What's the Big Deal with Latin?

My mother gave me a book of beginning Christian Latin to study in 7th grade. I loved languages, and she felt that knowledge of basic Latin would help me understand the roots, meanings and forms of words in English. She was right; I gained a greater understanding of English (and, coincidentally, Spanish) through studying Latin vocab and grammar than I ever could have from English spelling and grammar workbooks.

But something else happened that my mother did not expect.

In studying Latin for its application to English, I came to enjoy the Lingua Latina for its own sake. It is precise, concise, and transcendent of place and time--basically everything a body could ask for in a spoken and written language. I liked it so much that I started learning songs and chants in Latin, and even occasionally attending the Latin Mass. And then, when my Best Beloved and I were planning our wedding Mass and including a lot of Latin in it, my mother started to protest. 

"Nobody will understand it! Nobody will get anything out of it. It's basically useless. It's a dead language. What's the big deal about Latin, anyway?"

But looking at history, it's fairly obvious that Latin is a pretty big deal. In the way that everyone learns English now for political, social and economic reasons, once upon a time, every educated person learned to read, write and speak Latin. Latin was the language of communication between different cultures of the Western World for several hundred years. Even after the Roman Empire died out, it was still used as the universal language of the Catholic Church, and continues in that capacity to this day. Why is that?

Let us lay aside the political reasons of Rome having expanded its empire over almost the entire Western world; after all, if the Church found that Latin was not well suited to its purposes, she could very easily have thrown it off when the Empire collapsed. I don't believe that she held onto it out of fear of change either, for the Church is not marked by fear, but by boldness. There must have been something about Latin that made it worth keeping around, even after being called by most of the world a "dead language."

 Unlike English, Latin is incredibly precise. English was once a Germanic language, which was over the centuries merged and mixed up with Norse, Celtic, Latin and French, and is in a constant state of flux and evolution. It is in constant, everyday use by people who have grown increasingly lazy, and (probably as a result) is slowly becoming less exact, less descriptive, and more confusing. Latin, however, grew to maturity as the language of a dominant world power--it did not bow to other languages, and did not need to alter itself significantly to accommodate them. It remained pretty much the same from the days of St. Jerome (who compiled the Latin Vulgate) until now. The grammar, spelling and pronunciation are very mathematical, with few (if any) exceptions. If you want the words to say exactly what you mean, and as efficiently as possible, use Latin. The Church, in her wisdom, has done for centuries. 

Latin is also concise. When I was studying Latin, I marveled at how much less space on the page the Latin phrase took than the English translation beneath it. Relying on context and subtle changes in the endings of words, the Latin language found that it did not need most of the little connector words that we necessarily have to use in English--words like "the" and "a" and "of." This is how the Latin versions of some of my favorite hymns pack way more meaning into the same number of syllables than their English counterparts. And as a side benefit, if you happen to be crunched for time, Latin prayers are faster to say. (Though I don't recommend speed-prayer as a rule, unless perhaps you are being chased by lions...)

And it is a transcendent language. Latin may be a "dead" language today, in the sense that no one would use it conversationally, but I think its very deadness gives it attributes that no other language has. It it no longer the language of any one culture or country, yet the whole world still feels its influence, and uses it to connect to the great intellects and wisdom of our past. Thus it transcends place. 

Since Latin is not regularly spoken anymore, it is no longer in a state of flux, ever-changing and evolving, like English, Spanish, or any other language commonly spoken today. Yet it has been used through the years, primarily by the Catholic Church, to an extent far greater than any other dead language in the world's history. I think this is because, throughout the last two-thousand or so years, Latin has liked us to Christ in ways that even more obvious languages, like Hebrew and Aramaic have not. Whenever we pray a prayer or sing a song in Latin, it is like praying or singing alongside all the Christians throughout time who used this same language to worship Christ, transcending the boundaries of time.     

Unfortunately, I had no luck communicating this to my mother. She still professes not to see the point of Latin, but my Best Beloved and I did not give in, and she was forced to sit through an hour-and-a-quarter Mass which, although mostly in English, was sprinkled generously with gems from the past in the language of our spiritual forefathers. Maybe when she gets to Heaven she'll figure it out.  

Because of the Angels

Mass yesterday (which, was, incidentally, a weekday) included red cassocks for the acolytes, a stirring homily on the courage and fortitude of St. Margaret Clitherow, and Latin chant. This last was supplied by me. The former two items were courtesy of the visiting priest.

Before the final blessing, Father thanked everyone for their reverence, recalling a time when the very demeanor of Catholics and their behavior toward the sacred caught the attention of non-Catholics, and made them want to follow our faith. He prayed that such a day would come again, and encouraged us to keep on as we were doing. Then, after Mass, he thanked me for wearing a veil.

“I did not grow up in the Catholic tradition at all,” he said, “but I have always found that passage of St. Paul one of the most beautiful parts of the Bible, in that line where he says, ‘because of the angels’.”

He was referencing 1^st Corinthians 11, where Paul instructs that men should uncover their heads for worship, while women should cover their heads. He offers a theological argument for this, and then, seemingly out of the blue, says “because of the angels.”

