LANGUAGE OBSTACLES IN DISCUSSING
EASTERN CHRISTIANITY IN ENGLISH

© 2007 by Orchid Land Publications (20070106, updated 20070108-c)

     Only a very naïve person would deny that language influences thought, as well as conversely.  Languages sometimes divide up reality in different ways, just as one’s axiomatic paradigm of reality influence given terms to have opposite import.  For example, some languages have more words for (different kinds of) things that are spoke of with a single term in English—Greek has several words for (different kinds of) “life,” “love,” and many other concepts, including the difference between sea water and fresh water—whereas English has more than one word for things that may be spoken of with a single term in this or that other language.   A prime example is the differentiation of the word for” human being” or “humanity” from the word for “adult male” in most languages other than English and the Romance languages;  I find it unacceptable to use “man” for the former in this day and age, since it offends females as well as being incorrect.  It would be strange to speak of the Theotókos as a "man."  Admittedly, one can arbitrarily define Greek ánthrōpos or Latin homo as a person, but such arbitrariness will not satisfy many . . . any more than proving a conclusion from a premise one has embraced, one that others have not embraced.

     It is important to recognize that the matter under discussion is as much a problem within Orthodoxy as in ecumenical discussions involving the Orthodox. 

     There may be even be no translation for some words.  I suggest that certain Biblical or theological Greek terms have no satisfactory English translation and hence need to be taken over the way English and other languages have always done.  Among those I would name are:

     dýnamis a potential or capacity (or power) to become an actualitzed reality when           

          energized by energy (as conceptualized in the Hellenistic-Apostolic Age  (see      

          HERE; this sense is not that of modern physics)

     noûs a faculty of transcendent understand located in the heart or, according to some,           

          not in any specific part of the body but everywhere in a person

     mysteric is proper for a Mystery; the translation “mystical” is a confusing as it is           
          incorrect.
     hamartía (often mistranslated as a volitional-juridical “sin” (for which the correct word in Greek is hamártēma, “the result of sinning”).  This is only one of many examples in which a Greek term has ontic import, whereas the Western Christian term has deontic import.  In the example under scrutiny, the sense of a state or condition of being deprived of Divinization, i.e. of the uncreated energy of Grace, God’s Life—the sharing of which makes worshipers members of Christ’s mysteric (not "mystical"!) Body.

     The Orthodox view (as long ago, also did Western Catholics)  the Incarnation of God the Son as the “first Mystery” of salvation, the basis of all other Mysteries (juridically termed sacraments or ordi­nances in Western Chrsistianity).  This view is as obsolete in much Western Christianity as is the Orthodox view that the “ultimate Mystery” is Divinization (2 Peter 1:4), partaking of the divine Nature (i.e. God’s uncreated Energies), not the imparticipable divine Essence.  Where Eastern Christians understand the Crucifixion of Our Savion to be a perfect latreutic (having to do with worship) Act of offering a perfect created Being  back to God as an acknowledgement of the divine ownership of all that is, an Act that makes the soterial resurrection of the soul and body thinkable, eminent Western theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, have considered bodily resurrection not to be soterial in and of itself.  The paradigm divide is categorical. 

     A legal system can, according to the Ockhamist-Reformation principle of justum quia jussum (“right because commanded”) declare that respect for life makes abortion wrong but capital punish-ment and initiating a war do not (as such; e.g. in the Old Testament) offend against the principle.  St. Paul rejected this view of legality and upheld, in effect, a view that later came to be the principle of jussum quia justum, “commanded because right,” i.e. by promoting human nature.  The latter is an ontic point of view, one that does not distinguish—except possibly as a matter of degree, especially when it comes to the life of both the mother and of the child when both cannot be preserved, some-thing avoidable today through safely performed Caesarian operations—the onticity of any sort of life, . . . though it may, as did St. John of Damaskós and St. Gregory of Nyssa, distinguish vegetative, animate, and rational (human) life.

     For a discussion of Christian paradigms, click HERE; for terminology, click HERE.
    Greek differentiates essence from nature—something’s energies.  The uncreated Essence is imparticipable and unknowable; the uncreated Nature is participable and knowable.  Human essence is created according to the icon (image, likeness) of God; human nature is created according to the assimlation to God.  Greek théōsis is Divinization, partaking of the divine Energies or Nature (2 Pet. 1:4); it is not Deification (Greek apothéōsis ), which refers to essences.  In Eastern Christianity, Christians are worshipers, and salvation is Resurrection and Divinization; in Western Christianity, believers, and salvation is conversion to the right beliefs. 

    True insight, which rises above brute knowledge, lies in connecting the dots in what is otherwise nothing more than a list of items.  This is best done in tabular form, since a table shows both “horizontal” and “vertical” (subcategorial) relationships.  That John called the Creator LOGOS (“Reason”) and Paul called Him SOPHIA (“Wisdom”) coheres.   Calling the LOGOS a “Word” is bad Greek (the term can mean a discussion or rationale, but can mean “word” only in the sense of “message” or “signal,” as in “give the word”; it is bad theology; it is bad semantics; and it is one of the many linguistics tricks of transmogrifying Eastern Orthodoxy into Vatican Lite.  Another delusion occurs in referring to a mistranslation of the Greek Bible as “the” Bible.

      I see no problem in using energy for enérgeia, provided we never let a reader lose sight of the fact that the Greek word in the Bible does not have the sense of modern physics.  Non-causative translations of enérgeia—note that the verb for energize in Greek is as plainly causative as is energize in English—such as work , which denotes activity but not necessarily causal activity, is plainly inadequate,  .  .  .  as is also true of  Latin actus or operatio)  The plainly energetic word for  “assimilation” (feminine should not be translated as its result, namely image or likeness—Greek ‘omoíōma (neuter) and four or five other words)  (and in fact the only acceptable) English translation of Greek ‘omoíōsis in Genesis 1:26.  Treating assimilation as with something equivalent to "being like" is the same sort of error as translating the word for "kill" in some language as English "die."

      It would be almost unseemly to ignore the use of ARCHAÏSMS (from the King James Version) puzzling the reader and Elizabethan morphology that bothers the reader—the way doth for does or thou for you.  To suppose that Greek vocatives are generally markered by O in the Bible or to replace all past verbs with did plus the verb is not linguistically acceptable.  More generally archaïc English is not more suitable to liturgical use than an elevated modern style.  Semantic confusion is wholly unprofitable.