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Reggie was himself on Thursday afternoon in South Bend, and this made for one very entertaining presentation about the undying importance of Latin studies, even and especially entertaining for those who otherwise had little familiarity with the subject. Speaking for my family, my parents, grandparents, and my brother, who made the trip with me to South Bend, they had a very good time and Reggie made quite an impression on them. As my mother said, as much as one may relate about him, one has to see him in person to believe it.
The talk was held in Notre Dame’s Law School and the crowd who came to see Reggie was large enough that we had to remove from a lecture hall, of modest size, to the court room, slightly larger, one floor up; even there, there were not enough places for people to sit. My family and I had come all the way from East Lansing; my friend, Iacobus (not the inimitable Iacobus of this blog) came from Iowa City; I talked to a priest who had come from Chicago; I talked to a Chemistry professor who had come over from Valparaiso (my alma mater); and then, of course, there were any number of people from Notre Dame and St. Mary’s, etc. Reggie drew quite an audience, though I imagine that, by and large, it was Catholic, if the number of men in clericals was proportionate to the laity in the group.
As for the substance of what he said, it was the typical Reggie. If you’ve been to one of his summer’s in Rome, then you’d heard it all before. He told some of his favorite stories, explained a little about his amazing method of learning Latin (no memorization and no tests), talked about some of the new books he was carrying with him, by way of illustration of the Latin tradition: Erasmus’ explanations of Latin and Greek proverbs and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Most of all, as he always does, he communicated, indeed imparted, to the audience some of his passion for this language, so that even my father and grandmother were wondering, albeit vaguely, about studying Latin.
For myself, it was a reinforcement of my current efforts, a strong reminder that I shouldn’t feel strange for carrying my Lewis & Short with me, everywhere I go, that one should spend some time each day with Gildersleeve & Lodge, and that, as Reggie said to the audience, yeah, after 15 or so years, you might get the hang of this language, you might then be said to know it modestly well.
Perhaps more pointedly than at other times, he spoke of the crisis in the Church – no, not the crisis in the Church about which this blog often comments – but about a crisis which Reggie thinks is here or will soon be here when men of his age and men like Grandpa Joe (which is how they refer to Benedict around the office, Reggie said) are gone and the last of those folks who took a knowledge of Latin for granted are no more. How will we study canon law, the Second Vatican Council, the Church Fathers, etc., if we no longer know Latin?
And this is where I think a certain tension comes into Reggie’s view. For people like me, I have no qualms about abandoning everything in order to master this language and revel in its 2,000 years of literature, poetry, and philosophy; but for someone who wants to get on with some particular subject, say, canon law, the language is important, but it can’t be the focus of one’s whole work. Yet Reggie says that we’ll need 15 years, perhaps, to get the language nailed down. Maybe he’s intimating that we need to take a generation to train Latinists who can teach the next generation from the ground up, as it were, and they will be the ones to go into these other areas of inquiry and study with the proper tools in hand.
Perhaps this is what made a diversity of studies, coupled with a more than solid background in Latin, possible in the past. If one studied letters from the time one was knee high to a grasshopper, by the time one was 18, Latin might be second nature. But one has to begin in elementary school, as men like Ronald Knox did, and even Reggie was hesitant, at least on Thursday, about beginning that early. Of course, he thinks that he could teach babies to speak Latin, but he wants to avoid at all cost a return to the bad old days in which Latin was jammed down childrens’ throats.
I don’t know if we can have it both ways. Men are forever the same: we don’t like difficult and prolonged tasks; St. Augustine in his Confessions talks of his childhood abhhorrence in studying Greek. Children do love to learn, but most children also need a good shot of discipline to keep them on the right track. Reggie doesn’t want anyone to suffer the old whips and chains method of learning Latin – and maybe that stifled freedom and the growth of truly loving Latinists – but one thing we know is that they did know Latin. And I’m not talking about the state of affairs on the eve of the Council, for things had gotten pretty bad, relatively speaking, by that point. Pius XII’s knowledge of the language was far less as compared to Pius X’s, and John XXIII’s Veterum Sapientia should be sufficient confirmation of the fact that things Latin were not in good way.
