There are people who don’t give merdam about Julius Caesar, Catullus or Cicero.
Not me, but I understand and respect it.
Still, these people want to learn Latin and they ask me about it:
I want to learn Latin to read the Bible, is your course good for that?
Sometimes their interest is more specific, even extravagant, like reading Renaissance manuscripts of so and so. (This person should combine it with learning paleography).
Imagine someone from India in love with Spanish culture. He still aspirates the H for “hola”, but wants to learn the language so he can watch the movies of his idol, Almodóvar, in the original version without subtitles.
Well.
As far as I know there are no Spanish courses for Almodóvar. What our Indian friend would have to do is to learn Spanish starting with “hola”, “buenos días” and “me gusta el chocolate con churros”. And then, once he has the basics, he can consider the rest.
When all the covid thing hit the fan, I got in contact with a friar interested in my Latin contents, because his classes had been disrupted and he needed to continue with his education.
I am not religious, but I understand the importance of Latin (and Greek) to someone who is.
For my own information, I asked him how the teaching of these languages is approached when the purpose is religious.
And naturally, he told me, his learning goes through classical grammar and work on the texts of Julius Caesar, Xenophon, Aesop and all these fine people.
Even if the subject matter of the works may be very different from that of the Church Fathers, the same basis is common and fundamental for reading Virgil and Homer, Caesar and Xenophon, Aesop and Phaedrus, Tertullian, Ambrose of Milan, Gregory the Great, John Chrysostom…
To build the domus aurea and a church you also need foundations.
To work with Propertius or the Vulgate you will need, essentially, the same Latin.
Vale!
Paco
P. S. The grammar is practically the same. Throughout the course we work mainly with classical texts, but you will be able to apply your knowledge to religious texts.
