It is a cliche that the pen is mightier than the sword.  Why is this said?  Let us provide one historical example.  What historical tribe has a name that brings up images of immense slaughter and robbery and willful destruction but in reality was a peaceful tribe of whom it was said of one of their most famous members that he was “descended from the unwarlike, avaricious, perfidious, and crafty nation of the Vandals.’ [1]  History is too important to let your enemies write it.  If we let neo-Confederates write history about the Civil War, we might forget that it was fought over slavery and not States Rights, for example.

One of the reasons why history and journalism are filled with so many lies and half-truths is because the stakes of both areas of study are immense.  If inconvenient truths can be obliterated from memory, they no longer cease to influence the minds and hearts and actions of people.  If people can believe lies about their own history, they lose sight of their own dignity, or what was lost in a conquest.  Other people are told lies about their history so that they feel proud, even arrogant of who they are and where they come from.  The word has tremendous power, extending far beyond the short lives of the person wielding them.  The sword is soon dropped in death or exhaustion, bathed in the blood of enemies and then returned to its sheath, but the pen lives on to kill over and over again for many centuries.

What can a pen do?  It can invent illustrious ancestors, should they be needed to cover up a less than spectacular parentage (whether one is a world-conqueror like Alexander the Great or the ambitious peasant of A Knight’s Tale, or somewhere in-between, like the insecure kings of the Middle Ages).  A pen can erase embarrassing disasters, turn defeats into victories, recast one’s shameful actions in a more flattering light, or bury one’s opponents under a mountain of propaganda so that the truth cannot easily be known.

But the pen is a tricky weapon, for it not only cuts at one’s enemies, but also at one’s self.  A pen records a hasty boast, a foolish oath, a nasty threat against someone that one might want to take back but cannot, because the target knows the power of the pen as well as the clumsy assailant.  A pen, an extension of the boastful tongue, only more permanent in its record, can record what should not have been said, so that it may recoil back to harm the person who wielded it incompetently.  A hasty pen can ruin careers, and make someone look ridiculous for centuries.

Nonetheless, when the pen is wielded with skill, it can produce sublime works which resonate for all time.  Small wonder that at least two of the world’s major religious worship the Word (Christianity in the form of Jesus Christ, Islam in the form of the Quran).  Even in translation poems can resonate deeply, full of meaning, symbolism, and intensity.  If we are lucky and wise, our words live on for ages, giving us a reputation of excellence, whether we are a savvy businessman like William Shakespeare, whether we are a popular theologian like C.S. Lewis, or whether we are an English spinster like Jane Austen.

So, given that we are living in an age that encourages all to express themselves, their thoughts, their feelings, their mundane behaviors in 150 character chunks, let us take up that fearsome weapon of the pen wisely.  For someday people may examine our own writings seeking to understand us, ready to pronounce the verdict of history on our actions, validate (or invalidate) our causes, our lives, our sacred honor.  Let us do all we can to leave behind an honorable record by which we can stand in good faith that we have created something worth leaving behind.  For if we cannot use the pen in our self-defense and self-examination, how can we trust anyone else to do it skillfully on our behalf?

[1] Orosius, Commonitorium, VII, 38.