A cornucopia for copy and paste

My current project requires the transcription of large slabs of text, specifically Magisterial documents of the Catholic Church. I recently discovered a French website, catho.org which has the 1917 Code of Canon Law in Latin and French as well as the 1996 edition of Denzinger's Dogma. So I was able to save myself typing out DS 1247-1279 (the questions to be posed to those accused of the Hussite or Wycliffite heresies, decreed by the Council Of Constance 22nd February 1418). Also Catho.org gives the older paragraph numbers of Denzinger right next to the current number. This is useful for using pre-1963 works of theology. From the home page you navigate to the French versions but there is a little button ("Latin" hand written with a mouse it looks like) to switch to the original. It does not provide the Greek texts of the early councils. Also it only provides French texts of the Fathers. Clicking on the pair of blue semi-circular arrows (looks like a refresh button) within a given text takes you to citations of the passage which you are reading. As they say on the home page:

Un système UNIQUE AU MONDE, issu de la technologie exclusive du logiciel Ictus, permet de savoir immédiatement où un document est cité. Ainsi, vous découvrirez comment les Pères de l'Église commentent un passage des Saintes Écritures, ou bien comment un texte du Magistère (concile, encyclique) est utilisé par un autre document. … Grâce à Internet et aux techniques les plus modernes appliquées à ce trésor de textes, ayez l'érudition d'un vrai moine!

Quite so.

Meanwhile I am agog at developments on Newman Reader. Although they have adopted a rather odd looking font (looks like Papyrus) for the front page we can forgive all that because they have put PDF scans of all 32 volumes of Newman's Letters and Diaries (it would cost thousands to assemble a collection of printed copies) as well as of modern collections of Newman's miscellaneous papers. They seem to have done an OCR job on it so the text is searchable, at any rate it is as searchable as something on Google books (presumably Google did the work, since "snippet view" and "preview" versions of L&D are available on Google books). I cannot find Newman's preface to Hutton's Anglican Ministry, but I just gave you that. Nor is there the full version of his ejaculation in favour of the Papacy beginning "Deeply do I feel…"

Last, but not least, (via Chant Café) the complete four volume Missale Romanum cum lectionibus is now online.  Each volume is split into four files. They take an age to download. They have been gone through a first run with optical character recognition so you can copy and paste up to a point. It is not very accurate however. But it is better than nothing. Much better.

Gus and Tommy Latine

Augustinus.it provides the complete works of St Augustine in Latin and Italian. They are organised according the Augustine volumes in Patrologia Latina (PL 32-46). For some reason PL 46 is not included in the "elenchus" on the left but the sermons in that volume can be found by searching "PL 46" in the Tavola Cronologica. Unfortunately it does not include the prefatory material found in the printed volumes. This means it is no help in deciphering the PDF of this discussion of the text of sermones inediti.

There is also a page of links to English translations of his works. Apart from those listed there, I don't know of any others.

Corpus Thomisticum is a site with the complete works of St Thomas Aquinas, courtesy of the University of Navarre. There is also a collection of links to volumes of the Leonine edition on archive.org.

New Advent only has a translation of the Summa Theologica, done by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province in 1920. The Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. offers the complete works of Aquinas in more recent translations. (Bookmark that link because there is no obvious way to navigate there from the homepage). It was novices at the DHS who produced that charming work Lives of the Dominican Saints. I wouldn't mention that, except that it always makes Dominicans squirm when I do.

Preaching and the Biblical Languages

The Rev. Gerald Ambulance discusses the problem of preaching.

Greek is another good time-killer. Try this kind of thing: "Now the word translated 'preaching' here is the Greek word kerygma. And that comes from the verb kerysso, meaning 'to preach'. So when St Paul says 'preaching', what that word really means is 'preaching'." (Stephen Tomkins, My Ministry Manual by Rev. Gerald Ambulance, p.31).
Rod Decker, Preaching and the Biblical Languages: Garnish or Entrée Mellon or Mantra? has a more serious approach.