This is where, I think, a suggestion which Ambrosius first raised in conversation ought to be considered. A great deal of valuable time in the formative years has been lost, at any rate today, if not decades ago, by the introduction of science studies and the like in the elementary and middle school and even high school years. The actual content of these studies is so piddling that it is material which would be better learned all at once, as part of a broader and more complete study, once one is in college. Removing these studies from at least elementary and middle schools, if not high schools besides, would free up hours upon hours to dedicate to the study of letters, grammar, language in general.
If we don’t have a solid knowledge of Latin and at least a modest knowledge of Greek by the time we’re 18, we’ll never again have another Cardinal Newman or a Ronald Knox; and Leo XIV will certainly not be drafting glorious encyclicals in Latin as did Leo XIII.
The downside of this talk on Thursday was that there were any number of people there who had no previous acquaintance with Reggie, which would seemingly be a good thing, except that it meant that they asked him all the wrong questions. For instance, they wanted to ask him about the liturgy, about the translations of the Mass, the new one and the older one. Reggie can talk about all of these things, but he doesn’t appear to have much relish for it. At some person’s request, however, he did talk, but this is not the topic on which you want to hear Reggie discourse, because his liberal ideology leads a very smart man into saying stupid things like, for one, defending the older translation of the Novus Ordo Missae as, for example, on the grounds that “Et cum spiritu tuo” just means “And also with you.” Which is a complete pile of garbage, and the Latin certainly doesn’t mean that, and the expression is so obviously a Christian one, and so obviously a theological one – do you think that Cicero went around greeting his neighbors, “Et cum spiritu tuo!” – “And with your breath!” “And with your wind!” or some other such nonsense?
So Reggie told the audience: just leave the Latin alone, as it is, and for the rest, you write whatever you want in your English missal or Swahili or whatever, and don’t even bother about whether it corresponds to the typical edition (Latin) of the current Novus Ordo Missae. Which pretty much sounds like the philosophy the ICEL employed the first time around, though it probably would have sounded more elegant in Swahili!
Reggie related how they had been reading from Martin Luther’s sermons in summer school and from some of Luther’s letters to Erasmus; he confidently told the audience that Luther was no heretic and that if you but switched the names at the top of these sermons, putting Aquinas for Luther, no one would ever know the difference. Now I’ll be the first to tell you, Martin Luther wrote some beautiful Scriptural commentary and he was not a man altogether devoid of spiritual insight. But the same would go for just about every other heretic out there, which is why they are heretics: they keep a lot of the good stuff, as it were, and leave out the bits that they don’t like. Except we’re not talking about ice cream flavors here, we’re talking about divinely revealed truths, and who has the authority to say that some are and some are not divinely revealed.
A good question which came from an audience member asked what one might to do, lacking many hours each day, to keep up on one’s Latin. I thought Reggie might give us the “Read something, write something, listen to something,” which he had given us last summer in summer school. Instead, he answered this man with something else which he had recommended in summer school: get yourself a Latin Bible (the latest, most modern edition, of course) and read the stories therein. It was at this juncture that we were treated to Reggie’s famous, “You don’t believe in God? neither do I!” but that’s no objection to reading the Bible, jack.
This insistence on reading from the Bible is, I think, one of the best things that Reggie says; as much as an ignorance of Latin puts us out of touch with our civilization, how much more does an ignorance of the Bible remove from us a knowledge of half the allusions in literature and of sympathy with men of culture before our time who knew the text in great depth. (Even putting us out of touch with men like Martin Luther who, in his old age, could yet quote from memory whole pages from the Vulgate!)
