The Rapturous Power of Words

Sarah Moorhouse explores Edward Wilson-Lee’s “The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language.”

By Sarah MoorhouseMay 24, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

LANGUAGE IS A CONSTANT throughout the tumult of human history: our tool to persuade, deceive, and unite into more than the sum of our parts. The transporting power of speech is the subject of Edward Wilson-Lee’s new book, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language. It’s a curious work, and one that’s hard to classify. Part philosophy of language and part literary criticism, the book is arranged around a life story of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), the Renaissance polymath whose ideas scandalized the church and challenged the intellectual conformities of his time.

In 1486, the young Pico arrived in Rome to defend what he called his “universal philosophy.” Laid out in 900 propositions or conclusions, the work claimed to articulate “all knowable things” and thereby unify the world’s philosophies, from the “falasifa” of the Islamic world to Aristotelian and Platonic thought. Never mind that many of these philosophies directly contradict one another; Pico advocated a system in which each was “true according to their own manner” and which, through a “layering of different truths,” might lead us to understand our place within the universe.

Pico had been a child prodigy and had long commanded admiration for his feats of intellectual prowess, but this project was ambitious even for him. The source of his confidence, perhaps, was a fascination with what Wilson-Lee describes as the “underlying oneness to all existence”; for Pico, each of the world’s philosophies was essentially in quest of this ideal. The questions that emerge are as follows: How might language accommodate a “universal philosophy”? And might we ever approach that “underlying oneness” through words?

Anticipating that the reader might dismiss the sublime potential of words as “hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo,” Wilson-Lee invites us to consider the following:

Why is it that beautiful poetry or music can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up[?] […] How are we to understand the way that listening to a powerful speech or song can sometimes make you feel like you are being drawn along by it, or even that you are speaking or singing the very words yourself?

Language—especially when transmitted through song—can sweep us beyond ourselves. When this happens, our status as individuals starts to become less solid. Words can gather us into collective experiences that suggest, perhaps, something of the underlying oneness that Pico sought.

Pico is not, of course, the only philosopher to have been fascinated with what lies beyond the realm of the individual self. Wilson-Lee situates him within a tradition of thinkers that goes back to the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who viewed “all distinctions between things” as “mere illusions”; ultimately, he posited, “all is one.” The relationship between individual physical experience—the realm of these illusory “distinctions”—and what Wilson-Lee describes as “a metaphysical elsewhere” has consumed generations of philosophers since, from Plato to Kant. Language, we might assume, sits firmly within the realm of those distinctions that, according to Parmenides, are mere illusions. After all, when we use a word, we are confirming our perception of those minute differences that allow us to navigate the world.

Is it possible to conceive of a mode of communication that isn’t subject to those conditions? In 15th-century Italy, another type of language was widely believed to exist that wasn’t restricted to the human realm—the speech of angels. Angels are a stock presence in each of the major religions: they are understood as messengers of God in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. Their position is poised between mortals and God, their voices mediating between the human and the divine. Many, Wilson-Lee explains, believed that angel speech was “so powerful that it did not attempt to express thoughts like human speech but, rather, made the thoughts of one angel inhabit another, dissolving the boundaries between the two in such a way as to leave it unclear whether there were still two beings or only one.” Pico required for his universal philosophy a form of speech that could dissolve boundaries. His aim, as he expressed it in 1486, stands in startling opposition to Parmenides’s paradigm: he wanted to “tur[n] the multitude into one.” Perhaps angelic speech held the answer.

But can human language ever approximate the conditions of “angelic speech”? Perhaps occasionally. Poetry and music—think of how a choir sings as one—were often held up as states in which we might imitate the angels. To take an anachronistic example, we might consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a poem whose literal meaning is almost beside the point. Experiencing Coleridge’s poem is less about making sense of what the words mean and more about allowing its rhythms to wash over you. The sound of the poem inhabits us before we know what it means. Pico was intrigued by this kind of speech: “Voices that mean nothing,” he wrote, “have more magical power than those that mean something.”

