The Language that Rose from the Dead
by Rev. Randall Paine
Chesterton once made a disarming retort to the customary detraction of Latin
as a "dead" language. He simply remarked that to say this is not a detraction at
all, for quite in contrast to the detractor's intentions, it throws into profile the
clear ascendancy of Latin over all the "living" languages of today. "It is the
question of a dead language and a dying language. Every living language is a
dying language, even if it does not die. Parts of it are perpetually perishing or
changing their sense; there is only one escape from that flux; and a language
must die to be immortal."
Yes, indeed, pagan Latin eventually bit the dust, and the Western mind
turned with relish to the new throng of spawning tongues which began to
mottle the linguistic map of Europe. Among them, the intense lucidity of
French, the irresistible bounce of Italian, the vehement velocity of Spanish, and
the nasal sincerity of Portuguese entered upon their long evolutions, each of
them drawing a thousand voices of secular discourse into their new
constellations of emphases. But the golden tongue of Cicero was on its way
out, and along with the Empire whose body was dismembered and put to seed
for a new garden of nations, that ancient tongue was almost buried too.
But then came one of those bizarre turns in human history that makes us
wonder just how human it really is. After Rome had lost its imperial dignity to
Byzantium, and furthermore taken the moral nosedive of soaking its arenas in
Christian blood, it would have surprised no one had the last dying syllables of
the Empire's language remained inaudible to history. But at the opening of the
5th Century, the idiom that once vibrated on the tongue of Cato was strongly
and brilliantly ringing out again and in the very midst of the collapsing walls of
the Empire. The Vandals had moved into northern Africa from Spain, and in
twenty years time would sally northwards and sack the imperial capital itself.
Meanwhile, within the African walls of Hippo, St. Augustine was penning the
last chapters of The City of God and must have looked up from his desk every
few minutes or so, wondering if Genseric's hordes were going to bring his
episcopal residence down on his head. With the grace of God, he finally
brought his book to an end, but in the interim, the Vandals had also brought
Hippo to an end.
Latin died to the world
This was in 430. Just years before, St. Jerome had completed his Latin
translation of the Bible, destined to become the most influential Biblical text
ever. St. Jerome did his work largely in Palestine, as St. Augustine had in
Africa. But in Rome itself, where the Hellenized Jewish converts had arrived
with the Good News from Palestine, many of them turned their energies to the
translation of the Greek Gospel and liturgy into a Latin the waning Romans
could understand. The language was dying, but the souls of those who still
spoke it were nonetheless in need of salvation.
To everyone's surprise, there rose upon the field of this purely instrumental
effort something like a linguistic renaissance, as a host of prefaces, collects,
orations, secrets, and post-communions grew into what is known to us today as
the Leonine Sacramentary. Roman civilization went on and died; the last
emperor unceremoniously left the scene in 476. But paradoxically, the heart of
the Latin language was still beating strongly, and its conjugations and
declinations were carried on the breath of a new host of talkers. But there was
a difference: for what these men were talking about was something hitherto
unheard of on the street corners of history, and statements were being made
that no period of Cicero's had even remotely embraced.
This is Chesterton's point. The Latin language died, indeed, but the death it
died it died to the world. In the small enclave of the Christian Church, the
same language experienced nothing less than a miraculous resurrection; and
the analogy can be pursued to the end. The bloodless carcass of the language,
filled to the skin with the earthbound schemes of the ancients, could no longer
respond to the soul of paganism; like every merely natural body, the life that
had sustained it was merely mortal. So history slowly drug it off to the grave,
that one more might be added to the thousand withered tongues of time.
But then came Latin's Easter sunrise; for after the Gospel of Christ had been
rejected by the Jews, the Prince of the Apostles sealed his witness to the
Master by reddening a hill in Rome we now call the Vatican. And then, like a
hurricane abruptly changing course, the full fury of Christ's message turned
itself suddenly and excitedly upon this prostrate language of the Romans, and,
lifting a hand over its lifeless heap of words--all of them tongue-tied by
centuries of unanswered questions--it cried out, "Ephphatha!"--and the tongue
was loosed, and Christian Latin began to speak to the world.
We will never appreciate the
enormous importance of the Latin
language for our Church and our faith
until we grasp the supernatural
character of what I have just
described. We grow so limp and
woolly in our use of intellect when
anyone scares us with slogans like
"historical conditions" or "cultural
coordinates"; we vaguely agree with
we know not what and overlook the
most obvious features in the Church's
past, such as this one: in Christ, history
itself was conditioned by God, and
nothing, including language, has
looked the same since.
The Church did not adopt Latin just because it was a ready-made tool which
historical conditions furnished and which she then appreciatively picked up. It
would be as big a lie as saying that Bach took up the fugue because everyone
else was taking it up, when, in fact, everyone else was dropping it. The fact
that fugues loom so large in the history of music is in no small way because
Bach did pick it up when everyone else was tired of it; ignoring the "winds of
change," he breathed his own storm of genius into the old form, while the
others, red in the face and with throbbing temples, turned at last to the tamer
challenges of novelty. In the same way, the Church picked up the discarded
morphemes of Latin.
