Ecclesiastical Latin

But even in this respect Africa had been beforehand with Italy. As early as A.D. 180 mention is made in the Acts of the Scilltitan martyrs of a translation of the Gospels and of the Epistles of St. Paul. "In Tertullian's time", says Harnack, "there existed translations, if not of all the books of the Bible at least of the greater number of them." It is a fact. however, that none of them possessed any predominating authority, though a few were beginning to claim a certain respect. And thus we find Tertullian and St. Cyprian using those by preference, as appears from the concordance of their quotations. The interesting point in these translations made by many hands is that they form one of the principal elements of Church Latin: they make up, so to say, the popular contribution. This is to be seen in their disregard for complicated inflections, in their analytical tendencies, and in the alterations due to analogy. Pagan littérateurs, as Arnobius tells (Adv. nat., I, xlv-lix), complained that these texts were edited in a trivial and mean speech, in a vitiated and uncouth language.

But to the popular contribution the more cultivated Christians added their share in forming the Latin of the Church. If the ordinary Christian could translate the "Acts of St. Perpetua", the "Pastor" of Hermas the "Didache", and the "First Epistle" of Clement it took a scholar to put into Latin the "Acta Pauli" and St. Irenæus's treatise "Adversus haereticos", as well as other works which seem to have been translated in the second and third century. It is not known to what country these translators belonged, but, in the case of original works, Africa leads the way with Tertullian, who has been rightly styled the creator of the language of the Church. Born at Carthage, he studied and perhaps taught rhetoric there: he studied law and acquired a vast erudition; he was converted to Christianity, raised to the priesthood, and brought to the service of the Faith an ardent zeal and a forceful eloquence to which the number and character of his works bear witness. He touched on every subject apologetics, polemics, dogma, discipline, exegesis. He had to express a host of ideas which the simple faith of the communities of the west had not yet grasped. With his fiery temperament, his doctrinal rigidness, and his disdain for literary canons, he never hesitated to use the pointed word, the everyday phrase. Hence the marvellous exactness of his style, its restless vigour and high relief, the loud tones as of words thrown impetuously together: hence, above all, a wealth of expressions and words, many of which came then for the first time into ecclesiastical Latin and have remained there ever since. Some of these are Greek words in Latin dress - baptisma, charisma, extasis, idolatria, prophetia, martyr, etc. — some are given a Latin termination — daemonium, allegorizare, Paracletus, etc. — some are law terms or old Latin words used in a new sense — ablutio, gratia, sacramentum, saeculum, persecutor, peccator. The greater part are entirely new, but are derived from Latin sources and regularly inflected according to the ordinary rules affecting analogous words — annunciatio, concupiscentia, christianismus, coeaeternus, compatibilis, trinitas, vivificare, etc. Many of these new words (more than 850 of them) have died out, but a very large portion are still to be found in ecclesiastical use; they are mainly those that met the need of expressing strictly Christian ideas. Nor is it certain that all of these owe their origin to Tertullian, but before his time they are not to be met with in the texts that have come down to us, and very often it is he who has naturalized them in Christian terminology.

The part St. Cyprian played in this building of the language was less important. The famous Bishop of Carthage never lost that respect for classical tradition which he inherited from his education and his previous profession of rhetor; he preserved that concern for style which led him to the practice of the literary methods so dear to the rhetors of his day. His language shows this even when he is dealing with Christian topics. Apart from his rather cautious imitation of Tertullian's vocabulary, we find in his writings not more than sixty new words, a few Hellenisms — apostata, gazophylacium — a few popular words or phrases - magnalia, mammona — or a few words formed by added inflections — apostatare, clarificatio. In St. Augustine's case it was his sermons preached to the people that mainly contributed to ecclesiastical Latin, and present it to us at its best; for, in spite of his assertion that he cares nothing for the sneers of the grammarians, his youthful studies retained too strong a hold on him to permit of his departing from classical speech more than was strictly necessary. He was the first to find fault with the use of certain words common at the time, such as dolus for dolor, effloriet for florebit, ossum for os. The language he uses includes, besides a large part of classical Latin and the ecclesiastical Latin of Tertullian and St. Cyprian, borrowings from the popular speech of his day — incantare, falsidicus, tantillus, cordatus — and some new words or words in new meaning — spiritualis, adorator, beatificus, aedificare, meaning to edify, inflatio, meaning pride, reatus, meaning guilt, etc. It is, we think, useless to pursue this inquiry into the realm of Christian inscriptions and the works of Victor of Vito, the last of these Latin writers, as we should only find a Latin peculiar to certain individuals rather than that adopted by any Christian communities. Nor shall we delay over Africanisms, i.e. characteristics peculiar to African writers. The very existence of these characteristics, formerly so strongly held by many philologists, is nowadays generally questioned. In the works of several of these African writers we find a pronounced love for emphasis, alliteration, and rhythm, but these are matters affecting style rather than vocabulary. The most that can be said is that the African writers take more account of Latin as it was spoken (sermo cotidianus) but this speech was no peculiarity of Africa.