Despite the matters in which I disagree with Reggie, it’s still fun to hear the guy, even when I’ve heard it before, and so I’m very glad that I went and was able to bring my family along. I was able to chat with him afterwards, at the reception, and introduce my friend. I warned him that we would have a contingent from Cornell descending upon him next summer, and he took it in stride. Since we’re only bringing one classicist with us, though, as is the plan now, it shouldn’t be too painful for him.
My family and I had also come to stroll the campus, since my grandparents had not seen it before, and we had a lovely time of it. As my family and I drove out of South Bend the next day, under the sun and along the fields of corn, I wrote the following couplet in honor of Notre Dame:
Sol iste arva super Cereris viridissima splendet
Qui quoque Nostrae in discipulis Dominae ore renidet.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
You see, this is, perhaps, the first lesson one learns from Reggie, even before touching down in Roma: without Lewis & Short, you’re dead in the water. The first glance meaning of “horreo” looks like it must have something to do with “scary” or “horrifying.” And it does, but only eventually. First of all, it means to stand on end or to bristle. Vergil uses it in the Aeneid this way all the time, in the sense of bristling or rough.
We also find in Lewis & Short “to move in an unsteady, shaking manner; to shake or tremble.” Look at this citation from Ovid: “corpus ut impulsae segetes Aquilonibus horret.” The corn stalks like rough hairs bristling, rustling in the wind.
Or look at this passage from Book One of the Aeneid (165): “. . . tum silvis scaena coruscis/Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra.” There’s nothing particularly terrifying about the shadow of the woods; it’s just that the trees are waving in the wind and so the shadow moves unevenly besides.
The “aequora” requires similar investigation. Most often, we find it used of the seas, because of their smooth, level surface. But it can be used of any smooth, level surface, and is, in fact, used of fields besides. So I was thinking of the seas of grain and I wanted to use this word, which is well adapted for an hexameter line, because it makes for a perfect fifth foot.
TP: “the Sun, the one who also….”
Oh, I should also say that the photo credit for the post goes to my grandma. I don’t know how many people were taking pictures – I don’t remember many flashes going off – as they didn’t want to risk drawing Reggie’s eagle eye, but my grandma braved it.
Though it looks like she was hiding the camera in her lap, so there were some heads in the way.
Yes, I knew what horrentes meant, as well as aequora (which is quite good). However, “splendeo” is intransitive, so “horrentes virida aequora” all must depend on “super.” So how does “horrentes” work with “virida aequora”? The genders are different, and if “horrentes” refers to the grain, you don’t yet have a way of coordinating the grain to the green fields.
I’ll grant “et qui” as being coordinated with “saltans super.” It was not clear to me what the “et” was linking the subsequent clause back to — the entire preceding clause, or just saltans.
I’m sorry, I see now what you guys were talking about!
Also, since “viridis, -e” is an adjective, it is an i-stem 3rd declension. So the neuter plural accusative and nominative is “viridia,” not “virida.”
I must commend you, Iosephe, it is unlikely that I could have fit anything into a dactylic hexameter in the first place!
Not yet seeing my own mistake, I thought, Clara, that you were wondering about the meaning of “horrentes.”
Blast! Another mistake! This is what I get for trying to write verses in the car. : )
I’ll fix it around here . . . .
Okay, thanks to the attentions of Clara and Tobias, I think my couplet is now much improved – besides lacking what I’ll call “spelling” mistakes. :)
Actually, I did get that meaning of “horrentes”, from lowly Latin Words. So I figured it must be something like that. But yes, my compliments as well for putting something like that together at all!
By the way, while we’re on the topic of Lewis and Short, does anyone happen to know the cheapest way to acquire one? I really want to buy one, but they’re so expensive, and it’s about the worst time of year to be piling on extra expenses…
I wasn’t sure if Latin Words made the meaning sufficiently clear in the context. Anyway, I waved goodbye of “horrentes” and “aequora”!
Amazon.com has used Lewis & Short’s from $130, $70 off the list price.
Also, you might want to scope out the used bookstores in the Ithaca, I think, especially that Bookery place, near the organic store near the episcopalian church. Stuff like that will go through there from time to time.
