Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 9.djvu/43

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was familiar to their listeners. St. Augustine says this very frankly to his hearers: "I often employ''*, he says, ** words that are not Latin, and I do so that you may understand me. Better that I should incur the blame of the grammarians than not be imderstood by the people " (In Psal. cxxxviii, 20). Strange though it may seem, it was not at Rome that the building up of ecclesia«tical Latin began. Until the middle of the third century the Christian community at Rome was in the main a Greek-speaking one. The Liturgy was celebrated in Greek, and the apologists and theologians wrote in Greek until the time of St. Hippolytus^ who died in 235. It was much the same in Uaul. at Lyons and at Vienne, at all events until after the a ays of St. Irenseus. In Africa, Greek was the chosen language of the clerics, to begin with, but Latin was the more familiar speech for the majority of the faithful, and it must have soon taken the lead in the Church, since Tertullian, who wrote some ■of his earlier works in Greek, ended by employing Latin only. And in this use he had been preceded by Pope \ictor, who was also an African, and who, as St. Jerome assures us, was the earliest Christian writer in the Latin language.

But even before these writers various local Churches must have seen the necessity of rendering hito Latin the texts of the Old and New Testaments, the reading of which formed a main portion of the Litiu-gy. This necessity arose as soon as the Latin-speaking faithful became numerous, and in all likelihooti it was felt first in Africa. For a time improvised oral translations sufficed, but soon written translations were required. Such translations multiplied. " It is possible to enu- merate", says St. Augustine, "those who have trans- lated the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek, but not those who have translated them into Latin. In sooth, in the early days of faith whoso possessed a Greek manuscript and thought he had some knowledge of both tongues was daring enough to undertake a trans- lation" (De doct. Christ., 11^ xi). From our present point of view the multiplicity of these translations, which were destined to have so great an influence on the formation of ecclesiastical Latin, helps to explain the many colloquialisms which it assimilated, and which are found even in the most famous of these texts, that of which St. Augustine said: " Amor^ all translations the Itala is to be preferred, for its lan- guage is most accurate, and its expression the clearest " (De doct. Christ., II, xv). While it is true that many renderings of this passage have been given, the gener- ally accepted one, and the one we content ourselves with mentioning here, is that the Itala is the most important of the Biblical recensions from Italian sources, dating from the fourth century, used by St. Ambrose and the Italian authors of that day, which have been partially preserved to us in many manu- scripts and are to be met with even in St. AJugustine himiself. With some slight modifications its version of the deuterocanonical works of the Old Testament was incorporated into St. Jerome's " Vulgate ".

Elements from African Sources. — But even in this respect Afnca had been beforehand with Italy. As early as a. d. 180 mention is made in the Acts of the ScilUtan martyrs of a translation of the Gospels and of the Epistles of St. Paul. " In Tertullian's time ", savs Hamack, " 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 pos- sessed any predominating authority, though a few were beginning to claim a certain respect. And thus we find TertiuUan and St. Cyprian using those by preference, as app>ears from the concordance of their (quotations. The interesting point in these transla- tions 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 inflexions, in their analytical tendencies, and in the alterations due to

analogy. Pagan liUSrcUeurSf as Amobius tells us (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 Latih of the Church. If the ordinary Christian could translate the " Acts of St. Pcrpetua", 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. Irenaeus's treatise "Adversus ha>reticos", as well as other works which seem to have been trans- lated 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 Ter- tullian, who has been rightly styled the creates 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 im- petuously together: hence, above all, a wealth of expressions and words, many of which came then for the first time into ecclesiastical I^atin and have re- mained there ever since. Some of these are Greek words in Latin dress — baptisma, charisma, extasis, idolo^ latria, prophetia, martyr, etc. — some are given a Latin termination — dccmonium, aUegorizare, Paracleltis, etc — some are law terms or old Latin words used in a new sense — ablviio, gratia, sacram^ntumj scBculum, per^ secutor, peccator. The greater part are entirely new, but are derived from Latin sources and regularly in- flected according to the ordinary rules affecting anal- ogous words — annunciatioj concupisceniia, christianiS' mtiSf coa^ternus, compatilnlis, trivitas, 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 arc 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 tiie practice of the Hterary methods so dear to the rhetors of his day. His lan- guage shows this even when he is dealing with Chris- tian 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 — apos^' tola, gazophyladum — a few popular words or phrases — magnolia, mammona — or a few words formed by added inflections — apostatare, darificatio. 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 dolu» for doHor, effloriet for fiorebit, 098um