   
Françoise Waquet, Le Latin, ou l'emploi d'un signe,
XVIe-XXe siècle
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 414 pp.
...Orest's other
reviews
A "cultural history of Latin"? That is what Waquet proposes, with the first
54 pages being about teaching Latin and reading-speaking it in school, then
86 pages on the role of Latin in the churches, followed by 30 pages on the
various degrees of competence in writing and speaking the language over the
centuries. The final 100 pages of the book are the more interpretive, in
the sense that there was a need to state what Latin was thought to do in
education, followed by its history in inscriptions, the natural sciences
and medicine, and finally its strengths and weaknesses as a "universal"
linguistic instrument (not strong!) as well as its place in the fabric of
more recently constructed universal languages.
It would be in the eighteenth century that the argument about the use of
precious time in education would be made to question whether the years of
effort teaching Latin grammar, composition and speaking were well spent.
The French Revolution brought a momentary triumph of French, but then by
the early 1820s Latin had recovered its privileged position in the curriculum,
one that would last down into the 1880s. Latin declined more slowly in Germany
than in France. In Britain the public schools would continue to place
considerable importance on Latin, in part as a result of the Humanist "revival"
of the nineteenth century. In czarist Russia Latin held a privileged position
down to 1882, when Tolstoy, who had favored it as minister of education,
fell. Latin would decline slowly there, down to the Revolution — when
it was abolished, only to be revived in some select schools after the fall
of the Soviet regime.
In the world of the Roman Catholic clergy, from the Early Middle Ages down
to World War II, Latin would occupy a privileged place, though vernaculars
were used considerably by the evangelizing orders such as the Franciscans
from the fourteenth century down to the present. Not the Latin of Cicero
and Horace, medieval Latin nonetheless constituted a medium which permitted
spiritual-literary and philosophical expression. The attempts to restore
classical Latin that began in the fourteenth century and that became very
strong in the sixteenth century, fostered a concentration on constructing
grammar that became ever more complex and a kind of "discipline" of its own,
the bane of schoolboys for centuries.
On the vexed issue of whether or not the laity could understand liturgical
Latin, Waquet traces the history of the question as a debate within the Church.
She seems somewhat sympathetic toward those who stressed the importance of
comprehension. At a glance, this would seem obvious, especially when one
recognizes that a religious experience could be shared (which is what "liturgy"
means) without necessarily comprehending the words.
The story about the pastor who was losing his flock for lack of Latin (p.
282) brilliantly illustrates a more general issue. From the "éloquence
sauvage" of the Amerindians that moved the Jesuits (Doiron,
XVIIe Siècle, 173 [1991]: 373-402), to the issue
of comprehension, as it were, beneath simple signification — "being
not made, being of one substance with the Father" — repeated by tens
of thousands in their native languages today, the liturgical has the
"mystification" element about it in most religious traditions, regardless
of the language.
What was going on in the eighteenth-century education debates, just as in
choices between churches, was the rise of an ever more present sense of choice
and lack of time. Children lacked the time to spend on Latin are so many
other subjects were added to curricula. And the liturgical declined when
faced with growing emphasis on preaching, music and private devotion. And
an inscription in the vernacular on a building could also be comprehended
more rapidly (p. 287).
One of the most delightful parts of this book is about how Latin could be
used to hide things — medicine and pharmacy come immediately to mind
— but also Gibbon's use of Latin to describe sexual aspects of Empress
Theodora's life, so that modesty would be preserved. Nudes received drapery,
the sexual required Latin in the name of modesty, and leaving much to the
imagination, that feature of the human mind that the Parisian police of the
eighteenth century feared above all else.
In a very thoughtful final chapter, Waquet explores the links between Latin
and a longing for the global or universal communication that has been an
integral part of Western thought since the eighteenth century. Arguments
in favor of teaching Latin because it was a more "universal" language than
any other, and was sustained by the richness of the literature, law, and
since from Antiquity, also finally were not so much refuted as ignored, though
the longing persisted and inspired the creation of various new universal
languages and movements to diffuse them.
It would seem that Waquet subscribes to Umberto Eco's remark: "Le
problème de la culture européenne à l'avenir ne réside
certainement pas dans le triomphe d'un polyglottisme total ... mais dans
une communauté ce personnes qui puissent saisir l'esprit, le parfum,
l'atmosphère d'une langue différente." This is a profoundly
interesting view — one that offers a critique of the superficial learning
of languages in the multi-cultural "programs" that are consciously or
unconsciously extending over the world. Superficiality in learning languages
is rampant!
But given the fundamentalisms of religious and cultural movements across
the world (learning Corsican!), the possibility that a new Humanist moment
centered on Latin and ancient literature ought not to be excluded. Only a
small minority might be attracted to it (less learned than the neo-Latinists),
but in the Western world — at least — there may no longer be large
majorities, but only minorities, some trained in American English and others
in English.
Only a learned person with a truly mature and profound mastery of Latin would
dare write this book. She is dressed in her contemporary scholarly fashion
clothing, while around her are many who wear "knock-offs" of the emperor's
new clothes.
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