I told Father that I had never understood that particular line. I understood the part preceding it, which had, in part, motivated me to start veiling in the first place. But that fragment of a sentence had always baffled me, as though it did not fit. I did quite a lot of research on that passage later, and none of the commentators I read seemed to have any logical explanation either. Some attempted one, but others echoed my thoughts that it just didn’t seem to fit. None seemed to think it important to the overall passage.

The best explanation I had found so far was that the angels are present at every Mass, and they would be scandalized to see a woman with her head uncovered, symbolically flouting the natural order that a woman is to be subject to her husband. It was as though St. Paul was saying, “if you won’t do this because it’s the right thing to do, do it because you’ll make the angels cry if you don’t.” It seemed a weak argument on Paul’s part, and weak arguments are not his characteristic at all-at all.

Father proceeded to explain how he understood it. “It is because when the angels look down from heaven on a veiled woman, they see not the woman’s glory, but the glory of God, and that gives them joy.” This was basically the answer I had found, but turned upside down. Or rather, right-side-up. And when you turn something right-side-up, it starts to fall into perspective.

I got a mental image of the veil reflecting the glory of God by concealing my womanly glory. If, to paraphrase a Paulism from another place, I die to myself, then I can live in Christ. If I hide my own glory, then I can show forth God’s glory—to my neighbors, to my coworkers, to my fellow-parishoners, and even the angels, who dance with joy when they see it.

Small Sentiment Saturday

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way, and laid on the color in great washes, it might drip down again on one's face in floods of rich and mingled color like some strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.”

--G. K. Chesterton

Picking Sunflowers

Once upon a time, my Dad told me a story on the way home from work.

I have the good fortune of being able to carpool with my dad to work. This is fortunate for me, because it means I don’t have to spend much of my hard-earned cash for gas, and it gives me time to read books instead of paying attention to traffic for an hour and a half every day. Plus, it gives me the opportunity for quality conversation with Dad when I feel so inclined, although most of our trips are relatively silent.

Today, however, he began telling me about his day at work, and after awhile, asked “Have I ever told you about picking sunflowers?”

“No,” I said, so he told me.

“Well, it was when I was about six or eight. My dad was a member of the Jaycees, which means Junior Chamber of Commerce, which was a group of young men, under thirty-five, and they worked for the improvement of the community. They put up the shelter in the park. I remember a bunch of them put on their hats and tool belts and got together and built it. I thought it was a church group or something to do with church, because they always met there, but I was little.

“Sometimes they would do projects to put some money in their coffers to fund these things that they did. One time a farmer called them and said he had this cornfield that he wanted to combine, but it was full of sunflowers, and he couldn’t combine it with all those sunflowers in it, because they would contaminate the corn and he wouldn’t get a good price at the elevator. So Dad and the other men went out to walk that cornfield. [Cousin about the same age] was visiting at the time, so he and I got to come along.

“The sunflowers were all different sizes. Some were big and some were little, and they were cutting them out with corn hooks, because that was the way you did it.  Dad could reach six rows, with me and my cousin on either side, because you could reach more rows than you could see, and you could do more rows at once as long as you noticed all the sunflowers. So he had us on either side of him and he could do six or eight rows that way instead of just three.

“Well we started out, and then all of a sudden I noticed that everyone else was getting way ahead of me. I was pulling up all kinds of little sunflowers, and they were missing them. My cousin was keeping right up, and I was getting further and further behind. I was quite worked up about it, because I was doing it right and they were all doing it wrong.

“I called out to them that they were missing all these sunflowers, and my dad came back and explained to me that we didn’t need to worry about the little sunflowers. They wouldn’t get big enough by harvest-time to cause any problems. What we needed to worry about was the big ones with the heads on that had seeds, and the ones that would form heads by the time the combine came through. ‘The ones about as big as you,’ he said.

“Well I hadn’t known that. I had got so caught up in picking all  the sunflowers, and hadn’t thought about which ones were going to cause problems and which weren’t. I was like that when I was little. I tended to get caught up in the details.

 

“I have never forgotten that, because life is like that sometimes too. Sometimes you don’t need to pick all the sunflowers, just the ones that are going to cause you problems. It doesn’t pay to get worked up about things that aren’t going to matter in the long run anyway.”

Till We Have Faces

I have for a very long time been a great fan of C. S. Lewis. He is easier to read than Chesterton, has a greater variety of published works than Tolkien, and has a masterful way of weaving Christian principles into his fiction without shoving them down your throat, as I have not seen equaled since his time. So, having just finished his novel Till We Have Faces, and having enjoyed it immensely while being challenged at the same time, I thought I’d recommend it here.

This book is the source of that excellent quote of his which goes thusly: “To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”

The story is that of Orual, an ugly princess of pre-Christian times, who has a beautiful sister named Psyche, and a grudge against the gods for stealing her. It is based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, but draws from it a much deeper lesson than that of curbing one’s curiosity.

