our thoughts, and is imperfectly understood by we who have conceived it. With the word, it takes on body and almost visible, tangible, and distinct form.” What we have here is not only philosophy of language but also philosophy of mind. Maybe you’ve never considered this, or maybe you have, but do you think in whatever language is most natural to you? Probably not. For the most part, when I’m sitting in my rocking chair or running depressingly slowly around Newton Lake, I don’t cogitate in English, per se.

Still, there’s more to that story. I hope I’m not alone in that when I’m lost in thought, I’ll often either replay or imagine conversations I’ll have with other people, and when my mind runs in that direction, I think that I’m thinking in English. Who knows where exactly to draw the line, but there comes a point when we’ll occasionally focus our thought life in such a way that our mental musings take on formal language. Without such formal langue in our mind’s eye, our thoughts tend toward the indistinct.

This is what Leopardi is driving at in this quote. An “idea without a word” can be quite fuzzy, and it requires language to give it definition and shape. More than that, he continues, when given a word, an idea “takes on body, and almost visible, tangible, and distinct form.”

Famously at the beginning of his gospel account, the apostle John observes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). It’s one of the most striking statements ever made. Speaking of Jesus, John draws both from the Hebrew Scriptures and also some Greco-Judaic ancient philosophy in identifying Jesus of Nazareth as “the Word” (“logos” in the original Greek). There are certainly breadcrumb trails of precedent that we can look back upon, but nowhere in the Old Testament is the Messiah-to-come exactly portrayed in terms of Word. Inspired by the Holy Spirit as a writer of the scriptures, John is here making an innovation.

And it’s a glorious one. Later on in this gospel, Jesus tells his friend Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). Not that what we learn of God from the Old Testament is untrue or unreliable, but since Jesus is confessed by the church as the culminating climax of all of the Father’s revelatory and redemptive acts to us in history, in Christ the being of God has taken on, in Leopardi’s words, “visible, tangible, and distinct form.”

Also, a body. By a word, Leopardi says, an idea “takes on body.” Although Giacomo was deeply acquainted with Christianity, somewhat unusually for the time and place (i.e., 19th Century Italy) he didn’t self-identify as a Christian. But if I ever run into a Leopardi scholar, I’d want to ask, Was he alluding to Jesus’ incarnation when he referred to words taking on bodies, or was it just a coincidence that he’s echoing John 1:14 so perfectly: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Additionally, if I’d ever run into Leopardi himself, I’d want happily to tell him, “It’s all true.”

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