Intellectual Serfs and Ideological Masters

INTELLECTUAL SERFS AND IDEOLOGICAL MASTERS

Uses and Abuses of Celtic and Indo-European Studies

by PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Quia filii hujus saeculi prudentiores filiis lucis sunt - Luke, 16:8

Since the middle of the last century, Celtic Studies has been a relatively esoteric discipline.  It is of interest only to the Celts and some academics of other fields, such as mediaevalists and philologists.  Those who directly involve themselves in the study of Celitica are few.  Much scope is give to scholars of dubious credentials to make mischief as a result.

The systematic investigation of Celtic languages and literature began about 150 years ago.  The English poet Matthew Arnold and the French critic Ernest Renan were among its earliest enthusiasts.  Renan was a student of Blessed Frédèric Ozanam, but was more impressed by the latter's romanticism than by his Catholicism.  One of his best-known works is the Vie de Jésus (reading this was one of the reasons Stalin lost his faith and was expelled from seminary).

Neither Arnold nor Renan was orthodox in his religious beliefs. Their view of Celtica was based on an idealisation of the Celt.  They saw the Celt as intuitive, artistic and unfettered by reason, while they regarded the Germanic mind, though logical and industrious, as lacking creativity of any sort.  So the 19th-century precursors of the hippies looked to the Celt, on industrialised Europe's western fringe, for their new paradigm.  It is significant that neither Arnold nor Renan was burdened by the knowledge of even one Celtic language.  It made stereotyping so much easier.

The Würzburg glosses

At the same time, Johann Caspar Zeuss (1806-56) was deciphering the Würzburg glosses.  The glosses, found in manuscripts of a commentary on the Pauline epistles in Würzburg, on the Psalter in Milan and on Priscian's Latin grammar at St Gallen are as important to Celtic Studies as the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptology.  The texts are in Latin, but the margins are cluttered heavily by explanatory notation in Old Irish for the benefit of students.

Zeuss, a classical philologist, did the opposite and used the Latin to learn Old Irish.  His Grammatica Celtica is a seminal world and should establish Zeuss as the father of Celtic Studies.

St Kilian brought Christianity and classical learning to Würzburg, Milan was close to St Columbanus' Bobbio and St Gallen is named after St Gall.  And it is from these places that we derive our first knowledge of early mediaeval Ireland.  But the foundational work was grammatical and tedious - and the lay enthusiasts preferred ready-made translations and commentaries.

Nationalist fervour

The lay enthusiasts were impatient.  They had from O'Donovan's and O'Curry's ideas that the tales were historical.  The spirit of the Gaelic Renaissance and the Anglo-Irish literary revival was the spirit of Arnold and Renan.  Even the scientific scholars, such as Professor Eoin MacNéill, sought to explain away the old sagas as myths concerning the rising and setting of the suns.  Patrick Pearse had an uncommon insight into the discipline for his day, due to his competancy in French and German, but was not above manipulating this knowledge for political purposes in the latter years of his life.  It could be said that the popular presentation of Celtica contributed to the nationalist fervour which brought about the Easter Rising and subsequent events.  Militant nationalists continue to draw from this source, up to the present day.

One side-effect of the Celtic Renaissance was the publication of the lives of many early Irish saints.  These books and pamphlets, with their emphasis on monastic life and asceticism, held up a Celtic spirituality for the admiration and not for the imitation of the readers.  For who would sleep on a plank and keep those impossible fasts anyway?

The Venerable Matt Talbot did!  But when one hears of Celtic spirituality nowadays, Matt Talbot is not a name that comes to mind.

Indo-European Studies

After the First World War, Germany was still the centre of Celtic Sudies.  Scholars were now looking east, to India.  The Germans wholeheartedly embraced the study of Sanskrit.  Thus emerged the new discipline of Indo-Germanistik, rendered Indo-European Studies in most other languages.

The juxtaposition of Arnold's and Renan's "Far West" (the Celtic fringe) with the orient did not go unnoticed.  Irish scholars, having devoured the new Sanskrit grammars, presented Ireland and India as the ultimate peripheries of the Indo-European domain; and therefore, if one could isolate the ancient customs both had in common, one could reconstruct the mores which prevailed in Europe and much of Asia at the dawn of history.  Gandhi borrowed the hunger strike from Terence McSwiney and each believe they were following a tradition known in Ireland and India in primeval times, and therefore practised everywhere between the two.

Aryan brothers

The Germans were more interested by parallels between their own peoples and the Indians.  This too found popular expression.  The National Socialists thought the idea fascinating.  It is no mere coincidence that the Hakenkreuz is an Indian symbol and that the Aryans were a prehistoric race who occupied the region between India and Persia.  Iran and Aryan are derived from the same word.  The Nazis' enthusiasm for Indo-Germanistik is not so extraordinary when one sees it provided them with an origin myth conveniently devoid of the perfidious Jew, and perfectly consistent with Mr Darwin's theory.

