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.

Tom Paine vs the Classics, Part II

Along with new weights and measures and a new calender, the French Revolution introduced new fashions, including short hair in the style of the ancient democrats of Greece and Rome. Neither Robespierre nor Paine cut their hair in the classical style, but many younger people did, for example Napoleon. Jacques-Louis David painted very popular pictures on Roman themes. Classicism remained evident in architecture and theatre. One wonders how far the taste for classical styles was bound up with the cultivation of classical languages, or, indeed, if many of the people who dressed and cut their hair in the new way were even aware that they were copying the Romans. Presumably many people, whatever the length of their hair or their aesthetic tastes, and whatever their politics, would have rejected out of hand Paine's assertion that all the useful books of antiquity had been translated, and that therefore learning Latin and Greek was a waste of time. One of course cannot blame the decline of classical education on Paine; this decline had begun before him and continued after him, it was a gradual slipping away from one kind of learning into another. I assume that a conscious rejection of classical studies comparable in vehemence to Paine's was and remains rather rare. Among those few dull people who have read with enthusiasm the whole of The Age of Reason -- I've only read the above-cited passage and a little more, and I'm convinced that I've had enough Paine to last me my whole life. One doesn't have to drink the whole ocean to know that it's salty. A little sip will do --among Paine's actual readers, the main interest of The Age of Reason presumably has to do much more with its Deist philosophy than with specific points like language.

Apparently Thomas Edison was an enthusiastic reader of Paine, and helped to re-popularize him a century after his death. Here is Edison on Paine:

"I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic . . . It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood . . . it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days."

Paine and Edison each did a lot to improve the lot of their fellow man. It would be foolish to try to paint them in an entirely negative light. Still, I think that we have now and again had intelligences which were, in this respect or that, somewhat sounder. Let's take another example of an American widely regarded as a genius and a hero, Edison's close personal friend Henry Ford. On the one hand, for decades he paid extraordinarily high entry-level wages to his laborers, wages which changed many lives for the better and forced other companies to pay fairer wages, too; and he gave these high wages to many black employees at a time when it was quite unusual, and took some courage, to do so. On the other hand, he was an anti-semite and an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. And he offered his famously high wages only to those of his employees who, as far as he was able to determine, led their lives in a manner of which he approved; he established a "Sociological Department" in the Ford corporation to spy upon his employees. And he opposed labor unions with especially brutal tactics.

It is not very far from Paine's "As there is now nothing new to be learned from the dead languages, all the useful books being already translated, the languages are become useless, and the time expended in teaching and in learning them is wasted." to Ford's "History is bunk." It certainly is bunk when studied and taught as Paine and Bryan and Edison and Ford did. The illiteracy in Latin and Greek which Paine advocated has as its result an inability to improve on the historical teachings of our predecessors whenever they relied on Latin or Greek texts, to correct their errors in translation, or to know that there may indeed be books in Latin or Greek which are useful and as yet untranslated. To say nothing of previously-lost texts in these languages, ancient and more recent, which are still being discovered now and then. (It makes my head hurt just to consider Paine's assertions for the very brief time it takes to refute them!) Ignorance of these two old, allegedly dead languages, and of Hebrew, allows such nonsense as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which Ford published in his Dearborn newspaper, to crop up relatively unchallenged. Such ignorance is in line with a reliance on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth -- as THE book, from the Greek "biblius," meaning "book," any book -- and the consequent will to attack any other line of thought which contradicts this ultimate source, just as Bryan did at the Scopes "monkey" trial. Furthermore, how well can you understand even one book if you only know that one book?

Naturally, not everyone can learn everything, and even the brightest human mind cannot understand every language. There may be or may sometime have been someone so blessed with understanding as to be truly fluent, not only in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but in Arabic and Chinese and Sanskrit and Persian, Japanese and and Mongolian and Georgian and Armenian, Nahuatl, Mayan languages, Coptic, Cherokee and Swahili as well. Even such a genius, however, would be ignorant of the foundations of many of the world's cultures. Fluency in Latin and Greek is certainly not to be confused with intellectual omnipotence. On the other hand, it's certainly not to be despised, as Paine clearly despises it. I have the strong suspicion that Paine himself was one of the schoolboys he describes, who are so cruelly tormented by the study of Greek. It seems fairly clear to me that if any effort was made to teach Paine Greek, it was in vain. Perhaps Paine had a point, when it came to the majority of schoolchildren: maybe it's wrong to force the ancient languages upon them. Maybe it's wrong to make most children go to school at all. There's so much effort expended these days just in repeating the mantra: "Stay in school," and so little reflection about the purpose of the entire educational system. As late as a century ago, only a small percentage of the population ever attended a university -- is it realistic to think that universities can do now for 60% percent of the US population what they so recently did for 3 or 4%? I think not. I don't want to turn back the clock, and re-introduce the social privileges and restrictions of a century ago. The problem with higher education back then was that it was almost exclusively for privileged, upper-class white men. And, as anyone can see by observing some past Presidents of the United States or certain chief executives of large corporations, being white, male and privileged is no guarantee of scholarly aptitude.

