So listen, it's not like I insist that the liturgy be performed in Latin. But can we maybe work on the English translations we use? Because the ones we have are inelegant at best, and potentially misleading at worst.
Take the Nicene Creed. In Latin, there's a rhetorical beauty to the way the relative clauses all hang off of the initial verb - 'I believe in x, who... who... by whom...' &c. But English syntax doesn't easily allow for this sort of complexity, so most translations substitute 'and he... and he... and he...'
This practice is objectionable on two grounds.
One, generally: it lends a weird narrative quality to the creed, a crudely paratactic structure in which (I don't think it's stretching to say that) God is falsely understood to be within time. For example - nobody would understand the Holy Spirit's mission from the Father (and, if you're so inclined, filioque) as chronologically preceding the Holy Spirit's being glorified, or the Holy Spirit's spaking through the prophets. But that's very much the sense one gets from the translations in which a relative pronoun is replaced by a conjunction and a re-assertion of the subject. It's 'narrative theology' in the bad sense.
Two, particularly: in a couple of instances, these translations (for no reason I can determine) ignore their principles and go ahead and (correctly) translate the 'qui' as 'who', giving the impression that the creed makes this distinction. This winds up being twice as confusing as it would have been had they stuck to their guns. For a relatively innocuous example: 'whose kingdom shall have no end' (the paratactic principles of translation would seem to suggest 'and also, his kingdom shall have no end') - as it stands, someone could misunderstand this lone relative pronoun as referring to its most immediate antecedent, namely 'the quick and the dead,' as this is how the English language tends to work, rather than to Christ. This example is relatively innocuous because (1) it is unlikely that somebody would make this mistake, and (2) it wouldn't much matter if they did.
But there's much more of a problem in this example: 'being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.' As it stands, this strongly has the sense of a parenthetical reminder: to paraphrase, 'Christ has the same substance as the Father - remember him? from the first article? yeah, the one who made all things.' Whereas, obviously, the phrase is supposed to refer to Christ, not the Father, and properly understood, it carries a fair amount of theological weight (instead of being a banal repetition of ground we've already covered, it's the doctrine of linguistic creation, and thus of the 'logical' quality of creation, and thus of participation).
So problematic is this idiosyncratic, but nearly universal, rendering into English, that I'm tempted to say that it was some kind of anti-Platonist conspiracy. I'm of course too lazy to try to research the history of interpretations of the creed, but who do you think I half suspect of being behind this implicit but fierce denial of the analogia entis? Hint: rhymes with 'Runs bloat us.'
(We don't have to mention at much length the more grossly revisionist mis-translation, common in more liberal churches, of the initial 'credo' as 'We believe...' Although the intent here, presumably to emphasize that the Church's belief is corporate, is admirable, the translation falls into the trap of assuming that the singular 'I' refers simply to the individual reciting the creed - as though an individual ever says the creed by themself. Understood correctly, the singular 'I' in 'I believe' implicitly teaches the same logic of participation - the Church offers her belief in the singular to underscore precisely her unity, in which I may understand myself participating as I too utter 'I'. To say 'we' is to reinscribe the individual/communal dialectic which the Church precisely rejects, pretending that the Church is simply a collectivity of 'I's.)
16 April 2008
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10 commenta:
Jeffrey -
Blogs like this make my soul tingle and mish your mustacheoed face.
Jeff,
I noticed that St. Mary's had a wonkier than usual version of the Creed. It is also the only CoE church that I've heard use the antiqued "quick and the dead". That's more of a side note than anything.
It is strange to me that you think someone would misunderstand 'being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made', but I suppose I could see it happening. It is strange that you would call this the doctrine of the analogia entis though or that Duns Scotus is behind the translation problems you have with this section. But I'm too lazy to do that historical research either.
Grant,
Thanks.
Anthony,
The Duns Scotus thing was no more than a joke. But the analogia entis part is for real - the affirmation that all things were made by means of Christ as Word is the closest thing to a credal affirmation of analogical being as there is, and the correct understanding of this phrase would be very difficult to reconcile with a univocal or an equivocal account of being.
As for the likelihood of someone misinterpreting it, I'm way too lazy to try to poll parishioners or anything, so it's hard to be sure, but I should've phrased it more harshly - the language itself means something different, it's not really even a matter of individuals reciting the creed misinterpreting it. The problem lies in a difference between Greek or Latin on the one hand, and English on the other - in English, it's extremely rare for the antecedent of a relative clause to be anything other than the word immediately preceding it (but not so in Latin) - so the very structure of the English language strongly suggests the 'by whom' to refer to 'the Father' and not to Christ.
Well yeah, Jeff, but the archaic idiom does give us a bit of a clue (an argument for using the old versions, I guess, or modernising more radically). I've certainly grown up with the "quick and the dead" version mentioned by Anthony, and don't remember ever having misunderstood it.
