History in English words

by Owen Barfield

Thus, Platonic philosophy fades from our view in the person of Socrates, proving by analogy the immortality of the soul of man and the soul of the world; and the fatal chill has scarcely risen to his heart when Aristotelian philosophy comes over the horizon, vigorously investigating by analysis the structure and composition of the body of man and the body of the world. Thanks to his friendship with Alexander, Aristotle himself had hitherto unparalleled opportunities for collecting information on every conceivable subject. Knowledge, often inaccurate enough, was garnered from the four quarters of the civilized world, old manuscripts were edited and compared, and, above all, Nature herself was observed in a way which was quite new. After his death his followers went on putting his methods into practice. Side by side with the weighing and measuring went naming. And so to the three or four hundred years which followed we owe a good deal of the technical terminology of our arts and sciences. It was at this time, for instance, that botany first developed into a science. Many of the names of our commonest wildflowers can be traced back to writings of the period, and the following examples are all taken from the first half of the alphabet: aconite, amaranth, balsam, balm, box, calamint, celandine, cherry, chestnut, chicory, germander, heliotrope, marjoram, melilot. Moreover, nearly all the technical terms of botany are Greek, and though most of them, including the word botany itself, were created later, writers of this period may be said to have given the lead with such learned labels as calyx, perianth, and gymnosperm.

When we are “dating” a word in this way, however, we must remember that only a fragment of the whole of Greek literature has come down to us. Thus we cannot be sure, because a flower-name first occurs in a writer of the Alexandrian period, that it was actually created by him or his contemporaries. Anemone, asparagus, bugloss, celery, centaury, clematis, coriander, crocus, lily, medlar, and mint all go right back to Classical Greek, while petal and possibly spore are botanical terms which were already in use. On the whole, the Alexandrians probably collected, arranged, and renewed the meanings of more words than they actually created.

This is even truer in the case of medicine. The analytical method of thought led naturally in Alexandria to the actual dissection of bodies, living and dead. Aristotle himself is still regarded as the founder of comparative anatomy (cutting up), and it was he who first used this word in its medical sense. The peculiar meaning of the word empirical, moreover, derives from a set of physicians who held that practice was the one thing necessary in their art. It might be thought that with this foreshadowing of modern “methods” there would have been a great influx of new information and new terminology. In actual fact we find that the Greek words (and their name is legion) in the terminology of medical science were either created later by the different European peoples, or else they appear in the works of Hippocrates, a physician who had a large practice in Attica before Plato was born. Among the words found in Hippocrates are the Greek originals of arthritis, bronchial, catalepsy, catarrh, diarrhoea, dropsy, dysentery, epidemic, erysipelas, haemorrhage, hypochondriac, hysteria, nephritis, ophthalmia, paregoric, phlebotomy, phthisis, quinsy, rheum, sciatica, and hypochondriac; while apoplexy is particularly interesting because its Latin translation, ‘sideratio’, shows that it originally had the sense of ‘star-struck’ or ‘planet-struck’. Crisis is Hippocrates’s name for the crucial point at which a disease takes a turn for the worse or the better. It came to England with this meaning in the sixteenth century, and was gradually extended to cover first “the conjunction of stars on which this ‘crisis’ depended”, and then “any critical situation”. Anaemia, however, and possibly enteric, seem to have been first used by Aristotle.

The centre of all this furious intellectual activity was the city of Alexandria. Nor was it confined to scientific spheres; for the results of religious and philosophical developments which now took place in and around the cosmopolitan city in the north of Egypt were, if anything, more far-reaching than those of empirical science. Indeed, it was from this point in history that theology and science first[30] began to be two separate studies, science following eagerly in the footsteps of Aristotle and religion brooding over the profundities of Platonic philosophy and saturating them with feeling. Between Aristotle and Plato is the great divide from which flowed in two different directions two separate streams, as it were, of human outlook; and just as the modern European, whether or no he possesses any genuine scientific knowledge, can trace the general shape and method of his thinking back to the former, so, whether or no he calls himself a Christian, he must trace much of what he regards as his ordinary “feelings” back to the latter.

For the stream of Platonic thought was now to join itself with other influences coming, for the most part, from farther East. One of the few Egyptian words which have come down into our language is ammonia. It is the name of an alkali which was said to have been found near a certain spot in the Libyan desert, where there was an Egyptian temple to Zeus Ammon, and it will serve to remind us that Alexander the Great was deeply under the influence of the Egyptian priesthood when, in 332 B.C., after his brilliant career of conquests, he visited this temple to pay his devotions before founding the city of Alexandria. We find, therefore—as might be expected—a strong Egyptian element blending with what was Greek in the thoughts and feelings that began to ferment in the more enterprising Alexandrian bosoms. And that is not all. A third influence was added. In the third century B.C. a certain capable ruler of Alexandria invited a body of Egyptian Jews to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The Septuagint, as it was called, was so successful that Greek soon became the official language of the Hebrew religion. Thus, the Greek version found its way into the synagogues of Palestine, and it must have been the Greek version which was read by Jesus of Nazareth.