Some extracts.
Forty years ago as a college and seminary student I was a cook. I worked in various types of kitchen settings: short order, line cook, and commercial dining rooms. In most such situations we were concerned that the plate we served look nice. Part of the “dressing” was some sort of garnish—a sprig of parsley, a spiced apple ring, a lemon curl, etc. The garnish was not part of the nutritional value of the meal. We did not intend that our customers eat the parsley. It just looked nice. What we wanted them to eat was the entrée. Whether that was a juicy steak grilled to perfection or a chicken breast stuffed and wrapped and prepared just so, we took great pains that it be good quality, tender, and tasty. We did not, however, carry it to their table on a greasy spatula or in a crusty roasting pan. We served the finished product in an appealing, ready-to-eat form. That setting provides my analogy. 
The biblical languages should not function merely as a garnish. Too often pastors pay only lip service to the biblical languages. They may acknowledge that they are important—at least to the commentary writer. They expect others to do the dirty work so that they can garnish their sermons with impressive-sounding jargon, a sprig of Greek parsley. “In the original Greek this is an ‘ā-or-ist’ tense, therefore it means [such and such.]” Or they add a lemon curl. “The Greek perfect mood proves that we were saved in the past and will be eternally secure forever.” Or for a real “ringer” (i.e., a spiced apple ring garnish), “This word in the original Greek is number 4352 which is a compound of 4314 and 2965, so it means to lick God’s hand like a puppy dog.” All such statements are merely attempts to sound impressive or to wield the Greek as an authority club. They prove nothing and do not add anything to understanding the meaning of the text. That is neither the purpose nor the value of the biblical languages.
The languages are much more like the entrée than the garnish. They are not the entrée as such, but the tools used to prepare the entrée. We do not feed God’s people with Greek and Hebrew. What goes on the sermonic plate is an appetizing, tender piece of meat. If we are ministering in an English-speaking context, that means that the entrée—the biblical content—must be explained in relatively simple English that our audience can understand. Just as the goal of a vernacular translation of the Bible is communication, so the goal of a biblical sermon must be the communication of the Bible’s message in language that our audience can understand.
He then discusses the Doors of Durin in The Lord of the Rings. (It seems even Baptists are not immune to the lure of Tolkien.) Just as the Fellowship needed to say the Elvish word for "friend" mellon, to enter Moria, so "it is through the door of the biblical languages that we enter (certainly as friends!) into the Scriptures".
On the other hand, we ought not make the biblical languages, as important as they are, into a mantra (the last part of my subtitle). Some people, being firmly convinced of the general argument that I have proposed thus far, use the biblical languages, not as a mellon, but as a mantra. They are certainly sincere and they have commendably placed a high priority on the biblical languages, but they then go one step too far in making the tools of exegesis into the gadgets of homiletics. Just as a mantra refers to something repeated continually, so these preachers continually inflict their audience with Greek and Hebrew. They preach Robertson and Danker and Wallace in their efforts to preach Christ. Their sermons contain profuse reference to Greek and Hebrew words, to technical grammatical description, to diachronic etymologies, and even verb parsings. Some even imply to God’s people that they should (or even must) learn Greek if they are going to understand Scripture and become spiritually mature. Their churches become language institutes and their pulpits become lecterns.
According to the epilogue to Decker's paper, Dr Christopher Cone, at the same conference, argued that it is the job of preachers to teach their audiences the Biblical languages, textual criticism, genre, and so on.
God revealed Himself using language. That he revealed Himself in such a way has tremendous implications for teaching. God expected that His audience would be sufficiently skilled in the principles of the languages He used so that they could understand His meaning. We all need to understand how to understand God’s word. We all need to know how to handle variants, translations, background, rhetorical structure, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and context.
"We all"? Everyone needs to be able to cope with textual criticism, ancient genres etc not to mention the languages? How shall we be saved?

What Cone and, to a lesser extent, Decker do, is confuse preaching the words of God with preaching the Word of God. They come rather close to the Mahometan approach of treating a particular language (at least two languages so far as Christians are concerned) as the very language of the Almighty.

Almost ten years ago, as friends of mine were ordained to the diaconate, I was always writing the following passage in greeting cards, from St Gregory the Great (Hom. in Ev. xvii) used in the Office for St Luke on 18th October.
For our Lord follows in the wake of those who preach him, since preaching paves the way, and then our Lord himself comes to make his dwelling-place in our hearts. First come the words that exhort us, and then by means of them truth is received into the mind. It was for this reason that Isaiah [40:3] commanded preachers: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God." For the same reason too the psalmist gives them the order: "Make a highway for him who goes on high above the setting sun" (Ps 67:5/68:4). 
Msgr. Charles Pope discusses this passage.

"The more barbarous Latinity of a Rhabanus Maurus" : On Ecclesiastical Latin

When taught to translate English into Greek or Latin (something I was never very good at) I was told to use the idioms of a classical author appropriate to the genre of the text. For example, if the text prescribed for translation came from a speech of Churchill, one would go to Cicero or Demosthenes. In many cases any prose writer would do, but if a piece of grammar only occurred in the poets then it was not to be used.  At Merton we all had a terrible time with trying to translate something from Proust.

What would be the equivalent for somebody ordered to provide a translation into Latin of an extract from the works of Blessed John Henry Newman (for example) for his office? In other words what counts as Ecclesiastical Latin? Somewhere in volumes iii or iv of Liturgia Horarum is a sermon by St Leo the Great which uses a grammatical construction not found in classical authors. I'll track it down later but, for the purpose of this post, it is enough to remark that Cicero and co. need not be our only models for writing Latin now.

