All You Need is Caritas

I remember an interesting e-conversation I had with a friend on the sanctity and infallibility of the Bible. She had remarked that since the Bible is God's word, it necessarily must be right.

Of course, I'm not one to take that lying down so I had pointed out as gently as I could that her King James Bible was God's word originally spoken in Hebrew (or some local dialect thereof), then translated into Greek, many score years after the events, then translated from Greek into Latin, many hundred years later, then from Latin into English a millennium or so after that. Surely, something must have been lost in all these transmutations.

Today I read an article on Saint Jerome's homework assignment from Pope Damasus in the 4th century. He was asked to translate the Bible from Greek into "vulgar" Latin, that is, the Latin commonly spoken by the people. (This translation came to be known as the Vulgate.)

Apparently he got stuck when he encountered the Greek word agape which is love. But we all know that there are many kinds of love, from the erotic (from another Greek love word eros) to the familial, from the love of one's country to the love of one's pet dog, from the love of one's hobby to the love of one's work, and so on.

Latin, being an exceedingly practical and cut-and-dried kind of language, had only amor to represent any and all kinds of love. So, Jerome chose to use another Latin word, caritas, which meant "expensive", and, by extension, "esteem"; which, if you stretched a point, could mean, "affection" and thereby a chaste kind of "love".

From caritas came "charity", hence the triumvirate of "faith, hope and charity". So what did God really mean?

The Muslims have a more orthodox approach: the Koran was handed down to Muhammed in Arabic, therefore there is no other authentic version. All translations, by the very fact of their being translations, are suspect.

None of this has curbed humanity's penchant for a Humpty Dumpty approach to God's word:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

On a laterally related note, there is a rather tatty art-deco cinema house in downtown Mumbai that calls itself Eros. Considering the open-mouthed, passive dull-wittedness which is invoked, nay, required, by most of the movies it screens, it should perhaps have chosen the alternative Greek word for love: Agape.