1. What is Church Latin?
One of the courses I teach in this year in our Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary is Latin. The textbook I use with the first-year students is titled Church Latin for Beginners: An Elementary Course of Exercises in Ecclesiastical Latin (1923). Its author is Joyce Egerton Lowe, and her book is the same one Bishop Donald Sanborn used teaching me when I started my studies at Most Holy Trinity Seminary.
Miss Lowe was trained in Bedford College, and graduated as Master of Arts in classics in 1914. Afterwards she became a lecturer in Latin at the Catholic training college at Cavendish Square, which was under the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. She was also a part-time assistant of Latin at the University College London.
As the title tells, Miss Lowe’s book teaches students church Latin. There are two major divisions in the Latin language. There is classical Latin, and then there’s ecclesiastical, or church Latin.*1 Classical Latin is that of Caesar and Cicero, written in the end times of the Roman Republic. Church Latin, on the other hand, is the language of the Catholic Church which she uses in her public prayers, especially in the Mass and the Divine Office.
At certain point of time, it became fashionable in the academic circles to praise the “classical” Latin of Cicero and Caesar, and downgrade the ecclesiastical Latin of the Catholic Church as “inferior.” In Protestant countries, in the spirit of “effacement and destruction of faith and morals,” as Saint Pius X called the Reformation in one of his encyclicals,*2 the great works of the Church Fathers and writings of the Popes were branded as “dog Latin.” Church Latin for Beginners contains a foreword written by Father Ronald Knox (1888-1957). In it he writes: “Call it dog-Latin if you will; there remains a proverb which tells us that a living dog is better than a dead lion, and the difference between the dog-Latin of St. Jerome and the lion-Latin of Cicero is the difference between a living and a dead language.”
One of the banners of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, who wanted to abolish the Mass, was vernacular liturgy. This idea, that the Latin Mass is an elitist creation of the medieval times to keep the common people out from the sphere of worship, was also the motive of the liturgical reformation of the Vatican Council II in the 1960s. Paul VI, the creator and promulgator of the so-called New (Novus Ordo) Mass said: “Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more – particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech.”*3
In reality, the origin of church Latin is far less elitist. Latin was originally the language of the people of Latium, a province in Italy. In the early days of Italy several different small states were at constant war with each other, until in 753 BC a war chief named Romulus established his own city. It was named Rome after him, and Romulus became its first king.
2. Why Latin is called a “dead language”?*4
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were all spoken in Palestine when Christ lived there. His own native language was a form of Hebrew called Aramaic. The Gospels retain some Aramaic phrases used by Him, for example:
Then he took hold of the child’s hand, and said to her, Talitha, cumi, which means, Maiden, I say to thee, rise up. (Mark 5:41)
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lamma sabachthani? that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46)
Greek was the lingua franca, i.e. the common language used in wider communication, of the Roman Empire. Saint John writes (John 12) that after Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, certain gentiles of Galilee came to Philip and asked that they might have a conversation with Him. Jesus then gave them His last public speech. It is quite probable that Our Lord gave this speech in Greek. Saint John, as well as the other authors of the New Testament, wrote in Greek.
The language of the Catholic Church continued to be Greek both in her literature and in her liturgy until the end of the second century. All the first converts to the Catholic Faith spoke Greek, and no sooner was the Faith brought to the West than the Mass was celebrated there.
The Greek language of the liturgy changed to Latin quite naturally as soon as the Greek language ceased to be the usual language of the Roman Christians. By the second half of the third century the usual liturgical language at Rome seems to have been Latin, though fragments of Greek remained for many centuries. It is not known exactly when Latin was adopted in the services at Rome, but the Church there had been founded more than a century and a half before it produced a single Latin writer. The first among ecclesiastical authors to use Latin was Pope Saint Victor I (AD 191-203).
The reason why Latin supplanted Greek in the greater part of the Western World is not hard to find. The spread of the Roman Empire, and the fact that its official language, Latin, was also the language of the see of Saint Peter (Rome) show why the prayers and services of the Church became and remain Latin.
