Gettysburg, Bishops, Androids, and Latin?

The Connection 

Gettysburg, Bishops, and Androids. What, you may wonder, is the connection?  And what do they have to do with Latin? Well, as we’ll see, Latin is the connection. Allow me to explain.

Let’s start with Gettysburg. I’m not really talking about the Battle of Gettysburg itself. It really has more to do with our tangible experience of the Civil War contest more than a century and a half after the fact. What my family and I experienced at the site of the largest and most destructive battle in the history of North America has something in common with one aspect of how we experience the Latin language in the modern world.

 Gettyburg  

Let me explain. Walking on the same ground upon which thousands of men had fought and died a century and a half before was a profound and moving experience.  We stood on the very spot where our own state’s 20th Maine Regiment had planted their colors at the extreme left of the Union line.  We looked up from the jumbled rocks of Devil’s Den at the steep, stony slopes of Little Round Top and marveled at the courage of the confederate soldiers who had assaulted those forbidding heights.

 From the shadow of the North Carolina monument, the starting point of Pickett’s Charge, we gazed across the open fields gently rising to what had been the center of the Union position on Cemetery Ridge. There we wondered at the reckless audacity of Robert E. Lee in sending 15,000 men marching across that long, long mile into the massed fire on the other side.  

I had read any number of books and articles about the battle in my lifetime, and had seen movies filmed on location.  It wasn’t until I had actually been there, even 150 years after the guns fell silent and all the carnage of the fight was long gone, that I really began to understand the Battle of Gettysburg on more than a purely intellectual level.

 Mystery 

     Gaining knowledge that goes beyond what we can know through the intellect is the essence of the Greek word μυστήριον, “mystery.”  The word did not originally (and does not today in theology) have its modern colloquial meaning of a puzzle to be solved, or something simply unknowable.  A mystery is something that we can know only through experience or revelation.

Standing on the site of an old battle is a mystery in this sense of the word. Taking in the topography with all our senses, connecting the faces and names on the various monuments with exact spots on the ground, but most of all knowing that your feet are touching the very ground stained by the blood of the men who fought and died there gives a sense of connection that goes beyond mere rational understanding.

Bishops

The Greek  μυστήριον is often translated into Latin with the word sacramentum. I recently gave a series of talks at my parish church on the importance of the Latin language in the Catholic church.  In my first talk I looked at how the traditional Christian understanding of sacraments, sacramenta, applies to the role of Latin in the Church. There’s a principle here that applies not only to the Church, but to the secular world as well.

Let’s take a look at the religion sense first, and specifically the ordination of bishops.  The bishops are the successors of the Apostles, the original followers of Jesus. An essential part of the ordination, the rite that makes a man a bishop, is the laying on of hands. The presiding bishop places his hands on the head of the bishop elect. That presiding bishop felt the hands of another bishop on his head when he was ordained, the hands of a bishop who himself experienced the laying on of hands from another bishop.

This sequence of bodily touch goes all the way back to the first Apostles, who were touched, literally, by Jesus Christ himself. A true bishop must be part of that unbroken chain of physical contact starting with the hands of Christ.

 The Big Picture 

The Latin language is something like that laying on of hands. I’m not speaking only in the religious sense here, although there is that added dimension for believing Christians, especially Latin Rite Catholics. It applies in a very ordinary sense to everyone who has any connection to western culture.

So, let’s look at the big picture. If Western Civilization is important, then the Latin language is important.  Latin is an inseparable strand in all the various threads woven into the fabric of our culture.  We see it in language, law, literature, religion, art.  

We even see it in something that seems so “modern” as science.  Take a look at the scientific names of any plant or animal you can think of.  Or, consider a word as modern as “data.” I often use this word with my students as an example of how neuter endings work in Latin.  The nominative and accusative plural of neuter nouns and adjectives end in -a. Data is the plural of datum.

 Enter The Android 

Of more interest to us here is the fact that datum means “given.”  The plural data, then, means “givens,” as in the givens with which we begin a mathematical proof. When we talk about scientific data we’re speaking the language of our ancient forebears. This word is so redolent of the space age and beyond that it serves as the name of a Star Trek android . . . but it is in fact a gift of the lingua antiqua.

Star Trek, as it happens, came up in an earlier post (“Time Travel is Real) in which I wrote:

. . .  But even if I couldn’t visit the past bodily as Captain Kirk and Spock were able to do, there was still a real connection.  Even if I couldn’t share my own experiences with our distant ancestors, they could still speak directly to me.

They don’t just speak to us when read Vergil’s Aeneid or Gauss’s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, they are speaking right now. Not only that, their voices echo back to us even from our mythical future.

Featured image top of page: Fr. Corby Granting General Absolution, statue from Gettysburg National Military Park. Photo by Marla Venable, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)