RITES
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RITES
coloured by the Septuagint and the New Testament.
These liturgies remained in this form and have never
been recast in any modern Greek dialect. Like the
text of the Bible, that of a liturgy once fixed becomes
sacred. The formulae used Sunday after Sunday are
hallowed by too sacred associations to be changed
as long as more or less the same language is used.
The common tongue drifts and develops, but the
liturgical forms are stereotyped. In the East and
West, however, there existed different principles in
this matter. Whereas in the West there was no
literary language but Latin till far into the Middle
Ages, in the East there were such languages, totally
unlike Greek, that had a position, a literature, a
dignity of their own hardly inferior to that of Greek
itself. In the West every educated man spoke and
wrote Latin almost to the Renaissance. To trans-
late the Liturgy into a Celtic or Teutonic language
would have seemed as absurd as to write a prayer-
book now in some vulgar slang. The East was never
hellenized as the West was latinized. Great nations,
primarily Egypt and Syria, kept their own languages
and literatures as part of their national inheritance.
The people, owing no allegiance to the Greek lan-
guage, had no rea.son to say their prayers in it, and
the Liturgy was translated into Coptic in Egypt, into
Syriac in Syria and Palestine. So the principle of a
uniform liturgical language was broken in the East
and people were accustomed to hear the church ser-
vice in different languages in different places. This
uniformity once broken never became an ideal to
Eastern Christians and the way was opened for an
indefinite multi[)lication of liturgical tongues.
In the fourth and fifth centuries the Rites of Antioch and Alexandria were used in Greek in the great towns where people spoke Greek, in Coptic or Syriac among peasants in the country. The Rite of Asia Minor and Constantinople was always in Greek, because here there was no rival tongue. But when the Faith was preached in Armenia (from Ca^sarea) the Armenians in taking over the Cesarean Rite translated it of course into their own language. And the great Xes- torian Church in East Syria, evolving her own litera- ture in Syriac, naturally used that language for her church services too. This diversity of tongues was by no means parallel to diversity of sect or religion. People who agreed entirely in faith, who were sepa- rated by no schism, nevertheless said their prayers in different languages. Melchites in Syria clung entirely to the Orthodox faith of Constantinople and used the Byzantine Rite, yet used it translated into Syriac. The process of translating the Liturgy continued later. After the Schism of the eleventh century, the Ortho- dox Church, unlike Rome, insisted on uniformity of rite among her members. All the Orthodox use the Byzantine Rite, yet have no idea of one language. When the Slavs were converted the Byzantine Rite was put into Old Slavonic for them; whVn Arabic be- came the only language spoken in Egyi)t and Syria, it became the languag(M)f the Liturgy in those countries. For a long time all the peojjle north of Constantinople used Old Slavonic in church, although the dialects they spoke gradually drifted away from it. Only the Georgians, who are Slavs in no sense at all, used their own language. In the seventeenth century as part of the growth of Rumanian national feeling came a great insistence on the fact that they were not Slavs either. They wished to be counted among Western, Latin races, so they translated their liturgical books into their own Romance language. These represent the old classical liturgical languages in the East.
The Monophysite Churches have kept the old tongues even when no longer spoken; thus they use Coptic in P]gypt, Syriac in Syria, Armenian in Ar- menia. The Nestorians and their daughter-Church in India (Malabar) also use Syriac. The Orthodox have four or five chief liturgical languages: Greek,
Arabic, Church-Slavonic, and Rumanian. Georgian
has almost died out. Later Russian missions have
very much increased the number. They have
translated the same Byzantine Rite into German,
Esthonian, and Lettish for the Baltic provinces,
Finnish and Tartar for converts in Finland and
Siberia, Eskimo, a North American Indian dialect,
Chinese, and Japanese. Hence no general principle
of liturgical language can be established for Eastern
Churches, though the Nestorians and Monophysitea
have evolved something like the Roman princi{)le
and kept their old languages in the liturgy, in spite
of change in common talk. The Orthodox services
are not, however, everywhere understood by the
people, for since these older versions were made lan-
guage has gone on developing. In the case of con-
verts of a totally different race, such as Chinese or
Red Indians, there is an obvious line to cross at once
and there is no difficulty about translating what
would otherwise be totally unintelligible to them.
At home the spoken language gradually drifts away
from the form stereotyped in the Liturgy, and it is
difficult to determine when the Liturgy ceases to be
understood. In more modern times with the growth
of new sects the conservative instinct of the old
Churches has grown. The Greek, Arabic, and
Church-Slavonic te.xts are jealously kept unchanged,
though in all cases they have become archaic and
difficult to follow by uneducated people. Lately the
question of liturgical language has become one of the
chief difficulties in Macedonia. Especially since the
Bulgarian Schism the Phanar at Constantinople in-
sists on Greek in church as a sign of Hellenism, while
the people clamour for Old-Slavonic or Rumanian.
In the West the whole situation is different. Greek was first used at Rome, too. About the third century the services were translated into the vulgar tongue, Latin (see Mass, Liturgy of the), which has remained ever since. There was no possible rival language for many centuries. As the Western barbarians became civilized they accepted a Latin culture in everj'thing, having no literatures of their own. Latin was the language of all educated people, so it was used in church, as it was for books or even letter-writing. The Romance people drifted from Latin to Italian, Spanish, French, etc., so gradually that no one can say when Latin became a dead lan- guage. The vulgar tongue was used by peasants and ignorant people only; but all books were written, lectures given, and solemn speeches made in Latin. Even Dante (d. 1321) thought it necessary to write an apology for Italian (De vulgari eloquentia). So for centuries the Latin language was that, not of the Catholic Church, but of the Roman patriarchate. When people at last realized that it was dead, it was too late to change it. Around it had gathered the associations of Western Christendom; the music of the Roman Rite was composed and sung only to a Latin text; and it is even now the official tongue of the Roman Court. The ideal of uniformity in rite extended to language also, so when the rebels of the sixteenth century threw over the old language, sacred from its long use, as they threw over the old rite and old laws, the Catholic Church, conservative in all these things, would not give way to them. As a bond of union among the many nations who make up the Latin patriarchate, she retains the old Latin tongue with one or two small exceptions. Along the Eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea the Roman Rite has been used in Slavonic (with the Glagolitic letters) since the eleventh century, and the Roman Mass is said in Greek on rare occasions at Rome.
It is a question how far one may speak of a special liturgical Latin language. The writers of our Col- lects, hymns. Prefaces, etc., wrote simply in the lan- guage of their time. The style of the various ele- ments of the Mass and Divine Office varies greatly ac-