The problem, though, is that such meaningless language isn’t very practical. Words allow us to communicate, and while life might present us with the odd moment when (to borrow from another poet, Philip Larkin) we get it whole, most of the time we need to distinguish between things to get around. Pico himself fell prey to this dilemma when, subsumed by a febrile, chaotic enthusiasm in the days before his untimely death at the age of 31, he took to scrawling page after page of what Wilson-Lee describes as “sublime gibberish.” Pico’s writing became “so haywire, crossed out and written over, patched together and confused, that he left a thicket and a farrago impossible to untangle […] the illegible and incomprehensible in hot pursuit of the unthinkable.” In attempting to transcend the “multitude,” it seems, Pico could only find noise.

¤

There’s a fine line, then, between language that transcends its expression and gibberish, sublime or otherwise. But can we reliably distinguish between the two? Pico didn’t live long enough to resolve the question, and Wilson-Lee doesn’t quite crack it in his book either. The Grammar of Angels is, like Pico’s dream of a universal philosophy, tripped up by its own ambition; it weaves so many threads that the narrative is hard to follow. Wilson-Lee’s command of his subjects, from Pico’s life to the ontology of angels to Platonic philosophy, is impressive. But a decisive argument about Pico’s impact doesn’t quite materialize. It’s clear that his philosophy and his interest in the language complemented one another, but one wishes that the relationship between these two areas of inquiry could’ve been more clearly spelled out.

We’re left unsure what to make of Pico: was he a visionary or a failure? Part of the problem when reckoning with his legacy, we learn, is understanding the tricky conditions in which Pico was working. His project to “synthesize the thought of the known world” flew in the face of Christian doctrine and was met with forceful opposition. Pico has the distinction of being the first philosopher to have a book officially banned by the church. If Pico is not a household name, then, that’s partly a consequence of his ideas being buried and his impact on his contemporaries thereby curtailed. But it’s unlikely that Wilson-Lee’s book will make him a star now: swamped by its expansive approach, The Grammar of Angels leaves its subject something of an enigma.

Perhaps Pico’s ultimate achievement was to reveal, inadvertently, his project’s impossibility. As in set theory, where a universal set (that is, a set that contains all objects, including itself) is impossible, Pico’s project of a universal philosophy cannot be realized because it remains at a remove from the ideas it describes. Wilson-Lee suggests that Pico sensed this:

Pico seems to have felt more keenly than most the frustration that arises from the feeling that thought, no matter how keen and forceful and exalting, seems for ever to remain bounded within the circle of its own conceiving, never making the slightest change to the set laws that govern the world outside.

Despite his talents, which included a stunning facility with languages and a preternaturally sharp memory, Pico couldn’t get around the gap between thought and reality.

Even if Pico’s project of capturing “all knowable things” in a single philosophy was an impossibility, his interest in testing the limits of language remains strikingly relevant today. In the final chapter of The Grammar of Angels (the most compelling in the book), Wilson-Lee explores various conditions in which the boundaries between individuals have been dissolved by language, resulting in, if not the unlocking of an “underlying oneness,” then at least a powerful experience of collectivity. To speak is to bend another person to your will; this is a power that, as Wilson-Lee points out, can all too easily be abused. Think of the speeches of Hitler, a “spectacle of vast crowds being merged into a single entity by the power of his rhythmic utterances.” Hitler’s “hypnotic chant,” Wilson-Lee tells us, turned “people into automatons” in what we might see as a sinister inversion of the “angelic speech” concept.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, debates continue to rage about freedom of speech, its value and its possible dangers. Just as the church recognized the subversive potential of Pico’s writing, Wilson-Lee points out “the extraordinary energy invested by our culture in inoculating us against enrapturing speech.” The West is, he says, haunted by “nightmarish visions of Communist conformity and cult indoctrination.” And yet, at the same time, the modern world is propelling us ever further from individuality: Wilson-Lee describes the internet as a “superorganism” whose power to sweep us up into a collectivity exceeds that of the most skilled rhetorician. He stops short of commenting explicitly on the role of online misinformation in determining recent political events across the world, but it’s clear that Wilson-Lee has a point: language can transport us into chaos just as often as it can into sublimity and harmony.