Where Latin was not used for the Mass, another dead language still remained, such as Syriac or Greek. They were retained for fear that a new language might not catch and hold the true meaning of the Mass. Old languages preserve the ideas of words, while vernacular languages change all the time. In the seventeenth century the missionaries to China asked for permission to say Mass in the native language. The people found Latin extraordinarily difficult, utterly unlike their own in structure. The Church gave them permission to use Chinese. But she decreed that the old classical Chinese, a dead language as changeless as Latin, was to be used instead of the ordinary speech of the people.
3. The differences between Latin and English
Latin is what is called an inflected language. “Inflection” means bending, and Latin words bend or inflect at the end and change. For example, when the English speakers put up a sign telling the trespassers to “beware the dog,” the ancient Romans inscribed a sign which said simply “cave canem.” “Canem” is the noun “canis” in the accusative case, which shows it to be the object of the sentence, in this case the thing which one must beware. In English the word “dog” remains the same notwithstanding if it is the subject or an object, while in Latin one sees the relation of the noun from its case, namely how the noun is inflected.
This difference can sometimes be confusing to the English speakers. When King George VI was touring South Africa in 1947, he was disedified when the police enforcing the racial segregation requested him to stay away from the black greeters. Noticing the motto of the country “Ex unitate vires,” which his father George V had granted to the country in its coat of arms, George VI exclaimed that there was not much “unitate” there.*5 The King probably wanted to say that there was not much ”unity” in the country, but then it would have been better for him to use word “unitas”, the nominative singular case of the word, instead using the motto’s word “unitate”, which is the ablative singular of unitas, and which used with the preposition ex creates the phrase “strength from unity.”
Besides inflection of the words, the word order is another major difference between the languages. In English the correct word order is quite strictly enforced, usually being subject – verb – object, for example “I give the rose to the girl.” In Latin, on the other hand, the word order is very free. There are some general guidelines, but the sentence in question can be said either “dono rosam puellæ”, or “rosam puellæ dono,” or “puellæ rosam dono.” The inflection “rosam” shows that that word “rose” (rosa) is the object, that of “puellæ” shows that ”the girl” (puella) is the one who receives the rose, and “dono”, which means “I give,” shows the action, the subject, and the tense of the verb.
The third major difference is that in Latin all nouns have genders, namely masculine, feminine or neuter. It is of course easy to distinguish the gender of words indicating male people or female people; for example the word “puer” (boy) is masculine, while “puella” (girl) is feminine. But inanimate things may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter; for example liber (book) is masculine, mensa (table) is feminine, and verbum (word) is neuter.
4. History of Spelling
Classical Latin did not distinguish between upper case and lower case letters, nor was there any system of punctuation. It was only in later medieval times that church Latin started to introduce types of punctuation. Also, there was no difference between the letters I and J, nor between U and V.
This difference between old and modern Latin spelling can be seen clearly in the inscription above Our Lord’s Cross. In the fourth century Saint Helena brought the tablet of the True Cross to Rome, and this relic is kept in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Rome. With the invasion of the Vandals in 455 the tablet was hidden, and was rediscovered only in February 1492 in a sealed lead box built into a wall. In it is written in mirrored text IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM, which in modern spelling is rendered as “Jesus Nazarénus, Rex Judæórum,” meaning “Jesus Nazarene, King of the Jews.” That is why many crucifixes show a tablet bearing the letters INRI, after the classic Latin abbreviation of Our Lord’s title.
This lack of lower case letters and punctuation could sometimes cause problems in the real understanding of the text, which is one of the reasons they were introduced in church Latin. When Our Lord heals the leper in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, He tells him “Volo. Mundáre.” Saint Jerome points out in his commentary to the text, which is read in the Breviary lessons on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, that most Latin readers were misled in reading the text. This was because “mundáre” can be either the present infinitive active, meaning ”to clean,” or the second person imperative passive, meaning ”be thou cleansed,” or ”be thou made clean.” Simply reading “volo mundáre”, the Latin readers would first have assumed the meaning of the text be: “I will to make thee clean.” This Saint Jerome says to be wrong, for the true meaning of the sentence is not a mere wish but a command: “I will: be thou cleansed.” Our Lord used His divine power to heal the leper, which is much better expressed by separating the two words with a period: “Volo. Mundáre.”
