For Christians, language holds a unique importance. John tells us, “In the beginning was the Word,” referring to the second person of the Trinity. In Genesis, God spoke the world into existence. God communicated his will to Moses at Sinai in the form of the written word on two tablets; and then, he communicated his inspired Word to all Israelite people in the form of the Hebrew scriptures and instructed them to write his words “on the door frames” of their houses and teach them to their children. Later, he communicated the new covenant to Greek and Jew alike through the apostles in the form of written Greek. Thus, Christians from the beginning have been rightly called the “People of the Word” and the “People of the Book.”

The first example of work that God gave Adam in the garden was to name the animals. And whatever Adam called the animal, that is what it was. The first act of dominion was specifically a linguistic activity—coming up with names and categories for the animals. This makes a lot of sense: the first step of taking dominion of anything is to understand it, and understanding something necessarily requires language. This is because language is the vehicle for our thoughts. If you try to have a thought without putting it into words even in the privacy of your own head, you cannot do it. A language incarnates the categories of the mind. If Adam was going to rule the beasts, then he needed to understand them, so he needed to have names for them. And what was true for this first task is true for every task that we do as humans. The first step in doing any work is to learn the terminology. Do you want to farm? Okay, this is field, this is seed, etc.

But language is even more important than this. Not only is language the vehicle for thought, but different languages cause thoughts to take different shapes and different forms. A language describes the world and everything in it—sort of like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Each word is an irregularly shaped puzzle piece that signifies a certain amount of reality in the world. But in different languages, even though the world being described is the same, the “pieces” are different and of different sizes. For example, there are only about 2,000 pieces in Hebrew, so they are necessarily big and (from our perspective) weirdly shaped. In Greek, there are 60,000 much smaller pieces, and (from our perspective) they are still weirdly shaped. In Latin, there are about 30,000 pieces with shapes that are more familiar to us than in Greek or Hebrew, but often different from what we see as normal from a modern perspective. When a person thinks in a language, the number and shape of individual pieces make a huge difference. In particular, the language (or vehicle of thought) constantly controls what he thinks of as the same or similar, and what he thinks of as different or unlike. And this changes everything.

To a degree, you can even tell how a culture thinks simply by looking at its vocabulary. The classic example of this is that some dialects of the Eskimo language have at least 53 words for snow. What does that tell you? It tells you that snow is an important part of their life and the distinctions between different kinds of snow matter to them. Because they need to think and speak about these distinctions, they need more words for them. This is true of every language on every topic.

But does any of this suggest that we must learn a foreign language? Why not just have students pour themselves into English? Is English insufficient to serve as the linguistic foundation for modern education? After all, it has a huge vocabulary and has served as the lingua Franca of the world for over two centuries now.

While it is true that English is a powerful and beautiful language, we must remember that it only became so through the influence of French and Latin. Before Alfred the Great (9th Century), what could a person talk about in English? Farming, sailing, chain mail, axes, and Danes. We can still see traces of pre-Latin English in monosyllabic derivatives from Old English, such as pig, ax, farm, dung, etc. There was a huge translation of ideas and words from Latin during Alfred’s reign that made English capable of communicating about many complexities in the world for the first time. A few centuries later, there was a second giant influx of Latin (through French) beginning when the French-speaking Normans conquered England. English changed so dramatically during that time that we call it Middle English today, as opposed to the Old English of the centuries before. Once again, during the 16th century, there was a third influx of language from Latin when people were beginning to use English to produce works of theology, philosophy, and literature that before that time were almost entirely composed in Latin or Greek. This third transformation resulted in what we call Modern English, which derives no less than 85% of its total vocabulary and a good deal of its grammar from Latin in one way or another.

But why does any of this matter? Who cares how we got to modern English—now that we have it, right? Pretty much everything in the modern world has roots in something ancient. Do we have to learn things just because they came first?

In this case, it matters a lot. Languages do not always get better. Vocabularies do not always grow. Sentence  structures do not always become more subtle, more versatile, and more capable of communicating thought clearly, powerfully, and beautifully. Even the greatest languages will languish if the speakers are not regularly fed a diet of great literature and great languages. Look at the high Middle Ages! Latin, which itself had become a powerful language through its interaction with Greek in the 1st century BC and has been called the most successful language in history, even Latin—through centuries of being cloistered up with monasteries with few teachers and small libraries—languished to a shadow of its former self. By the 13th and 14th centuries, authors such as Thomas Aquinas were writing lifeless, simplistic prose you could almost call pigeon Latin. The glory had departed from Latin.