Selfishness masquerades as love, sin is justified into virtue, and denial is called skepticism, while faith is mourned as madness, hope is seen as folly and true love is turned in Orual’s mind into disloyalty. It is a story about how one can be so wrapped up in one’s error that one never notices that it is error. It is a story of extreme jealousy, loss, misery, and finally despair, but it shows that even in the face of this there is hope. There is no sin so great that it cannot be forgiven a penitent heart. It shows the redemptive quality of suffering. And using the ancient gods, Lewis points to the True God, whose ways are above our ways, and whose thoughts are above our thoughts.

While reading, it was fun to try to pick out similarities between Lewis’ writing and Tolkien’s. Orual’s Captain of the Guards, Bardia, has a loyalty and devotion like that of Samwise Gamgee. And when you read of Glome as a web, and “the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives,” it’s difficult not to think of Shelob or Ungoliant. Even “Ungit,” the name used for Aphrodite, who craves blood sacrifices, is similar to “Ungoliant.”

There are also some threads that run through other Lewis books. Like his way of inventing names, for example. In the preface of the Screwtape Letters, he describes this: “I aimed merely at making them nasty [in the case of the demons]…by the sound. Once a name was invented, I might speculate…as to the phonetic associations which caused the unpleasant effect.” (emphasis added by me.) “Glome” definitely sounds something like “gloom.” There were also themes of “further up and further in” (in this case reversed to further down and further deep) from The Last Battle, God’s splendor affecting different people in different ways, like The Great Divorce, and the idea of loving vs. devouring, seen in the Screwtape Letters.

 

Oh dear. This seems to have turned out rather like the book reports I used to write in college. My main point is to encourage you to do yourself a favor and read Till We Have Faces. And when you do, if you figure out what the title points to in the book, let me know, will you? I still haven’t discovered it.

On the Actual Reading of Books

Women of culture in the days of yore were expected to cultivate their minds as well as their manners by the reading of books. And there is much to be said for reviving that practice today. I do not have research to back up my opinions, but I will lay out a few of the benefits I have found for spending one’s time reading books, rather than, for example, watching movies or TV for entertainment.

Firstly: It improves your vocabulary. It really does. People have told me and my siblings that we sound like we’re from England or some other European country, merely because we are precise in our speech and use longer/more obscure/more precise words. At college, I found I had to explain myself frequently to my fellow students, because they didn’t know words like “callow” or “scintillating” or  “colloquial.” It comes of reading books. And it’s amazing how quickly your vocabulary can slip if you stop reading books for an extended period of time.

Secondly: Scanning a page is a lot healthier than staring at a screen.

Thirdly: You will learn a lot. Especially if you choose your books carefully, but even those dreadful dime-a-dozen murder mysteries contain a decent amount of interesting trivia. And no, you will not learn just as much by watching detective shows on TV. When you read something you internalize it more than if you were watching it…possibly because you can read at your own pace, pause, back up and re-read, almost without noticing it, whereas a show goes along at a predetermined pace, and while your remote does have pause and rewind buttons, are you very likely to use them?

Fourthly: Books are adaptable to a busy schedule. If you sit down to watch a movie, you kind of have to devote two hours together out of your day to that activity. Whereas the nice thing about books is that, when used in conjunction with bookmarks, you can pick up and leave off at your convenience, without worrying about using up electricity, tying up the DVD drive, or missing anything.

Fifthly: Somehow, when you finish a book, you don’t get that feeling that you’ve just wasted a lot of time, like you get when you finish a marathon session of your favorite TV show. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe not. Just sayin’ (to quote a colloquialism).

Lastly: I must say, the idea of having one’s own personal library and having read most, if not all, of the books in it, is appealing indeed.

You Never Grow Up…

Some kids never want to grow up. Others spend their entire childhood looking forward to the day when they will be considered grown-ups, and in their long-awaited early twenties are disappointed to discover that “being grown-up” is not as clear-cut a line as they thought it was.

That was me. I’m still looking forward to being grown up. But now I’m not as sure just how much longer that will take.

Once upon a time, my mother in her wisdom (I’m convinced God gives mothers a particular motherly grace that manifests itself as wisdom. They know things just by virtue of being mothers) said that when you are a little child, you think the world revolves around you, and everyone else is there to take care of you or amuse you. As you get older you come to realize this is not the case, and that there are other people in the world that are possibly of more importance than yourself. But the true mark of being grown up is learning to put others first and yourself last, giving yourself to the service of others.

Hearing that, I was afraid I’d never make it. My fantasies of magically being grown-up at eighteen or twenty-one were now completely shattered. “How old were you when you learned that?” I asked.

“I’m still learning it,” she replied.

I cannot describe how simultaneously reassuring and disappointing that revelation was to me. If my mother, having had roughly thirty more years than I in which to grow up, had not yet made it, I would probably be very old and gray before I could ever claim to be completely grown up. On the other hand, I didn’t have to.

If being grown up is, as in my mother’s definition, a perfection in selflessness, it is something none of us can attain in this life. I am not asked to be perfect. I am simply asked to strive for perfection. In that same way, I am not asked to reach a point where I can consider myself grown up. All I am asked to do is to continue to grow up, to continue striving, all my life.