After the African writers no author had such influence on the upbuilding of ecclesiastical Latin as St. Jerome had. His contribution came mainly along the lines of literary Latin. From his master, Donatus, he had received a grammatical instruction that made him the most literary and learned of the Fathers, and he always retained a love for correct diction, and an attraction towards Cicero. He prized good writing so highly that he grew angry whenever he was accused of a solecism; one-half of the words he uses are taken from Cicero and it has been computed that besides employing, as occasion required, the words introduced by earlier writers, he himself is responsible for three hundred and fifty new words in the vocabulary of ecclesiastical Latin; yet of this number there are hardly nine or ten that may fitly be considered as barbarisms on the score of not conforming to the general laws of Latin derivatives. "The remainder", says Goelzer, "were created by employing ordinary suffixes and were in harmony with the genius of the language." They are both accurately formed and useful words, expressing for the most part abstract qualities necessitated by the Christian religion and which hitherto had not existed in the Latin tongue, e.g., clericatus, impoenitentia, deitas, dualitas, glorificatio, corruptrix. At times, also, to supply new needs, he gives new meanings to old words: conditor, creator, redemptor, saviour of the world, predestinatio, communio, etc. Besides this enriching of the lexicon, St. Jerome rendered no less service to ecclesiastical Latin by his edition of the Vulgate. Whether he made his translation from the original text or adapted previous translations after correcting them he diminished, by that much, the authority of the many popular versions which could not fail to be prejudicial to the correctness of the language of the Church. By this very same act he popularized a number of Hebraisms and modes of speech — vir desideriorum, filii iniquitatis, hortus voluptatis, inferioris a Daniele, inferior to Daniel — which completed the shaping of the peculiar physiognomy of church Latin.

After St. Jerome's time ecclesiastical Latin may be said to be fully formed on the whole. If we trace the various steps of the process of producing it we find

• that the ecclesiastical rites and institutions were first of all known by Greek names, and that the early Christian writers in the Latin language took those words consecrated by usage and embodied them in their works either in toto (e.g., angelus, apostolus, ecclesia, evangelium, clerus, episcopus, martyr) or else translated them (e.g., verbum, persona, testamentum, gentilis). It sometimes even happened that words bodily incorporated were afterwards replaced by translations (e.g., chrisma by donum, hypostasis by substantia or persona, exomologesis by confessio, synodus by concilium).
• Latin words were created by derivations from existing Latin or Greek words by the addition of suffixes or prefixes, or by the combination of two or more words together (e.g., evangelizare, Incarnatio, consubstantialis, idololatria).
• At times words having a secular or profane meaning are employed without any modification in a new sense (e.g. fidelis, depositio, scriptura, sacramentum, resurgere, etc.). With respect to its elements ecclesiastical Latin consists of spoken Latin (sermo cotidianus) shot through with a quantity of Greek words, a few primitive popular phrases, some new and normal accretions to the language, and, lastly various new meanings arising mainly from development or analogy.

With the exception of some Hebraic or Hellenist expressions popularized through Bible translations, the grammatical peculiarities to be met with in ecclesiastical Latin are not to be laid to the charge of Christianity; they are the result of an evolution through which the common language passed, and are to be met with among non-Christian writers. In the main the religious upheaval which was colouring all t he beliefs and customs of the Western world did not unsettle the language as much as might have been expected. Christian writers preserved the literary Latin of their day as the basis of their language, and if they added to it certain neologisms it must not be forgotten that the classical writers, Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, etc., had before this to lament the poverty of Latin to express philosophical ideas, and had set the example of coining words. Why should later writers hesitate to say annunciatio, incarnatio, predestinatio, when Cicero had said monitio, debitio, prohibitio, and Livy, coercitio? Words like deitas, nativitas, trinitas are not more odd than autumnitas, olivitas, coined by Varro, and plebitas, which was used by the elder Cato.

Hardly had it been formed when church Latin had to undergo the shock of the invasion of the barbarians and the fall of the Empire of the West; it was a shock that gave the death-blow to literary Latin as well as to the Latin of everyday speech on which church Latin was waxing strong. Both underwent a series of changes that completely transformed them. Literary Latin became more and more debased; popular Latin evolved into the various Romance languages in the South, while in the North it gave way before the Germanic tongues. Church Latin alone lived, thanks to the religion of which it was the organ and with which its destinies were linked. True, it lost a portion of its sway; in popular preaching it gave way to the vernacular after the seventh century; but it could still claim the Liturgy and theology, and in these it served the purpose of a living language. In the liturgy ecclesiastical Latin shows its vitality by its fruitfulness. Africa is once more in the lead with St. Cyprian. Besides the singing of the Psalms and the readings in public from the Bible, which made up the main portion of the primitive liturgy and which we already know, it shows itself in set prayers in a love for rhythm, for well- balanced endings that were to remain for centuries during the Middle Ages the main characteristics of liturgical Latin. As the process of development went on, this love of harmony held sway over all prayers; they followed the rules of metre and prosody to begin with, but rhythmical cursus gained the upper-hand from the fourth to the seventh, and from the eleventh to the fifteenth, century.