There are many prejudices of which we should disabuse ourselves. In the early stages of the French Revolution there was much talk of opening careers to to talent, and sometimes even more than just talk, but actual opportunity based on ability rather than social rank. This was a very good idea, and it corresponds to the very good idea here in the US, which unfortunately remains more often an idea than a reality, that everyone should have equal opportunities, in careers, and also for example in education. Much more should be done in offering equal opportunity, including improving the schools and the public libraries in poor areas.

There was also, however, a more radical attitude in the Revolution, which also lives on to this day, and which insists so utterly on equality that it denies differences in ability. This is not usually explicitly said, or probably even explicitly thought, but rather works on an unconscious level, resulting in demands which are anything but well-thought-out: Stop teaching Latin and Greek. Send everyone to college. This is a particularly complicated issue, having to do with traditional class distinctions, respect, contempt, and other factors which tend to be repressed, and which therefore express themselves the more incoherently and irrationally. Until a few centuries ago, in Western civilization, an elite made up of the aristocracy and a small group of other rich men controlled practically everything. The people in power were almost exclusively white, male, and Christian. This small elite group was also, with very few exceptions, the only segment of the population to be intensely schooled, and their education always included Latin and Greek. On rare occasions a woman would rise to power or be admitted to a university, or a Jew would be granted an aristocratic title. Apart from such rare exceptions, an exclusivity was rigidly maintained, based on preconceptions of gender and race which were clearly wrong. Just as wrong was the contempt for all the kinds of work which fell outside of the traditional education -- and the traditional education was very narrow indeed. Just as there were people from outside the traditional elite with an interest in and a talent for the traditional objects of study in the elite institutions, so there were white male aristocrats who would have been better at carpentry that at Latin, and much happier at it, if not for the traditional attitude that carpentry was beneath a man "of quality."

I suspect that Paine and Ford and other unreflective opponents of traditional education felt very keenly the contempt of the upper classes. They both worked their way up from very humble beginnings, and neither of them lost his identification with the poor, oppressed masses -- which is fine, as far as it goes. The problem is that their outlook did not expand as their power and privileges did. They did not become curious about the new culture to which they were exposed. Many people rise in social status, and then do their best to wipe out all traces of their humble origins, working with tremendous effort to change their speech, dress, habits and manners so as to blend in with others of the upper classes, if not to appear more aristocratic than any actual aristocrat. Others are very open about their past, and, while they appreciate what their new surroundings and new acquaintances have to teach them, they also continue to struggle on behalf of poor people, as they struggled to overcome their own poverty. These lucky few people are significantly free of class prejudice; having belonged to different classes personally, they can see the good in different ways of life: for example, the riches of the traditional classical education, of which the masses, unfortunately, have always been relatively ignorant; and the skill and knowledge and wit required by all forms of manual labor, of which the upper classes traditionally have been rather ignorant, and have usually quite drastically underestimated and under-appreciated. There is blindness on both sides, and it still today is nowhere near disappearing: the contempt of laborers for all sorts of cultural achievement which they do not in the least understand; and conversely the contempt of the rich for the labor of those people without whom they would be much less comfortable, labor which tends to be much more difficult, and interesting, than they assume. There are exceptions, of course: mechanics who read Vergil and Ovid, perhaps even a few who read them untranslated; and multimillionaires who can align their cars' wheels and fix their own furnaces -- but they remain exceptions.

Paine saw everywhere around him, and all the more so as he rose to ever-greater power and prominence, wealthy, privileged people who benefited from the labor of the masses without ever remotely appreciating that labor, or even acknowledging that there was any sort of skill or intelligence involved in it. He was right to condemn that ignorance. He was wrong, however, to remain ignorant of the traditional intellectual preserves of the upper classes, and to remain hostile to the classics. He himself never learned much from the classics, this much is clear. It's very unfortunate that he concluded that there was nothing there to be learned, and all the more so that such sheer ignorance is displayed in the work of such a popular and influential author.

Tom Paine vs the Classics, Part I

"The Greeks were a learned people, but learning with them did not consist in speaking Greek, any more than in a Roman's speaking Latin, or a Frenchman's speaking French, or an Englishman's speaking English. From what we know of the Greeks, it does not appear that they knew or studied any language but their own, and this was one cause of their becoming so learned; it afforded them more time to apply themselves to better studies. The schools of the Greeks were schools of science and philosophy, and not of languages; and it is in the knowledge of the things that science and philosophy teach that learning consists.

"Almost all the scientific learning that now exists, came to us from the Greeks, or the people who spoke the Greek language. It therefore became necessary to the people of other nations, who spoke a different language, that some among them should learn the Greek language, in order that the learning the Greeks had might be made known in those nations, by translating the Greek books of science and philosophy into the mother tongue of each nation.

