Monthly Archives: November 2021

Human or Man?

Human or Man? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In English should we say that Jesus "became human" or "became man"? Join me as I work through the history of the Nicene Creed and how this most pivotal of beliefs was interpreted first by the Greek speaking Church Fathers who wrote the Creed, later by the Latin speaking Catholic Church, and today by us English speakers. You can read a transcript of the full episode here. Written, read, and produced by Seán Thomas Kane. © Seán Thomas Kane, 2021.

On Saturday I took the opportunity to go to 4:00 pm Mass at my home parish here in Kansas City, MO while I was in town for Thanksgiving. It was wonderful getting to see the place again, and even though it’s only been 3 months since I left town for the semester a part of me doubted I’d actually see these places that are so dear to me anytime soon.

During the Nicene Creed as I recited the words I’ve known at least since freshman year of high school, the proclamation of the Faith, kind of a Pledge of Allegiance that we Catholics still have mostly in common with our Orthodox and Protestant cousins, I noticed something that made perfectly good sense but I hadn’t thought of yet. A friend who was standing near me said that Jesus “became human” instead of “became man.” It caught me off guard for a number of reasons. Firstly, the official English translation that we use in the US does use the older word “man” rather than the newer “human” but secondly, I had a feeling from what I could remember of the Latin translation that our English one is more closely based on that “human”, “homō” in Latin, might actually be the noun used.

That evening I made a point of going to the source. I looked up the Creed in Latin and sure enough the line there is “et homō factus est,” which I’d translate in my schoolroom Latin as “and he was made human.”1

The one catch here is that the Creed wasn’t originally written in Latin but in Greek. So, in order to get to the original meaning and intent of the Church Fathers at the Council of Nicaea (325) that wrote the Creed we still say nearly 17 centuries later, I’d need to call up my admittedly elementary and rusty knowledge of Greek. Unlike Latin, which I studied all through my high school years, have picked up again twice since, and use professionally on a regular basis as a historian of Renaissance natural history, I haven’t been lucky enough to use much of my Greek. I took Classical Greek in my senior year of high school after finishing my last required math credit the summer before, and then took a semester of Koine Greek (aka New Testament Greek) in my sophomore year of undergrad at Rockhurst. So yeah, my Greek is rusty. I can still read the alphabet pretty well and I know enough about etymologies that I can get by, but I never really got it the way I got Latin or French.

Still, I was determined to spend at least a few minutes of my Saturday evening at home working through this question: what was the original Greek line that the Latin translator rendered as “et homō factus est“?2 I went to a pretty reliable source that has both the Latin and Greek versions and started scouring the Greek, figuring I was either looking for one of two words: ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) meaning human or ᾰ̓νήρ (anḗr) meaning man.3

One of the big tricks that I’ve learned after now a few years of working with sixteenth-century printed books that are often not in English is the quickest way to find a particular word you’re looking for is basically to just focus on finding that word, don’t pay too much attention to the rest of the text. Once you’ve found the word you’re looking for then go and read the rest of it to put that word into context.

One example of a 16th century printed book that I’ve worked with.

Anyway, back to the story.

So, I scanned through the Greek original version of the Nicene Creed and was left stumped. I couldn’t find either ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ anywhere. I began to wonder if there was some third Greek word for human or man that I didn’t know about, and knowing what I do know about Greek there being three words for the same concept isn’t at all out of the question. Looking for clues, I turned then to the previous line, “and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary”. In the Latin this appears as “Et incarnātus est, ex Spirītū Sānctō ex Marīā Virgine“. A great trick for any researcher working in a second or third language, or better yet one that they have a passing familiarity with is to always keep an eye out for personal names or other proper nouns: those will usually be more prominent, and when it comes to the BVM (Māter Deī, Θεοτόκος [Theotókos]) you can bet her name will be prominent. Sure enough, I quickly found mention of a Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου (Marias tés Parthenou) meaning the Virgin Mary and kept looking along that line for something that resembled either ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ. Two words over came my answer: a fittingly long Greek verb ἐνανθρωπήσαντα (enanthrōpōpésanta).

