Dear Stella,
- Could you explain to me what the benefits of reading Latin would be? A blunt way to put this is–what makes learning Latin worth my time? I’m not Catholic, and think learning Latin would be cool.
- Can you explain to me what the cultural implications were with the importance of Latin? What did this language contribute to society and so how would this language help me?
- From an Etymology standpoint–how close is Greek to Latin? I’m still trying to learn Greek and so I wanted to see if a lot of those principles and concepts would cross over to Latin and how different of a language it is. I believe it was a derivation of Greek or connected on some level?
- Who even uses Latin? Is it mostly Catholic scholars or other people?
- Wanted to hear more of the practicality and applicability of it if I’m reading documents? Meaning, do people read it outside of Catholic circles, and does it cross over into science, etc.? I hear a lot of theological principles being described in Latin from the scholastics and so I think I want to learn more.
Thank you for your time!
God bless
My answer:
Salve—
I am very happy you want to study Latin! Let me quote my favorite paragraph from N.M. Gwynne’s wonderful book Gwynne’s Latin:
“In summary, what a well-designed course in Latin provides is a training and development of the mind and character to a degree of excellence that no other mental or physical activity can come anywhere near to bringing about….In fact it trains the mind and character to the utmost extent in everything human that is valuable. It does all this as no other academic subject (other than Classical Greek), or other activity of any kind at all, can come remotely close to doing.“
Gwynne’s Latin, p.10
That’s one of the most rousing recommendations for Latin study that I have ever read–and I have seen Latin do good things for people myself.
If you know some Greek, it will help you immensely with Latin. So much Ecclesiastical Latin is directly from Greek (see below for more on this topic), and the structure of the two languages is extremely similar, whereas neither of them is similar to most modern languages. You already would have a head start!
As I always say on the first day of my beginners’ class, Ecclesiastical Latin can be thought of as a Christian dialect of Late Latin. Part of what made Ecclesiastical Latin a distinct Latin dialect was all the Greek and Hebrew that had to be brought into the pagan Latin to discuss the developing Christian theology of the early Church.
Latin is the language that made the West. If you will ever learn Spanish or French or Italian someday, Latin will get you at least halfway there. If you want to know law or medical or scientific terms from any of the disciplines, you’ll want to know Latin. Western fine arts, including music, were basically all in Latin until about the 1600s–and if you ever view or listen to anything before even the 1960s, you can expect to meet Latin right and left. Furthermore, all scholarship and education was done exclusively in Latin in those same times–there was only Latin as the medium of communication for educated people anywhere in Europe for centuries. And, of course, Latin still walks among us American English speakers under our very noses, such as the “&” which is a scribbled “et—and” and the word “exit” which means “he goes out,” and thousands more derivative words and mottos and phrases.
Yes, on top of all of the rest of that listed above, Latin is definitely the language of theology. Part of what makes Latin such an ideal instrument for theology is its precision: its unchanging, unambiguous definitions for terms; its almost fractal-like ability to enclose a lot of meaning into just a few words; and its hyper-organization of grammatical forms and patterns. The majesty and beauty of religious texts in Ecclesiastical Latin is unforgettable once you have experienced it.
I love Latin a lot, I am sure you can tell. I’m not the only one–here’s Mr. Gwynne again:
“If I were to be faced with the choice…of, on the one hand, giving children for whom I had responsibility an education consisting of a wide variety of useful subjects, or even relatively few useful subjects as was standard in the education of my day, or, on the other hand, giving them an education consisting only of Latin and of no other subjects whatever, even in their spare time, I should unhesitatingly opt for the Latin-only alternative, no matter who the children were and no matter what their inborn intellectual abilities were…”
Gwynne’s Latin, pp. 13-14
All this to say–hopefully you will study Latin someday. It takes persistence and total focus, but is well worth it!
God bless you (Deus tibi benedicat)!
Stella
Learn Church Latin 
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