At half-time in Sunday Mass, the sermon is over. The congregation struggles to its feet and begins reciting the formulas of the Nicene Creed. “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible …”
It’s quite a change of pace. The sermon relies on homely stories and advice adapted to our circumstances, different each week. The creed is an austere list of propositions we believe, virtually unchanged in 17 centuries. No stories, no prayers, no instructions on how to live, no irrelevant details. It is a kind of document more like statements of principles such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights than any part of the Bible.
Perhaps it’s excusable that, while we should concentrate on its meaning, we tend to drift off. Abstraction isn’t easy.
But do we understand all of what the Creed says? It was written in philosophically honed Greek, while most of the languages we speak are less than half the age of the Creed itself and come with a very different array of basic assumptions. And what about much more distant languages, such as Warlpiri? Is it really possible to translate the Creed into them, so that it can be meaningful to a truly universal audience?
Anna Wierzbicka’s recent book The Nicene Creed in Minimal English has an answer. Over a long career as professor of linguistics at Australian National University, she has developed an “atomic” theory of world languages. All the vocabulary of all languages, she believes, is expressible in about 60 atoms of meaning, or universal human concepts (like “I”, “people”, “think”, “good”, “if”, “live”, “very”). Translating any text into the English version of that (“minimal English”) analyses its meaning completely and allows it to be translated exactly into any other language. Wierzbicka’s earlier book What Did Jesus Mean? applied this process to the Sermon on the Mount and parables, and now she translates the Creed.
It is a very exacting discipline to translate rich natural language into such a tiny number of concepts. How it works can be seen in the analysis of one of the Creed’s most revolutionary phrases, “For us men [anthropous: humans, people] and for our salvation …” The explanation begins:
God loves all people.
All people can live with God; God wants this.
When people live with God, it is very, very good for them,
nothing else is like this …
The language is extremely simple (hence intertranslatable) but does capture the essential meaning. That helps make clear how the phrase breaks with what was accepted in the ancient world. “All people” equally are in the frame for God’s wishes, and he wishes good for us. The gods of Olympus were not interested in all people, nor in doing good for all the ones they were interested in. The equality of persons is implicit in both the Old and New Testaments, but, as Wierzbicka writes in her commentary, “the phrase ‘us people’, which we see in the Nicene Creed, does not seem to appear anywhere in the Bible and can be seen as the fruit of Christian reflection over the first three Christian centuries.”
The Nicene Creed is a powerful symbol of Christian unity – almost 99 per cent of Christians adhere to the Creed, even Protestants proud of rejecting tradition beyond “scripture alone”. Its universal message can now be communicated universally, thanks to The Nicene Creed in Minimal English.
