The Grammar and the Bible

For Christian educators who routinely sing the praises of a liberal arts education, of devoting oneself to the classic texts of Greece and Rome, it is startling to realize how skeptical early Christians were of Greek and Roman education, of the very formation that classical schools now strive to provide. As the empire of Rome faded, the survival of the liberal arts in medieval Christendom was not assured. In fact, the liberal arts survived only by being diminished in importance, by being subordinated to the study of that singular Great Book, the Bible. 

To witness this, consider the first two books chosen for printing by Johannes Gutenberg. The first book printed by metal movable type—prior to the Bible—was a short Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus (†380 AD): the Ars minor, affectionally called “the Donat.” One of the most talented grammarians and rhetoricians of his day, Donatus authored numerous grammars and commentaries on Latin texts, particularly those by Terence and Virgil. His Ars minor became the standard introductory Latin textbook for centuries, such that we find Thomas More, over a thousand years later, saying that after studying the Psalter, “children were wont to go straight to this Donat.” 

As a pagan loyal to imperial Rome, Donatus would have been surprised to find that Christians had cared to preserve his grammar. Christians, after all, were a crude and troublesome lot, hardly the sort to appreciate the eloquence and nuance of high Latin literature. Indeed, they spent their time with the Bible, that muddled mess of Hebrew and Greek texts. As he says in Confessions, Augustine himself shared such a view before his conversion, when, as a finely educated young man, he first read the Scriptures but found them boorish, “unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Tully [Cicero].”  

Later in his career, Donatus accepted a pupil, an adolescent named Jerome, from Stridon, a backwater city in modern day Slovenia. The boy was talented. From what we know of Jerome’s bellicose personality and youthful escapades, we can assume he was not an enjoyable student, but Donatus would have recognized his genius. Indeed, Jerome later eclipsed his teacher, mastering not just Latin but Greek and Hebrew also. Yet he abandoned a promising career of teaching liberal letters by being baptized. As a Christian who treasured pagan literature, Jerome wrestled with the purpose of his fine classical education. In one of his letters, he relates a dream where he stood before the Judge:  

Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge; and here the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was I replied: “I am a Christian.” But He who presided said: “You lie, you are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” 

Like Augustine, Jerome struggled to appreciate the Bible, which, compared to the eloquence of the great Roman authors, seemed tasteless and vulgar. Both overcame this stumbling block when they read the Bible with the eyes of faith and recognized it as the inspired word of God. Decades later, the opportunity to alleviate this tension for future converts came when Jerome, now a grown man famous for his linguistic talents, was commissioned by Pope Damasus to compose a new Latin translation of the Bible. The Latin version then in use was not just crude but convoluted, leading Jerome to exclaim once that “there are as many versions as there are copies!” Besides correcting textual errors, Jerome could have seized the opportunity to translate the Bible into proper Ciceronian Latin. We know from his personal letters, which are written in high classical style, that he had the capability of doing so. We can even note, as an analog, that the translators of the King James Version did choose this course, writing in a style of English that would have been considered elevated even in the 1600s.   

Jerome chose a different path for his translation. Rather than elevate and polish the Latin style, Jerome wrote in common, simple Latin. Adopting Greek and Hebrew idioms, he introduced new barbarisms utterly foreign to Latin. Consider Jerome’s translation of 2 Samuel 16:7, when Shimei curses David, saying, “Come out, you man of bloods.” The plural sounds as strange in English as it does in Latin (vir sanguinum). Indeed, the phrase was never spoken in Latin before Jerome. The KJV opts for the more palatable “Come out, thou bloody man.” Another notable example is the emphatic promise of Isaiah 26:3, rendered by Jerome as “You will keep peace peace (pacem pacem), because we have hoped in you.” The KJV, eschewing the repetitive Hebrew idiom, renders this eloquently as “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.”  

We can imagine Donatus’s disappointment in his promising student, who was so well versed in grammar and rhetoric, intentionally and obstinately writing such debased Latin. Yet Jerome had recognized a truth that would save classical literature, including his teacher’s own textbook: The entire classical system of learning must be subordinated to the inspired word of God. If we are to keep the liberal arts, they must be reduced to serving as preliminaries, as handmaids of theology.  

In the coming centuries, this hierarchical view prevailed. At the end of sixth century, we find Pope Gregory the Great, speaking of the grammar of Scripture, saying that it is “not suitable to submit the words of the divine Oracle to the rules of Donatus.” His contemporary Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman and successor of Boethius, wrote a book for monks, who, he says, should study secular letters for the reason that “to a considerable degree, it is by this that our minds are equipped to understand Sacred Scripture.” In the ninth century, we find Ermanric of Passau claiming, “The sayings of the pagan poets, as abominable as they are on account of their untruth, are nonetheless useful when it comes to comprehending divine eloquence.”  

Returning to where our study began, Gutenberg in the fifteenth century, we can ask, Why, then, did Gutenberg print the grammar first and not the Bible? Yet even here we find the subordination of the liberal arts to the Bible on the level of technology and economics. It was always the goal of Gutenberg to print the Bible, but to do so properly he first needed to experiment with his movable metal type, to play around with various page layouts. Printing the Ars minor afforded this needed experience, and the sales of the grammar provided Gutenberg the money he needed to print Jerome’s Vulgate.