Why Latin Should Revive

I am rather excited by various developments which seem to show that Latin may be making a comeback: the Living Latin movement, for example, and some recent publications of Medieval and Neo-Latin texts. It seems possible to me that some momentum may be accumulating.

"Latin is a language without  a country.  It is not the native language of any country.  That is why it is doomed." 

It was a language without a country when the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476, and for well over a thousand years after that it remained the international language of western Europe. It was not a global language as English is today, and I don't happen to know whether or not the reach of Latin was greater than that of Arabic or Chinese, but within western Europe, it was universal.

 

In European universities, from Finland to Portugal, to Lima, Peru, where St Mark's University was officially established in 1551, lectures were given, discussions were held, and examinations, oral and written, in Latin. Latin was the language of mathematics and physics, of botany, chemistry, geography, medicine. Newton published his Principia, in 1728, in Latin. Spinoza published a few minor early works in Dutch, and then all of his major works were in Latin. 

Descartes and Leibniz each published about half in Latin and half in French. Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes wrote mostly in Latin. Milton wrote in English, Italian, Latin and Greek, the show-off! But these were all 17th- and 18th-century figures, coming at the end of the period of Latin's dominance in Europe. Before the year 1600, although there certainly was a large amount of vernacular literature, exactly none of it could have been considered academic. Latin had no country of its own, that's true, but it did have communities, including the academic community. Students and professors traveled all over Europe and employed the same language wherever they went. It was expected that a professor would teach in several countries over the course of his career, in part to ensure that ideas circulated internationally. 

Latin was the language of royalty and high aristocracy, and of international diplomacy. It was not always expected that every single king and queen could speak brilliantly and spontaneously in Latin, but the advantages of being able to do so were large and obvious.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, military generals, colonels and majors came from the aristocracy, and they traveled internationally, working sometimes for this country, sometimes for another. Although in this case it had less to do with the spread of ideas than with the mercenary officers seeking the most advantageous positions. And all over Europe, battlefield commands were shouted out in Latin.

Latin was the international European language of shipping and commerce. Christopher Columbus did not attend a university, but he did learn Latin, in order to be a ship's captain traveling internationally, and also in order to read works about the Earth's geography which were all either originally written in Latin or translated into Latin from Greek.

So you see, although Latin did not have a country, for over a thousand years it still had some very important uses. And I didn't even mention the Middle Ages, or theology! It may have been no-one's first language -- or very few people's first language -- but it was very many people's second language. The time in which Latin has declined is still a very short time compared to the time when it flourished.

Anyway, when I said yesterday that I was very excited because I thought Latin might be about to make a very big comeback, I was not thinking about it replacing English as the world language numero uno (see what I did there? never mind). I was merely expressing the hope, shared by some others, that Latin may be reviving somewhat from the low point in popularity it has recently reached. At the very least, perhaps more people will resume studying several thousand years' worth of the history of hundreds of millions of people in the language in which it was written.

The Persistence of Latin

Sometimes referred to as Neo-Latin. I'm going to list just a few examples.

For the most part, new volumes of Classical Latin and Greek texts from Oxfordand Teubnerare still appearing with prefaces in Latin. The few recent exceptions with prefaces and/or appendices in vernacular languages disturb me not a little.

Apart from Classical Studies, the only current communication in Latin of which I know is a Finnish website which still presents the news in Latin.

I own several volumes of volumes written by Catholic clergy in Latin in the 20th century, before the 2nd Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, some consisting of theology, others of general news and notes from this or that order.

They say that the use of Latin persisted longer in the fields of mathematics and botany than elsewhere. For now I'm taking their word for it about botany. When it comes to math, as late as when Thomas Paine was blithely calling for ancient languages to be discarded, one of the leading mathematicians of the time, Leonhard Euler,was writing and publishing in Latin, as were, I presume, many of his contemporary mathematicians, and many more for quite a while after.

A little earlier, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica in Latin; and Newton's rival -- or his punching-bag, depending upon how one views the matter -- Leibniz, although born and raised in Germany, was writing and publishing almost exclusively in Latin and French. As a young man Leibniz briefly met and corresponded with Spinoza, who wrote a few things in Dutch, but whose fame rests for the most part upon his Latin works, which today, for whatever reason, seem to be extraordinarily hard to find in untranslated book form. (Beaucoup translations of Spinoza's works. What th Heck are the translators translating from? as a character in William Gaddis' JR asked who was, it's not such a stretch to presume, representing Gaddis wondering in the face of the volume of fan mail he got about The Recognitions, are they all passing one copy around?)

Milton and Hobbes wrote quite a bit in Latin as well as in English. Milton's Latin poems -- and his Greek ones! Boy howdy! -- can be had in some anthologies;his Latin prose, although available translated everywhere you look, just like Spinoza's stuff, seem to be even rarer untranslated. (Or -- a possibility which my readers should assumed is implied. Always -- I'm just clueless.)