I quickly returned to my favorite English-Greek dictionary and found the root form of the verb in question, ἐνᾰνθρωπέω (enanthrōpéō), meaning “to put on human/man’s nature,” or more essentially “to become human/man.” The only job left to do was to take out that clunky slash and acknowledge which noun, ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ was at the heart of that verb. As it turned out, and as you can see, it’s ἄνθρωπος.

Thus, to the best of my efforts as a scholar and translator, and as you can see, I’d argue that in English saying that Jesus “became human” works, perhaps even better than “became man”. Why? Well, remember that English has changed a lot as a language in the past century. We have so many more people and ideas using this language than ever before, and to be honest while the English noun man began as both a word meaning males in both gender and sex (ever a complicated series of terms) and our entire species in general, it has steadily come to lose that second, neuter meaning in favor of solely being a masculine noun. Neil Armstrong’s first words when he stepped onto the Moon’s surface in 1969 were “it’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” For a guy in 1969 that worked. But for the astronauts that will be setting foot on the lunar surface again in the next few years with the Artemis program, I firmly believe that man won’t cut it anymore.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that was a predecessor to this now weekly Wednesday Blog about why I prefer to say “you guys” rather than “y’all”. Long story short: I’m not a Southerner, and I’ll fully admit when I hear “y’all” I don’t tend to think of much besides the people who drug our country into a Civil War 160 years ago because they couldn’t accept the fact that it was morally corrupt to own other human beings. The fact that their heirs are still fighting against racial equity in this country makes my case for me. In that same blog post I also argued that we should move away from the word mankind, and towards something that more closely reflects a more gender neutral word for our species: humanity. On a small side note here (in a paragraph begun with a side note) I don’t like humankind because it combines the very Germanic -kind with the very Latin human. Instead, Latin gives us the word humanity, derived from the Latin hūmānitās. Let’s use that instead. It works, and frankly as we do become far more globally interconnected (which, guys, really isn’t a bad thing at all), it translates far better than humankind ever will.

All this said, getting back to the main point after a brief stop in the politics and history of American English, I think it’s actually a lot better and more profound to refer to Jesus as God becoming human instead of God becoming man. It means that Jesus came to be among all of us, to be one of all of us. I’ve written before in an academic setting about why I believe it’s flawed to refer to God in gendered terms: gender is cultural, it’s fundamentally human, and it keeps the blinders on us to the extent that we can’t make a true effort at seeing, and by seeing hopefully we can get closer to understanding the fullness of God. From there, I’ll leave the writing about how to understand the fullness of God to the theologians and clergy.

Footnotes

  1. Why the difference between the official “became” and “was made” in my translation of the Latin passive verb factus est? Factus est is the passive perfect 3rd person singular form of the verb faciō, which my old stalwart dictionary William Whitaker’s Words translates into the English verbs “do, make, create; acquire; cause, bring about, fashion; compose; accomplish.” So, while “became” is more poetic, “was made” is more accurate to the verb in question. But, theologically was Jesus the passive recipient of the blessing of being made human? After a significant amount of time for what I thought would be a short search I found an entry in the Liddell, Scott, and Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) on the Perseus database that listed the original Greek verb that was translated into Latin as factus est, namely ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, as an aorist participle singular active masculine verb in the accusative case. So basically, while the Latin factus est is in the perfect passive voice (meaning it’s describing an event that fully happened to the subject in the past), the Greek verb is an event that happened in the past without any time specified as to when it happened (kinda like a French passé simple?) This alone shows the complexity of trying to translate from Greek into Latin and then by extension into English. One final note here: while the Greek verb grammatically has a masculine gender (see above in this oversized footnote) I’d stress that that gender designation is referring to Jesus who it’s generally accepted was biologically male. In the process of trying to figure out how the Greek verb in question (ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, in case you forgot) was conjugated, I found an interesting article from the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University discussing how best to translate this very verb in the Nicene Creed from the Greek original into English. So, to return to the original question that led me to write this footnote that would outrun the Gettysburg Address in length: the fact that Jesus in the Latin was apparently the passive recipient of his humanity, given to Him by the Holy Spirit is more or less a “it’s the best we can do” translation from the original Greek where Jesus actively “became human”. So, in English while the best translation from the Latin is “was made” human, when taking the Greek into account the official Catholic “became” human works a lot better, because it recognizes that at the end of the day Jesus and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father, meaning they all share the same Substance, i.e. they are all One. “Three Persons in One God” as my notes from my undergrad freshman Honors Christianity I notes say.
  2. For my fellow grammar constables out there, yes I put the quotation mark outside the quotes. There’s a reason for that, it’s not a part of the quote so I don’t see why it should be included in the quotes. I’m going to write another blog post about this eventually.
  3. For my Greek friends and all Greek scholars out there: to my understanding ᾰ̓νήρ is the Ancient Greek word for “man.” To my understanding the more familiar and modern word άνδρας is descended from the accusative singular (direct object form) of ᾰ̓νήρ.

