Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
Uwe Michael Lang: Early Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language
132 U. M. LANG Christine Mohrmann distinguishes between a period of rigorism in the first three centuries, when Christian authors sought to express the newness and otherness of their faith in new linguistic forms, and a period of humanism in the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christian authors increasingly used the spolia gentium, the 'spoils of the Gentiles'.17 From the middle of the fourth century, in the wake of the Constantinian settlement, Church Fathers like Ambrose and Augustine were more open to the Roman linguistic tradition. Nonetheless, Christian Latin remained more reticent towards its surrounding secular culture and preserved its own peculiar character, shaped by its early Biblical translations, more strictly than Christian Greek. Mohrmann neatly summarises the different attitudes between the Greek East and the Latin West: Early on the East sought to establish a closer tie with the classical Greek heritage, and did not hesitate to use the old, Greek words with a new Christian meaning. The West, though not rejecting this proceeding, sought, in this respect too, a greater and more complete isolation. The West was also more conservative. More than the East, it jealously guarded its old, Biblically inspired, linguistic patrimony.18 The East was in general more susceptible to classical paideia than the West, as Edward Watts argues in his recent study City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria. However, Watts also notes tional Augustinen, Paris 1954, pp. 111-116), at p. 387: “Dans les années qui suivent le baptême, saint Augustin ne se familiarise pas seulement, d’une manière objective, avec l’idiome des chrétiens, il s’efforce aussi de surmonter les scrupules d’ordre linguistique et stylistique qui rendaient parfois difficile, pour l’ancien rhéteur, l’adoption de tel ou tel terme particulier. Nulle part on ne voit mieux cette antipathie à l’égard du néologisme que dans la manière dont saint Augustin s’oppose, pendant de longues années, à l’usage du mot salvator'. 17 C. MOHRMANN, ‘L’étude de la latinité chrétienne. État de la question, méthodes, résultats’, Tome I, pp. 83-102 (originally published in: Conférences de l’Institut de linguistique de l’Université de Paris 10 [ 1950/1 ], pp. 125-141). 18 MOHRMANN, ‘Linguistic Problems in the Early Christian Church’, p. 196.