As is well known, the cursus consists in a certain arrangement of words, accents, and sometimes whole phrases, whereby a pleasing modulated effect is produced. The prayer of the "Angelus" is the simplest example of this; it contains all three kinds of cursus that are to be met with in the prayers of the Missal and the Breviary:

• the cursus planus, "nostris infunde";
• the cursus tardus, "incarnationem cognovimus";
• the cursus velox, "gloriam perducamur." So great was their influence over the language that the cursus passed from the prayers of the liturgy into some of the sermons of St. Leo and a few others, to papal Bulls from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and into many Latin letters written during the Middle Ages.

Besides the prayers, hymns make up the most vital thing in the Liturgy. From St. Hilary of Poitiers, to whom St. Jerome attributes the earliest, down to Leo XIII, who composed many hymns, the number of hymn writers is very great, and their output, as we learn from recent research, is beyond computing. Suffice it to say that these hymns originated in popular rhythms founded on accent; as a rule they were modelled on classical metres, but gradually metre gave way to beat or number of syllables and accent. (See HYMNODY AND HYMNOLOGY.) Since the Renaissance, rhythm has again given way to metre; and many old hymns were even retouched, under Urban VIII, to bring then into line with the rules of classical prosody.

Besides this liturgy which we may style official, and which was made up of words of the Mass, of the Breviary, or of the Ritual, we may recall the wealth of literature dealing with a variety of historical detail such as the "Pereginatio ad Loca sancta" formerly attributed to Silvia, many collections of rubrics, ordines, sacramentaries, ordinaries, or other books of a religious bearing, of which so many have been edited of late years in England either by private individuals or by the Surtees' Society and the Bradshaw Society. But the most we can do is to mention the brilliant liturgical efflorescence.

Wider and more varied is the field theology opens up for ecclesiastical Latin; so wide that we must restrict ourselves to pointing out the creative resources which the Latin we speak of has given proof of since the beginning of the study of speculative theology, i.e., from the writings of the earliest Fathers down to our own day. More than elsewhere, it has here shown how capable it is of expressing the most delicate shades of theological thought, or the keenest hairsplitting of decadent Scholasticism. Need we mention what it has done in this field? The expression it has created, the meanings it has conveyed are only too well known. Whereas the major part of these expressions were legitimate, were necessary and successful — transsubstantio, forma, materia, individuum, accidens, appetitus — there are only too many that show a wordy and empty formalism, a deplorable indifference for the sobriety of expression and for the purity of the Latin tongue — aseitas, futuritio, beatificativum, terminatio, actualitas, haecceitas, etc. It was by such words as these that the language of theology exposed itself to the jibes of Erasmus and Rabelais, and brought discredit on a study that was deserving of more consideration. With the Renaissance, men's minds became more difficult to satisfy, readers of cultured taste could not tolerate a language so foreign to the genius of the classical Latinity that had been revived. It became necessary even for renowned theologians like Melchior Cano in the preface to his "Loci Theologici", to raise their voices against the demands of their readers as well as against the carelessness and obscurity of former theologians. It may be laid down that about this time classic correctness began to find a place in theological as well as in liturgical Latin.

Henceforth correctness was to be the characteristic of ecclesiastical Latin. To the terminology consecrated for the expression of the faith of the Catholic Church it now adds as a rule that grammatical accuracy which the Renaissance gave back to us. But in our own age, thanks to a variety of causes, some of which arise from the evolution of educational programmes, the Latin of the Church has lost in quantity what it has gained in quality. Until recently, Latin had retained its place in the Liturgy, as it was seen to point out and watch over, in the very bosom of the Church, that unity of belief in all places and throughout all times which is her birthright. But in the devotional hymns that accompany the ritual the vernacular alone is used, and these hymns are gradually replacing the liturgical hymns. All the official documents of the Church, Encyclicals, Bulls, Briefs, institutions of bishops, replies from the Roman Congregations, acts of provincial councils, are written in Latin. Within recent years, however, solemn Apostolic letters addressed to one or other nation have been in their own tongue, and various diplomatic documents have been drawn up in French or in Italian. In the training of the clergy, the necessity of discussing modern systems whether of exegesis or philosophy, has led almost everywhere to the use of the national tongue. Manuals of dogmatic and moral theology may be written in Latin, in Italy, Spain, and France, but often, save in the Roman universities, the oral explanation thereof is given in the vernacular. In German and English speaking countries most of the manuals are in their own tongue, and nearly always the explanation is in the same languages.