Philo & Sophia · PrequelThe verb to be; there is / there are · A1–B1

The One Who Is

In which Philo asks a question that has been waiting longer than any grammar lesson, Sophia takes the smallest verb in the language apart piece by piece, and Aristotle is invited to the table, where he discovers that there is one answer he cannot sort.

It was the hour after the lamps are lit, when the reading hall empties and the copyists go home, and the four of them were still sitting at the long table under the east windows. Sophia had just announced that tomorrow they would begin the tenses in earnest, and Marcos had just groaned, when Philo put down his pen.

“Before we begin anything,” he said, “there is one verb I want to understand. Not learn. Understand.”

Sophia raised her eyebrows. It was not like Philo to interrupt a plan.

“When Moses stood in front of the burning bush,” Philo went on, “he asked God for his name. And God did not give him a name. He gave him a verb. I want to know what that verb is, before I learn what it does.”

There was a short silence. Then Sophia went to the shelf behind her, took down a scroll, and laid it on the table. “Then we shall do it properly,” she said. “First the story. Then the grammar. And then a friend of mine, who spent his whole life asking what it means to say that something is.”

The bush

Philo unrolled the scroll himself. It was the Greek of the Law, the translation made on Pharos, and he found the place without looking for it.

“Egō eimi ho ōn,” said Philo quietly. “‘I am the One who is.’ In the Hebrew it is shorter and stranger: ehyeh asher ehyeh. I am who I am. Or: I will be what I will be. The scholars still argue.”

“And the verb,” said Demetria, “is to be.”

“The verb is to be,” said Sophia. “So let us meet it.”

Eight faces of one verb

Sophia took a wax tablet and wrote, one under another, all the forms the verb can take in English. Demetria counted them before she had finished.

“Eight,” she said. “Every other verb I know has four or five. Walk, walks, walked, walking. Even go only has five.”

“To be has eight,” said Sophia, “because it is not really one verb at all. English built it, long ago, out of the ruins of three older verbs, the way a poor family builds a house from the stones of three fallen ones. From one came is and am. From another came was and were. From the third came be, being and been. Greek did something very similar, Philo. Your eimi, ēn and esomai are not good friends either.”

Marcos studied the tablet with the expression of a man reading a list of debts. “And questions? Do I say, ‘Does the bush be burning?’”

“Never,” said Sophia, so quickly that Demetria laughed. “Be is too proud to need help. It makes its own questions and its own negatives, simply by stepping in front of the subject or by taking not.”

“There is one more use,” said Sophia, “and it is the simplest of all. Before you say anything about a thing, you may want to say that it is there. For that we say there is and there are.”

“There is a bush,” said Demetria. “There is a mountain. There are sheep.”

“And notice,” said Sophia, “that there is not a place in those sentences. The bush is not over there. It simply exists. English has borrowed a little word to hold the front of the sentence, so that the verb can do its oldest job: to announce that something is.”

Aristotle comes to the table

Now Sophia went to a different shelf, higher up, where the philosophers were kept, and came back with a thin, much-handled roll.

“Aristotle,” she said. “The teacher of Alexander, who founded this city. This little book is called the Categories, and in another book he wrote a sentence that I think Philo will like. ‘Being is said in many ways.’”

“In how many ways?” asked Marcos warily.

“Ten,” said Sophia. “Aristotle noticed that when we say that something is, we might mean ten quite different kinds of thing. He called them the categories, and each one answers a different question you can ask about anything in the world. Let us try them on the bush.”

She drew ten short lines on the tablet, and beside each she wrote a question. Then, one by one, the four of them answered.

“Substance,” said Sophia. “The first question: what is it?”

“It is a bush,” said Demetria. “Moses is a man.”

“A noun after is. Good. Quantity: how much, how big?”

“The bush is three cubits tall,” said Marcos. “I’m guessing.”

“A measurement after is. Quality: what is it like?”

“The flame is bright,” said Philo. “Moses is afraid.”

“An adjective. Relation: compared with what, belonging to what?”

Marcos thought. “Aaron is Moses’s brother. The mountain is higher than the hill. Oh,” he said, pleased with himself. “So that’s where higher than lives. In Relation.”

“That is exactly where it lives,” said Sophia. “Every than, every brother of, every double and half. Next: Place, where?, and Time, when?”

“Moses is on the mountain,” said Demetria. “It was at midday. Prepositions!”

“Now two stranger ones. Position: how a thing is placed, standing or lying or sitting. And Having: what state a thing is in, what it has on or has off.”

Philo smiled. “Moses is kneeling. And Moses is barefoot. Because God told him to take off his sandals. The category of Having is in the story.”

“It is,” said Sophia. “And now the last two, which are the most beautiful, because the whole miracle is made of them. Action: what is it doing? Affection: what is being done to it?”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Demetria said, slowly: “The bush is burning. That’s the action. And the bush is not burned up. That’s the affection. It’s doing the burning without having the burning done to it.”

“And look at the grammar,” said Sophia. “Action is be with -ing, the continuous. Affection is be with the past participle, the passive. Aristotle sorted the world into ten boxes, and English sorts its sentences into almost the same boxes. When you learn the continuous and the passive, you are learning Aristotle’s last two categories.”

The answer that fits no box

“Now,” said Philo, and he said it very gently, as if he were putting something down that might break. “Try God’s answer.”

Sophia looked at the ten lines on the tablet.

“‘I am the One who is,’” Philo said. “Which category? He does not say what kind of thing he is, so it is not Substance. He does not say how great, or what he is like, or whose he is, so it is not Quantity or Quality or Relation. He does not say where he is, or when. He is not standing or kneeling. He is not doing anything and nothing is being done to him. He does not say that he is anything. He just is.”

For a long moment the only sound was the lamp.

“Aristotle saw the puzzle too,” Sophia said at last. “He said that being itself is not one of the categories, because it runs through all of them, like the thread through a necklace. Every is in those ten sentences is being. But being is none of the ten.” She looked at Philo. “And you are telling me that your scriptures put God exactly there. Not inside any box. Above all of them.”

“Yes,” said Philo.

“Then you have understood the verb,” said Sophia, “better than a great many philosophers.”

Marcos, who had been quiet for longer than anyone could remember, leaned back in his chair. “So the smallest verb in the language,” he said, “holds up the whole of Aristotle. And the only thing it can’t hold up is the one who used it at the bush.”

“Marcos,” said Demetria, astonished, “that was almost wise.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

Try it yourself