Month: September 2004

A reader writes:

I’ve recently responded to your blog’s Latin lesson entry — and this question was rolling in my mind for the past week, so I figured that you may be able to answer from a linguistic viewpoint.

Fr. Amorth says in [an] interview:

This same Jesus had taught us a prayer for liberation in the Our

Father: “Deliver us from the Evil One. Deliver us from the Person of

Satan.” This prayer has been mistranslated and today people pray

saying, “Deliver us from evil.” One speaks of a general evil whose

origin is essentially unknown. But the evil against which Our Lord

Jesus taught us to fight is, on the contrary, a concrete person: it is

Satan.

My question is this — Is Fr. Amorth’s translation accurate for the Lord’s Prayer?

Based off of your blog’s lesson, I think it’s possible — as you noted there are no articles in Latin:

Latin does not have words for “a,” “an,” or “the.” This means that if

you wanted to say “voice,” “a voice,” or “the voice,” in Latin you

would just say vox. When you translate from Latin into English, you

will have to guess based on the context whether you should add “a,”

“an,” “the” or nothing at all to the word you are translating.

Let me start by saying that I have grave reservations about Fr. Amorth and do not recommend his writings. This Rock published a review of one of Fr. Amorth’s books a while ago (online here, scroll down) which highlights some of the problems with his writings. I would add two thoughts: (1) I think the reviewer was far too kind to Fr. Amorth’s book; he could have (and, to my mind, should have) slammed Fr. Amorth far harder than he did. (2) Nothing I have seen from Fr. Amorth since this review was published has altered my opinion of the matter.

Having said that, there is something to what he is saying in this case. The language that is most relevant to the matter, though, is not Latin.

It would be ideal if we had an Aramaic original of the Lord’s Prayer, but we don’t–at least not an indisputable one, and Aramaic is kind of fuzzy regarding the definiteness of nouns, anyway. Unlike Hebrew and Arabic, it does not have a definite article, but (sometimes) uses a grammatical feature of nouns called “state” to express definiteness. If a noun was meant to be definite, they would put it in “the emphatic state.” Unfortunately, over time Aramaic started to use the emphatic state for nouns even when they aren’t definite (which is to say, even when we wouldn’t put a “the” in front of them in English). In modern Aramaic the emphatic state has almost completely taken over, and this trend was already established in Jesus’ day, even if it had not yet completely taken over.

So we have to use the canonical form of the Lord’s Prayer, which is in Greek. Here we have an advantage, because Greek (like English and Hebrew and Arabic but unlike Latin and Aramaic) does have a definite article (i.e., a word for “the”). When we consult the Greek text of the Lord’s Prayer in Matt. 6:13, we find that the phrase corresponding to “from evil” is “apo tou ponErou,” which would literally be “from the evil” (apo = from, tou = the, ponErou = evil).

That’s not the end of the story, though, because the translator has to make a choice at this juncture. He could translate the phrase as “from the evil one,” meaning the devil, or he could take note of the fact that Greek sometimes overuses the definite article (from an English-speaker’s perspective). In particular, Greek often wants to use the definite article in front of abstract concepts like “Truth” or “Beauty” . . . or “Evil.” (It was the same in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic in Jesus’ day: The emphatic state was often used for abstract concepts.)

Therefore, we can’t say with certainty here. It’s debatable. Different translators render it different ways, and both are legitimate.

The Catechism reflects this uncertainty. When it first broaches the meaning of the phrase, it says:

CCC 2851 In this petition, evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. The devil (dia-bolos) is the one who ‘throws himself across’ God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ.

But this doesn’t mean that the petition refers only to the devil, for he’s certainly contained within the range of the phrase even if it’s a more generic reference to evil. The Catechism thus also notes:

CCC 2854 When we ask to be delivered from the Evil One, we pray as well to be freed from all evils, present, past, and future, of which he is the author or instigator. In this final petition, the Church brings before the Father all the distress of the world. Along with deliverance from the evils that overwhelm humanity, she implores the precious gift of peace and the grace of perseverance in expectation of Christ’s return By praying in this way, she anticipates in humility of faith the gathering together of everyone and everything in him who has ‘the keys of Death and Hades,’ who ‘is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’[Rev 1:8,18; cf. Rev 1:4; Eph 1:10]

Deliver us, Lord, we beseech you, from every evil and grant us peace in our day, so that aided by your mercy we might be ever free from sin and protected from all anxiety, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Sounds to me like the Catechism may be hedging its bets. In any event, the biblical text isn’t decisive one way or the other.

One more reason to exercise caution when Fr. Amorth says something.

