I wonder how far I shall carry any opinion with me when I plead for active effort to revive the general use of Latin?
It has always seemed to me one of those necessary reactions without which we shall be unable to reestablish the unity of Christendom. The longer we defer making the effort the harder the effort will become; yet it is hardly more than 200 years since Latin was still the common medium of understanding on serious matters among Europeans, and not 300 years since it was the necessary medium for discussion on subjects common to all nations.
It was not replaced by French as a diplomatic language till after the middle of the seventeenth century. It was in general use in Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary, in Poland and the Lower Danube districts till much later. Even during the Great War one important international speech was made in Latin at the moment when the Bulgarians threw in their lot with the Prussian Reich under the certitude that it would come out victorious.
The problem presented is simply this: There is a common civilization, abominably warped by the religious revolution and ruin miscalled “The Reformation,” but still in the main one thing. There is another name for this civilization. It used to be called Christendom; it is now sometimes vaguely called “the white races,” or, more exactly, Europe. At any rate there is one unmistakable thing which, in spite of a badly diseased and divided social state, is still in the main the common descendant of the old Christian culture. Its dress, its manner of living, its main social ideas are the same.
Inter-communication between its various parts is absurdly interrupted by profound differences of idiom. The different national languages are thus separated precisely because there used to be a common medium, and because it was therefore thought no menace to unity that the vernacular languages should flourish. Latin was the common language and the bond between all men of European stock.
The necessity of some common language is seen in the fantastic attempts to create one artificially. You will find enthusiasts for stuff like Esperanto, which is about as much like a human language as a jig-saw puzzle is like a living face. Such enthusiasts seem never so much as to have heard that Latin was for century after century the common living tongue of our race. It enshrined half the greatest of our literature, nearly all our traditions, all our religion—yet no one has a word to say for it now as an international medium!
There was a moment when it looked as though French would take the place of Latin, at any rate with cultivated people; but the growth of an exasperated nationalism, the vast expansion of the New World, and the victories of Prussia during the nineteenth century wars have made that impossible. It would have been better than the chaos in which we now live, but a poor substitute for Latin save in this, that French is a living language.
It is, by the way, just as well for the French that the thing did not happen, because nothing is worse for a local language, or for the nation that speaks it, than to be internationalised. We are already seeing the pathetic effects of this on our own nation and speech, the decay of English, its rapid vulgarization and weakening, are due to its sprawling undisciplined over such incongruous lands.
Outside the training of men for the Catholic priesthood, and one or two special areas such as Scotland, Latin gradually became in the West of Europe, after the Reformation, the privilege of the wealthier classes. To-day it is not even that. But the fact that it was once so has, I believe, done a great deal to prejudice people against it. The prejudice has some foundation in reason; for if Latin were indeed to be the test of an expensive education, then, since only a small and wealthy class could afford to know it, the mass of men would have good right to protest against its use, for by such a custom they would be cut off from public discussion.
There has further grown up in connection with the use of Latin an idea -- false, but also natural -- that there was something specially difficult about that tongue. On the contrary, it is the easiest of all foreign languages to learn because it is the most clear and logical, and because so many of our words in all languages are connected with it.
Of all subjects which our modern and dangerous machine for compulsory instruction insists upon putting into the young, Latin is the one of which they talk least and the one of which they wish to know least. That Latin is more necessary to the plain man than reading the vernacular I won’t say, and I think it is not more necessary than to be able to keep very simple accounts. But it is a great deal more necessary than unproved theories on health, or than “nature study,” or than the already false and warped national history that is put before the young, officially, in the official schools. It is even more necessary than elementary geography, and its general use would make all the difference in the relations between men of different countries.
To-day the several Christian nations are quite cut off. There is only one international language, the Judaeo-Deutsch, called in English Yiddish; and that is only of service to a comparatively small segregated section of people, and is used more or less secretly. A Jew brought up to that use in say, Poland, will have a common medium wherewith to talk to his brothers in London, Paris or New York -- and he uses it. But the Pole who comes to London, Paris or New York has no common medium wherewith to talk to his fellows of the Christian world. There is only one obstacle to the revival of Latin, and this is, that the idea of it has been allowed to fall out. We are as unused to it to-day as our immediate forefathers were used to it. We take its absence for granted as they took its presence for granted; and I am persuaded that its revival would be the best merely scholastic reform we could undertake for re-uniting our imperilled civilization.
In order to effect so salutary a change, how should we proceed? We have to hand most powerful instruments: all that is needed is the spirit that shall set them going.
We have for a nucleus the vast body of the Catholic priesthood, drawn from every rank in society and everywhere strongly grounded in Latin, using it daily in the liturgy and constantly in touch with its phrases and text-books. All these hundreds of thousands are ready as a foundation for the general resurrection of Latin.
The modern usurpation of teaching by the State, amid all the evils it has bred, promises to permit one very good thing: which is the revival of that ancient Catholic idea, the presentation of superior education to all children whose parents care to give it them. When the Faith was universal any likely child who showed aptitude for scholarship could obtain it. Poverty was no bar. As a matter of common principle education was endowed, and all over Europe, even here in England before the wholesale robberies under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, one of the duties and functions of the well-to-do was to endow secondary schools, and in these the acquirement of Latin was the chief activity, so that there should be everywhere a large body who could use the common language of Christendom.
To-day that idea of easy popular access to higher education is reappearing. It is reappearing in a cramped, base, mechanical form, with none of the old diversity and local feeling, but it is there and might be used to a good purpose. All are familiar with the conception that superior education should be open to those who desire it.
Provided the State does not lay its deadening hand upon the new development, nor exercise that blind tyranny of which it is to-day more enamoured than was any despot in the past (and how tamely we submit!) the situation may be saved.
Even if the State so mars and deflects the new movement, and compels the mass of children who would have higher instruction to follow its cast-iron rules and learn only what it provides, we can in part escape. In those countries where some fraction of the taxes Catholics pay is allowed them for their own schools, they can give their new secondary schools, if they are careful to preserve them, a system of their own: and in that system they can restore the place and the prestige of Latin. If the practising Catholic body in any country, even in one where Catholics are few, were known to be generally conversant with elementary Latin it would leaven the rest.
To do so would be part of that task which, in temporal things, is our main function -- the true political vocation of the Catholic -- to arrest, if it still be possible, the decline of civilization, to revive culture, to form of the Catholic body an army of leaders in the preservation and possibly the extension of our old glories now so grievously imperilled. We are the true heirs and guardians of civilization in the modern race to barbarism, and to reverse the current should be our privilege as well as our duty. The achievement is arduous, but possible. It should be our glory to obtain it.
From Essays of a Catholic Layman in England (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931), pp. 259-264.