It was highly embarrassing to the Indian Congress Party leadership - particularly Nehru - that some of their members swallowed the Indo-European myth.  Thus for many Indian nationalists, Hitler was a hero, and the Nazis their Aryan brothers.  Gandhi (not unlike de Valera) had good reasons for keeping the Congress aloof from India's war effort.

Faulty analysis

The look to the East received a more sophisticated veneer after the war.  Suddenly structuralism, functionalism and formalism - or any combination of these - were the buzz-words.  Georges Dumézil provided a new set of theories, substantially based on the functions of a member of any given Hindu caste.

He had two willing disciples in the Rees brothers, whose book Celtic Heritage* is something of a classic.  Personally, I would warmly recommend Celtic Heritage to any novice, provided they concentrate on the narrative to the old Irish and Welsh tales and ignore the analysis of them.  The Dumézillians seem to have forgotten that India was a highly developed, urban and literate society for some millennia before Christ, while the Celtic and Germanic peoples remained rural and illiterate until they were evangelised.  It makes a difference.

At present, there is a tendency among some professional Celtic scholars to regard the Irish and Welsh sagas as mediaeval Christian literature.  As such, they owe as much to Christian sources as they do to allegedly extensive pagan lore in the Celtic regions prior to their christianisation.  Of course, it is easier to see the Christian influence when the extant material is compared with classica, patristic and apocryphal sources, not to mention Scripture itself.  The existence of this school of thought is a well-kept secret.

Ideology or ideolatry?

Just as scholars are coming to a new appreciation of the Christianity of Celtica, the pseudo-scholars are using it to construct a neo-paganism.  In appealing to the archaic, they seek to give legitimacy to new philosophies such as feminism and New Ageism.  These speak of a matriarchal society in which the earth was worshiped and humankind was at one with nature.  Women, naturally, held sway.

This is not the first time that scholarship is being twisted to serve ideology.  And where an obscure discipline such as Celtic Studies is thus abused, what would one expect of something like history or theology?

I wonder if ideology is the right word to describe feminism or Marxist-Leninism or any of the other philosophies that accommodate themselves so well to the Zeitgeist.  Ideology suggests discussion of an idea; and these fundamentalisms admit no dissension in any form, but rather involve worship of the idea - equivalent of the worship we would give to God, and probably contrary to the First Commandment.

Would the word ideolatry not be more appropriate?  And are the adherents of an ideolatry not ideolaters?

* A. and B. Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition of Ireland and Wales, 1961

The Brandsma Review, Issue 36, April-May 1998

On Tongues of Men and Angels

ON TONGUES OF MEN AND ANGELS

Esperanto, PIE in the Sky and Linguistic Devolution

By PEADAR LAIGHLÉIS

Et incirco vocatum est nomen ejus Babel, quia ibi confusum est labia universae terrae 

et inde dispersit eos Dominus super faciem cunctorum regionem. - Genesis 11:9

IN 1887, Dr L.L. Zamenhoff published Lingvo Internacia, which outlined the grammar and structure of a proposed universal language.  The artificial language was called by Zamenhoff's nom-de-plume, Esperanto - the word for "one who hopes" in the new language.  Appropriate, as Zamenhoff was a dreamer. 

He also tried to invent a universal religion based on the Golden Rule.  To date, the language has been more successful; but there are other dreamers out there working on a common denominator creed.

In his Etymologiae, St Isidore of Seville lists 72 languages, which he says came into being at Babel.  Of these, Latin, Greek and Hebrew are pre-eminent, sanctified, as it were, on the Cross.  This highly influential mediaeval work caused some embarrassment here: Irish was excluded in some version of the text.  But this became an opportunity to suggest that the common ancestor of the Gael, Fénnius Farsaid, took the finest elements of the 72 languages and concocted a new tongue which he named after his grandson, Góedel.  Gaelic.  There is a subtle hint that Irish is a reconstruction of the common language spoken from Creation to Babel.

Modern endeavour and mediaeval legend fly in the face of the reality of the diversity of tongues.  The Bible and the Church's tradition teach this to be a curse on man, even after the Fall.  Modern scientists and linguists see things differently.  Languages are held to be the products of millenia of evolution, from animal grunts to the sophisticated jargon we employ today.

 Becoming simpler

Observation does not bear this out.  Five thousand years of written records show that language is simplifying.  Anyone who has studied an ancient tongue, even very superficially, will tell you a dead language is more complex and exact than a living language.