It would seem that a working knowledge of Latin was still assumed in some circles in the 17th century, not just in math and other sciences and philosophy, but among politicians and readers of history as well. In his collection of eywitness and near-contemporary accounts of the battle of White Mountain in 1620,Anton Gindely includes among his 44 sources 12 written in Latin. (Along with 20 in German, 3 in French, 4 in Spanish, 3 in Czech and 1 in English, which adds up to 43 and means, you're right, I counted wrong. But you get the idea.)

Some collections of letters give me the impression that Elizabeth I and Henry VIII of England wrote much more and much better in Latin, and possibly in French as well, than in English. (Which would mean that that scene in A Man For All Seasons where Henry meets Thomas More's daughter and the subject of Latin comes up, and she starts chattering away in the language and Henry can only haltingly respond with a few words, and he gets embarassed and angry, is historicaly waaaay off. Unless someone ghost-wrote all those letters of Henry's, but you know what? I doubt that!)

How far back into the past, into the history of western Europe, does one have to go to reach the point where Latin was more prevelant as a written language than the venacular? It really depends upon which group one considers, which profession or specialty, which social class, too. Latin seems always to have been more prevalent the higher one climbed on the social ladder. Perhaps the higher classes consciously used it as a means of separating themselves from the masses or of making the separation greater. Thomas Paine reacted by rejecting the language. I take just the opposite tack, I say it's just one more reason for us unwashed masses to learn it, one more way to seize what was denied our kind.

The American Revolution

So, the Roanoke colony failed in the late 1580's, and then Jamestown was founded in 1607 and the Plymouth colony in 1620, and gradually the English began to establish themselves in the Western Hemisphere. By the 1630's there was a college, Harvard, in Massachusets, by the 1670's the English power had supplanted the Dutch at New Amsterdam, and so it went, and the English colonies grew by leaps and bounds, crowding against the French settlement to to the north and West and against the Spanish to the south and West long before the American Revolution.

Was English rule in the colonies always, inevitably going to become intolerable to the colonists -- there was Bacon's Rebellion in the late 17th century -- or would the colonists wished to have remained British subjects in the absence of the specific mismanagement of things insyigated by the mad king George III and his ministers?

You asking me? I don't know. It seems to be the current fashion among historians to regard the colonists as Englishmen, who wanted nothing more than to enjoy the rights which Englishmen in England took for granted. But this view contests, has always contested against the opinion that the colonists were intrinsically different from Englishmen, which opinion prevailed from time to time in the past, and may or may not be the prevailing opinion in the History departments again in another few decades. (I'm not going to make a prediction here; a careful examination of predictions of the past has led me to the point where the only prediction I feel inclined to make is that in the future many people will continue to predict many things and that they will usually be wrong.) It seems to me that perceptions and historical depictions of the American Revolution are particularly fraught with preconceptions and political argument That very often the Revolution is described as being what the individual historian wants it to be: the precursor in spirit as well as in time to the French Revolution, or utterly distinct from it, associated with it only through ignorance. Truly a victory for freedom for ALL people; or the business dealings of a small clique of WASP's, plus a few of their cronies of Dutch descent; or something somewhere in between. I suppose that to a large extent it is legitimate to argue the Revolution is also what it became, whether the Founding Fathers had it in mind or not. On the other hand, does it make sense to see a fulfillment of the promise of 1776 in 1863, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire long before 1863?

I tend to see a lot of the rhetoric about American freedom, specifically American freedom, as somewhere between dubious and downright ridiculous. It seems to me that it amounts to a large extent to the Smithian freedom for a small group of capitalists to squeeze the rest of us, and for the rest of us to either play ball, or starve, or rot in prison. Nice freedom, Ben, George! Thomas may have been a little more progressive than that, or maybe I'm still looking at Thomas through rose-colored glasses. Thomas didn't free his slaves, after all, stirring though his writing often was.

Accurately or not, a lot of Enlightenment philosophy and highfalutin' rhetoric was associated with the American Revolution since well before 1776, and with the Dutch, English, Mexican, Russian, Chinese and Nicaraguan revolutions as well. The problem is, a lot of that Enlightenment philosophy doesn't make any sense, doesn't have much relation to reality. Man is not born free, he is born covered in slime and blood and usually screaming in horror, and in need of constant care and supervision. I subscribe to the Hobbesian, not the Lockeian and Rousseauian view of nature. Freedom is something which we ATTAIN to some degree if we are fortunate, and consists in no small degree of OVERCOMING nature.

Except that it's nowhere that simple either. For instance, I see no reason for this arbitrary distinction between "natural" and "man-made." As if we were somehow apart from other animals. Singled out by God for a special destiny or some such nonsense. I don't think that the arbitrary nature of the distinction between "man-made" and "natural" has occurred to most people yet.

So anyway, the blather of Locke and Rousseau about the supposedly noble nature of man in "nature," corrupted by awful, awful civilization, was in the air a lot during the American Revolution, and perhaps even more so in Europe in the observation and misunderstanding from afar of the American Revolution. The French Revolutionaries, many of them anyway, may have believed that they were doing exactly the same things that the American Revolutionaries had done.

I could go on. Happy holiday.