As modern English was being forged by true greats, such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Donne, and Dryden (the greatness of which was derivative from their readings of Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, and the like), it was necessary to maintain this newly created modern English through regular interaction with Latin and Greek. Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, at the end of the 16th century in his seminal work The Scholemaster, laid out a new program of education based on double-translation for the English elite classes in which schoolboys would spend most of their days translating the Latin greats into English and then translating them back into the original as precisely as possible. The British called this “doing your Latins” throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. It is very possible that Ascham was the primary culprit for killing Latin through this brutal method, but simultaneously he preserved the power and beauty of modern English. The English and English-speaking colonial elites became so used to the vocabularies and grammatical structures of the Latin originals through these harsh exercises, that the English language became deeply imbued with the spirit of Latin, so much so, that the prose of English authors such as John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, who himself probably never had the opportunity to study Latin, are nevertheless manifestly deeply Latinate. This was no less true of American authors. In the 19th century, Booth Tarkington, who wrote the hilarious Penrod stories, had failed to get his degree from Princeton because he was unable (or unwilling) to complete his Latin requirements. And yet, if you read the prose surrounding his rustic dialogue, much of his sentence structure and vocabulary choice looks like it was written by Cicero himself. Even a Latin flunky was possessed by the spirit of Latin as he wrote English about American rural life. Latin had trickled down into the English of everyday Englishmen and Americans

However, as impressive as modern English has become, we must face the reality that it is now in marked decline and has been so for almost 200 years. When elite schools stopped studying classical languages in the mid-19th century in favor of “more practical” subjects, English immediately began to become simpler: sentences shrank and became less varied. Although technical vocabularies in modern English are bigger than ever, the general vocabularies of both elites and common people have become smaller. Go on Google Books and find a copy of any personal letter written by a farmer or a teenager in the 19th century and read it. If you can make out their cursive, you will immediately notice how eloquent their prose appears. Their sentences were long—joined together with subordinate clauses and participial phrases; their vocabulary was precise and varied. They demonstrate a copiousness that not many people today could replicate. Their letters often contained a complexity that we see now only in academic prose, but they had soul and communicated real meaning to real ordinary people—not just a handful of specialists who have dedicated themselves to an exclusive club of academics

If you look at the literature written in that period, you will see the same but even more so. We have to take classes in school to understand English literature that was at one time popular among common people without a formal education. Regular people (not just literature majors) used to read Charles Dickens during their leisure time of their own volition. We often had to consult Spark Notes to know what these authors were saying and take quizzes to make sure we understood. When we make miniseries of Jane Austen’s novels for a popular audience, we have to simplify her language so they can follow the plot. When we make film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, the actors have to compensate for the antiquated language by over-acting everything and adding ridiculous gags (such as random flatulence) so the audience will know when to laugh). Why do the screenwriters do this? Because nobody but Shakespeare scholars knows what the characters are saying half the time. English is reverting slowly to the simplistic language it was before classical languages made it great.

Someone will object, “Don’t we have examples of great literature written in English in the 20th century after the decline of Latin in schools? What about Orwell, Auden, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Lewis, Sayers, T.S Elliot?” Yes, yes, these authors have written some truly great works. But did Orwell study Latin in school? Yes, he did. Auden? Yes. Tolkien? Well, he probably knew more Latin by the time he was twelve years old than almost any Doctor of Classics today, not to mention Greek and other ancient languages. How about Charles Williams? Yes, he did too. Lewis? He was very well-versed in Latin and Greek and even wrote a series of letters in classical Latin to an Italian priest who knew no English. Sayers? Well, she admits that she did not know it very well, but she did study it for 20 years. But is their knowledge of Latin evident in their great works? In many cases, it is very evident. Tolkien crafted the greatest epic of our time and went to great lengths to make it English through and through. And yet, if you look at his work carefully you will find that his marvelously original work is reworked from the models of Homer and Vergil, and not just at the macro-level. He carefully crafted his English sentence structure to create a suspension that is unnatural in English, but essential in Latin and Greek. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Space Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces (all of his fiction) draw heavily on the works of Apuleius, Ovid, and Phaedrus—to the point that you cannot read the originals of those works without being reminded of particular passages in Lewis. Without his Latin education, we probably would not have read any Lewis at all.

