Some Learning Goals for 2008

αμαθεστατε και κακε, αφες τον παλαιον, μη μεταποιει
(Fool and knave, can't you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!)

—The complaint of a scribe, written in the margin of Codex Vaticanus at Heb. 1:3.

My father gave me a Latin Vulgate Bible for Christmas. This is thrilling. He bought me one once before, but I gave it to Liam to take to college with him since I had more accessible internet than he did at the time. But I have missed it very much since.

When I was visiting them in Alaska, my father told me about his recent habit of combined devotions and language study. He reads a given section of the Bible in the Latin Vulgate. Then he reads it in Greek. Then he reads an English translation. (I may have the order wrong). This allows him to keep up familiarity with Latin and Greek and also really get deeply into the language of the Scripture. This kind of studying is so typical of my father. Anyway, I thought I might do something slightly similar on a way more amateurish scale. It might help me keep just slightly ahead of my two middle ones in those languages, which would be nice, plus provide a new way to ponder the familiar Gospels. Nathaniel Bowditch, I read once, whenever he wanted to learn a new language, would acquire a Bible in that language. Since he knew the contents of the Bible so well, he could inductively discover the grammar and vocabulary of the new language from the context of the Bible.

The cranky quote above is from this site with links to Greek New Testaments. Here is another Greek NT. And here is the Vulgate Bible online with interlinear King James and Douay Rheims translations.

audiens sapiens sapientior erit et intellegens gubernacula possidebit
"A wise man shall hear, and shall be wiser: and he that understandeth shall possess governments."
(from the Vulgate/Douay Rheims/King James site linked above).

I need my Costco magnifying spectacles to read the hardbound Vulgate, which is sad. Another book in the "magnifying spectacles" and "acquired from my father" category that I am reading is From Dawn to Decadence which I first heard about at Dominion Family. So far I am agreeing with her take on it. It takes forever to read ten pages and the magnifying glasses give me a headache. But I really want to finish it. The reason I was motivated to start it was because of Liam talking about Spinoza. The only book I could find around the house on this time period was Classics of Western Thought, vol 2, which was one of my college texts. It is basically an anthology, like Norton's, of well, the classics of Western thought. I read this over Christmas. ...not the medieval section, but the Renaissance and Reformation selections. But it was only a taste of, let's see, Castiglione, Montaigne, Cellini, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. Just a sample, and not enough. Then I decided that Dawn to Decadence might give me a big picture view. I am not sure yet if it will or not. It is interesting, though. I decided to read Pope John Paul II's Fides et Ratio as well, and finished that yesterday. I had read excerpts of it previously, but never the whole thing, so I'm glad this weird recent obsession of mine with secularist philosophy led me to follow through with reading this excellent document.

Besides doing the interlinear Bible study I described above, and furthering my understanding of vulgate Latin and koine Greek, I hope to:

• Read several more of these Encyclicals.(They are arranged in chronological order on this site, which is very nice)
  
• Read several more of these Great Books of the Western World.

This would have seemed way way too ambitious to me last year, but for some reason, I have recently been able to confront books that would have daunted me before. It is very strange. I just read several old books on studying and learning, from the bibliography of Francis Crotty's Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home, and so perhaps I have absorbed some of the methods proposed in the books.

So those are my three learning goals for 2008. I am keeping them quite vague because -- well -- just because. I do not know how long this enthusiasm will last.