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Abstract
The
paper suggests a new hermeneutical take on receptive patristics.
Receptive patristics means here the ways in which patristic texts are
perceived in the community of patristic scholars and in ecclesiastical
communities. The perceptions of the patristic materials that these two
kinds of communities demonstrate are not always convergent. Their
divergence can be explained on the basis of the distinction between
normative linguistics and sociolinguistics. Ecclesiastical communities
tend to treat the language of the Fathers and Mothers of the church in
coherence with the way in which the proponents of normative linguistics
treat the phenomenon of language. Patristic scholars, in contrast,
usually treat them along the line of sociolinguistics. The approach to
the language, which is applied by sociolinguistics, if adopted by
ecclesiastical communities, could lead to a better understanding between
them. It could foster the ecumenical rapprochement between confessional
traditions, especially if they are based on patristic identities, such
as in the case of Byzantine and Oriental churches. The academic method
of sociolinguistics, thus, can be applied to the ecumenical studies and
can positively contribute to practical ecumenism.
Patristic languages can be understood in two senses.1
On the one hand, they are languages per se, in which patristic texts
have been written: Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian,
Ethiopian, etc. On the other hand, they are languages in a broader
sense; they include theological phrases and formulas translatable in
multiple languages. The patristic languages in the latter sense are
based on what we now call discourse. When we apply the term discourse to
the patristic languages, we act anachronistically, because this
postmodernist term is hardly applicable to the premodern era, when most
patristic texts were written. Nevertheless, this term can be helpful in
explaining the point of this paper.
Just as peoples, for example, in Syria and Egypt spoke their own languages (Syriac and Coptic), they developed their distinct theological
dialects and languages. Languages in the proper sense (Syriac, Coptic,
etc.) certainly contributed to the formation of theological languages.
At the same time, it occurred quite often that the same theological
language could be expressed in different languages per se. For instance,
Greek and Latin converged in expressing the Chalcedonian theological
language. They diverged, however, when later they were used in
articulating the procession of the Holy Spirit and the distinction
between the essence and energeiai in the Holy Trinity, or in discussions on primacy in the church.
The
point of this paper is that distinctions between linguistics and
sociolinguistics are applicable not only to languages in the proper
sense, but also to theological languages. Particularly useful in the
analysis of both kinds of patristic languages can be a branch of
sociolinguistics know as Critical discourse analysis (CDA).2 It deals with complex textual structures, larger than sentence.3 In application to the patristic languages, CDA can deal with variability of theological formulas and phrases.
Sociolinguistics
is based on the assumption that languages and social structures are
intrinsically connected with one another. This assumption was made first
by Japanese scholars in the 1930s. The term sociolinguistics as such
was coined in 1939 by a Cambridge anthropologist Thomas Hodson. The
discipline of sociolinguistics flourished after the World War II. Haver
Currie in 1952 defined it as a field of cross-study between sociology
and language. In some studies, sociolinguistics has been differentiated
from the sociology of language. The former has been identified as
micro-sociolinguistics, while the latter, as macro-sociolinguistics.
Richard Hudson defined micro-sociolinguistics as the study of language
in relation to society, while macro-sociolinguistics, as the study of
society in relation to language.4 For Florian Coulmas,
Micro-sociolinguistics investigates how social structure influences the way people talk and how language varieties and patterns of use correlate with social attributes such as class, sex, and age. Macro-sociolinguistics, on the other hand, studies what societies do with their languages, that is, attitudes and attachments that account for the functional distribution of speech forms in society, language shift, maintenance, and replacement, the delimitation and interaction of speech communities.5
The
“macro-” aspect of sociolinguistics is more appropriate for our study
here. It will help us better to analyze the reception of patristic
languages by both scholarly and ecclesiastical communities. Therefore,
while speaking about sociolinguistics, we imply primarily its social
impact, which is studied by macro-sociolinguistics.
The bottom
line of both micro- and macro-sociolinguistics is that the linguistic
structures influence social structures and in return get influenced by
the latter.6
Particularly important for us here is how linguistic structures
influence or even determine social structures. This influence is studied
as “linguistic determinism” or the “linguistic relativity hypothesis.”