Leaving aside the question of models – examples of good style – if we want to know if something is Ecclesiastical Latin, what are the sources of the Language? An obvious such source would be the Vulgate and its predecessors – bearing in mind that some constructions are literal translations of the Hebrew. If you wanted to describe something made of individual parts as strongly compacted together, you would not say "cuius participatio eius in id ipsum" (Ps 121(122):3). Later on Jerome rendered that passage "cuius participatio eius simul". Pius xii gave us the elegant "in se compacta tota", but these days the Church has compromised with "sibi compacta in idipsum".

Presumably Jerome's other works are sources, as are those of Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine and Ambrose. St Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in Greek, but his only works to survive intact do so in Latin translations made during his lifetime. Presumably they could be a model. You would probably include Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux and Bernardine of Siena as well as all Papal documents at least up to the middle ages.

Veni sancte Spiritus, the Sequence for Pentecost, was written in the 12th century, probably by Innocent III (ob.1216) or by his friend from the Sorbonne, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury. I would be inclined to include the acts of the council of Trent (not meaning to exclude anything else up to that point) as well as the Breviary (1569) and the Missal (1570).

Urban VIII (1623-1644), assisted by some learned Jesuits, replaced many of the hymns of the Breviary with new versions in a more Classical language and metre. These survived until 1969. The Catholic Encyclopedia remarks that 

surprise may be expressed at the temerity that dared to meddle with the Latinity of a Prudentius, a Sedulius, a Sidonius Apollinaris, a Venantius Fortunatus, an Ambrose, a Paulinus of Aquileia, which, though perhaps lacking the purity of the Golden Age, has, nevertheless, its own peculiar charm. Even the more barbarous Latinity of a Rhabanus Maurus is not without its archaic interest and value.

But are these Classicised hymns Ecclesiastical Latin? And can they be used as models for modern compositions? Maybe but perhaps, by definition, no. How about the 1917 code of Canon Law? Perhaps. How about the 1983 code, composed from scratch in my lifetime (perhaps a little earlier)? The mere fact that an idiom is in St Leo the Great means it could be used in translating (say) John Henry Newman's sermon on the Roman See. What if it is in Vatican II and nowhere else?

I see very little evidence that any thought whatsoever  has been given to this sort of question. Instead people are left to do their work with whatever Latin they happen to have picked up along the way. We end up with things like this, from the Office of Readings of Padre Pio (23rd September), translated from one of his letters (presumably in Italian):

Gratias, ergo, agite infinitæ pietati æterni Patris, qui sic animam vestram ad salutem deputatam gerit. Cur non gloriari benevolis his optimi ex omnibus patribus adiunctis?

I cannot construe the second sentence. I cannot see how dative plural benevolis his connects with omnibus patribus adiunctis nor what genitive singular optimi is doing unless it is nominative plural and subject of some understood verb. Perhaps somebody believes benevolo is a verb and that benevolis is its second singular.

Edward Peters, mentioned before, gives a list of books for studying Latin, in particular Ecclesiastical Latin. I for one would not turn up my nose at Vincent Huber's Latin for Sisters.

Via New Advent, Msgr Daniel Gallagher – apparently the successor to Fr Reggie Foster as one of the Pope's Latinists – discusses the return of Latin in the Church.

Origenal work

Between 1933 and 1941 Sir Frederic Kenyon published descriptions of 12 papyrus manuscripts, the Chester Beatty Papyri, principally containing texts of scripture. Number xii included an otherwise unknown homily by St Melito of Sardis. Sir Frederic gave it the title "On the Passion". This was corrected to "On the Pasch" after the discovery of the Bodmer Papyri in 1952. Fourteen years after that the homily was published in Sources Chretiennes 123. Extracts were used in volume ii of Liturgia Horarum (1971) for the Office of Readings on Maundy Thursday and Easter Monday.

I mention all this because a 12th century Greek manuscript in the Bavarian State Library has now been identified as a series of homilies on the Psalms by Origen of Alexandria. See the article by Catholic World Report and also this blog post which includes instructions on how to view pictures of the entire manuscript.

Lionel at Forget the Channel says:
The importance of this find cannot be overestimated.
Plus there's this bloke called Benedict, living in Rome, who used to have something to do with Bavaria:
[Origen] was a true "maestro", and so it was that his pupils remembered him with nostalgia and emotion: he was not only a brilliant theologian but also an exemplary witness of the doctrine he passed on. Eusebius of Caesarea, his enthusiastic biographer, said "his manner of life was as his doctrine, and his doctrine as his life. Therefore, by the divine power working with him he aroused a great many to his own zeal" 

I wonder how long before we get an edition.