Thomas Cole, The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1834
Lost in Translation #101
Last week we examined the opening words of the Gloria in excelsis, “Glory to God in the highest.” Today we examine the second verse, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. It is traditionally translated as "and on earth, peace to men of good will," a vastly superior rendering of the ICEL translation in use from 1972 to 2010: "and peace to His people on earth."
Men of Good Will?
Consulting the original biblical text helps us gain a better understanding of who these men of good will are. Εὐδοκία or eudokia, which the Vulgate renders bona voluntas or “good will,” literally means “favorable thinking” or “being well-pleased.” When, for example, God the Father says of Jesus Christ, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” (Matt 3, 17) He uses the verb eudokeō. The message in Luke 2, 14, then, is that on earth there will be peace for the men with whom God is well pleased, the men of whom He thinks favorably. There is also a nice word play in the Greek that cannot be translated. The verse begins with “Glory (doxa) to God in the highest” and ends with “men of good will (eudokias), with doxa and eudokia being etymologically connected.
Perhaps because they were not familiar with the original Greek, several Latin commentators interpret “good will” as a reference to the men’s character rather than God’s favoritism towards them. St. Bede, reading the verse in its immediate Nativity context, concludes that men of good will are those who receive the newborn Jesus as the Christ. Thinking more generally, St. Augustine writes that men of good will possess a divine justice by which the devil has been conquered. Having a good will involves at least two things: “to will well, and to be able to do what one wills,” and “to be purged from vices”. [1] Augustine also combines this verse with Matthew 12, 50:
“Whoever has done the will of God (voluntas Dei), He is my brother and mother and sister.” And therefore, at least among those who do the will of God, the will of God is done: not because they cause God to will but because they do what He wants, that is, according to His will. [2]
In a sense, the misunderstanding does not matter. As the Venerable Bede notes, “there is no peace to the ungodly,” (Isa. 57, 20) but “much peace to them that love the name of God.” (Ps. 118, 165). God is well pleased with those who love Him, and insofar as they love Him, their wills are good. And to these men with whom God is well pleased He gives peace, even though, paradoxically, their ability to love Him, which makes God well pleased, is itself a gift of God. Just as God gives a peace that the world cannot give, (John 14, 27) He infuses us with a love that our wills cannot produce.
In 2018, the meaning of this verse came into dispute when the Italian bishops changed their older translation of the Greater Doxology from “pace in terra agli uomini di buona volontà – peace on earth to men of good will” to “pace in terra agli uomini, amati dal Signore – peace on earth to men, loved by the Lord.”
As our brief survey of the Greek suggests, the new translation is in some ways an improvement, since “loved by the Lord” captures the sense of the Lord being well pleased. But the translation is nevertheless misleading, for it gives the impression that all men are loved by the Lord and that all men are therefore to be given peace. It is true that the Lord loves all men, but it is not true that the Lord gives peace to all men: just ask the souls writhing in Hell. “There is no peace for the ungodly,” Isaiah reminds us. The sounder interpretation of the verse, then, is that peace will only go to some men, the men with whom God is well pleased. Writing for this journal, Gregory DiPippo concludes:
To speak of “men of good will” implies that there are men who are not of good will, one of the most basic facts about human existence, and one which the Church has for over half a century wasted enormous time and effort on denying. The new reading permits the insertion of a comma, turning the phrase “loved by the Lord” into a non-restrictive adjectival phrase, (“men, who are loved by the Lord”), in a way that cannot be done by translating the actual text.
Men of Good Will?
The second controversy surrounding this verse is the use of so-called gender inclusive language. The English translation of the 1965 Roman Missals translates hominibus bonae voluntatis as “men of good will” while the 1972 ICEL translation of the 1970 Missal veers off the reservation with "and peace to His people on earth." The 2011 English translation tries to restore order with a more literal “people of good will,” but it retains the so-called inclusive language.
Both the Greek anthropoi and the Latin homines designate human persons, male and female. Historically, the English equivalent for anthropos and homo is “man,” as in “mankind.” But since “man” can also refer to a male human being, twentieth-century feminists contended that the use of “man” for homo or anthropos is sexist, a denial of a woman’s full humanity.
Rev. Paul Mankowski, S.J.
Fr. Paul Mankowski, God rest his soul, wrote powerfully against any concession to the ideological manipulation of language, persuasively arguing that the distinction between gender-inclusive and gender-exclusive words makes no sense linguistically; he was joined in this opinion by such doyens of the English tongue as E. B. White, editor of Strunk and White’s famous Elements of Style. [3]
I agree with Fr. Mankowski, and his insights are especially prescient in an age where pronouns are now being divorced from reality and put in the service of an often capricious self-identification. I also maintain that “outdated” language in liturgy is good insofar as it contributes to its sacrality, such as the use of “deign” and “vouchsafe” or “Thou.”
On the other hand, if the point of translating is to make concepts intelligible in one’s own language, and if the majority of people in that language no longer think that this word means A but B, then liturgical translators are faced with a genuine dilemma. It is one thing to compromise theological meaning, as I believe the use of “brothers and sisters” for fratres does (more on this in a later essay); it is also problematic to violate the rules of grammar or of eloquent usage, as with the substitution of the numerically inaccurate “their” or the clunky “his/her” for the more proper pronoun “his.” But when neither orthodoxy nor grammar nor sonority is at stake but the basic meaning is, I wonder what the right path is.
That said, in the case of hominibus bonae voluntatis, I still tend to favor “men of good will” over “people of good will” because “people” can signify a single populace or group, but “men” keeps the focus on the chosen individuals with whom God is well-pleased. “Persons of good will” sounds too forced and abstract, and “men and women of good will” is, despite recent ideological disputes, still semantically redundant. Perhaps the best course of action would have been for our modern translators to have left well enough alone. Of course, ironically, in order to see the goodness of the older translation, one must approach it with a good will of one’s own, one in line with the Catholic wisdom tradition and a spirit of benevolent interpretation rather than with an ideologically-driven hermeneutics of suspicion.
Notes
[1] On the Trinity 13.13.17.
[2] On the Sermon on the Mount, II.6.21.
[3] See “Voices of Wrath: When Words Become Weapons,” in Jesuit at Large: Essays and Reviews by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., ed. George Weigel (Ignatius Press, 2021), 42-49. See also E. B. White, who rejected the idea of gender-neutral writing in the fourth and final edition of Elements of Style. “The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language,” he wrote in 1979. “He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances.” After White’s death, however, the following line was added. “Currently, however, many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive.” The Wall Street Journal characterizes the posthumous insertion as “an assassin slipping a stiletto into someone's back." (David Gelernter, “Back to Basics, Please,” October 14, 2005, W.13)
