How Monks Helped Invent Sign Language

Deacon Steven Greydanus alerted me to this interesting piece in National Geographic.

Dom Pedro Ponce de León, “the first teacher for the deaf,” was a 16th-century Spanish Benedictine who hit upon the idea of teaching the deaf to communicate using a system of hand gestures similar to ones used by his fellow monks during periods of silence.

Another 16th-century Spanish priest and pioneering educator for the deaf, Juan Pablo Bonet, built on Ponce de León’s work, developing the first manual alphabet, similar to the manual alphabet used today in American Sign Language (ASL). In 1620 he published the first surviving work on teaching the deaf.

A 17th-century French Catholic priest named Charles-Michel de l’Épée developed still more comprehensive methods, and in Paris founded the first public school for deaf children. De l’Épée’s successor passed on his methods to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an American Congregationalist minister, who founded the American School for the Deaf in Connecticut. (He is of course the namesake of Gallaudet University, a university for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, DC.)

I wonder if anybody has ever undertaken to do an exhaustive catalogue of all the spinoffs and side-benefits the world owes to the Catholic tradition and the work of enterprising Catholics who were either just puzzling over the Tradition and stumbled on something cool, beautiful or useful or who were just trying to get stuff done (like teaching the deaf or teaching Slavs) and just cooked up sign language or the Cyrillic alphabet in order to get the job done? I wonder if such a project is even possible?

Jesus remarks that if we seek first the kingdom all the other stuff we need will be given as well. This is a small sample of that. Monks busy about the work of building the kingdom cook up sign language along the way and the whole world benefits. An Augustinian monk interested in the work of God in creation invents the whole science of genetics and we all benefit.

Unfortunately, one of the tendencies of post-modernity is to go ahead and just try seeking “everything as well” without seeking first the kingdom. The trouble, as Paul warns us is that “the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope” (Romans 8:20). So the project of seeking our happiness in creation without God is always doomed to break down in futility in the end, forcing a return to seeking God’s kingdom. We are in the middle of a vast civilizational attempt at just such a project. It will not end well and we shall discover, sooner or later, that a return to seeking the Kingdom is necessary.