If the final purpose of education is to lead the human person out of the bondage of ignorance and sin into the illumination of intellect and freedom of will found in communion with the triune God, then the educational journey must be one conducted along the pathways of the Logos. Following the Word, we encounter and come to know most deeply both the things made through the Word and the words whereby we cultivate and express our knowledge. And, in the process, we hope that we ourselves will be written into the story of salvation.
En route, we deal with the business of language, this strange human gift that both unifies us and sets us at dis-ease. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” cries Prufrock. Still, by some alchemy, the stuff of thought becomes on the page or in the air a means of communion, of recognition. “That’s how it is!” we say in the face of the perfect poem. In words, we give ourselves. We find ourselves. And we find, too, in earliest childhood or in the schoolroom, that language is a tricky thing, fraught with rules and customs and the other trappings of community.
Nonetheless, the student who gives himself to the study of words and their rules often meets with delight, with a sense that the structure of words somehow traces the structure of the world. Where education is concerned, I submit not only that cultivation of such linguistic delight—and insight—is at the heart of the work of being led out into communion with the Word, but also that Catholic educators can best serve their students by training them not only in their native tongues but in foreign ones as well, and that pride of place still belongs to Latin.
Language as Triangulation
Readers of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick have long noted an oddity of the book’s beginning, the so-called land chapters: They feature a surprising amount of doubles. Ishmael visits two port cities: New Bedford and Nantucket. He stays in two inns: The Spouter and the Try-pots. He goes to a black church and a white church. He meets the two owners of the Pequod. He enjoys two types of chowder. While some have supposed that Melville was simply getting his bearings, it seems more to the purpose that he was in fact giving us ours. By giving us two points whereby we might navigate, Melville allows us to triangulate our own position with respect to the text.
Indeed, language itself is a triangular matter. St. Augustine, standing near the headwaters of the stream of semiotics, drew distinctions among the sounds of words, their meanings, and the things they signify. The word “deer” on the page differs from the concept of deer, whose concept is itself a different thing still from the many individual creatures in the world that answer to the name of deer. And indeed, this triadic nature of our human power of language is critical to an understanding of how language carves along the joints of reality.
The student who gives himself to the study of words and their rules often meets with delight, with a sense that the structure of words somehow traces the structure of the world.
The study of languages is thus critical to the reinvigoration of education precisely inasmuch as it helps students to better appreciate their own being with respect to signs and to things, and the study of foreign languages performs this function both by giving students more conceptual points of contact with reality and by bringing to life the capacities of language in itself.
In an especially popular passage in his Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes his tutelage in Greek under a man known as “The Great Knock.” Sailing into Homer, Lewis finds himself becoming more and more fluent in the language until he finds that it is becoming conceptually transparent to him. As he puts it,
I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, ‘Naus means a ship,’ is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.
Learning another tongue both increases a student’s facility with words and demonstrates to a student the gap that exists between words themselves and the things they signify. While Lewis is here remarking on the experience as it came to him through Greek, it is to be supposed that many a student will enjoy a similar process: In reading many times the Latin word “Danaos,” he will come not simply to think to himself “the Greeks” but to see in his mind a warrior band encamped around fires down on the beach or lying concealed within the hull of the great horse or gathered around a cold slab where a kingly father has prepared his daughter for sacrifice in the service of war.
At the same time, language study often opens students to formerly unsuspected truths of their own linguistic concepts. Any first-year Latin student will, for instance, quickly encounter the unusual masculine nouns of the first declension, such as “nauta,” “poeta,” and “agricola.” What does it suggest about the realities of sailing and writing poetry and farming that these nouns, while masculine, take the feminine ending? Perhaps the student begins to sense that while these are three grueling activities, masculine indeed, they nonetheless possess a character of profound receptivity: the sailor forever at the ocean’s mercy; the poet listening, listening, for a snatch of inspired song; the farmer depending on sun and wind and rain for the fulfillment of his labor.
While such quirks are present in any language, Latin deserves some privileges in that it gives students firsthand access to the very large portion of the Western tradition, which was first set down in Latin from Vergil and Ovid to Seneca and Cato to Augustine and Aquinas. If this is the tradition we seek to transmit, we would be remiss as educators not to hand down the very medium of transmission and to see that as many students as possible have the means to receive our great luminaries in their own words.
Learning another tongue both increases a student’s facility with words and demonstrates to a student the gap that exists between words themselves and the things they signify.
In short, the study of Latin, which is itself often prefatory to the study of Greek (that little “treat,” as Churchill remarked) or of modern romance languages, is in many ways a lost key to coming to know the world we occupy. Its capacity to give students the world anew, stripped of the familiarity of all the usual words, and at the same time to reveal to students the space between words and things, is a tremendous power waiting to be taken up afresh by Catholic educators.
More Truly and More Strange: Scripture and the Vulgate
Catholics, as everyone knows, know next to nothing of the Bible. Yes, we have our Hahns; we have our Bergsmas. We have our Pitres and Barrons and Cavinses and Frs. Mike. Indeed, it’s just possible that, absent the last five centuries of scriptura vs. traditio, the accusation concerning our biblical illiteracy would never have been leveled. And yet (as Fr. Mike says), it is perhaps to be wondered whether the Bible plays as vivid a role in Catholic education as we might hope. For many of us who have grown familiar with the Scriptures, there is the danger that always attends familiarity—that of inattention, not to say contempt. It is just possible that, having heard the Sermon on the Mount fifty times before, I might be tempted to daydream through the fifty-first. It may transpire that the words of Genesis and Isaiah and Revelation fade into a spiritual miasma that only faintly animates the ear or the heart.
If the Bible has become familiar in this manner, and if we seek especially to revive a love of Christ in the Scriptures in our educational institutions, we might again find help in Latin. The Vulgate, easily obtained, presents the familiar under the guise of the fresh, the ancient as hitherto unexplored. For the Latin student, the experience can be especially gratifying. For if the particular words of the Vulgate are new qua reading material, the concepts they convey are nevertheless quite familiar. If “in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” is new to me, still, assuming even the faintest acquaintance with Scripture, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” is not. Thus, the familiar words made strange by the veil of Latin, and the veil of Latin words made familiar by the familiarity of the verses, the Vulgate can become both a highly effective pedagogical tool and a double-edged sword, piercing the soul anew for the reception of the Word.
They Divide the World Between Them
T. S. Eliot wrote that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” What the two giants would have made of such a sentiment seems fairly clear. Dante, who placed himself among the six greatest poets near the outset of his Inferno, would no doubt have spurned the Swan of Avon’s right to soar with him into the celestial aevum. And Shakespeare, who seems not to have cared at all about reputation or legacy or anything other than writing well and retiring early, would no doubt have shrugged and asked, “Who’s T. S. Eliot?”
In any case, these two are without exception the great poets of the Christian era, and their study, especially in the case of Shakespeare, has for a long time played a critical role in education. If, in the English-speaking world, Dante’s Comedy is not very closely known, his name is at least associated with the Inferno. But hardly a student anywhere in the world can be produced who does not recognize Hamlet’s famous inquiry: “To be or not to be.” The names of Romeo and Juliet spring readily to any romantic lips. Julius Caesar is forever asking, “Et tu, Brute?” And, though they be not actively associated with Shakespeare in many people’s minds, countless sayings, phrases, and even words have come to populate our language and our cultural mindset thanks to the Bard. He appears to us everywhere, if not quite like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, then at least like a friendly spirit sent to haunt us from our linguistic complacence.
For our purposes, these two poets are of the utmost importance because representing, as they do, the pinnacle of Christian poetry—particularly poetry written in the vernacular—their education would have been conducted in Latin and, in Shakespeare’s case especially, would have lain in little other than Latin. Thus, if we seek reasons to center education on the study of Latin once again, we need look no further than to the careers of these two men.
Dante entered history in the year 1265, at the height of the High Middle Ages, on the cusp of the Italian Renaissance. A student of one of St. Thomas Aquinas’s students, he was intimately familiar with the scholastic tradition as well as with the classical tradition. Indeed, if St. Augustine went so far as to model much of his Confessions on the Aeneid, then Dante, himself in many ways Augustinian, did him one better and, not content to make his literary avatar a pilgrim in the Vergilian vein, introduced Vergil himself as Dante’s guide through the Inferno, up the slopes of Purgatorio and to the guiding eyes of Beatrice. As Augustine points out, Christians have from the beginning possessed the rights of Israel to the Egyptian spoils where classical learning is concerned. Yet the reading of Vergil and Ovid can indeed present dangers to the learner who has not availed himself of Scripture and the Church’s magisterium, so much of which has been worked out in the Latin writings of the Church Fathers and the Scholastics. Dante’s vision, and the one which we ought to inculcate in our students, is one that sees the classical through the eyes of the Christian, taking what is good in the old and elevating it through the new wine of revelation.
On the other hand, Shakespeare’s education was not so extensive as Dante’s. His formal schooling ended when he was around fifteen. In the boys’ schools of the Bard’s day, it was customary for students to learn Latin, to read a great deal of Latin, and to become well versed in all of the rhetorical devices the classical authors put to such extensive use. Indeed, from the ages of about seven to fifteen, they did little else between the hours of six in the morning and five in the evening but study Latin, with breaks for discipline, in which the masters were well schooled. If Shakespeare’s speakers can be taken as representative of his thought, “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school,” his experience was not the most enjoyable. But it was, as Bill Bryson puts it, a magnificent way to learn “every possible rhetorical device and ploy.” And the evidence of this education is apparent in practically every line of Shakespeare’s poetry. Many of his plots, of course, are themselves drawn from the ancient world, and his endless experimentation with words themselves and of the seemingly infinite rhetorical modulations they allow both remind the reader of the great joy, the astonishing pleasure, of language and so keenly reflect the reality the reader has experienced that he can hardly help finding in Shakespeare’s plays the certification of his own experience.
That certification can always be found in the best of writing. The reader sees himself on the page in a way analogous to that in which Adam saw himself in Eve. He is handed back to himself via the gaze of the other. Understood in this way, Latin appears as a means for making its students more capable of being agents of grace in the world, revealing to their fellows the world around them, and so revealing them the more clearly to themselves.
By learning faithfully to use our words, by tuning them to the highest pitch we can manage, we advance toward harmony with the Word himself. The study of Latin was critical to forming that capacity in the greatest of the Christian tradition’s poets; we set that study aside at our risk.
There are, of course, dangers to language. So often, words veil the things of the world in overfamiliarity so that words and things alike become so many contemptible sparrows, flitting about in the hedgerows of being. Then again, the magic of words can distract us from the reality of things, tempting us into worlds of our own verbal coinage.
Nonetheless, words are a gift of the Word, and their proper use is key to our being made one with him.
In canto XIV of his Paradiso, Dante writes, as he is brought to a higher heavenly sphere, “I saw myself translated.” The use of the metaphor reminds us that language is itself metaphorical in character, that it not only bears across meaning from one language-user to another but also has the capacity to bear us over from ourselves into the Word. Allowing our students to become well-versed in the language in which their tradition has been handed down is critical to helping them eventually to be translated into him.