But then, my school forced Latin on me at the age of 11...
And hey, 'language itself' never means anything. Not on its own it don't.
And liturgy is weird. You can quote me on that.
Jeff,
I'm not really interested in developing an ontology from what is essentially a document whose goal is to say just enough, but not enough to say too much. And, though I don't want this to seem rude, I think you say too much here. It is strange to suggest this is a credal affirmation of something that doesn't even become an accepted (sort of) doctrine until the Fourth Lateran Council. I know you've told me before I don't understand analogy, but to read analogy into the creed in the way you suggest goes against the purpose of this part of the creed. When you say that 'the affirmation that all things were made by means of Christ as Word' this actually, despite the point of analogy in Aquinas at least, posits what can only be understood as a creaturely relation of the Father to the Son - one of utility. The point of the preceding bit (i.e. "God from God") is to reject Arianism - that is that there is a creaturely relation of the Father to the Son, which is to say that there is no ontological relation of the Son to the Father, but that the relation is substantially so. Which is a way of saying that there is no relation of being within the Godhead, but that the relation is the being of the Godhead. Now, if I am extrapolating correctly what I think your position to be (and it is largely Pickstock's position, no?) your point is that their is an implicit analogy of being in the affirmation that creation happens through Christ as word. However, I want to challenge the idea that the antecedent of "by whom all things were made" is obvious, It is not obvious which person does the creating, as such, because if you are right it creates an ontological redundancy in the Godhead (the notion that the phrase "by whom all things were made" refers ontologically to the Son and not to the Father) that, well, I think is troublesome.
I'm not trying to defend univocity or anything here. I'm just trying to say that this sort of reading of the analogia entis mistakes its fundamentally apophatic purpose and in a kataphatic mode doesn't answer the problems the way people think it ought to.
"there" for "their" at one point. Sorry, woke up at 5:30.
Andy,
I'm glad that you never misunderstood this - perhaps the whole post was an overreaction to my own faulty understanding of the phrase, going back to childhood. Would that more schools forced Latin on everybody, from birth.
And yeah, I understand that 'language itself doesn't mean anything' &c, but I wasn't making any weird linguistic positivism claim or anything. Grammar still works, and in this case, language and culture have gotten together to decide that, in English, antecedents to relative clauses precede those clauses immediately.
And if liturgy needs to be weird, it should be weird in a productive way.
Anthony,
This is fair enough. And I wouldn't disagree with what you say about the Trinity. But the 'per quam' in the Creed is making an ontological claim about the extra-trinitarian doctrine of creation: that there is an ontological distinction (and an ontological affinity) not between Father and Son, but between the Trinity which creates and the creation which is created.
Call it analogia, or don't, it doesn't make a lot of difference.
I'm not entirely sure I grasp your meaning with 'ontological redundancy' - so if I'm reading you wrong, do tell. But if you're objecting to my reading of the Creed as claiming that it is the Son, and not the Father, 'by whom' all things were made (and here, with Augustine, I read this as the formal cause of creation), then wouldn't you also have to read all of the phrases of the creed as referring to the entire Trinity? Because that's pretty clearly heterodox (if the Father and the Spirit also, e.g., suffer and are buried).
Or is there a sense in which this is the only phrase that, if understood to refer to only one Person, creates an ontological redundancy?
But your point about apophasis/kataphasis is well taken. I do usually tend to the hybristic, and don't mind being called out on it.
Also I would like to point out how weird this blog phenomenon is, in that I just wrote that out, even though you're sitting about two metres away. And in that I did not verbalize it, so as not to interrupt your conversation. But now the residue is permanent and public.
just to back jeff up, until i read this blog entry, i had always interpreted the "by whom all things are made" as refering to the father -- indeed a relative clause refering to the nearest antecedent as is typical in English.
So thanks for the small revelation, Jeff, that will certainly make me think the next time I say the Nicene Creed. Although that will probably be in German. Hm... going to check on something... And what do you know-- the German is just as unclear as the English, not helped by the fact that both "son" and "father" are both grammatically masculine (might seem intuitive, but "girl" in German is neuter, as is an old word for "wife"...). Anyway, that explains why my interpretation was never brought into question by the German text.
I think it's the list-like character of the creed that made me interpret it right (as well as the intravenous Latin) as a kid. I'm not denying that it can be read wrong: Kelly's entirely right to say that it can be. But I do still think it's ambiguous. Grammatical rules are flouted all the time without language falling apart.
The Norwegian translation is slightly less ambiguously correct: "By Him were all things were made". Would that be a good solution in English too?
Maybe the list character (which to me justifies the grammar-flouting) should be emphasised with bullet points. And power point made obligatory in all churches.
Power point and Mission Praise.
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