LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE. The Orthodox Church has never had a unique sacred language, although during the Byzantine era (q.v.) imperial policy sought continually to enforce Greek as the common tongue within the Empire’s boundaries. Later the Phanariots, using the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire (qq.v.), would attempt-to disastrous effect-to impose linguistic uniformity on the Slavs and Romanians of the Balkans. Traditionally, however, the Eastern Church both within Byzantium (q.v.) and subsequently in Russia fostered translations of the Scripture and liturgical books (qq.v.) into local languages. Greek could never, in any case, aspire to the unique position of Latin in the Christian West. The eastern Mediterranean was already home to too many ancient cultures, each with its own literary tradition, for any of them to dominate absolutely. Latin had no such competitors in the West.

In another vein, language as the necessary medium of theological discourse was the constant preoccupation of the Church Fathers (q.v.), in particular the problem of adapting a Greek vocabulary shaped by philosophies and religious attitudes foreign to the Old and New Testaments to the requirements of the Christian faith. This effort effectively involved the transmutation of the Greek philosophical lexicon, a work of many centuries. Secondly, language per se had to be recognized as ultimately inadequate to the mysteries of the faith: Trinity, Christology (qq.v.), and the living experience of God (q.v.), which underlies these dogmas. The Orthodox theological enterprise has thus been characterized by Fr. Georges Florovsky (q.v.) as the search for the words most adequate (or least inadequate) to God, theoprepeis logoi. This notion of language as a vessel or as a necessary exercise in conceptual iconography not unakin to the canons governing the making of holy icons (q.v.), distinguishes the approach that the best Orthodox theologians this century have taken. It may be compared to the theory advanced by Cardinal Newman in the last century, and repeated subsequently by the better Western theologians, of the “development of doctrine.”