Regarding the ease with which the young are capable of learning Latin, my granddaughters, who are not yet 5 and 3, have committed to memory and daily recite in Latin the Angelus, all the prayers of the Rosary and their mealtime blessing prayers.
As their Grandma I’ll admit to an inclination to boast, still, I think that’s quite remarkable!
That’s very good, and I hope that they’re given an opportunity to start the rudimentary study of the language from a young age.
I’m amazed at this reaction to Reggie:
his liberal ideology leads a very smart man into saying stupid things like, for one, defending the older translation of the Novus Ordo Missae as, for example, on the grounds that “Et cum spiritu tuo” just means “And also with you.” Which is a complete pile of garbage, and the Latin certainly doesn’t mean that
Who was the peritus at this address . . . you or Reggie?
When HIS considerable scholarship doesn’t support YOUR tenaciously held preference, he’s reduced to “a smart man who says stupid things?”
How arrogant is that!
What you should have said is, “That’s not what the Latin SAYS.”
Because I think Reggie is a bit more intellectually equipped than you to tell us what the Latin MEANS.
In this, he is supported by the highest authorities in the field – not MODERN authorities, mind you, but those of, say, the stature of Joseph A. Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite, volume I, p. 363ff., especially footnote 16.
I vastly prefer “And with your spirit” (actually, I prefer “et cum spiritu tuo” – but that’s another story!) . . . but Reggie is telling us WHAT THE LATIN MEANS, not what a literal translation of the Latin says.
In this regard, too, see Monsignor Ronald Knox, On Englishing the Bible (found on some online bookdealers under its USA title, Trials of a Translator), in which he explains the “words are not coins: you cannot give an exact conversion from one language to another” and in which he asks, “What do you want, a literal translation or a literary translation? Because you can’t have both.” He also says – and here was a man fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and born and brought up in the tradition of the Book of Common Prayer, “The translator must not be afraid of the word ‘paraphrase’ – it is the bogey of the half-educated.” And he goes on to give numerous examples. It might be noted, finally, that when translating the Holy Week Liturgy in 1951 for Burns and Oates (Sheed and Ward) HOLY WEEK BOOK, Knox rendered, “Et cum spiritu tuo” as “And with you, his minister.”
Knox and Foster get my vote over Pell, Roache and – God help us – Moroney, any day!
Anonymous, please, please use a name. A pseudonym, even one created for this blog, is perfectly fine, but it is annoying and confusing to refer back to “anonymous,” especially if more than one person goes by this. Thanks.
Have you taken Reggie’s course, anonymous?
Dear anonymous, thank you for your kind remarks. It’s not often that we get comments on the blog which make use of Ronald Knox and Joseph Jungmann.
You’re concerned, I take it, that while Reggie and the nice people who gave us the current translation of the Novus Ordo Missae were telling us what “Et cum spiritu tuo” means or, at least, were giving us a literary rendering of it, I and others who would spit all over the current translation are reverting to a barbarous literalism which, I guess is the implication, would be both unsavory in its sound and unfaithful to the true meaning of the Latin.
I’m sorry, my friend, but “Et cum spiritu tuo” does not mean “And also with you.” Nor is “and also with you” a literary or polished rendering of the expression. It is flat, insipid, and misses all of the theological nuance.
As Reggie said at his talk, we’ve gone with “And also with you” because “And with thy spirit” (these are Reggie’s words) sounds funny to us. It’s a question of our contemporary tastes and sensibilities and “And also with you” is what we’re left with.
Ronald Knox is an interesting character. Now notice that in his translation, though it’s extremely clunky, he doesn’t leave out the theologically important aspect of the greeting: “and with you, his minister.” That’s faithful to the Latin, though neither a literal nor an elegant rendering of it.
You want to talk about the Book of Common Prayer, that literary work, and of people who really knew the meaning of Latin? How do they translate “Et cum spiritu tuo”? “And with thy spirit.”