But as the decline of modern English progresses, even many of these works from just a few decades ago are becoming too difficult for a popular audience to read without the structure of a class and the coercion of a teacher. To say nothing of the general population, many of our students in classical Christian schools are finding Tolkien, the Vergil of the 20th century and our mother tongue, too daunting to read and instead prefer to coddle their brains with the easy images and sounds of Peter Jackson’s dumbed-down, de-Christianized, de-poetrized, secular monstrosity. In doing so, they choose to cast aside a gem from their inheritance of English literature and leave Tolkien’s works unread in favor of a director of horror films, who grew up on a steady diet of Dungeons & Dragons and Conan the Barbarian.

The study of Latin is a hallmark of the best authors who write in English. Even many of the most notable popular English authors of our time studied it: Terry Pratchett, J.K. Rowling, and Susanne Collins to name a few. Okay, you say, that may be the case of literature, but what about the spoken word? You will find that the same is true there. The most well-spoken and effective orators of our time also studied Latin: Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson, and Winston Churchill. Where do you think their eloquence came from? Would Winston Churchill have been able to persuade the English not to give in to Hitler if it had not been for his education in Latin? Who can say? But the Germans certainly started World War II in part because they had stopped studying liberal arts and humanities and the classical languages in general and decided to raise a generation of technical specialists who were very good at building machines and figuring out how to blow things up, but forgot who they were, and where they came from, and the difference between right and wrong.

The modern English language was truly magnificent once. The study of classical languages made it so and kept it so for centuries. It is less magnificent now, but still pretty good. But if we love English, we should be passionate about preserving it and do our part to stem its decline. We should go further and strive to restore it to its former glory by feeding it with a serious study of classical languages and literature. If we love English, then we ought to be good stewards of it. We should study Latin and, if we still have time, we should study some Greek too. An education built on a linguistic foundation of English alone will not turn the tide, and unless we look to the languages and literature that made English great, future generations a few centuries from now will call the 16th and 17th centuries the “golden age of English”, but our time “a period when English languished” and one to be skipped over.

Nevertheless, the study of classical languages and literature is not merely a program to save English, as worthwhile as that endeavor may be. We are not only citizens of the United States (or England or Canada)—we are citizens of the kingdom of God, and our loyalties must go back further. Our people began in a different time and were speaking and writing in archaic languages. Our mother tongue may be English, but our grandmother tongue is Latin, and our great-grandmother tongues are Greek and Hebrew.

We all recognize the importance of studying history: those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the stupid mistakes in history as well as to miss the opportunities to repeat the great successes in history. But what we forget sometimes is that in history we mostly learn what people have done and how it turned out. But when we read ancient literature in the original languages, we listen to the very voices of our forefathers. In doing so, we are thinking their very words after them, and thus we learn how they thought about the world. We learn to think in their terms, in their categories, in the structures of their thinking—not just about the big ideas that we cover in philosophy and theology classes. We learn to hear and see their thoughts and way of thinking on every topic: battle, clothing, food, housing, power, love, virtue, vice, good, evil, and beauty. Sometimes, we see that they think very differently than we do on those topics. Other times, we see that they thought exactly like we do on those topics.

But no matter how differently or similarly they thought on a given topic, we learn something. When we learn to follow their thoughts and think differently, we think, “Aha, maybe there is a different way to look at this. I never considered that aspect of it before.” Or, we might say to ourselves, “Oh, so that’s why so-in-so in such-in-such a work says such-in-such a thing. I now understand what he meant.” Conversely, when we see that the ancients thought of things in similar ways, we still learn something: “Maybe there is something to this idea since people have been talking exactly like this for two millennia now. Maybe we aren’t crazy to talk and think this way. Maybe our predecessors did understand our current problems and maybe they have something useful to say about how to solve them.” Either way, reading literature in ancient languages allows us to step out of our own time and our categories for a moment, so we can consider things from a historical perspective.