5. Latin is Saved by the Church
Gradually, when the Romans became masters of Italy, they imposed their own dialect of Latin on the tribes they conquered. In its early stages Latin was heavy and clumsy. But in the later times of the Republic, when Rome started to become a world power, the men of literature, who were trained in the school of the Greeks, started to embellish and hellenize the Latin of the Romans. However, the large mass of the common people could not or cared not to be part of this internationalizing of their native tongue, and continued to speak their old language.
So eventually there were two forms of Latin: those of the educated elite, and those of the lower classes. When the Republic was to change into an Empire, the upper classes soon degenerated in their education and morals, and many new leaders of Rome came either from the lower class or from the military. Even foreigners became Emperors during these tumultuous times. One of the most notable of them was Philip the Arab, born in Syria, who, by the twist of fate, ruled as the Emperor, when Rome celebrated its one thousandth anniversary of foundation in 248 AD.
By the time the Catholic Church became the state church of Rome in the fourth century, the literary or high-class Latin was already borrowing widely from the popular speech. And to better promote the Gospel, the Church abandoned the language of Caesar and Cicero, and preached in the language what the common people could best understand.
This adaptation had its dark side too. Many popular versions of the Sacred Scripture, which Catholics were now free to read and distribute openly, ended up being prejudicial to the Church authority and incorrect in their translations. Therefore the Church authorized Saint Jerome to prepare the authorized version of the Bible. Saint Jerome was a great admirer of language of the old classicists, especially Cicero. He saved the language what would later be called church Latin from the fate which fell to Latin as a spoken language. By doing this, Saint Jerome guaranteed the survival of Latin as a dead language, a paradox very fitting to this saint of a fiery temperament.
With the invasion of Rome by the barbarians, Latin would have been lost had it not been adopted by the Catholic Church. In 455 the Vandals attacked Rome, forcefully evacuated many of its people and sold many of them into slavery to North Africa. The provinces and military commanders started to lose their respect to the Emperor, and in 475 the high commander of the legions, Flavius Orestes, deposed the Emperor and set his own son Romulus Augustus on the throne. This son, who was merely a child at the time, was to be the last Emperor of Rome. And so, by a pure chance, the last ruler of independent Rome happened to bear the name of her first one. Another military revolt was made in 476 by an auxiliary general Odoacer, and Romulus was forced to abdicate before the Senate and sent into exile. Odoacer made himself King of Italy, and ended the rule of Rome and the medieval times started.
6. The Dead Language Which Remains Forever
With the end of the rule of Rome in western Europe, the fate of the Latin language as spoken language was sealed. But in the midst of the political and cultural chaos of the early Middle Ages, the Catholic Church sought determinately to preserve this language of the ancient Rome in her liturgy. In a sharp contrast to the words of Paul VI, Pope Pius XI wrote:
For the Church, since it contains all nations in its embrace, since it is going to endure until the consummation of the ages, and since it utterly excludes the common people from its governance, requires by its own nature a universal language, unchangeable, not that of the common people.*6
Therefore, it is not only for cultural reasons, but also for doctrinal reasons that the study of Church Latin is important and useful to a Catholic student. Vernacular languages change all the time, almost from generation to generation. This is the reason the Protestant churches and the Novus Ordo church are constantly updating and republishing new translations of their prayers, liturgies, and Bibles. The Latin language of the Divine Office and the Latin Mass on the other hand never needs updating or retranslating. “Hoc est enim corpus meum” means “for this is My Body” just as much today as it did one thousand years ago. The Latin of the Catholic Church needs no change into any sort of “plain language easily understood” nor to be “converted into everyday speech,” as Paul VI would have it.
Endnotes:
*1 For a detailed study on the subject, read the entry “Latin, Ecclesiastical” by Antoine Degert in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).
*2 Editæ Sæpe, encyclical of Pope Pius X on St. Charles Borromeo, May 26, 1910.
*3 Speech at the general audience, November 26, 1969.
*4 The information is taken from the book The Mass by Father Joseph A. Dunney, New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1936, chapter 5.
*5 Robert Lacey: Monarch. The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II. New York, NY: Free Press, 2003, p. 155.
*6 Pope Pius XI: Apostolic Letter Officiorum Omnium, 1922.
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