We labor under a particular handicap when we try to grasp this point today.
The churchmen of the Renaissance, and to a greater extent, the Jesuits of the
Counter-Reformation, were both anxious not to play second fiddle to the
humanists; so they began dragging the paradigms of classical Latin into the
ecclesiastical academies and reluctantly nodded when the Christian language
of St. Augustine and St. Bernard was demoted beneath the flaunted standards
of the ancients.
Not a little of the increasing disaffection of modern clergy with Latin has to
do with their being terrorized by the tortuous Latin of many Church
documents, including the modern encyclicals, and being made to study Cicero
and Virgil when all they wanted to do was offer Mass. Rather than enjoying
the more accessible prose of many of the Fathers and the simple Latin of St.
Thomas's Summa, the drilling of the mind in the complexities and subtleties of
ancient Latin was taken as the unavoidable baptism of fire in the Church's
native tongue. And many got predictably burnt out.
Dorothy Sayers thought this was all wrong, even for grammar school
students:
I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon the
Procrustean bed of the Augustan Age, with its highly elaborate and artificial
verse forms and oratory. Post-classical and medieval Latin, which was a living
language down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways
livelier; and a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning the
literature came to a full stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at
the dissolution of the Monasteries.2
Those who have read long and deeply into the works of St. Augustine,
St. Bernard, or St. Bonaventure, who have memorized a number of Vulgate
Psalms, or perhaps a Pauline passage or two, and who have learned to
appreciate the unique beauty and technical appropriateness of the old collects
and prefaces will know what Miss Sayers means, and why she means it so
energetically.
Classical Latin is indisputably grand, undeniably majestic, and irrevocably
dead; for the Renaissance did not resurrect it, but only drug the skeletons out
of the tombs and taught us to marvel over the intensely interesting way the
bones are joined together. The classical scholars may get more or less close to
imagining the meat and feeling the pulse of the language in its true Sitz im
leben, and a few men like Erasmus can certainly make this sort of thing
engaging. But the language is not living again, neither as it did in antiquity,
nor through the infusion of a new life; for the humanist has no new life to
give. When framed in this unnatural medium, the simple, sublime assertions
and quasi-inspired neologisms of Christian theology seem to bang about
clumsily amidst all the flourish and measured earnestness of Ciceronian
constructions.
Moreover, all this is so time-wasting, for the Christian mysteries have
already forged their own language, and there, as nowhere else, they unfold
their truths not only accurately, but also naturally. This was St. Augustine's
great discovery about the Latin Bible; for after first turning to it after years of
Cicero, he found the style cropped and barbaric, making him wonder what
crude doctrines were lurking behind such ingenuousness. Indeed, the
Scriptures "seemed to me unworthy of comparison with the grand style of
Cicero." But once he was touched by the mysteries behind the style, he
discovered the reason for the plainness:
. . . what I saw was something that is not discovered by the proud and is not
laid open to children; the way in is low and humble, but inside the vault is high
and veiled in mysteries ... these Scriptures would grow up together with a little
child; I, however, thought too highly of myself to become a little child; I,
swollen with pride, I was, in my own eyes, grown-up.3
Or in the familiar poetic paraphrase of Herbert:
Humble we must be, if to heaven we go!
The roof is high there, but the gate is low.
The Christian Latin which we find in the Vulgate, in St. Augustine and the
Latin Fathers, and in the early Sacramentaries is not just a salvaged Latin,
shaken, dusted off, and clumsily recycled in an age that had lost the inspiration
of the days of Virgil and Horace (which is the Renaissance view of the
matter). It is rather a language reborn through obstetrics irreducible to
ordinary linguistic evolution; and what the literati mistake for barbaric
unsophistication is rather the dignified simplicity demanded by the mysteries
of a God who is Simplicity Itself. The anointment of the Spirit seems to force
this Latin to move about more modestly, with a kind of self-forgetful gait, but
for all this it moves far closer to the hushed world of God's most intimate
secrets.
This is the first claim I should like to make for Christian Latin, namely that
it was the same language that had "known" the wisdom of Greco-Roman
antiquity, but had died a natural death as that wisdom exhausted its resources.
It then was resurrected from the dead by the supernatural Truth of Christ.
After much malignment, academic opinion has come to acknowledge this
quasi-miracle, especially after the 19th century researches of Ozanam,
Roensch, Goelzer, and others.