Someone who knows only one language only knows the world from a single perspective since he views things from a single set of categories and can only articulate his thoughts through a single medium. Someone who knows two languages sees the same world from two slightly different perspectives. It is like having two eyes—instead of just one. Together your eyes can see an object more fully because they see slightly different aspects of the same object. Even knowing a modern foreign language has this effect. The more foreign the language, the more dramatic the effect. Someone who knows Spanish will tell you how Spanish views things a little differently. But in the grand scheme of things, Spanish is very close to English, and the difference in perspective is not that large: they are both recent languages, born in Europe, based in word order, and built on a foundation of Latin. Spanish just has a different barbarian influence than English. But someone who knows Mandarin will have a very different perspective on the world. Asian categories, baked into their language, are very different from our own. Ask someone fluent in Mandarin how the Chinese would view any given concept (whether mundane or profound). Unless the concept itself is very recent, it is almost sure to be very different from our way of thinking. This is why we often do not get their sense of aesthetics or humor, and they often do not get ours: our categories are so different that we find different things beautiful, and different things funny.

But when you learn an ancient language, especially one like Latin or Greek, the perspective is not just different from our own—it is also historical. Our way of thinking in English was built on the model of Latin and Greek thoughts, so learning their way of viewing the world casts light on all our literature and institutions (the high and the low). Learning a very foreign language like Mandarin will certainly help you see the world in a different light. Learning Latin or Greek will help you understand who we are as heirs of the Western tradition, where we came from, and why we speak and think the way we do. Simultaneously, it shows us where modern thinking has departed from historical thinking.

Most importantly, as Christians, we are people of the Word and people of the Book. That word and that book took shape in the form of Greek and Hebrew and partly under the rule of a Latin-speaking empire. Thus, learning to see the world as the Romans and Greeks did is extremely helpful in understanding the Scriptures themselves as the immediate audience did.

Although it is a wonderful thing that the Scriptures have been translated for us into modern English, the process of translation is itself necessarily a reorganization and recategorization of the original ideas—even when it is spot on. I am not just talking about the Living Bible or The Word—this applies even to the King James Version. Does this mean that we do not have real access to the Scriptures? No. Does this mean that we often misunderstand what the Scriptures are saying? In some places, yes. In as much as you cannot think in the same categories and structures of thought as the original, there will be both incorrect loss and incorrect gain in your interpretation. Think about what you thought a particular passage meant when you were a kid and how when you grew up and read the same passage again, you realized that it did not mean quite what you originally thought. When you read the Bible in the original languages, this happens all the time. Do we need to worry about our salvation now because we read the Bible in English translation? No. The Lord knew about the limitations of human language from the beginning and arranged accordingly for the Bible to be redundant in so many ways that His Word is preserved through all times and languages.

But now more than ever, when the world has changed so drastically and our categories for the world have shifted equally as much, it is critical that we actively pursue an understanding of the thought system found in ancient literature. When Christ says, “Love your enemy”, did he mean “hostis (an enemy on the battlefield) or inimicus (a personal enemy)”? When Proverbs says, “It is not good for a man to eat too much honey: so for men to search their own glory is not glory.” what in the world does that even mean? We learn the answers to those questions by learning classical languages and learning them for real—that is, to think in their categories.

Learning the systems of thought of the ancients through their languages is an essential part of the great conservation effort we call classical education. Without them we risk the complete or partial loss of comprehension of old language and concepts and run into an intellectual barrier between us and all the literature of the past—most dangerously the Bible itself. By studying them, we ensure that we and our children can understand the Bible, and gain or preserve the ability to read, love, and learn from old books of Homer, Vergil, Augustine, Shakespeare, and even Jane Austen. We are The People of the Word and The People of the Book, so we read old books, learn old languages, and study the world as it once existed. We do not do these things because we are stuck in the past, but because we love our faith, our history, and our heritage. What better guides could we ever hope for in such a shifting present and uncertain future?

Tim Griffith is a Senior Fellow of Classical Languages, the Chairman of the Institute for Classical Languages, and Director of the Universal Latin Exam. Timothy has spent the last 17 years improving methods for teaching ancient languages in a modern context. Most recently he has developed Picta Dicta (www.pictadicta.com), an online learning platform specifically designed to assist parents and teachers with teaching ancient languages.

Footnotes

This article was adapted from a presentation entitled “A Spicy Manifesto on Classical Languages” given by Tim Griffith at the New Saint Andrews College Disputatio on March 20, 2024, in Moscow, Idaho. Accessed March 20, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UquUv7wzAgQ and https://nsa.edu/blog/a-spicy-manifesto-on-classical-languages.

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