Linguistics and Nominalism

I have long had something of an interest in Bible translation. At one time I seriously considered a career as a Bible translator. For reasons I don't remember now that notion pretty much died on the vine, but not before I had done a fair amount of study on the subject. I will never forget the article in a respected journal that defended the translation "Pig of God" for a people group who had never seen sheep and had no word for "Lamb". I was outraged. I still get upset about it when I think about it :-)

The root of the problem was of course in the philosophy of Bible translation that informed such a decision. It was grounded in modern linguistics. I've read guys like Eugene Nida and Jan de Waard, and I've read stuff by Moises Silva, among others, and they all make a reasonable argument for a dynamic equivalence philosophy of translation. I'm not saying that they're dummies: they're certainly not. But because their conclusions followed so naturally and reasonably from their premises, and because "Pig of God" was always a most foul stench in my nostrils, I felt compelled to conclude that the problem isn't with the reasoning; it has to be with the philosophy or theology of language beneath the translation philosophy, and beneath the linguistic theory. Unfortunately I'm not a philosopher or theologian of language (nor a linguist, nor a philosopher nor theologian of any other stripe, for that matter).

So I had a problem: a thing with what I consider to be noxious effects, but which was coherent as far as I could tell, and whose presuppositions I could not get at. I asked my Greek instructor about this matter when I was in graduate school, and he said that to his knowledge no one had done any work on a theology of language. So my problem seemed intractable, my formal education came to a conclusion, and my prospects for resolving the matter were dreadful.

And then along came David Knowles and his book The Evolution of Medieval Thought. Towards the end of the book, he writes of Nominalism:

A given thing, a dog or rose, evokes in the human mind a mental 'sign' ... which is the same in all men, as is a laugh or a cry; each race of men then gives to this sign a verbal sign or term or name in its own language, which we attach to our mental image and which recalls that image to our mind. [p. 322]

Bingo! This is exactly the way, as far as my linguistic "knowledge" goes, that linguists and translators talk about language!

This seems to me and my limited understanding of things to suggest a link between Nominalism and modern linguistics (and consequently with modern theories of Bible translation as well). I don't have any kind of resolution of this problem yet, but at least I have a direction to go when I get round to the thing again.

Brief Interruption of Sabbatical

I was going to be reading a few books by Bainton...but I can't bring myself to do it, and anyone monitoring the Reading List in the sidebar merits an explanation now (as opposed to following Easter).

So I started reading The Age of the Reformation. And early on he says this (p. 12):

Obviously, the historian of this period is not poking ashes without embers, and he does well at the outset to avow his own affiliation. The writer of this book is a staunch Protestant. At the same time he kneels before the shrine of objectivity. Let it be hoped that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Well, the two aren't mutually exclusive, and being fair-minded doesn't mean you have to ditch your principles. So I appreciate the fact that Bainton is being forthright about this.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem that this honesty has gone very far in influencing what he wrote. Some examples are necessary. On page 19 he says:

Consider the case of lay culture, which the Catholic Reformation naturally [sic] did not foster. Instead it enhanced sacerdotalism.

Well, my historically-minded wife nearly jumped out of her skin in outrage at this spin, which would have nullified the work of St. Francis de Sales. But let us read a bit further on, in the same paragraph:

The Jesuits undertook the education of the Catholic masses that the laity might be religiously literate.

Okay, full stop. First he tells us that the Catholic Reformation didn't foster lay culture, and then he says that it did. Well, which is it, Dr. B? So it seems that he can't keep his story straight here for the duration of a single paragraph. But there is more, because in the same paragraph he also says:

Protestantism did contribute to laicism but not to secularism. The priesthood of all believers was designed not to make all priests into laymen, but all laymen into priests. The net result, of course, was to demote the clerical caste, but not to diminish the religious orientation.

Heh. There's an appropriate quotation from The Incredibles:

Elastigirl: Everyone's special, Dash.

Dash: Which is another way of saying no one is.

The point, of course, is that if everyone's the same in being a priest - if the priesthood of believers is the only priesthood - then there are a lot of obvious consequences, and secularism may certainly be said to be one of them (or at least a benefactor thereof). Bainton emphasizes the high-minded intent behind the insistence on the doctrine, and of course I'm willing to grant that the intent may well have been great - but that doesn't change the fact of the pernicious consequences. It's fatuous to say that you and I can have differences of opinion about obviously fundamental religious issues and that those differences don't matter - that you can be Baptist, and I a Lutheran, and that the differences are fundamentally irrelevant because we're both Protestants - it's fatuous to say that it's okay to have those sorts of differences but then to say at the same time that the man who apostasizes on the same grounds of private judgment hasn't exercised the same faculty as the Baptist and the Lutheran. Hence to say that the individualism inherent in Protestantism hasn't contributed to secularism is, shall we say, not exactly a stellar example of objectivity on Bainton's part.

A second example may be helpful. Bainton says that Luther was trained as an Ockhamist (pp. 15, 25, taking "Modernism" as a synonym for "Occamism" - cf p. 14), but "he was not interested, at bottom, in philosophy at all" (15). And:

He was, indeed, trained in the philosophy of the Modernists, but imbibed from it little of that theory of individualism which reduced Church and State to individual components. Luther's individualism was religious. It meant that he, Martin Luther, must confront God for himself alone.