The Puzzle of the Source Material used by my Primary Sources

Title page of Pliny’s Natural History. Source: Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by user LDove (2018).

This is a rare blog post that deals directly with my day job. For those of you who aren’t aware, I’m currently a PhD Student in History at Binghamton University. I study sixteenth century French natural history discussing Brazil, drawing particularly from the works of André Thevet (1516–1590) and Jean de Léry (1536–1613). As such, my main primary sources are pretty straightforward: Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557) and Cosmographie Universelle (1575) and Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578) form the backbone of my work. But beyond those sources is another layer of source material that those two authors used to ground their own writing. In the case of natural history, Renaissance Natural History is largely founded on Pliny’s Natural History (published 77–79 CE) and Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy and zoology, in particular his History of Animals (4th c. BCE).

Thankfully, I came into this project already fairly familiar with Pliny, having used his Natural History in a project on classical geography and the legacy of the voyages of Pytheas of Massalia (c. 350–306 BCE) in my undergrad. I’ll admit I’m less familiar with Aristotle outside of his works on ethics, but luckily for me and all other scholars there are plenty of resources available today that can give you everything from a quick citation to a thorough discussion of Aristotle. My two favorite are the Loeb Classical Library side-by-side Greek-English translations and the Perseus database provided by Tufts University. These are often the best resources I’ve found, and have in a sense made buying copies of these classical texts unnecessary, which my budget appreciates.

That said, in the context of Renaissance Natural History how much should I really be using these twentieth and twenty-first century editions of these classical sources? If I really want to be accurate to the period I’m writing about, I ought to be using sixteenth-century editions of both authors. The easiest and most accurate way to do this would be to figure out which editions were used by my authors and look for copies of those that have been digitized and are available online. But more often than not it’s not that easy to figure out which editions exactly were used. The secondary literature about Renaissance editions of Pliny and Aristotle provide some clues as to how the early printed editions differ from our modern edited ones, both in the original languages and in translation, but those articles and books don’t quite take the runner to home plate.

The best guide then seems to be using the examples and patterns set by other books that I know for sure were owned and read by these authors and use those to guess at which editions of Pliny and Aristotle they would most likely have known. One good lead for Thevet at least appears to be the fact that he had a connection to the court of François I (r. 1515–1547) who like Thevet came from the provincial city of Angoulême. This means if there’s a specific edition noted as being present in François I’s library, then that might be a good lead to follow to see what Thevet was reading. Looking at the nine books known to have been owned by Thevet, curiously all of them were in French, none in Latin. Generally, I’ve taken this to mean that he probably preferred to read in his native language, so he may have preferred a French translation of both Pliny and Aristotle rather than reading editions in Latin and Greek.

At the end of the day as much as I see a profound benefit in using these sixteenth-century editions of Pliny and Aristotle to really establish my research in the natural history being written in the Late Renaissance, I’m still going to keep my modern edited versions of those same classical works handy. After all, they’re much easier to search than any sixteenth-century version, so if anything the modern editions will continue to prove to be good road maps to help me navigate through their centuries old forbearers.

Beethoven’s Ghost

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano trio in D Major, op. 70, no. 1, musical autograph.

Over the weekend I took a break from my usual work and TV schedule and decided to watch something on the PBS streaming app. I ended up choosing the latest episode of Scott Yoo’s series Now Hear This which has been airing as a part of PBS’s long time arts show Great Performances. I wrote about Yoo’s episode on Mozart a few months ago, and this iteration’s focus on Beethoven likewise did not disappoint. The premise of the episode was essentially Yoo and friends renting out an old Gilded Age mansion in the Berkshires and recording Beethoven’s Ghost Trio (op. 70, no. 1). At the same time, in the Halloween spirit of the weekend when this episode aired, the ghost of Hr. Beethoven himself appeared to listen to his music being played once again. Yet alongside the great composer also appeared the ghost of Dr. Sigmund Freud, who it turned out, had been offering psychoanalysis to the ghosts of dead composers since his own demise in 1939.

