> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 18:23:40 +0200
> From: Julian Lord <jlord_at_free.fr>
> To: glorantha_at_rpglist.org
> Subject: Re: Biblia
> Reply-To: glorantha_at_rpglist.org
>
> Andrew :
>
>>> The congregation, in fact, had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the >>> texts. >> >> This is a serious oversimplification. At the time that Jerome was >> translating the Bible into Latin, Latin was the language of most people in >> Western Europe, so in the 4th and 5th centuries, many people would have >> understood it if read to them (although it probably would have sounded much >> like formal high British pronunciation sounds to a farmer in the American >> south).
If you were referring exclusively to the Western European Christian population in the 4th and 5th century, the statement is correct (with the exception of Germanic Christians for whom Latin would have been a foreign langauge (such as the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, for whom Gothic was the native tongue). In your original statement, it was unclear exactly what time period you were referring to. You appeared to be suggesting that peasants throughout the Middle Ages would have understood Latin. My comments were addressed to that aspect of the issue. Since it wasn't your intention to comment on that, we can more or less be in agreement on this.
>> It is true that in France, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula, the general >> population in the Early Middle Ages spoke a debased form of Latin which >> might well have allowed them to understand the written Latin of the Vulgate >> when it was read out loud. However, pronunciation was already changing, so >> it is unclear that, say, a French peasant would have fully understood the >> words he was hearing, because they were being pronounced in a somewhat >> different manner than the conversations he had around the dinner table. In >> Italy, comprehension would have been higher.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. There is clear evidence to suggest that many priests memorized the Latin rituals rather than understanding them, which means that their pronunciation is going to be based on the more formal church Latin rather than the vernacular usage.
> Your suggestion that Italians would have had improved comprehension is
> incorrect. Resemblances between modern Italian and Latin are derived from
> 18th - 20th century word derivation from Latin, and not directly from the
> Latin
> sources themselves.
Okay, fair enough, but that would seem to reinforce my point that even in Italy, France, and Spain the vernacular was rapidly diverging by this point. But again, since your original intent was to speak of 4th century audiences, there's not much point in pursuing this.
>>> In fact, the doctrine of Biblical purity is an invention of the late Middle >>> Ages >>> and Renaissance. Previously, it was considered to be a working text >>> meant for use (and abuse) by Christians. Many modern Catholics still >>> use it like that. >> >> In the 15th century, there was considerable hostility >> among the educated to the idea of retranslating the Bible, even into Latin.
>> But the way the text was understood by scholars was more complex than it is >> today.
>> The Bible was not seen as having an exclusively literal meaning. In >> fact, medieval exegesis recognized 4 distinct layers of meaning in the text, >> and any one of them was suitable for study and exegesis.
These other approaches were also of interest in the Middle Ages, and one can find scholars pursuing them, so they're hardly new. (Augustine, for example, was rather interested in philological issues, and many theologians applied allegorical means to philological analysis; many medieval scholars were interested in historical analysis, albeit of a rather crude kind by modern standards.) But in modern Biblical exegesis, in any given passage, there tends to be an emphasis on one or two levels as the 'correct meaning' of the passage. Christ's parables, for example, are normally studied only on the allegorical or moral (technically, tropological) level. Much modern Christian fundamentalism relies excessively on the literal level of the text. Medieval scholarship tended to assume that in any given passage, all 4 levels were operational at once, so what a modern scholar might tend to dismiss as simply a minor detail on the literal level, a medieval scholar might explore as having deep anagogical or allegorical significance. For example, Genesis says that Noah's Ark was 300 cubics in length. The 12th century theologian Hugh of St Victor asserted that this was a prefiguration of the Cross, because the number 300 in Greek is represented by a Tau, which is shaped like a cross. Pope Gelasius divided the world into two domains governed by the Emperor and the Pope on the basis of a passage in the Gospels where Jesus says that two swords are enough.
As an example of how all four layers can be present simultaneously, the Exodus was literally a narrative of historical events; allegorically it prefigures Christ's death, as well as the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist (a double allegorical level); tropologically it depicts the conversion of carnal vice to spiritual virtue; and anagogically it depicts the soul's leaving behind of the sufferings of this world for the joys of Heaven.
This sort of exegesis is very uncommon today, and most modern theologians find it rather wrong-headed and overly-complex. Historical-critical exegesis argues that a text has only a single meaning, the particularly meaning which existed in the mind of the author when he wrote the text (although different scholars will disagree about which single meaning is present). Thus, if a parable was originally intended in an allegorical way, there cannot really be an anagogical meaning, and anagogical interpretation is not only useless, but distracting and must therefore be disposed of. Literal details, such as the length of Noah's Ark, do not carry any deeper meaning, although they can by analyzed in a historical fashion. So, yes, I think in this sense, medieval exegesis is much more complex than modern exegesis.
Some of this might even be useful for Gloranthan purposes, but I'll leave that to gamers more familiar with the Gloranthan West than I.
Andrew E. Larsen
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