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This is the story of the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The metaphor of Babel stands for the magnificent edifice of classical culture that was about to reach the sky, but remained self-sufficient and self-contained in its virtual monolingualism – the paradigm within which even Latin was occasionally considered just a dialect of Greek. The gradual erosion of this vision is the slow fall of Babel that took place in the hearts and minds of a good number of early Christian writers and intellectuals who represented various languages and literary traditions. This step-by-step process included the discovery and internalization of the existence of multiple other languages in the world, as well as subsequent attempts to incorporate their speakers meaningfully into the holistic and distinctly Christian picture of the universe.

This paper analyzes a set of ideas about language attested by late antique Christian writers—namely, their speculations on what kind of transformation languages undergo over time and their ethical, theological, and historical assessments of linguistic change and linguistic diversity. The incident that triggered the diversification of languages was normally associated with the biblical story about the Tower of Babel (Gen 11.1–9), the single dramatic event that once and for all changed the linguistic makeup of humanity and could be considered a disaster par excellence. And yet, the attitudes of late antique writers to the event and the subsequent linguistic diversification ranged from overtly negative (divine punishment and revenge) to reservedly positive (a minor inconvenience that prevented further wrongdoing) to a wholeheartedly optimistic reaction. Similarly, the gradual process of language change that always happens over time was often described in terms of “corruption” and “decline.” Observations of ancient writers that languages “get corrupted” due to multiple factors presuppose the slippery slope of a slow, empirically unimpressive, but steady and sure catastrophe. Its consequences are more threatening the less attention people pay to it. Comparing the two conceptual frames late antique writers employed to approach linguistic transformations—the sudden dramatic confusion of tongues at Babel and the everyday “slow catastrophe” of language corruption—this study challenges our own scholarly views on what constituted a disaster for intellectuals in Late Antiquity.

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