The second claim I raise is the first of two consequences of the first claim, and
it is this: though Christian Latin was not born with Christianity itself, it was
nonetheless born with Christian theology, and thus, not only its characteristic
simplicity (at least when compared with classical Latin), but also its new world
of meanings grew apace with the new understanding of the faith. Here,
certainly, Christian Latin was deeply beholden to Christian Greek, at least in
the early centuries. Still, the unique powers of Western speculation, starting
with Augustine and one day to climax in the overwhelming Latin edifice of
Aquinas, were fruits borne in the language in which Christian thought first
moved and matured. Within the grammar and vocabulary of Latin, pious
reflections on Christ's revelation had taken their inaugural steps, fashioned
their first conceptual tools, and demanded of syntax and morphology that they
yield to the sovereign exigencies of the WORD's own Word. All this made
Christian theology and Christian Latin into correlative realities--each, in turn, a
mother to the other.
The third claim I raise is the most pertinent of all, at least for us who ride on
the stampede of 20th century progress. Chesterton had observed that the only
way for a language to be truly living is to die and to resurrect by the agency of
a higher, life-giving force (such as the Church). The common, vernacular
tongues of everyday life are immersed in the contingencies of time and subject
to the vagaries of the world's currents of change. Words are dying almost every
day, with new ones rising to take their place. Through the king-of-themountain flurries of technological change, one on the heels of the other, many
of our words lose their targets on the very tip of our tongue.
This has come home to me in a worrisome way during the last 15 years.
Although I am an American, I have lived all this time overseas and spent most
of these years speaking European languages. Still, I have kept in touch with my
very American, monoglot brother. Very soon I noticed that he was using new
words I had never heard of before. It even got out of hand when I made my
visits; I almost needed an interpreter. How is it that "bad" can, in some cases,
mean "good," and that today one can only keep up with a contemporary
conversation by hopping onto the carousel of dizzily evolving computer
technology and memorizing its witless reworkings of dozens of words like
"soft," "bit," "floppy," "bootstrap," to mention just a few? The new edition of
the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language documents this overhaul the
English tongue has undergone in the last 20 years; and it does not document
increasing profundity or clarity, let alone consistency.
So--I repeat in a funereal tone--the English language is dying and with it, all
the other "living" languages of the world. And sometimes they are even
splitting in the middle. What is happening to Brazilian Portuguese when
compared with continental Portuguese (as I recently experienced firsthand) is
an even more dramatic case than American English compared with British. All
the spoken languages of the world are undergoing slow deaths, and parts of
them are being draped every day in black. But the only reason I bring all this
up is the effect it has on our ability to think and talk about immutable
doctrines.
If it is true that we are in possession of a supernatural revelation regarding
truths that are not dying, that is, that are rooted in eternity and not subject to
clocks and calendars, then it stands to reason that they will be imperfectly
preserved if the only receptacles we have are the leaky "old" wineskins of
contemporary idioms. If the truths of the faith are forever new (as they most
definitely are), then we should keep them well nested within a language that
has already been lifted above this linguistic mortuary we inhabit, invested with
some share in the unchanging status of eternity, and thus made dead to this
world and alive to another. For us in the Western Church, the forever new
wineskin ... has always been Latin, and if this beverage is to refresh us all the
way to eternity, we had better turn a skeptical eye to all the "new, improved"
wineskins being offered us today.
...Certainly we need to speak supernatural truths in the vernacular as well,
but I am afraid we will have to drink the doctrine fast, for these old wineskins
are hardly better than paper sacks, and the weakness of our fickle
contemporary tongues is tearing leaks in the fabric of the language almost as
fast as we utter our words. Sometimes it is impossible to find words whose
bottoms do not fall right out of them when you try to put truth into them.
Try, for instance, to put the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation into
modern, American English without feeling the need of a page of paraphrasing
to bring something close to theological content to the words "person" and
"nature" as we use them today. And when trying to speak of the substance of
the Eucharist, the need will be even more acute. Without at least a substantial
body of Latin in the background of our memory, all three of these fundamental
notions (and with them, the burden of our faith) will be lost to the English
words they originally generated. The words will be tossed around by history,
and, unable to signify anything beyond history, they will race out of the past
and hasten into the future; a rendezvous with the present will remain a rare and
puzzling accident.
Latin Lives in Eternity
The whole glory of Christian Latin is that it abides in the greatest present
tense of all: the "now" of eternity. Never needing to be up-to-date, it stands
free of the danger of ever getting out-of-date. And we who spend our hours
speaking interminably about the things that pass, must be able to turn in
theological reflection on God's unchanging mysteries, still inspired by a Breath
from the land of the living.
1
G. K. Chesterton, "Some of Our Errors," The Thing (New
York: Dodd, Mead &Co., 1930), p. 193.
2
Dorothy Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning," National
Review, 19 Jan. 1979, p. 94.
3
The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans., Rex Warner (New
York: Mentor-Omega, 1963), p. 57. Fr. Randall Paine is a
priest of the Archdiocese of Brasilia, Brazil, and professor of
philosophy at the University of Brasilia. He is the author of
The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, a study of G.K. Chesterton's philosophical
thought (Sherwood Sugden, 1999). This article is taken from the July, 1990
edition of Homiletic and Pastoral Review.