Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

September 3, 2009

What Do I Have Against Learning Latin?

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 8:03 pm

So my new friend asks me why I seem to be so “anti” the classics and why — at least to her — I appear to have a real chip on my shoulder regarding Christian kids learning Latin. It is, she said correctly, the foundation of language; to understand Latin is to understand more deeply our own English language.

And, you know, I have no problem with all of us understanding more deeply our own English language. Anything that would keep people from saying “anxious” when they mean “eager,” or referring to any act of destruction as “decimation,” would make me happy. I love words. I think I use them well — in two languages, English and Spanish.

On the other hand, it’s a serious, time-consuming endeavor to study a second language; you don’t learn Latin, Swahili, Tagalog or English, which I taught in Spanish for more than a decade, by dabbling. That commitment, then, won’t lead to mastery unless the reason for learning a new language in the first place is of sufficient importance to keep you going through the subjunctive tenses and reflective verbs. Without strong motivation, even the smartest kid will emerge from the classroom mono-lingual, her frustration describable in a dozen words in her native language.

Whether the impetus to test the waters of bilingualism comes from curriculum, business, evangelism, or sudden immersion — your wife, for example, just got transferred to Poland — the goal is the same. You want to speak to people and be understood in their language. For the Christian, there’s the added motivation that bi- or trilingualism results in an explosion of opportunities to talk with people about Jesus Christ, whether or not you originally picked up a second language because of other reasons not at all less noble, or much less noble. (“Less noble,” by the way, would include the study of another language solely as a means to meet suitable young men your Daddy would approve of). So, if you move to Sweden, you’d study Swedish, not Italian. Very few people in Sweden speak Italian, and your most flawless Italian presentation of the Roman Road will be lost to your listener; you will have acquired a language that no one around you knows. Yes, you’ll feel smarter. Yes, your resume will glow, and yes, your efforts were impressive, albeit not even remotely appreciated by Sven and Mats in Stockholm.

The same is true with learning Latin. It certainly is difficult, primarily because, as a “dead” language, there isn’t a contemporary, evolving, reciprocal Latin language spoken anywhere to refer to. It’s the province of classicists, an honorable exercise in learning, but the linguistic equivalent of busting a gut riding a stationery bike by the side of a wide-open road. Same expenditure of energy, but with a much different outcome.

Learning a dead language brings about fruit, I suppose, that certainly edifies the learner, but does so by doggedly plowing a field with no expectation at all of its eventually bearing fruit that can edify others. People who have mastered Latin have put enormous effort into a dead language, increasing the opportunities to speak and share Christ with, perhaps, the other five young classicists in their seminar at NSA or classroom at Logos. Never, then, with Macario, Ying-sui, or Akosua across the street, whose language could have been learned instead.

It seems to me a shame, if not an outrage, to choose a language that guarantees never being able, with the presumption of also not being willing, to talk to other people — about stock indices, Giant Schnauzers, plans for dinner, or the Gospel of Christ. When I learned Spanish, it became clear that my world — specifically, the number of people I could talk with about Christ — exploded. And while I may have only actually talked to a couple of hundred people, I could, theoretically, talk to any of hundreds of millions more in a couple of dozen or so Spanish-speaking countries. Spanish became a tool, like the study of Biblical doctrine or the memorization of Scripture, to enable me to minister. That’s my job and my call as a Christian — to be equipped, to “be prepared always to give an answer, a reason for the hope that lies within” me. Being equipped to offer an apologetic to Opus Dei in a shared, dead language probably isn’t what St. Peter intended.

If ministry — not just evangelism, but meaningful contact, service, and relationship with non-believers — were a priority of Classical Christian schools, a basic foundation in Latin might well be offered. But the expectation that there’s a message to share, and that it could be shared via a language people actually speak, seems to be less important than the acquisition of “lost tools of learning” as a reaction to a secular world that actually reads vampire novels without a true understanding of the literary tension involving syphilis. (See “Blog and Mablog” for a discussion of vampire literature and why other people aren’t as smart as the blog’s author).

These “tools,” particularly the study of Latin for the sake of, well, the study of Latin, certainly build up the learner. There is no shortage of puffery and ego, as we in Moscow have seen, among the classically trained when forced to deal with public-school refugees and the “lesser” homeschooled. The lost tools now recovered by our Pedagogue-in-Chief are a gilded crowbar — or perhaps a dainty, silver pair of tweezers? — with which to separate these students from those presumed to be not in the Covenant, or at least the classically enlightened Covenant. The tools, carefully etched and unscarred by use, do work well at excising and plucking out, but in a world crying for spiritual renovation, wouldn’t it be better to have a less-pretty toolbox filled with the stuff you can actually use — if, in this broken world, you were at all inclined.

1 Comment »

  1. “Ontbiaday assnay,” as the saying goes. 🙂 I’m not dogmatic about learning Latin — I took two years of Latin and classical Greek, and wish I had kept them both up, but the fact that I let them go is hardly the end of the world for me. (Now that I’m a Christian, I really wish that I had studied Koine Greek and Hebrew.)

    I think you are overlooking one of the most important reasons for studying Latin: it helps us to communicate better with our forebears. Until recently all educated people were able to use Latin, and did. For a dead language, it was very much alive. Latin ability and familiarity with the writings of classical antiquity are important to being able to fully appreciate and interact with European culture up until recently. Not a few important theological writings from the 17th century and earlier are still not translated into English and can only be read in Latin.

    A society that loses contact with its forebears will also lose the future. No past, no future — that is exactly the situation America and the rest of the West finds itself in today. I won’t say Latin is absolutely indispensable in keeping in touch with our past, but it does help a lot, and I won’t knock anyone who wishes to make it part of their children’s curriculum. However, any Christian should really be giving biblical Greek and Hebrew higher priority — they are more fundamental and useful to the Christian than Latin is.

    Finally, anyone who learns Latin to the point where it is actually usable as a tool should not have much difficulty learning Spanish to be able to communicate with the local Conquistadors.

    Comment by Christopher Witmer — September 4, 2009 @ 2:02 pm

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