“Fiat voluntas tua”
Professor Lewis was right.
I took a handful of years of Latin, added another term in college, taught the subject, and still couldn’t get it to work naturally in my brain. I was wrestling over tenses instead of text.
Jack Lewis said to read Acts.
This is brilliant really. Read something you know inside out, that you breathe. I found out I don’t know Acts as well as that.
So, I went back to Kindergarten and the Psalms that run through my head when I’m not doing much - Blessed is the man that does not walk in the council of the ungodly…
Psalm 1
Beatus vir qui non abiit in conselio imperiorum
Et in via peccatorum non stetit,
Et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit,
Sed in lege Domine voluntas eius,
Et in eius lege meditabitur die ac nocte.
As a teacher, I have samples of qui and eius, the present and future tenses, word arrangement, and common vocabulary. This is a good section to memorize as a first year language student, but it steps towards superlative because it is not contrived. The failure of Latin teaching is in part because the children learning it are unable to integrate it. Like much of mathematical teaching, it is posoted as an organizational system with nothing to categorize that is not randomly generated.
Language must dance. Otherwise all you have is the chopped up pieces sewn together as you run around trying to catch the right kind of lightning to animate it. This does not require strange stories about shipwrecks or overly obsessive descriptions of warfare. Latin is the language of Caesar, but not only his.
Take what a student knows and build off of it.
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Back to chapter 1.
As a student, I keep going back, mulling it over more. “Voluntas” is will as in the same phrasing used in the Pater Noster for “Your will be done”. I believe this is in keeping with the tripartite soul, but this changes a chunk of what I know in English*. “His delight is on the law of the Lord” becomes “In the law of God, the will…” In English delight has an emotional or inspirational connotation. The Latin is speaking of a fixed thing, a part of a person, and that if the part of the person is planted (like a tree planted) then the roots of it are fed directing both the Reason and the Heart towards the Ordo Amoris.
It also seems to carry more imagery in Latin, but I wonder if that is the nature of the language that enfolds meaning like a puzzle box. English can be loose, but it can also get specific with more distinct words. Latin pulls specificity around itself in endings and increases emphasis and understanding through word order.
I am guessing that the imagery from later in the Psalm begins sooner because the words can be applied to water movement as well.
“Blessed is the man who is not washed away by high councils,
nor stands in the stream of sinners…”
he shall be planted like a tree after all.
At the end the phrasing yields - concilio imperiorum and the via peccatorum become the concilio justorom where the peccatores can not stand and via justorum where the imperiorum are destroyed or perhaps washed away. What began with Eden continues to Flood imagery. They say Jerome favored the original structure more than most. This makes me want to find out.
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As a teacher I can’t believe the practical change a few days have made. My affections are won, or I should say, are what they ever were, and Latin has given me more of my dearest treasure, and beautified it. There is mystery. I want to know more.
*This popped up in Psalm 23 as well which is Psalm 22 in the Vulgate (9 and 10 are combined to my understanding). The first line is Domine regit me. The Lord rules me. That is not “The Lord is my shepherd.”
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