A reader writes:

I’ve recently responded to your blog’s Latin lesson entry — and this question was rolling in my mind for the past week, so I figured that you may be able to answer from a linguistic viewpoint.

Fr. Amorth says in [an] interview:

This same Jesus had taught us a prayer for liberation in the Our
Father: “Deliver us from the Evil One. Deliver us from the Person of
Satan.” This prayer has been mistranslated and today people pray
saying, “Deliver us from evil.” One speaks of a general evil whose
origin is essentially unknown. But the evil against which Our Lord
Jesus taught us to fight is, on the contrary, a concrete person: it is
Satan.

My question is this — Is Fr. Amorth’s translation accurate for the Lord’s Prayer?

Based off of your blog’s lesson, I think it’s possible — as you noted there are no articles in Latin:

Latin does not have words for “a,” “an,” or “the.” This means that if
you wanted to say “voice,” “a voice,” or “the voice,” in Latin you
would just say vox. When you translate from Latin into English, you
will have to guess based on the context whether you should add “a,”
“an,” “the” or nothing at all to the word you are translating.

Let me start by saying that I have grave reservations about Fr. Amorth and do not recommend his writings. This Rock published a review of one of Fr. Amorth’s books a while ago (online here, scroll down) which highlights some of the problems with his writings. I would add two thoughts: (1) I think the reviewer was far too kind to Fr. Amorth’s book; he could have (and, to my mind, should have) slammed Fr. Amorth far harder than he did. (2) Nothing I have seen from Fr. Amorth since this review was published has altered my opinion of the matter.

Having said that, there is something to what he is saying in this case. The language that is most relevant to the matter, though, is not Latin.

It would be ideal if we had an Aramaic original of the Lord’s Prayer, but we don’t–at least not an indisputable one, and Aramaic is kind of fuzzy regarding the definiteness of nouns, anyway. Unlike Hebrew and Arabic, it does not have a definite article, but (sometimes) uses a grammatical feature of nouns called “state” to express definiteness. If a noun was meant to be definite, they would put it in “the emphatic state.” Unfortunately, over time Aramaic started to use the emphatic state for nouns even when they aren’t definite (which is to say, even when we wouldn’t put a “the” in front of them in English). In modern Aramaic the emphatic state has almost completely taken over, and this trend was already established in Jesus’ day, even if it had not yet completely taken over.

So we have to use the canonical form of the Lord’s Prayer, which is in Greek. Here we have an advantage, because Greek (like English and Hebrew and Arabic but unlike Latin and Aramaic) does have a definite article (i.e., a word for “the”). When we consult the Greek text of the Lord’s Prayer in Matt. 6:13, we find that the phrase corresponding to “from evil” is “apo tou ponErou,” which would literally be “from the evil” (apo = from, tou = the, ponErou = evil).

That’s not the end of the story, though, because the translator has to make a choice at this juncture. He could translate the phrase as “from the evil one,” meaning the devil, or he could take note of the fact that Greek sometimes overuses the definite article (from an English-speaker’s perspective). In particular, Greek often wants to use the definite article in front of abstract concepts like “Truth” or “Beauty” . . . or “Evil.” (It was the same in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic in Jesus’ day: The emphatic state was often used for abstract concepts.)

Therefore, we can’t say with certainty here. It’s debatable. Different translators render it different ways, and both are legitimate.

The Catechism reflects this uncertainty. When it first broaches the meaning of the phrase, it says:

CCC 2851 In this petition, evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. The devil (dia-bolos) is the one who ‘throws himself across’ God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ.

But this doesn’t mean that the petition refers only to the devil, for he’s certainly contained within the range of the phrase even if it’s a more generic reference to evil. The Catechism thus also notes:

CCC 2854 When we ask to be delivered from the Evil One, we pray as well to be freed from all evils, present, past, and future, of which he is the author or instigator. In this final petition, the Church brings before the Father all the distress of the world. Along with deliverance from the evils that overwhelm humanity, she implores the precious gift of peace and the grace of perseverance in expectation of Christ’s return By praying in this way, she anticipates in humility of faith the gathering together of everyone and everything in him who has ‘the keys of Death and Hades,’ who ‘is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’[Rev 1:8,18; cf. Rev 1:4; Eph 1:10]

Deliver us, Lord, we beseech you, from every evil and grant us peace in our day, so that aided by your mercy we might be ever free from sin and protected from all anxiety, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Sounds to me like the Catechism may be hedging its bets. In any event, the biblical text isn’t decisive one way or the other.

One more reason to exercise caution when Fr. Amorth says something.