At first, I have to admit, I laughed at the idea that Freud interviewing Beethoven would fill the biographical aspect of this episode. It made sense, but it seemed like a silly idea. But as the show went on, I found the premise not only believable but it made Beethoven himself seem more endearing and modern. Now for both of these to occur, I have to admit that I do tend to believe in the possibility of the supernatural. Writing as a Catholic, I believe in an afterlife, and that likely both gentlemen in question are currently in residence there. What’s more, I’ve always thought that one of the things I’d love to do after I died would be to sit down and talk to some of these famous people: Beethoven, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, among all my own relatives I’d be dying to meet.

By the time the episode ended I really liked the idea of having the ghosts of historical figures interviewing each other as a way of describing their biographies. Sure, it’s corny, but it works. I remember a few years ago KCPT (Kansas City PBS) had a program that they ran with the KC Public Library where Crosby Kemper, then the library’s director, would interview figures from Kansas City’s past: whether they be President Truman, Buffalo Bill Cody, some of the great jazz band leaders, or Boss Tom Pendergast. In many ways, the format that Yoo and friends came up with having Freud’s ghost interview Beethoven’s ghost fits that same model.

Then again, one final question arises from the grave: are they Freud’s ghost and Beethoven’s ghost, or are they just simply Freud and Beethoven? What’s the difference between a potential remnant of a deceased soul and the person they once were? And if there is a difference, does that mean that experience makes all of us who we are?

The Voice of American Music

Growing up there always seemed to be a few specific genres of hymns that’d be sung at Mass: the really traditional Latin hymns that go back into the Middle Ages, the eighteenth and nineteenth century hymns, often of Lutheran or Methodist origin that we Catholics had adopted, without necessarily acknowledging their sources, and the newer hymns written by the likes of the St. Louis Jesuits or those that came out of the spiritual and Gospel tradition native to this country. Often, my experiences performing music, whether singing or playing, was pretty well focused on church music and on the other hand on traditional Irish music, which I started learning when I was 13.

It strikes me how much our common musical language here in the United States can bridge gaps that we ourselves aren’t yet quite ready to leap across ourselves. My own experiences coming from a Midwestern Irish American Catholic family are entirely different from many of the people I work with today on so many different levels, but at the core of it all there seems to be this same common musical language that subconsciously unites us.

One of my favorite YouTube videos lately is of the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma performing “Going Home” from Dvorak’s 9th Symphony for the New American Arts Festival. Ma begins his contribution by telling the story of Dvorak’s time teaching music to his American students before his own return to Europe, and how the Czech master told them not to copy his style but to go out and listen to all the different music around them and create their own style from that. Out of those students and their students came Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copeland, three of the great American composers of their day.

I often find myself thinking of how I could embody this country in a particular sound, or in a sonic landscape that could immediately transport me as I listen to one part of this country or another. When I wrote my trio sonata for flute, violin, and cello, I set the first three movements in a very Irish tone. The first movement was an entirely original jig, with the flute taking the part that I’d normally play with my tin whistle. The second movement ended up being my version of Dvorak’s “Going Home”, this time a setting of the Irish air “An Gaoth Aneas,” known in English as “The South Wind,” the third movement ended up being a setting of the jig “Merrily Kiss the Quaker’s Wife,” which has a really fun second part to it.

The fourth movement though was again something new. But unlike the first three movements, which told their story with an Irish voice, the fourth movement was set in America, and to tell that story I tried to emulate the voice that Aaron Copeland composed in, built off the sound of American folk tunes, their very particular twang that certainly has some Irish roots but has changed with all the other influences on music in this country. I wrote that fourth movement with the spirituals and originally Methodist hymns I’ve sung at Mass all my life in mind, and compared to the rest of the piece it has a very different sound.