It was introduced by the German anthropologist Edward Sapir7
and significantly improved by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf; it is
known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” or the “Whorfian hypothesis.” It
was recently updated by Guy Deutscher.8 The hypothesis states:
The social categories we create and how we perceive events and actions are constrained by the language we speak. Different speakers will therefore experience the world differently insofar as the languages they speak differ structurally.9
In
application to the patristic texts, this would imply the common wisdom
that theological differences were often determined by the languages, in
which they were expressed. For instance, the difference between the
Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian theologies is often explained by the
fact that the former was articulated mostly in Greek, while the latter,
mostly in Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian.
Sociolinguistics can
provide a more nuanced take on this common wisdom. It takes the
normativity of language differently from the way that classical
linguistics treats the phenomenon of language. Classical linguistics
tends to see language as an ideal construct with singular normativity.
This normativity is often imposed upon speakers, who are thus supposed
to be ideal. Sociolinguistics, in contrast, sees its speakers not as
ideal, but as real bearers of language. They speak not a high normative
language, but a language with a high degree of variativity and
flexibility.
As Steven Pinker noticed, “linguists often theorize
about a language as if it were the fixed protocol of a homogeneous
community of idealized speakers, like the physicist’s frictionless plane
and ideal gas.”10
Sociolinguists, in contrast, study language as intrinsically linked to
social realities. According to Jack Chambers, “Sociolinguistics is the
study of the social uses of language, and the most productive studies…
have emanated from determining the social evaluation of linguistic
variants.”11
These
two approaches have been elaborated by two prominent scholars of
language: Noam Chomsky and William Labov. In the 1960s, Chomsky argued
that there is no much relation between language and society. He
effectively developed an asocial linguistics. For him,
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker – listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.12
In
contrast to Chomsky, William Labov believed that languages should be
studied in their variativity and applicability to real usage. In the
same period of time, when Chomsky developed his normative linguistics,
Labov conducted a field study of language’s variability on the island of
Martha’s Vineyard in New England. This has become the foundational
field study in sociolinguistics. Labov researched how the locals in
different locations of the island used some vowels and consonants. On
the basis of this linguistic analysis, he made sociological conclusions
about the attitude of the locals to their homeland and to the holiday
makers from the mainland.13
For Chomsky, language is prescriptive, while for Labov, it is descriptive.
The distinction between their approaches to language gives to the
students of patristics an important hermeneutical key. Indeed, the
language of the Fathers and Mothers of the church (language understood
in the broader sense of a theological discourse) can be perceived as
either normative or variable. The former perception is pertinent to the
ecclesiastical communities that rely on it. The normativity of this
language is highly influential in shaping identity and ethos of these
communities. The impact of the patristic languages on ecclesiastical
communities is higher than the impact of conventional languages upon
speech communities. This is because patristic languages are usually
perceived as sacred, while conventional languages are usually perceived
as profane.
While the ecclesiastical communities, for whom
patristic languages feature ultimate normativity and authority, perceive
them in Chomsky’s way, the perception of the patristic languages in the
patristic studies is more Labovian. Patristic scholars treat patristic
languages in their variety and variability, as real and not ideal
phenomena. Therefore, the assumptions of the patristic studies about
patristic languages are closer to the assumption of sociolinguistics
than of linguistics as such.
At the same time, patristics tends to
focus on individuals and their texts rather than on communities, which
underpin and appropriate these texts. This is a major difference of
modern patristic scholarship from sociolinguistics, which focuses on
what it calls “speech community.”14 The focusing of sociolinguistics on speech communities was first accentuated by William Labov,15
for whom “the behavior of the individual cannot be understood without a
knowledge of the larger community that he or she belongs to.”16 As John Gumperz adds to this:
Modern sociolinguistics had its beginning with the recognition that anyone seeking to relate linguistic to social and political forces must take the speech community, seen as a group of communicating individuals, as the analytical starting-point rather than focusing on languages or dialects as such. Speech communities, broadly conceived, can be regarded as collectivities of social networks. Networks come in different types. Of crucial transmission is the primary network of socialization, into which one is recruited by kinship, and from which are recruited friends and often neighbors and co-workers.17
Modern
patristic studies still miss the communal dimension, which remains
strong in the ecclesiastical communities receiving patristic texts.
Proper attention paid to this dimension can reconcile the Chomsky’s and
Labovian approaches to the patristic languages. Seeing the patristic
texts from the perspective of speech communities can also explain the
divisions between these communities and suggest ways towards their
eventual reconciliation.
