A Classical Insurgency

Why learn Latin? And by what means? Many professional classicists have no convincing answer to either question. According to stereotype, classicists often don’t know how to talk to normal people. Nor do they know how to talk to bureaucrats, or administrators, or the powerful, as evidenced by the cascading disappearance of classics departments in schools and colleges over the past half-century.

Take a graduate from any university classics department, select a random page of Latin or Greek text, and ask him to translate it by sight with at least 75 percent accuracy. Then give him a simple piece of English prose and ask him to translate it into one of the ancient languages. You will find that even intelligent graduates from prestigious institutions will generally fail your test. As will plenty of faculty. 

Prestigious schools and universities continue to employ relatively high-quality classics faculty and provide them with adequate resources, but classicists in these institutions suffer from the same basic problem that persists at all levels of the discipline: Classicists aren’t confident in the value of their own field.

Christians, at least, used to know why they studied the classical languages. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew are sacred languages—and not in some vague, sentimental sense. They were used to proclaim who Jesus Christ is on the sign that Pontius Pilate affixed to the cross (John 19:19–20). For Christians, the cross is the focal point of history. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew are right there, with Hebrew as the language of the Old Testament, Greek as that of the New Testament and earliest Fathers, and Latin as that of the magisterium. 

Yet Pope Paul VI seems to have forgotten all of this in his sermon at the Ognissanti church in Rome on March 7, 1965, when the liturgy officially incorporated the spoken vernacular:

The Church has considered this measure right and proper . . . in order to render its prayer intelligible and make it understood. The welfare of the people demands this . . . to make possible the active participation of the faithful in the public worship of the Church. The Church has sacrificed her own language, Latin—a sacred, sober, beautiful language, highly expressive and elegant. She has sacrificed the traditions of centuries and above all she sacrifices the unity of language among the various peoples, in homage to this greater universality, in order to reach all.

The results were predictable. Only a few decades on, most clergy, including bishops and cardinals, are too poorly educated to understand even basic teaching texts in Latin that ordinary laymen had no problem reading and comprehending before the liturgical revolution. In recent years, even the Vatican’s own Latin office has deteriorated, to judge from the shockingly poor Latinity of the Holy See’s posts on X, to say nothing of recent encyclicals, whose Latin often approaches gibberish. 

Classics has been attacked repeatedly since the French Revolution because of its centrality to “Christendom.” Fashionable Parisian atheists in the eighteenth century were the first to realize that if Latin and Greek were eliminated from schools, along with the texts that these languages enabled students to read, then they could fill the void with texts that indoctrinated the young into their own ideology. This proved a remarkably successful strategy.

Enemies of classics aren’t attacking the languages of Pontius Pilate’s sign; they’re trying to obliterate the truth it proclaims, and ensure that nobody will be able to read it. Their beef isn’t with the Latin, but the man beneath it—the one nailed to the cross. This is why so many classicists have participated enthusiastically in the destruction of their discipline: they too want to see Jesus Christ dethroned.

In our post-Christian schools and universities, Classical Greek and Latin have frequently been sacrificed on the altars of at least two visions of progress. One is explicitly revolutionary; the other is technocratic and rooted in the idolization of economic growth. In the 1960s, a comfortably bloated establishment of liberals who liked being paid to read books found themselves under attack by bands of activists united by the youth culture’s vision of the future. The insurgents had catchy chants like “Hey hey! Ho ho! Western Civ has got to go!” What did the establishment offer as an alternative? Awkward middle-aged men in sweater vests pontificating about “Great Books.” 

Of course, the insurgents won, as they have since the days of the French Revolution. They could articulate a vision, not just of education, but of a mission one might dedicate one’s life to—liberation. The establishment, such as it was, had no firm beliefs. They never organized effective messaging in support of their field of study because they couldn’t agree on what they wanted to fight for, or why. 

Within a generation, the old insurgents became the new establishment. But another insurgency is rising, this time of classicists. It began in the 1990s, in Rome, when the Latinists Luigi Miraglia and the late Fr. Reginald Foster (“Fr. Reggie”) attracted an international following for their respective approaches to teaching the ancient languages. They treated Latin texts not as crossword puzzles but as artifacts of a living language. They helped rescue a tradition of classical learning that almost disappeared after the Second Vatican Council. 

Disciples of Miraglia and Fr. Reggie have founded initiatives like the Paideia Institute and Veterum Sapientia Institute, which specialize in immersive courses in spoken Latin and biblical or classical Greek. These have helped reinvigorate language teaching in a few schools and classics faculties.

Now, institutions of higher learning are taking interest in the revival. Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, is a small, secular institution dedicated to rigorous instruction in the liberal arts, rather than classics specifically. Yet an essential component of their year-long masters program in the humanities is an intensive, two-month summer course to learn Ancient Greek. A parallel program for Latin is in the pilot stage. 

The results are little short of miraculous. Last autumn, I saw them with my own eyes when I was invited to give a lecture for the fledgling Latin program. After less than three months’ immersion, students who had never previously studied Latin had a superior grasp of the language compared to undergraduates I taught at Cambridge who had been learning Latin since the age of eight. Evidently Ralston College is doing something right, and not just in terms of academic standards. Students and staff alike possess an authentic missionary zeal that can only come from love of the subject. 

Classicists need to reckon with this example. So do Christian educational enterprises, which ought to ask themselves how an avowedly secular institution has succeeded so rapidly where Christians, not least Catholics, have consistently failed for sixty years or more. Is it just the teaching method—or do the faculty at Ralston College remember something that everyone else has forgotten?