Now look at what Jungmann says about this greeting and exchange:
“Both the greeting and the reply are ancient, their origins hid in pre-Christian times. In the Book of Ruth (2:4) Booz greets his reapers with Dominus vobiscum. The salutation was thus a part of everyday life. . . . The reply of the reapers to Booz’s greeting was: Benedicat tibi Dominus. We employ in its place a phrase which means almost the same thing: Et cum spiritu tuo, a formula which betrays its Hebrew origin and has many parallels in St. Paul. We render its full meaning by saying simply, ‘And with you too.’”
Indeed? That’s the full meaning, Jungmann? But look at the helpful footnote he gives us:
“This is a Semitism: Spiritus tuus = your person = you. Still it is to be remarked that even St. John Chrysostom . . . had already referred ‘thy spirit’ to the indwelling Holy Spirit. In fact, in his first Whitsun sermon, he sees in the word ’spirit’ in this counter-greeting an allusion to the fact that the bishop performs the sacrifice in the power of the Holy Spirit. That is the reason the Dominus vobiscum was even at an early age restricted to those endowed with major orders, bishops, priests and deacons, and not given to subdeacons who were numbered among the higher orders only since the 13th century.”
Okay, so you want to stand with Foster on that one? Though he’s no Hebraist? And you think that Jungmann provides all the support we need to translate confidently, “And also with you”?
You see, though were an ass about it, you’d have a small point: you might say, with Foster, sure, yeah, it means “and also with you” – if everyone already understands that the YOU involved is only someone in major orders. The expresion has come along way since the days of Booz and it’s the theological significance which we’re worried about losing. You’ll hear know-nothing lay people saying it to each other all the time, “Dominus vobiscum” because they don’t understand what it’s all about, but they know a few Latin words.
So the translators of the new Mass, having neither literary taste nor theological erudition, said, yeah, “and also with you,” that gets at the idea. And so that’s good enough, right?
The expression is a theologial one, a liturgical one, and Reggie does no one any favors by saying that it just means “and also with you”, because it doesn’t. It means, “and with your breath or wind.” What it really means is going to depend on the context, right? It’s a meaningful Latin expression, it’s just that it’s probably not something anyone before the Christians would have said.
If you want to pick a fight with literalistic renderings – “spiritus” is a literalistic Latin translation of a Hebrew word, roo-ach. The Latin word is perferct for translating “roo-ach” and one can see a similar progression of meanings for these two words. But if, as according to Jungmann’s suggestion, it just means “and with you, too” the Latin failed the Hebrew; why didn’t they just say, “Dominus vobiscum. Et tecum.” Which Reggie would have translated, “The Lord be with you. And back at ya, jack!” Which greeting I would enjoy exchanging far more than the current meaningless, bland drivel.
Now look at some of the development in meaning that the Hebrew word, roo-ach – if we’re safe taking that as the original of our expression – goes through. First of all, it means, wind, spirit, breath. Jungmann stopped at the point where we find it means the spirit of the living, breathing, being in animals and men. But it goes on to have these other significations: the moral or prophetic character in a person; then, the Spirit of God as inspiring an ecstatic state of prophecy; spirit as impelling prophecy to utter instruction or warning; imparting warlike energy, executive and administrative power; the spirit resting upon the Messianic king – need I go on?? Oh, okay, I will, “the prophets of restoration conceive of the divine spirit [still roo-ach] as standing in their midst and about to fulfil all divine promises.”
Does this sound at all like the “spirit” with a Prophet, Priest and King, i.e. a bishop? You know, anon, those Church Fathers and early liturgists weren’t all complete idiots. So the Latin translates roo-ach as “spiritus” to bring in all of these rich significations, which are completely lost if we say, ploop bloop, “and also with you.”
No, anon, Reggie and Jungmann and whoever else you want to lump with them are WRONG if they say that “Et cum spiritu tuo” means, especially in the context of the liturgy, “And with you, jack.”
Will Reggie’s talk be published on-line?
