Earlier, I posted, in several sections, a larger work on the changing notions of merit and grace in the later medieval period, with minor attention to the changing economic background that affected the metaphors used for these. In some ways, these were stimulated by a post on the sense of the Greek word (“χάρις”) that gets translated into English as “grace” or “favor”. Continue reading
John Calvin
An Example of Historical Distance & Difference: Χάρις, Linguistic Singularity, and Confessional Projection
Translators are confronted with numerous choices when rendering ancient Greek words into English, and one of these is how to bridge the distance between the world of the text and the world of the reader. This historical distance can be notoriously difficult to see when one engages with a text that has already been translated, and which arrives in the world of the innocent reader as pre-chewed food. (A recent post on the shift in words we translate as “happy” reminded me of the need to write something on this more specifically.) This highlights a central feature of the secularity of our modern world: historical distance, the autonomy of historical epochs and local worlds, and the seeming worldliness of every bridge or road we might build to traverse them. Continue reading
Into the Clarities 