ASK FATHER: “Ghost” or “Spirit”, which is it? Wherein Fr. Z Rants.

From a reader…

QUAERITUR:

Something I’ve wondered about for a while. Old books and hymns have Holy Ghost and new ones have Holy Spirit. I know they are the same third person of the Trinity, but what’s going on with the change?

Good question, especially as Pentecost is a couple days away. This is something I just delved into a bit over at 1 Peter 5 where I post a weekly column. It’s older material, I’ve addressed it before, but repetita iuvant! Repeated things help!

“Holy Spirit” and “Holy Ghost” … which?

It is hardly to be doubted that we English speakers have traditionally used Holy Ghost because of early English translations of Holy Writ, namely the King James (KJV 1611, 1769, etc.) and the Douay-Rheims (DRV OT 1609–1610, NT 1582, revised 18th c.) versions even though both those Bibles use both Ghost and Spirit.

The supremely influential KJV capitalized “Ghost” when it certainly referred to the Third Person of the Trinity. Our English “ghost”, related to German Geist (which is used in German for the Holy Spirit), in its roots is any sort of spirit.  “Ghost” is used often to translate Biblical Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus. It became a matter of common parlance and traditional prayers, which people memorized and handed down. We sang and still sing hymns – mighty memory markers – with Ghost.

In short, “Holy Ghost” became archaic because “ghost” changed in common speech over time. “Ghost” narrowed in ordinary English to mean most often an apparition of a dead person, a specter, something haunted or spooky. Meanwhile, “Holy Spirit” became dominant because modern Bible and liturgical translations standardized it. There is also an ecumenical factor. “Holy Spirit” is now the common term across most modern English-speaking Christian bodies, so it became the standard for official and academic theology.

But “Ghost” is still correct and useable, archaic though it may ring.

We should feel free to use archaic words in our prayers, private and congregational.

Prayer should be from and of the heart, but we can use the richness of our language to express ourselves also in solidarity with our forebears.

There’s nothing wrong with using unusual or out of date language in our prayers.  To our 21st century ears, it can seem a little flowery, saccharine.

However, this is how our forebears prayed and look what they built as they prayed: pretty much everything we Catholics have today.

When the pointy-headed liturgy experts flattened prayer by updating it to sound more like what we hear at Walmart or on the news, our architecture, vestments, preaching, formation, ars celebrandi, not to mention vocations, have pretty much gone to… you know… the “other place”.   Churches were built in the style of municipal airports, vestments were made of plastic with who-knows-what that decoration is, preaching… please… I’ll stop.

Christians have always prayed with stylized language and not humdrum daily parlance.  I mean always.  The pencil-heads and those who listened to them will justify the deflowering of liturgical and devotional prayer because:

You know, in the ancient church they, you know, changed from Greek to Latin because it was, you know, the language the people spoke, the vernacular.  If they could do it then, you know, so should we!

WRONG!   When the shift was made from Greek to Latin, it was not to the Latin spoken in the street, as if in a play by Plautus.  Liturgical prayer shifted to a highly stylized Latin, a Latin which was decidedly not the “vernacular” (from Latin verna, a native slave born within the house rather than born abroad).  “Vernacular” came to indicate national language or mother-tongue. But liturgical Latin was not what was spoken in the houses and streets by our forebears.  The choice of the ancient Church was a form of Latin redolent of ancient Roman prayer, filled with ornamental tropes, technical and philosophical vocabulary and images which was, so-to-speak, “baptized” to express an ever-deepening identity and theology.

My WDTPRS offerings here show again and again how rich and structured our orations are, beautiful jewels handed down to us with love.  Jewels which the pencil-heads pretty much hacked up.

But that’s another rant.