In Europe, most languages appear to be interrelated. Scholars abandoned the notion that Sanskrit was the mother-language.  It is now believed our Indo-European ancestors spoke a common tongue which predates even Sanskrit.  So if you take Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavonic, Old Irish, Old Welsh, Old Lithuanian, Gothic and many others, you can work out how the first Caucasians spoke.  Thus you can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

These alleged Aryans occupied most of the lands between these islands and Central Asia.  The Old Irish rí and the Old Welsh rhi have the Gaulish suffix  -rix(e.g Vercingetorix) as their cousin.  The Latin rex is more distant and the Sanskrit ráj-á is even further removed.  These point to the PIE *rék-s (king).  Likewise, Old Irish fer (now fear) and Latin vir possibly derive for the PIE wiros.  So if we recall the word werewolf, we see an Old English equivalent frozen in Modern English.

Fruitless investment

It is not always so direct.  Our Irish antecedents had a difficulty with the sound "p".  So én(éan=bird) is *petnos in PIE.  This suggests the Latin penna (feather), which we see in English pen, Old Irish penn (peann).  Penna is the word for both pen and feather in Italian (like French plume, German feder and Russian перо). See what you get served if you order penne in an Italian restaurant.  Of course a pen is also a female swan.

The Latin palma, Greek παλαμη and Old English folm mean "palm".  The Old Irish lám (lámh) and Old Welsh llaw (hand) are similar enough to give *plhma (palm).  To find out what our forebears called their hands would involve going to Armenian and Hittite.  Much money is invested in the reconstruction of PIE, especially in Germany and Austria, in spite of the fact there will never be a shred of evidence anyone ever spoke it.

Courtesy of Attila

Not every European language is Indo-European.  Finnish, Estonian, Magyar and Turkish form a group on their own.  Their closest relatives are found in the Central Asian former Soviet republics (and also in Manchuria).  These were imported into Europe in the Dark Ages, courtesy of one Attila the Hun.

This leaves two unaccounted for: Basque and Georgian.  Recent research has suggested the two are distantly related and may be classified as Pre-Indo-European tongues.  There may well have been a common language across the continent, displaced by invaders from the Caucasus.  Perhaps the monuments of the pre-Celtic languages in Ireland might give us some direction as to language - as might the Pictish inscriptions in Scotland.  But where does that leave PIE?  And what did each language develop from?

Other coincidences exist which the scientific community ignore.  I know of a Basque who tried to buy onions at a market in the Himalayas..  He exhausted his range of major European languages, and the Nepalese vendor only knew what he meant when he used his native Basque.  Researchers into the Welsh tale of Prince Madoc reaching America in a coracle (before Columbus) stumbled upon similarities between Welsh and Pawnee.  A regular Brandsma Review reader told me much of the similarities between many words in Irish and Arabic.

I will not dwell on these suggested links between Basque and Nepalese, Welsh and Pawnee or Irish and Arabic.  But can the construction of PIE be beneficial?  Contrast PIE and Esperanto.  Both are artificial languages created from the existing vocabularies of "Indo-European" tongues - Esperanto from the living, to produce a simple language anyone could learn to speak; PIE from the dead, to arrive at a putative common ancestor.

In effect, PIE is an élitist Esperanto providing intellectual stimulation for etymologists.  Both experiments mock evolution, for if PIE is the alpha and Esperanot the omega, we would have a highly complex tongue devolving into a simple language.

Anarchy and dictatorship

It might be said language is being debased, that Gresham's Law applies to language as to money (or religion).  Let the doubtful listen to teenagers speaking among themselves.  It appears that television, inter alia, has speeded up the process of simplification.

Simultaneously, I can see two trends from the academic ivory towers.  One is towards linguistic anarchy - the neologism or Newspeak.  Write your own tongue as you go along, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass.  Secondly we have the Thought Police, taking a leaf out of George Orwell's 1984.  It's called PC.  The intellectual Mandarin class have successfully imposed "gender" in place of "sex" (though I am waiting to hear charges of "genderism" levelled against those who used to be "male chauvinists").

Though it is now acceptable to use four-letter words and take the Holy Name in vain, there are a great many words which may no longer be used.  So much for freedom of expression.

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift describes a race of talking horses, the Houyhnhms.  These noble creatures ask how one could pervert such a magnificent gift as the spoken word by telling a lie.  One wonders what the Dean would make of those who use language games to bully the masses into accepting a political agenda, as Mussolini did in Fascist Italy.

Thus the Church chooses her time to venacularise the Mass.  It is no surprise that there is an analogue of Babel among Catholics.  We no longer understand each other as we used to.  Moreover, the abandonment of a sacral tongue for the secular has left the language of the Mass open to the petty political demands of the vocal few, and to the cultural swing to the banal which has no place in something so venerable and so sacred.

Whereas the original Pentecost was marked by and understanding of diverse tongues, the promised second Pentecost has brought the opposite.  It is time to sit down and meditate upon Babel and Pentecost.  Veni, Sancte Spiritus!

The Brandsma Review, Issue 37, June-July 1998