The speech communities from the
perspective of patristic studies would be the ecclesiastical communities
of believers who have chosen to speak the theological language of a
certain Father or of the group of church Fathers. Thus, for example, the
community in western Syria in the sixth century chose to speak the
language of Severus of Antioch and his confederates, who in turn
modified the theological language of Cyril of Alexandria. This
theological language was originally articulated in Greek. The speech
community that adopted it, however, soon rendered it to its own
language, Syriac. The Syriac language of the community, on the one hand,
modified the original theological language, which had been articulated
in Greek. On the other hand, the same theological language, which stems
from Cyril of Alexandria and Severus of Antioch, consolidated Syriac and
Coptic speaking communities. The speech community, which spoke the same
Syriac language, was thus broadened and included the Coptic speech
community, after both of them had adopted the common theological
language.
Another example could be the theological language of
Augustine, which became appropriated as the main theological language in
the Latin-speaking West. When after the Reformation the Western
theological literature switched from Latin to vernacular languages, the
Augustinian theological language was rendered to German, French,
English, and other modern languages. It was also modified by numerous
interpreters and theologians who followed the Augustinian line. Probably
the most famous of them was Thomas Aquinas. Sometimes the later
editions of a particular theological language became quite distant from
its source. Nevertheless, the original Augustinian language constitutes a
foundation for most posterior theological languages that have developed
in the West. It keeps close to one another even groups, which turned to
different confessions. Thus, the bottom line of Catholic, Protestant,
Reformed, and Anglican theological languages remains Augustinian. At the
same time, the Augustinian language preserves a certain distance
between Western and Eastern Christianities. In my opinion, the
Augustinian theology is completely appropriate for the East, but not
every easterner would think so as well.
Many eastern theologians
recently began speaking the theological language of Maximus the
Confessor. Maximian lexemes and discourses, such as “logoi,” “way of
existence,” “existence according and against nature,” etc., turned to a
sort of lingua franca of the modern Orthodox theology. However,
sometimes the modern usage of Maximus’s theological language is quite
different from Maximus himself. For instance, Orthodox followers of
personalism tend to ascribe to Maximus the modern personalistic
understanding of the term “hypostasis.” From the perspective of
normative linguistics, such usage would be wrong. However,
sociolinguistics would accept it as a case of variability of a
theological language. Also the fact that such usage has been
appropriated by a speech community (of Orthodox theologians), would
provide an additional argument in favor of the personalistic reading of
Maximus’s theological language. The only problem with this reading is
that it takes itself as a normative expression of Maximus’s ideas. In
other words, this approach to the theological language of Maximus still
goes along the lines of normative linguistics, and not of variable
sociolinguistics: it prescribes and not describes how Maximus should be
read.
According to Muriel Saville-Troike, a criterion for a speech
community is “that some significant dimension of experience has to be
shared.”18
Members of ecclesiastical communities communicate to one another by the
means of shared theological languages their experience. The experience
of a community can be of different sorts. Sometimes the reason why a
community embarks on a particular theological language is that the
Father who has uttered it comes from the same milieu. He might have also
expressed local concerns, theological as well as social and political.
In the period of Late Antiquity and Middle Ages, people often spoke
politics in the language of theology. Therefore, the experiences that
the speech communities shared through theological languages were mixed.
On the one hand, they were spiritual and Christian. On the other hand,
they were social and political. For instance, the group of Syrians in
the fifth-sixth centuries adopted the language of anti-Chalcedonian
theologians not only because this language expressed their shared
experience of divinization of human nature through asceticism, but also
because of their common bitterness about imperial policies of
Constantinople. The council of Chalcedon, to them, embodied exactly
these policies. As a result, local population voiced out their political
protests by rejecting the council.
In sociolinguistics, speech
communities are sometimes called “communities of practice.” According to
Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, these communities share
“ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations
– in short, practices.”19
Religious communities of practice express their ways of beliefs and
values primarily through liturgical practices. In liturgy, the original
theological languages of the Fathers and Mothers of the church, become
appropriated by the community and turn to community’s own languages. A
theological language thus transforms to a shared norm. Shared norms have
become a subject of meticulous investigation by sociolinguists.
According to William Labov, speech communities are defined by shared
norms:
The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage.20
In
application to our topic this means that religious communities uphold
their integrity and distinctiveness by participation in liturgy and
other religious practices, which are based on theological languages
received as normative. In other words, a theological language, which is
rendered through liturgy as a shared language of community, turns to an
unquestionable norm and ceases to be a possible variant of the
normativity. As a result, it excludes other theological languages as
competing with and not adding to their own adopted language. A community
proclaims their language the only orthodox. This may lead it astray
from other communities, which have adopted different languages.