There’s a related but still different sound in the musical landscape of the American West, something born out of both old cowboy songs from the nineteenth century as well as both twentieth century Hollywood soundtracks to the great Westerns, including my personal favorites, the contributions of Ennio Morricone’s to the genre through his scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and of course Once Upon a Time in the West. Still more interesting to me is that this western soundscape has been picked up in recent decades by the continued popularity of Country music, though admittedly it’s a genre I’m personally not nearly as fond of as many of my fellow Americans.

When I think of one particularly American instrument, it’s honestly the trumpet. Sure, this is something that was invented in Europe and is used in all sorts of contexts outside American music, but the trumpet nevertheless plays a central role in two particular musical genres that speak volumes to me personally. The first is the frequent use of the trumpet to represent the solemn dignity of the republic, as a calling card for our country as the first modern representative government. It’s something I hear particularly in the film music of John Williams, especially in his scores for Lincoln and Amistad.

This particular sound blends into the use of the trumpet as a stand in for the military as well, seen especially well in Williams’s score to Saving Private Ryan or in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film Patton and Elmer Bernstein’s mix of military motifs with Keystone Cops silliness in his score for Stripes. The trumpet, it’s simple yet pronounced call, seems to me to symbolize the idealized nature of this republic, and its classical legacy with the same instrument often being used in sword and sandal films to stand in for Republican Rome.

The other great genre that uses the trumpet to tremendous effect is my favorite genre created in this country: jazz. When I was first really learning about jazz as an adolescent I specifically remember thinking that I was less interested in what I saw as that boring piano jazz that my Dad liked to listen to on NPR. Instead, I wanted to hear the exciting stuff written for trumpets and trombones and horns.

I’ve since grown to love piano jazz, as my students can tell you from listening to Duke Ellington, Count Baisie, and Jon Batiste before the start of my classes every Friday (when I can get the sound in the classroom to work), but I still have a knack for wanting to hear trumpet. I’ve gotten to see Wynton Marsalis play live twice now, the first time with the Abyssinian Gospel Choir when they played his Abyssinian Mass at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City about 7 years ago, the second time when he played with Jazz at Lincoln Center in a Christmas concert at the Midland Theatre in 2015 or 2016. Jazz trumpet especially lends itself to Latin Jazz, another part of this country’s and more broadly these continents’ musical landscape that speaks directly to the soul of what it means to be American.

One of these days, I’d like to try to blend the traditional Irish music that I play with jazz, to see what sorts of neat sounds come out of it. What sort of language will be sung by those instruments when they come together. Maybe if I try my hand at composing again I’ll make an effort at it. Oh, and if you’re looking for recordings of my sonata I’m afraid you’re out of luck, it’s yet to be performed, though I’m open to offers there.

Being Nice and the Metaverse

In the Star Trek series set during the 24th century one of the greatest inventions known to humanity is the holodeck, a room in a building or on a starship where one can recreate anyone, anything, or any setting in a virtual reality using holographic projectors. The technology itself is very optimistic in whether we’ll ever get quite that far along with virtual reality, but it’s a neat idea. If anything today, the holodeck reminds me most of Mark Zuckerberg’s idea for the metaverse. It’s a proposed virtual reality where people can escape from their everyday lives even for just a few minutes and be someone else. Software like this has been around for a long time, I remember a few years ago trying out the program Second Life, without much success. That said, as unsuccessful as my foray into that virtual world was, I nevertheless stayed up all night trying to make it work.

Charles M. Blow wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times last weekend criticizing the idea of the metaverse for denying us some basic elements of our own humanity, in particular our abilities to socially interact and on a more fundamental level to live in the moment. Yesterday evening, a full fourteen hours ago, I sat on a park bench beneath the statue of El Cid in the Plaza de Panama in San Diego’s Balboa Park. I could’ve spent that time checking my social media accounts on my phone, the most widely available version today of what could become Zuck’s metaverse. Instead though I took that forty minutes spent on that bench enjoying the sights around me, listening to the other visitors, to the intoxicating rhythms of the music being played live in the plaza, the sounds of the classic cars parading by on a beautiful Sunday evening in one of the most beautiful cities in this country.

The metaverse can offer solitary people like me a chance to live another life from the comfort of our own homes. And as much as another life is always an alluring prospect, why else daydream, I have the life I’ve been lucky enough to lead. My story is yet to be fully written, so why would I open a new virtual blank slate and start writing all over again?