the next best course is to read as much as possible of such authors as are most easily understood1. The Gospels in the Vulgate are very simple and easy to understand, and the same simplicity of style is also found in some of the early Ecclesiastical writers and in many mediaeval writers, especially in the Hymns and Liturgies. Speaking generally there is a directness and absence of artificiality about the Ecclesiastical writers which makes their works more easily intelligible than most of those of the Classical writers, except Caesar, and they have the advantage over his works in that they contain no long passages in "Oratio Obliqua.” Much of Classical Latin is highly artificial, not to say unnatural, in its modes of expression. The authors whose works are most generally read wrote for a fastidious and highly cultivated society of littérateurs who, in most cases, thought far more of style than of matter. Their subject-matter was often borrowed from the Greek; they wrote rather to please than to instruct; and, especially under the early Empire, they wrote with a view to reading their works to admiring circles of friends, whose applause they hoped to arouse by some novel or far-fetched turn of expression. All Classical Latin literature, except the very best, is vitiated by rhetoric, and by the desire to say old things in a new way. The Christian authors, on the other hand, although most of them had been trained in the rhetorical schools, and although their writings show many traces of their training, were at least men in 1 The author is pleased to find that his opinion in this matter is confirmed by the high authority of the late Dr J. H. Moulton in the parallel case of an adult who wishes to learn Greek. Dr Moulton considers that this study may be most easily approached by the way of N.T. and Hellenistic Greek, which, in Latin, is paralleled by the Vulgate and the Ecclesiastical writers. Dr Moulton's words are as follows: "Men who have had no educational advantages, called to the work (of the ministry) after many years away from school-how shall we best train them for service in which experience shows they may be surpassingly useful?... Perhaps the writer may contribute his experience of some years. Hellenistic Greek proves a far shorter road than the Classical grammar which the writer used in his schoolmaster days. A short and simple grammar and reader in New Testament Greek, written for the purpose, supplies the forms and syntax needed for intelligent reading of the sacred text; and with this basis it is found that students with an aptitude for languages can go on to Classical Greek when they have become proficient in the far easier Hellenistic." J. H. Moulton in Camb. Biblical Essays. deadly earnest. They did not write to amuse the leisure of their friends: those of the first three centuries wrote with the fear of death always hanging over them to men who needed help and guidance in the face of the same terror: those belonging to the age after the triumph of the Church wrote of things which they held to be of eternal and sovereign importance both to themselves and to those who should read their books. This, generally speaking, gives their writings a simplicity and directness which greatly facilitates the progress of the learner. Even the Latin of the middle ages, although it is certainly not Ciceronian, and would not have passed current even with Jerome, yet is a wonderfully forcible and pregnant form of speech at its best. It is foolish to condemn and neglect a whole period of literature, because the style in which it is written does not come up to a purely artificial and arbitrary literary standard. It is not necessary to deny the great excellence of the Latin of the Augustan age, and of Cicero in particular, in order to see merits in the Latin of other periods. We may heartily agree that the Latin of the Golden Age is supreme and unapproachable. We may all wish to write like Cicero and do our best to imitate him; but this is no reason why we should refuse to see any merit in writers who, carried on by the natural development of the language, and by the strange and novel ideas which they were constrained to express, wrote in a different style, and with a different vocabulary. There is no more reason for setting up the writers of the Augustan age as models of style, and labelling all that does not conform to their standard as decadent or barbarous, than there would be for setting up Dryden, Pope and Johnson as the only correct writers of English. No language in which it is still possible for an author to express his thoughts with precision and clearness can justly be called decadent or barbarous, even though it does not conform to a given standard; and it is by this test, rather than by approximation to any "Classical" style, that the later authors should be judged. Although, as has been said, much of the work of the earlier Ecclesiastical authors is vitiated by the rhetorical devices common to the period in which they lived, and although many of the later authors are barbarous enough; yet, with few exceptions, all the best known writings of Ecclesiastical authors of the first rank are worth studying in the original. There are very few books accessible on this subject. The following have been consulted: GOELZER. La Latinité de St Jérôme (deals with Jerome's writings other than the Vg.). REGNIER. La Latinité des sermons de St Augustin. KAULEN. Sprachliches Handbuch zur Biblischen Vulgata. (New edition, Freiburg im Breisgau 1904.) ROENSCH. Itala und Vulgata. DALPANE. Nuovo Lessico della Bibbia Volgata (Firenze 1911). PEULTIER, ETIENNE, GANTOIS. Concordantiarum universae Scripturae Sanctae Thesaurus. Paris. None of these books except the first and the last are very helpful. The author wishes to thank Dr H. J. White, Dean of Christ Church, for kind advice and encouragement. THORNCLIFFE, CLIFTON ROAD, HEATON MOOR, STOCKPORT November 1921 H. P. V. N. THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF ECCLESIASTICAL LATIN The found, in the vernacular speech of the Roman people of `HE basis, and much of the content, of Ecclesiastical Latin is to which but little survives in literature. The form of Latin which is most commonly studied is that which is to be found in the writings of the great authors who lived in the century before the commencement of the Christian era. To this form of the language the name ‘Classical' has been given, and it is often referred to as the Latin of the Golden Age. All the books of this period that have come down to us were the work of highly trained literary men who were thoroughly acquainted with Greek literature and who imitated of set purpose not only its form, but also its content. Vos exemplaria Graeca was the maxim which all of them followed. The consequence of this is that 'Classical Latin' is, speaking generally, a very artificial form of language. It may be said of it, as has been said of Attic Greek (as portrayed in the literature of Athens), that it is an artistic language which nobody ever spoke, but which everybody understood. This form of the language, however, was regarded in ancient, no less than in modern times, as an example to be followed, as far as possible. The writings of Cicero, Vergil, Horace and Ovid were studied in the schools of the Roman Empire in Africa, Gaul and Spain, no less than in Italy, as models of style and vocabulary, and left an ineffaceable mark on the language. They continued to be studied, though with less zeal and intelligence, throughout many periods in the middle ages and at the Renaissance they came in for more than their own. To write like Cicero or Vergil became the passionate desire of all scholars and the chief end of education: the direction then given to literary study has influenced the course of teaching almost to the present day. N.E. L. I |