Such
an exclusivist attitude to community’s own theological language as the
only legitimate expression of Orthodoxy, in my judgement, was one of the
reasons of the global schisms in Christianity. This was particularly
the reason of the split that occurred in the eastern church after the
council of Chalcedon. Then what we now call Byzantine and Oriental
groups embarked each on its own reception of the theological language of
Cyril of Alexandria, and proclaimed it own shared language the only
possible one. These communities tended to perceive their shared
theological languages through the prism of linguistic normativity, and
not through sociolinguistic variativity. If they perceived theological
languages as modern sociolinguists do, probably they would not have to
split from the groups that spoke other theological languages.
Instead,
they transformed their languages to identities. Anthropologists would
argue that this is a natural process for any people, when the language
they speak becomes their identity. A nuance should be added to this
common wisdom, which has been discussed earlier in the paper. Not only
the language in the proper sense, that is Syriac or Coptic, contributed
to the identity of Syrians or Copts, but also the theological languages
they had adopted from their Fathers.
A theological language, which
has turned to identity, can go quite astray from its original
intention. The modern Byzantine-Oriental ecumenical dialogue is an
illustration of how this can happen. The two sides of the dialogue have
agreed that the original theologies, which underpin Byzantine and
Oriental churches, did not significantly differ in what they meant
regarding the incarnation of the Logos. Their differences were not
semantical, but linguistic. Nevertheless, such a conclusion of the
dialogue did not help the two groups to reconcile. The reason is because
the original differences in theological languages have developed to
identities. Now it is not enough anymore to reconcile theological
languages. Without deconstruction or overriding of identities the
theological reconciliation seems to be impossible.
Sociolinguistics
gives us a clue how to approach theological languages elaborated by
individual Fathers and Mothers of the church, and then received by
communities. For the patristic studies, it confirms the approach of
these studies to consider patristic texts not only through the lenses of
normativity, but also as variables. It also suggests that patrologists
should pay more attention to the communal perception and rendition of
the patristic texts. At the same time, sociolinguistics explains how the
way, in which the word of the Fathers and Mothers was received by
communities and implemented in the policies of the church, has caused
schisms and other tensions between large regional groups. These groups
often tended to receive variables in the patristic texts as norms. They
treated theological languages articulated by the Fathers and Mothers as
ideal constructs instilled by God, and thus were unable to admit
variabilities in it.
Some ecclesiastical splits could be avoided
in the past, if methods of sociolinguistics were applied to theological
languages. The still existent splits can be overridden if
sociolinguistics is applied in the ecumenical dialogues. At the same
time, sociolinguistics cannot explain and heal all divides among the
Christian groups that rely on their theological languages. Its
application to theology is limited, because some ancient theological
texts differed not only in their wording, but in their meaning as well.
When it comes to differences in meaning, sociolinguistics reaches its
limits.
This manuscript is an extended version of the paper presented at the
Asia-Pacific Early Christian Studies Society 12th Annual Conference in
Okayama, Japan, in September 2018.
See Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, ed. N. Coupland, Cambridge, 2016, p. 10.
See M. Garner, “Techniques of Analysis,” in: The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics, ed. C. Llamas, L. Mullany, P. Stockwell, London–New York, 2015, pp. 41-47.
R. Hudson, Sociolinguistics, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 4-5.
The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. F. Coulmas, Oxford, 1997, p. 2.
R. Wardhaugh, J. Fuller, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, New York, 2015, p. 42.
E. Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, New York, 1921.
G. Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, New York, 2010.
Wardhaugh and Fuller, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, p. 11.
S. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, New York, 2007, p. 74.
J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, N. Schilling-Estes, The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Malden, MA, 2002, p. 3.
N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA, 1965, pp. 3-4.
W. Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia, 1972.
See L. Mullany, “Speech Communities,” in: The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics, pp. 84-91.
Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, pp. 120-121.
W. Labov, Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 3, Malden, MA, 2010, p. 208.
J. Gumperz, “Introduction to The Social Matrix: Culture, Praxis, and Discourse,” in: Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, ed. J. Gumperz, S. Levinson, Cambridge, 1996, p. 362.
M. Saville-Troike, The Ethnography of Communication: an Introduction, Malden, MA, 2009, p. 15.
P. Eckert, S. McConnell-Ginet, “Think practically and look locally: language and gender as community-based practice,” in: Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1992), p. 464.
Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, pp. 120-121.
