Interpretation of passage from "The Scarlet Letter"

[daniel16]

I get some of it, but could you please help clarify the meaning? I have to identify motifs and one of them is 'religion/church/bible'. I think that this passage may have to do with that motif. I specifically don't understand the part about "The Tongue of Flame" and what "kept him down on the level of the lowest":

""There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought -- had they ever dreamed of seeking -- to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of ms that Mr. Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered!"

(I'm only up to the part of the book where Dimmesdale, Pearl, and Hester stood on the scaffold at the same time. Please don't ruin the ending.)

Thanks

[Banana]

My guess is that the Tongue of Flame is a symbol for the kind of eloquence that he was describing. Not quite the same eloquence as at Pentecost, where every person heard Peter in their own language, but the kind of eloquence where the speaker speaks right to your heart.

[The Mythwriter]

What it means to me is that the preachers of the town don't actually have the authority and approval of God in their practice, but are simply proclaiming their morals to everyone through their own egos and self-assuredness. The tongues of flame were the physical manifestations of a Gift of God in the Book of Acts, and when the apostles received these, they were able to speak to everyone in their own language, literally. (Or in a deeper sense, able to communicate to every human through the heart, depending on interpretation) Since the preachers in "The Scarlett Letter" DIDN'T receive any such thing, apparently, they aren't preaching the true words of God.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a lot of this book to debase the religious practices of the time. He thought the preachers had too much power and abused it, and had too much glory to themselves rather than giving it to God. So the church leaders are the villains in this story, similar to in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible." Too much power, too little wisdom.

That's how I interpreted it, but of course someone else may see it differently. Hope it helps clear it up a little, "The Scarlet Letter" is a fantastic and deep book, but pretty opaque in places... I had a hard time with some of it too.

[Fran]

As I understood it "The tongues of flame ...." is a reference to the final gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, namely Wisdom. So that after Pentecost the Apostles not only possessed the knowledge but also the Wisdom to interpret that knowledge for the good of mankind.