Holy Ground: Latin in the Liturgy

Standing on Holy Ground

Holy Ground: we’re all probably familiar with the Biblical account of Moses’s first face-to-face encounter with God on Mt. Sinai. He sees a bush on fire, except the fire doesn’t seem to consume it. The strange sight draws him closer, and as he approaches he hears the voice of God:

God said, “Come no nearer!

Remove the sandals from your feet,

for the place where you stand is holy ground. (Exodus 3:5)

Set Aside

The word “sacred” comes from a Latin word which means which means “separated” or “set aside for God.” In the Bible it translates the Hebrew word qadosh, whose literal meaning, according to the Ancient Hebrew Research Center, is “set apart for a special purpose.” The ground upon which Moses meets God is separated from ordinary ground. Moses needs to leave behind something of his own before he can stand on it. He needs to meet God on God’s terms.

In my first discussion of why we use the Latin language in the liturgy I compared the use of Latin to the laying on of hands in the episcopal ordination rite. When a bishop lays his hands on the head of a new bishop, he’s bringing him into an unbroken chain of physical contact going back all the way to Jesus Christ himself. I also looked at how the Latin wording of the Catholic Mass, for which Latin is in fact the official language, can help us see the language of Holy Scripture in the Mass. Today, I’d like to talk about how the Latin language relates to the idea of the Mass as holy ground.

Sacred and Profane

Churches are themselves holy ground, of course. They are formally “consecrated,” which comes from the same Latin word as “sacred.” They are set aside for God’s purposes. The same is true of the Mass itself. It’s an action that’s set aside, separated, from the usual events of our lives. The priest wears clothes for liturgical worship that he doesn’t wear anywhere else. Clothes the rest of us don’t wear at all. We hear music that is different from ordinary music (or ought to be).

Liturgical language is a distinctive language. You can see this reality in the word “profane,” which originally meant simply “not sacred.” That is, not “set aside.” It comes from the Latin words pro, in front of, and fanum, shrine. When the presiding priest was sacrificing the victim at the altar, the unconsecrated people remained outside of the sacred precincts. They were literally in front of the shrine, pro fanum, rather than in it.

Let’s go back to the Exodus account of Moses and the burning bush. If you are to enter the sacred space, God’s space, you need to leave something behind. You need to avoid polluting the consecrated precincts, but you also need to be transformed in some way. In the case of Moses, he needs to leave behind the sandals that have been in contact with the unconsecrated profane ground before he can stand on holy ground.

Sacred Language

Worshipers do the same with ordinary, everyday language when they enter the sacred precincts of the liturgy. They leave it behind, just as Moses left his sandals, and instead take up sacred language. When the Church reformed the English translation of the Mass a dozen years ago, it was to get closer to the official Latin text, but also to create an English version that sounded more sacred. Sacred language sounds different.

**The Preaching of St Paul at Ephesus**, *by Eustache le Sueur, 1649*

It’s a common misconception that the language of the Gospels sounded like ordinary language. Yes, the writers of the New Testament used Koine, a comparatively simple form of Greek that speakers of different languages in the eastern Mediterranean used to communicate with each other. That doesn’t mean that laborers and merchants spoke the way St. Paul wrote his letters. And their speech assuredly did not sound like the Gospel of John or the Book of Revelation. Even the relatively simple Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) would not have sounded like conversational speech.

That’s not just a Christian thing, by the way. It’s a constant of religions around the world. In fact, it’s common that religious language is not just in a different style or idiom than everyday language: very often it’s a different language altogether. Chaldean Catholics worship in Aramaic, the same language that Jesus and the Apostles spoke. For Hindus and Buddhists the ancient Sanskrit is a sacred language. In the case of Muslims it’s the 7th century Arabic of the Koran. Zoroastrians worship in an otherwise obsolete Iranian language called Avestan. For Catholics, the sacred language was, and still is, Latin.

Magic vs. Religion

What is the point of sacred language, other than the fact that everybody seems to have one? It has to do with the difference between magic and religion. Magical spells involve formulaic language, and maybe even a non-native sacred language. The problem with magic is that it is an attempt to use those words to put God (or the gods) to work for us. When we use magic we are trying to put ourselves in charge of God.

Religion goes in the opposite direction. Its purpose is to connect us back to God (religio = “a binding back”). All the physical things that are set aside from everyday life are intended to draw us out of ourselves and into God’s orbit. A sacred space tells me I’m no longer on my own turf. Sacred language tells me that I’m no longer in my own world. In other words, sacred liturgy takes me out of myself. It’s not about bringing God down to my level, it’s about lifting me closer to him.

Converted and Baptized

Latin, for Christians in the Roman Church, is especially suited for this purpose. It’s not that there’s anything particularly sacred about Latin in and of itself. It was, after all, the language of the bad guys, the Roman persecutors, for the first three centuries of the Church. But just as each one of us, however sinful, can be redeemed by God, so has the language of Caesar been converted and baptized. Latin has been the sacred language of Catholics for the past millennium and a half. It takes us out of the here and now. It reminds us that we stand on sacred ground

Featured image top of page: detail from Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush, by Domenichino c. 1610-1616