Thomas_More
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When I was a teenager, I went through teenage stages of interest. One of these was a wish to become a monk.
I wanted to escape the modern world and I thought if I could be a monk, I could avoid what every one else did: get a job, etc. Plus, I loved history and thought being a monk would help me into a medieval world.
What type of monk I wanted to be depended on my teenage phases. I had a Buddhist period, and studied Tibetan Buddhism. I learned a lot about that. I also had a Catholic period, and learned a lot about that.
And during these periods, I practised the religions. I went to the Catholic church and told the priest about my wish to be a monk. In my Buddhist phase, I went to meet a lama who is a relative of the Dalai Lama and spoke to him.
Finally I had my last teenage phase, which was the Eastern Church. This phase went further than the others and lasted three years, beginning in my last year at school.I left home at nineteen and began to prepare to become a Greek monk. I was baptised and sent to Greece to stay at several monasteries. A translator met me there and I had some very bizarre experiences.
I learned a lot, from the inside, about Byzantine theology. I stayed in the mountains near Corinth.
When I was twenty I repudiated the Church and returned home to my parents. My teenage years were over. But I learned much which has helped me understand monasticism, theology and history.
In the Greek Church, even a monastic deacon is more influential than a married priest.
I stayed in several monasteries and one deacon visited them all and was in fact feared by the monks. They awaited him by looking nervously out the windows, saying “The deacon’s coming!” like schoolboys afraid of the headmaster. He was very tall and stern.
Even if the Roman Church were to allow priests to marry, it would only be secular priests at parish level. Not monastic priests. I guess it would work out the same as the Greek Church – which is how the Roman Church was anyway until the 11th century.
In Athens I lodged with a married couple. A young monk visited. He just walked in. The couple rose and stood with heads bowed. Although it was their home, they remained standing until the monk bade them sit. He wasn’t even a priest.
It is for Greek priests, but only if they accept they’ll never be bishops.
Married priests in the Greek Church have to marry before ordination.
You realise the difference in prestige because a monastic, unmarried priest can become a bishop, archbishop, and archimandrite (an abbot of several monasteries with jurisdiction over a large area). But married priests stay just priests and have no administrative power.Eromenos and Erastes.
The lewd, blasphemous and sexy Gamblers’ Mass. (Eleventh century).
I was taught (I opted voluntarily on Friday afternoons in school, just me and one other boy) Latin and taught to speak it in the classical way (all consonants hard). Church Latin is medieval, not classical, Latin, with Italianised consonants. Dog Latin describes the fun and invented Latin of the common people of the Middle Ages, who had a great sense of humour. Poor parish priests also spoke Dog Latin.
I heard from a student doing university Latin years later that now it is taught without the names of the cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, etc. They just say first case, second case, and so on. This is ridiculous, because the case names indicate what the cases are, and students today won’t have that grammatical resource.
The same with left and right. Latin sinistra and dextra. We say sinister for evil things, and gauche (Fr. left) for clumsy; and dextrous and adroit, both orig. right, which we also use as a synonym for correct.
For centuries left-handed children were beaten.
In theology the saved sit on Christ’s right and the damned on His left before being cast down.
And since “homo” means man, and not men and women, homosexual is a perfectly good word for males who desire other males, whereas Sapphist is good for women who desire women. (The inhabitants of Lesbos today have lost their geographical pronoun and also their adjective – which the Pride folk, normally very defensive of pronouns, have no sympathy with at all. Of course, there will also be lesbian Lesbians, but most Lesbians are not lesbians). 😀
Ain’t language a hoot?
But now we cannot use the word gay in its original sense without qualification.
For instance, when quoting the troubadours calling their music the gay science, one has to qualify whilst others stupidly chuckle at you, and adults are turned into giggling children.And everyone would have access to the means of production, and could learn how to make what he or she considered useful and beautiful.