"The study, therefore, of the Greek language (and in the same manner for the Latin) was no other than the drudgery business of a linguist; and the language thus obtained, was no other than the means, or as it were the tools, employed to obtain the learning the Greeks had. It made no part of the learning itself; and was so distinct from it as to make it exceedingly probable that the persons who had studied Greek sufficiently to translate those works, such for instance as Euclid's Elements, did not understand any of the learning the works contained.

"As there is now nothing new to be learned from the dead languages, all the useful books being already translated, the languages are become useless, and the time expended in teaching and in learning them is wasted. So far as the study of languages may contribute to the progress and communication of knowledge (for it has nothing to do with the creation of knowledge) it is only in the living languages that new knowledge is to be found; and certain it is, that, in general, a youth will learn more of a living language in one year, than of a dead language in seven; and it is but seldom that the teacher knows much of it himself. The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.

"The apology that is sometimes made for continuing to teach the dead languages is, that they are taught at a time when a child is not capable of exerting any other mental faculty than that of memory. But this is altogether erroneous. The human mind has a natural disposition to scientific knowledge, and to the things connected with it. The first and favourite amusement of a child, even before it begins to play, is that of imitating the works of man. It builds houses with cards or sticks; it navigates the little ocean of a bowl of water with a paper boat; or dams the stream of a gutter, and contrives something which it calls a mill; and it interests itself in the fate of its works with a care that resembles affection. It afterwards goes to school, where its genius is killed by the barren study of a dead language, and the philosopher is lost in the linguist."

This remarkably stupid passage, in which so many things are asserted as facts, hardly one of which is actually true, is taken from Tom Paine's book The Age of Reason, published in 1794. In Paine's case, as with any other person with a reputation for wisdom, it behooves one to read at least a little of the supposedly wise one's work, before forming one's opinion of him -- in other words: to have one's own opinion, as opposed to accepting someone else's. It is a commonplace that history is written by the winners. But so are sociology, paedagogy, economic theory, theology and so on.

Most people have heard of William Jennings Bryan, and accept the general view of him as a populist hero. Most have also heard of the Scopes "monkey" trial. How many people, however, know that at this trial, the primary attorney for the anti-evolutionist side, for the prosecution which wished to punish Scopes for teaching Darwin, was William Jennings Bryan? (By the way, Scopes, a high-school principal, intentionally sought prosecution by violating the state law against teaching evolution, because he and a group of businessmen cronies thought that the publicity would put their town of Dayton, Tennessee on the map. It did. It also led to the founding in Dayton of the fundamentalist Bryan College, which is still there. The prosecution won the case, and Scopes was fined $100. Bryan offered to pay the fine for Scopes. The defense appealed to the State Supreme Court, which upheld the conviction, but set aside the fine, as it had been set by the judge and not by the jury, and at the time judges in Tennessee were prohibited from setting fines of over $50.)

So was Bryan a progressive or a reactionary? He was both. Was Paine an enlightened enemy of superstition and oppression, or a class-obsessed moron who couldn't see the positive achievements of the ancien regime along with their crimes and tyranny? He was both. People are complex. If you want to think of a politician or a philosopher -- Paine and Bryan were both, each in his own way -- as 100% right or 100% wrong, and you yourself are not exceptionally dull, it helps not to be very familiar with his actual positions. Stick to a few quotations, carefully chosen for you from some other collection of quotes by someone with a similar outlook on life and a webpage. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Paine was in revolutionary France when he wrote The Age of Reason, quoted above. He was elected to the Convention. He was in many ways quite in tune with the Revolution, which was throwing out many things. Traditional weights and measures, which were often inexact and varied from place to place, were eliminated, and the metric system introduced. Other changes did not last longer than the Revolution itself, such as the new decimal-based calender, or the rejection of traditional names. The study of ancient languages, unfortunately, although it did not disappear as completely as the pre-metric weights and measures of France, did continue to decline; and it was, moreover, ever more identified with conservatism, reaction, aristocracy and the Catholic Church, in France as elsewhere. As did many other Revolutionaries, Paine rejected Christianity. The main thrust of The Age of Reason was to reject both organized religion and atheism in favor of Deism. Unfortunately, as one can see in the quote which begins this essay, Paine rejects the study of ancient languages along with traditional religion. And thus, implicitly, he rejects the study of whole millenia of the history of Europe, during which the written record is almost entirely in in Latin or Greek -- to say nothing of other ancient cultures in other parts of the world. Or, if he is not actually dismissing the importance of studying the classics, he is at the very least proposing a course which would very much hamper its study: because, no matter what the subject, no very profound knowledge can be gained while relying exclusively on translations.

Of course, one of the primary categories of things rejected by the Revolution, or at least by its self-appointed leader Robespierre, who in his own eyes was the most revolutionary among them, was other, insufficiently revolutionary Revolutionaries. Paine was one of the many former comrades condemned to death by Robespierre; Paine's offense was that he had argued against the death penalty for Louis XVI. It was in a French prison, awaiting the guillotine, that he wrote The Age of Reason. He was freed when Robespierre was finally overthrown and executed.