I don’t know that there is any “talk” to publish. He simply spoke from the top of his head – but maybe someone was recording it and will transcribe it? I doubt it, but maybe.
Well, Iosephus – good points. And there are not many blogs where footnotes are quoted, so we should be very pleased with ourselves! :-)
I’m FAR from defending the old ICEL – just reacting to Father Reginald’s remarks being called “a lot of garbage” or whatever other inelegant expression was used.
As you may have missed: I said I like “and with your spirit” better and “et cum spiritu tuo” even better than that!
A little observed/remarked upon but HUGE improvement in the revised ICEL – or at least the draft I saw in The Tablet (I think) – was the references to the Church with female pronouns (e.g. “watch over her and guide her” or something like that). Besides being more accurate in terms of the Latin, what an improvement not to refer to the Church with the neuter we would use for international corporations, but a PERSONAL PRONOUN – and a feminine one at that!
By the way, given your name (Iosephus), have you heard the Reggie story about Reggie noting that the Papal signature should be corrected from Joannes Paulus to Ioannes Paulus? As I heard the story, Reggie said to Don Stanislaus, “Tell your boss there’s no ‘J’ in Latin.”
Don Stanislaus came back with the signature unchanged and told Reggie, “My boss said to tell you: NOW THERE IS!”
Anyhow, it’s a chilly day in this part of the USA, and that reminds me of how appropriate the literal translation of THIS old proverb is:
SEMPER UBI SUB UBI.
Dear anon, I’m glad that we’re both seeing the matter more clearly now. I like Reggie very much, but sometimes the things he says needle me – which is often why he says them, to needle people like me – and since he is perhaps the greatest Latinist in the world, it makes an impression on people when he throws his authority behind this or that statement.
My remarks were intended to express my strong disapprobration of his offhand remarks about “et cum spiritu tuo” which I think were motivated not so much by Latin erudition as by his disapproval of the conservative agenda in the Church, an agenda which includes, among other things, an improved translation of the Novus Ordo Missae.
He said that day that all such wrangling about translations of the Mass is a waste of time – and there I agree with him heartily! only my alternative, far different than his, is that everyone return to the Latin. But that’s not a surprising view, if you’re at all familiar with this blog.
Thanks for the very interesting comments about “et cum spiritu tuo”. When I first read Knox’s translation, “and with you, his minister”, it was obvious to me that there was a theological meaning behind the reply which had been lost on those of us who never got beyond ‘amo, amas, amat’. And our Knox group completely agrees with you that many of his translations are “clunky” (his ‘Exultet’ being one of our pet peeves!). He was, it should be remembered, not translating for actual use in an English liturgy but for the purpose of helping people to understand the Latin liturgy better. I think he accomplished this in spite of the inelegance of some of his phrases.
It is also humbling to note that, while Knox’s English prose is matched by few, and his knowledge of Latin extensive, he so often did a bad job of translating. In other words, it isn’t as easy as it sounds to get the perfect translation!
Vicki, exactly. Nothing wrong with a “clunky” translation if it was for the purpose of explaining the meaning of the text. I hadn’t realized that when I read anon’s first comment. Knox would obviously have been able to render an elegant English translation of most anything Latin or Greek.
You speak of “your Knox” group. What is this?
Iosephus,
“Our Knox group” is a chat group for members of the Ronald Knox Society (www.ronaldknoxsociety.com) of which I am President.
BTW, Knox’s translation “and with you, his minister” only appears in his translation of the Easter Vigil. The Knox Missal, which really only contains his translations of Scripture, uses “and with you” as the prayers were translated by a committee.
Just for fun for you latinists:
how many of you ever noticed the following limerick in St.Thomas Aquinas? Msgr. Knox did!
Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio
Concupiscentae et libidinis exterminatio,
Caritatis et patientiae,
Humilitatis et obedientiae,
Omniumque virtutum augmentatio.
from Prayer After Communion
Beautiful! I often use that prayer, but all notice of limericks had escaped me. Just the thing that Knox would, however, notice!