John Calvin is usually credited with this, but that attribution is looking increasingly suspicious to me, having spent quite a bit of time in Past Masters' Calvin: Works and Correspondence database ("of heretics" and "of heresy"), Google, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, the Calvini Opera Database, and elsewhere, searching on not just the English above, but also, where appropriate, on haereticorum, herétiques, castellum, propugnaculum, and forteresse (without having looked closely yet at praesidium, ambiguitas and ambiguïté, plus any further declensions, variants in the orthography of 16th century French, and/or synonyms), etc.
Take haereticorum as it appears in the online version of the Calvini Opera Database mounted by Yale. Searching that for haereticorum, plus (to allow for hyphenation) reticorum, ticorum, and corum, I got a total of 70 hits on the former, but saw nothing like "fortress of heretics." Assuming that I didn't miss something, the closest I got was (I think) this, from the first chapter of the Commentary on John, at "and the Word was with God" (CO 47 =CR 75, col. 3):
And yet the ancient writers of the Church were excusable, when, finding that they could not in any other way maintain sound and pure doctrine in opposition to the perplexed and ambiguous phraseology of the heretics [(adversus flexiloquas haereticorum ambages)], they were compelled to invent some words, which after all had no other meaning than what is taught in the Scriptures.
According to the Oxford Latin dictionary, ambages is closely related, via ambigo (AMBI + AGO) and then ambiguus, to ambiguitas.
As for the 190 relevant hits on heretiques (heretiques, retiques, and tiques, but not yet any (if any) alternative 16-century spellings (and herétiques with the acute accent returned nothing)), I saw, merely skimming the complete Context (KWIC) Report, again nothing like "fortress of heretics".
Potential equivalents in English (a list in progress): refuge; heresies (rather than heretics); etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment