Tea at Trianon: Why Archaic Bible Translations Are Better

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Why Archaic Bible Translations Are Better

I use the Douay-Rheims-Challoner. From The New Liturgical Movement:

In an article last month, “Against Vernacular Readings in the Traditional Mass,” I spoke about why the traditional Latin Mass should remain in Latin for all of its parts, including the readings. However, I would not wish to be misunderstood as an opponent of vernacular translations of Scripture. On the contrary, there is an important twofold place for these translations: first, as a “support” to the congregation at Mass, either by way of their missals or from the pulpit before the homily; second, as a “mainstay” for lectio divina or personal meditation on Scripture. In keeping with the principle of St. Augustine, one should consult a variety of editions of the Bible because each will bring out meanings that the others do not. (The limit to this is merely a practical one: there are only so many Bibles one can juggle, and it is beneficial to have a “primary” Bible for the sake of memory and thorough familiarity.) Even knowledge of the original language of Scripture—Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New—does not obviate the need for other languages. For example, the Greek Septuagint offers invaluable insights into the Old Testament that the Masoretic text cannot supply.

This much is clear to me: for public proclamation of the Word of God, the translation we use should not be in “contemporary English” as it is spoken—or rather, cheapened and slaughtered—in today’s society. There are many reasons for this judgment in favor of archaic eloquence. Here I will present one set of reasons articulated by Fr. Luke Bell in his book Staying Tender: Contemplation, Pathway to Compassion (Angelico, 2020). Fr. Bell explains why he has chosen to quote from the King James Version:
Readers of early drafts of the book have suggested that this might be more difficult for people to get their head around than a modern version, so a word of explanation is in order. I don’t want you to get your head around it. I want it to get into your heart. I have chosen this version because it is poetic. T. S. Eliot observed (in connection with Dante) that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
That is to say that what comes through it is more than what the mind can grasp, at least to begin with. It speaks first of all to intuition rather than to any analytical faculty. That in us which sees the whole is touched by the poet’s own vision of the whole, its words awakening in us what awoke the words in him or her. Just as an inspiration of the oneness of creation can sometimes come through the beauty of nature, so a sense of the one divine source of all meaning can sometimes be received through poetry. It is the genre of the transcendent. Through it can be heard an echo of the music of eternity.
If all this is true of poetry it should be true a fortiori of versions of Scripture, which is above all the text through which the transcendent comes to us. If we word it so it reflects back to us the quotidian banalities of our own speech with all the limitations of its vision, reducing in effect what it speaks of to that of which we speak, then we tend to make it tamer than it should be. We risk the complacency of thinking we have mastered it replacing the aspiration that it should master us…
An older version, written when the language was richer and less abstract, is more likely to make us pause before the mystery, to humble us before the numinous, to open us to what comes from beyond.
(Read more.)

Also from The New Liturgical Movement:

The idea of a preserving prayers in an old language – and not updating them to keep up with the times – is not an eccentricity of Roman Catholicism. It is at the heart of most of the world’s most successful religions. Even in the Protestant World, English speakers have kept the King James Bible to this day, and a whole host of archaic usages; Germans have kept the Luther-Bible and its New High German.

Such a widespread phenomenon must mean something. It may go against reason, but the idea of a sacred language different from the language of everyday life appeals to human beings. I can say from my own experience that prayer in Latin and Greek actually does seem to have a different effect on me: it pulls me out of my daily life, places me sub specie aeternitatis, where I have room to reflect on what is most important to me. Joseph Campbell – the furthest thing from a traddy Catholic – wrote about this:
There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. Every time I read the Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity.... They’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is: it’s to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.
Human artifacts and cultural productions point the mind always to the era of their origin. Language acts this way as well. Sometimes this makes sense: the prayers and Scriptures of Islam hearken back to the days of Muhammad, who is considered the perfect embodiment of the Muslim life. The Aramaic of the Syriac Churches, and the Greek of the Orthodox Church, come directly from the times of Christ. When there is no particularly obvious reason for making the language of one era the language of prayer for later eras, people often resort to mythic reasoning: some Hindus maintain that Sanskrit is actually the language of the gods, just as some Jews maintain that Hebrew was the language spoken by God to Adam and Eve.

Latin has seen this mythic reasoning too, that it is the “language of the angels.” And indeed in Christian terms Latin’s claim to sacrality is not as great, quantitatively, as Greek or Aramaic, which were likely spoken by Jesus. But Latin has the same type of claim, qualitatively, as Greek and Aramaic: it is one of the languages of the days of Jesus. The Roman centurion he met spoke it; Pilate spoke it; when Paul had to defend himself in court in Rome, or when Peter heard the crowds in the Eternal City, Latin was the language of the day. And now Latin has been further consecrated by a whole host of saints and believers through the subsequent centuries of what has been called the Latin Rite. The Tridentine Mass makes those people and those present in the soul of the believer. (Read more.)