Please. So Luther was trained as a Nominalist, and this had no serious influence on his socio-political views, but only on his religious outlook? Are we really supposed to believe that? So what happens when agents of the State, thinking that they must "confront God" as individuals, decide that they're not going to be answerable to the Church? It seems absurd to suppose that Bainton really thinks that there's no connection here.

So the upshot is this. Bainton is getting it wrong on things I know about, so how could I trust him about things I don't know about? More than that, he's doing a simply terrible job of being objective. An objective writer might have written something more like this: "It cannot be denied that Luther's Occamist training powerfully influenced his outlook, but it must be emphasized that his interests were focused less upon socio-political matters than upon the individual's self-confrontation with God." If Bainton had written something like this, I might not object at all. But to just deny that Luther's theologically individualistic views have any secular conclusions - ones that "coincidentally" are consistent with the secular outcomes of the Nominalism in which he himself was trained - is pretty blatant special pleading in my opinion. Theology and philosophy cannot be so completely distinguished.

I have better things to read than controversialism posing as serious history. And this isn't the first time I've had this objection about Bainton. While reading his book on the medieval Church last spring, I remarked to my wife that I found his blatant prejudices rather annoying, and that the book's real value lay in the primary sources it reproduced. So - onward to better things. I will say one thing, though. The couple-dozen pages of this book confirmed my theory of the Nominalist heritage of Protestantism. This isn't to say that Ockham is its sole father, of course, but the connections and consequences cannot be denied.

St. Augustine, Scripture, and the Perpetual Virginity of Mary

I haven't been paying attention to Carrie's blog here lately, for two reasons. She has been doing most of her controversialist posting over at Beggars All, where the level of discourse is such that I can't imagine ever bothering to take the time to get involved. Consequently on her own blog she has been posting less, and the posts have consisted more of flat quotations from Catholic sources - quotations of such a sort that I really don't see the need to quibble with them, since they have seemed to be reasonably honest quotations which fairly present what the Church teaches.

Recently though, she posted a quotation from St. Augustine, and I thought I'd take a look. And the first thing I discovered is that her link to the source for the quotation is wrong. (Sigh) This is not the first time she has done this by any means. I wish that she would demonstrate a little more regard for her sources than this. A correct link to the letter of St. Augustine to Volusianus is here. Aside from the fact that St. Augustine did not believe in sola Scriptura, as has been repeatedly demonstrated to Carrie to no avail, let's see what we can learn from the broader context of this letter.

One interesting thing is that St. Augustine freely quotes from the book of Sirach, calling it Scripture:

For such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures, that even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else from early boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and talents greater than I have, I would be still daily making progress in discovering their treasures; not that there is so great difficulty in coming through them to know the things necessary to salvation, but when any one has accepted these truths with the faith that is indispensable as the foundation of a life of piety and uprightness, so many things which are veiled under manifold shadows of mystery remain to be inquired into by those who are advancing in the study, and so great is the depth of wisdom not only in the words in which these have been expressed, but also in the things themselves, that the experience of the oldest, the ablest, and the most zealous students of Scripture illustrates what Scripture itself has said: "When a man has done, then he begins" (1:3, emphasis added; quoting Sirach 18:5 - not 18:6 as the New Advent page says).

So St. Augustine here recognizes as Scripture a book that Protestants reject. Interesting. But even more interesting is that in this same letter St. Augustine affirms and defends the Perpetual Virginity of Our Lady. In 1:2 he quotes Volusianus, who asks about this very subject, so we can expect that St. Augustine will in fact defend it. He does.

The body of the infant Jesus was brought forth from the womb of His mother, still a virgin, by the same power which afterwards introduced His body when He was a man through the closed door into the upper chamber. Here, if the reason of the event is sought out, it will no longer be a miracle; if an example of a precisely similar event is demanded, it will no longer be unique. Let us grant that God can do something which we must admit to be beyond our comprehension. In such wonders the whole explanation of the work is the power of Him by whom it is wrought (2:8, emphasis added).

The saint defends the Perpetual Virginity by comparison with Our Lord's action in passing through the closed door of the upper room (Jn. 20:26). Now this leaves the Protestant Carrie who wants to claim St. Augustine as one of her own in a bit of a jam. Either she must concede that he did not believe in sola scriptura, in which case her appeal to him in defense of it is ridiculous; or she must say that she is wrong herself in denying the perpetual virginity of Mary, which St. Augustine has defended by the Bible (hmm...no chance of this, I suppose); or she must say that St. Augustine got the perpetual virginity wrong - but if he got this wrong, there is no reason that he could not be wrong on sola scriptura as well, and so the appeal to him as an authority is demolished on her own terms - so if she intends to use him as an "authority" to her Protestant friends, she has failed; and clearly she has failed if her intent is to "prove" something to Catholics.

Indeed, the only way that I can imagine that such quote-ripping would be useful is if context just simply doesn't matter - if only the forms of words matter. This seems pretty nominalist. It reminds me of a girl I knew back in the 80s who upon seeing a logo for a Van Halen concert (sorry, that's the best image of it that I can find) suggested that perhaps the fact that the character was holding up one finger was meant to imply that there is only one way: Jesus. Heh. Then again, maybe not. But the same adolescent, uneducated context-ripping that attempts to find references to Christ in a 1980s Van Halen logo is really indistinguishable from the context-ripping by Protestants who attempt to find Protestantism in the Church Fathers. It's just not there, and only by a ridiculous nominalistic abuse of words can they even pretend otherwise.