In our churches today the Liturgy is prayed in the language we speak, called the vernacular. If we reside in the United States, this means English. This has not always been so. Until the 1960s, the Roman Church always prayed in Latin, though for many centuries the people did not understand it. Likewise, even today, in Greece and Russia, the Liturgy is celebrated in “koine” Greek or Church Slavonic, neither of which are spoken by the people.
The principle of reform is to renew the Liturgy according to the Gospel principles. We ask the question: what did Our Lord do? There is no doubt that Jesus taught in a language the people understood, Aramaic. He probably prayed in Aramaic also, though the canonical hymns, the Psalms, were most likely sung in Hebrew.
Language in early church Liturgy
In the celebration of the Liturgy, how much did the people understand, and how important was it that they did understand? I believe that the comprehension of the prayers was an important principle in the early church. People prayed in Aramaic if they were Jewish Christians, but in apostolic times, the Christian message spread among the gentiles. We do not even have the original words of Our Lord, since the Gospels, in order to spread Jesus’ message, were written in Greek, the common language in the Mediterranean area.
We know that the early liturgical presiders improvised their prayers, which could have been so only if they prayed in the common language they spoke they wished to be heard and understood. The common Greek (“koine”) became, therefore, the sacred language. The community then avoided translating the Scriptural texts as long as possible once they were formed. The people’s common language changed, while the liturgical texts remained the same. After awhile the texts of the prayers would not be understood by the average person. I believe this is the basic reason why the prayers began to be recited silently. Hymns would remain aloud because the people liked the music, even if they could not understand the words. To this day, the Greek Church wants to keep the ancient words of worship because they are original to Holy Scripture.
Use of Slavonic language
Despite this, we have seen that the Byzantines did allow the use of Slavonic in the Liturgy in the Slav missions, and it also permitted Georgian in the Church of Georgia, which remained in union with Constantinople, and also Arabic for those churches in the Middle East that remained faithful to Constantinople, after the Moslem conquest.
The Byzantine Church has always prided itself on the principle of the vernacular. In their mission to the Slavs, Sts. Cyril and Methodius were aware that the people could not understand the Liturgy nor the Gospel at all and translated the Scripture and Liturgy into the people’s language.
Ironically, of course, eventually even the Slavonic language used in the Liturgy became obsolete and incomprehensible to the people. In 1917, there was a proposal made at the Russian Synod to translate the Liturgy from Church Slavonic to Russian, but the Communist Party took control in Russia and would not allow it, knowing that this might strengthen religion too much.
Use of vernacular in the West
In the West, the great push for the vernacular came in the time of the Protestant Reformation. The texts of liturgical worship were also translated into the vernacular wherever Protestantism was established. The Council of Trent was the Catholic reaction to the Reformation. Some Catholics advocated accepting the Protestant principle of the use of the vernacular, but the great majority did not. The council, therefore, rejected the possibility of the vernacular.
However, the Catholic Church finally accepted translation into the vernacular. following the Vatican II Council. Following the Byzantine principle, our church accepted the vernacular even earlier. The Liturgy began to be celebrated in English, probably in the Youngstown (Ohio) area in the late 1940s. It spread quickly in the early 1950s, supported by Bishop Ivancho and then by Bishop Elko.
Translation problems
Liturgical translation presents problems. One of the greatest translators, St. Jerome, wrote, “If I translate word by word, it sounds absurd; if I am forced to change something in the word order or style, I seem to have stopped being a translator.” It is not possible to translate exactly from one language to another because words do not perfectly overlap in meaning. Likewise languages do not exist in isolation from a particular culture and human context. Any translation will involve some interpretation of the original. The point of translation is to reproduce in the new language the same meaning and the same effect as the original as much as possible. This requires art and intelligence, and for this reason, we will probably always argue about translations.
Translation principles
Two principles are of primary importance. The first is that a liturgical text must be uplifting. Pope Paul VI said in 1965 that the liturgical text “should always be worthy of the noble realties it signifies, set apart from the everyday speech of the street and the marketplace.” The Liturgy is to lead us from our mundane lives into union with God, that is, from death to life, from earth to heaven, from darkness to light.
To this there is also a complementary principle, that the Liturgy must be intelligible. If it is written in a language so exalted that the average person cannot understand it, then it loses its purpose. The Gospels, written to proclaim the divine message of God’s salvation, are often in a very simple language that is not very elegant.
Understanding of the text must be a primary consideration, believing that they do convey a real meaning that is very relevant to our lives and will transform them. Pope Paul VI said, therefore, that the vernacular liturgical texts should be “within the grasp of all, even children and the uneducated.”
Archpriest David M. Petras SEOD is a professor at the Byzantine Catholic Seminary of SS. Cyril and Methodius and is the author of “Time for the Lord to Act: A Catechetical Commentary on the Divine Liturgy,” available from the Byzantine Seminary Press.
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