“Diversity” is the mot du jour, celebrated in all sorts of circles. Alas, many of those celebrating “diversity” are unclear about whether or how it connects to “unity.” Perhaps the readings for Pentecost can help. The central truth of Pentecost is the Holy Spirit, who is the principle of unity. How can that illumine our “diversity and unity” discussion?

Consider the First Reading for the Vigil Mass of Pentecost: Gen. 11:1-9 [here], on the Tower of Babel. We are told that “the whole world spoke the same language, using the same words” and, as a consequence of migration, had settled and mastered brickmaking. Having learned to produce sturdy bricks, their ambitions rose — literally: “let us build ourselves… a tower with its top in the sky and so make a name for ourselves.” The Lord is presented as seeing this and, as a consequence, confusing their language so that construction stops and they scatter. We should not dismiss this text nor draw false conclusions from it. The Lord is not a jealous God. Yahweh is not Zeus, torturing these Promethean humans for stealing the divine gift of fire, firing bricks, and building a city.

What is at issue is the building of a city of man in opposition to God. Their motives are self-aggrandizing, “making a name for ourselves,” ultimately, ones of pride. They aspire to reach heaven on human terms. They will scale the heavens not by God’s grace but the sufficiency of their own efforts. If “they have started doing this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do.” Like perhaps make babies-on-demand as products or even reject sexual differentiation. The “technological imperative” — we can, therefore we may — has always been a human temptation. It’s a human temptation because it is rooted in a more primordial temptation: to be “like gods” without actually being like God — to be “like gods” on humans’ own terms, not God’s terms. Babel is simply Eden reaching slightly higher than an apple tree.

Genesis presents linguistic diversity as God’s doing, though one wonders whether man’s own ambitions, spoken aloud, might not have been sufficiently confusing in themselves. Human unity deteriorates where God is excluded from the picture. It’s not that this was a good or nobly motivated project that God “spoiled” as much as an already prideful one whose seed of disunity God simply let sprout.

When one speaks one’s naked ambitions plainly, the confusion usually finds expression in blows: there’s not enough room on this level of the tower for thee and me. So, it’s more likely that Babel’s ambitions were also spoken by indirection, euphemism, double entendres, lies. As is often the case where sin is present, God allows what has begun to fester for man’s good, lest leaving him to his own devices result in an even worse outcome. It’s part of God writing straight with crooked lines.

So, the first lesson of Pentecost: Human unity separated from God cannot last. That was already apparent in Eden where the response to God’s “why did you do this?” results in mutual recriminations. The Babel project as a purely human enterprise of unified self-aggrandizement could not last. Fallen man cannot build unity without God. That’s the first lesson that today’s advocates of “diversity-to-unity” need to learn.

Now, no doubt such efforts may occasionally be dressed up, as necessary, in the garb of “civil religion,” with some vague allusions to a deity. Ersatz religion, however, is no substitute for real unity with the real God. Ersatz religion — especially in the attenuated form of civil religion’s residual gases pushing along the “arc of justice” and the “right side of history” — seems rather more like what Vatican II called “practical atheism.” Practical atheism, as the Council saw it, was lip service to faith that, in practice, was devoid of any real devotion or commitment. If that’s the “unity” contemporary civil religion is supposed to support, good luck. In point of fact, that civil religion is generally just drag for a secularism that has downed Rousseauan “inevitable progress” hook, line, and sinker.

So, how should diversity-in-unity be forged? The First Reading of Pentecost Mass During the Day [here] answers that one. Unity is not built from man reaching for heaven on his terms but from heaven reaching for man; the advent of the Holy Spirit forges unity even amidst diversity. The Holy Spirit fosters unity not by homogenizing but by understanding: those who witness the first Pentecost themselves acknowledge that. “We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs.” But each hears the Word of God in his language. Not in some “common” language but in his own culture and his own tongue. Their unity happens amidst diversity.

The principle of unity is not language or culture but God. It is God who overcomes such “simple” divisions as language and culture because it is He who overcomes the real divisions that beset man: sin and death. He does that not by turning back the clock to some earlier way but by enabling man — fallen man, with his sins and failings — to acquire that unity by accepting God and His grace. Because humans can do no good without God’s grace — and God’s grace is essential to moving man’s fallen will, since he cannot save himself — it is the Holy Spirit that overcomes the basic obstacle to human unity that is evil.

That is evident in the Gospel for Pentecost Mass During the Day. As the first Pentecost is actually recorded not in the Gospels but in the Acts of the Apostles, what Gospel text will you read on Pentecost? Jesus speaks of the Paraclete during the Last Supper, but the Gospel for Pentecost Mass During the Day is actually from Easter. It recounts Easter Sunday night, when Jesus first appeared to the Apostles in the locked Upper Room. It is then that the Apostles receive the first installment of the Holy Spirit: “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, whose sins you hold bound, they are held bound.” John 20:22-23, traditionally regarded as the institution of the sacrament of Penance, once again affirms the basic truth of unity: it must be rooted in God, i.e., away from sin. Only when sin is forgiven and man turns to God can we talk of unity. But, as even the Pharisees recognized (Mk 2:7), as no one but God can forgive sins, so no one but God — certainly not fallen man — can build unity from the “diversity” of man, even while respecting that diversity.

Let us then resolve, in our modern efforts to build unity amidst diversity, to not waste time with a new Babel. The only true renewal of the face of the earth comes with the Holy Spirit.