Without making a study of the Septuagint, it is easy to perceive how passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold and clear-cut Greek words, until classical Greek had grown slowly into the “Hellenistic” Greek of the New Testament. Seeking for words to convey such notions as ‘sin’, ‘righteousness’, ‘defilement’, ‘abomination’, ‘ungodly’, the Jewish translators had to do the best they could with vocables which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied something more like ‘folly’, ‘integrity’, ‘dirt’, ‘objectionable practice’, ‘ignorant’. Any number of such examples could be found. The harmless Greek word ‘eidōlon’ (idol), which had formerly meant any sort of mental image, including a mere mental fancy, suddenly found itself selected from its fellows to be spit upon and cast into outer darkness. ‘Paradeisos’, on the other hand—the park of a Persian nobleman—was spirited away, as though by the four Djinns of Arabian legend, first to the Garden of Eden and then to the heavens. It may well be that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, more than anywhere else, is crystallized out for us that process which went on in and about Alexandria for three or four hundred years, and which remained almost unaffected by the inclusion of the city within the Roman Empire. Language never ceases growing, but an important document such as this is like a cross-section of its stem. In it we can see clearly what an enormous part that Alexandrian mingling of Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek conceptions of the Almighty has played in determining the subtler part of the words we use every day—in building up those delicate associations of which few of us ever become fully conscious, but which we all instinctively bring into play when we are speaking under the influence of emotion.

And later, in the work of a writer like Philo the Jew, who lived and wrote about A.D. 50, we can discern some of the religious activities which had followed the translation of the Septuagint; how the Jew, with his expectation of the Messiah, the Egyptian devotee, with his reverence for Horus—the child of a virgin mother, Isis—who died and rose again as the sun-god Osiris, and the Greek, with his elaborated Platonic doctrine, met together, speaking Greek; how innumerable sects, ascetic and licentious, philosophical and superstitious, wise and foolish, had been springing up and dying down all over the Alexandrian world—all of them, to whatever extravagant lengths they may have carried their philosophies and their dreams, working unconsciously at the long task of altering the meaning, the emotional colour, the evocative power of common Greek words. Concepts such as ‘God’, ‘world’, ‘love’, ‘soul’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘spirit’, ‘self’, and a hundred others were first resolved by the chemical action upon them of similar concepts from the minds of other nations and races, and then they began to be built up anew and to take on the form in which they are presented, as he learns to speak, to the modern European child.

Greek philosophy had developed in many directions since Plato’s day. We hear of Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans, Stoics, all of which words originated as the names of different schools of philosophy. The last two, whose doctrines were to take such a firm hold on the educated classes of imperial Rome, have given us one or two important words. Apart from their moral teachings, they appear to have directed their philosophical inquiries more especially to the point of contact between thoughts and things or, as we should say, between objective and subjective. ‘Phantasia’, from which we have fantasy and fancy, was a popular word with the Stoics, who gave it much of its modern meaning; notion and comprehension are Cicero’s translations of Stoic terms; while image in the sense of ‘mental image’ and spectre are Latin renderings of Epicurean expressions. Epicurus had founded his doctrines on those of Democritus, and these last two words were employed by Cicero and one of his friends in discussing that philosopher’s odd theory of perception. He had held that the surfaces of all objects are continually throwing off ‘images’—a kind of films or husks which float about in space and at last penetrate to the mind through the pores of the body. Both the Stoic ‘phantasia’ and this Democritan word ‘eidōlon’, which Cicero translated by ‘imago’, seem to have contributed a part of their meaning to the later ‘imaginatio’, from which, of course, we have taken our imagination.

It was the Stoics, too, who gradually burdened the little Greek word ‘logos’ with the weight of a whole metaphysical theory of the relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings—‘Reason’, as it is often translated—which expresses itself by making and using words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had perceived as pervading the visible universe. They were the first to make the progressive incarnation of thought in audible sound a part of the creative working of God in the world; and it is to them accordingly, with their deep sense of the divine significance of words and their origin, that we owe the word etymology, the first half of which is composed of a poetical Greek adjective meaning ‘true’. Though he had never heard of Christianity, Philo, importing into the theory a certain Semitic awfulness, actually called this mysterious ‘logos’ the ‘only-begotten-son’.