The Saxon Creed

Being English has always been a kind of hybrid identity. Even the name of our ancestral people-group is a double-barrelled chimera: the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons were a hybrid of Germanic tribes who hybridised with Celtic tribes: Celtic tribes who had already hybridised with Rome. The English then form Britain, which is a hybrid of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Britain then becomes the British Empire: a world-monster with a British head and Afro-Asian limbs.

The hybrid finds it hard to answer the question: What am I? It finds the question hard because, being a mixture of identities, there are multiple competing, yet correct, answers. One way to hone in on a single answer is to purge some of the conflicting identities to leave a single identity — in other words, to purify the mixture. The answer becomes, This part of me, but not that part of me. However tempting this might seem, the ignored identities will always be lurking around, jabbing and jeering at the ‘answer’.

As the English are a hybrid people, English is a hybrid language. English is an arranged marriage between Saxon and Latin — between common words and uncommon words, low words and high words, short words and long words, between primal, coarse, concrete, visual words, and refined, precise, abstract, intellectual words.1 It’s the difference between touch and sensation, help and assistance, old and ancient. It allows me to either call someone an ugly cow, or remark that they are of a bovine countenance.

Some time in the long-ago, England was ejected from its Anglo-Saxon Paradise into the fallen Anglo-Norman foothills and has dwelt there to this day. It’s natural for Englishmen — feeling the keen injustice of being ruled by kings with prissy names like William and Charles, rather than regal names like Cynewulf and Alfred — to see the Norman, the Latin, part of their identity as something foreign and alien. If only we could use these words instead of those words; if only we could be Saxon and not Latin.

If you didn’t know, people have already tried this, and it’s called Anglish. Anglish is the purity solution of hybrid identity applied to the English language. It’s the attempt to purify English of its Latin part, leaving only the sevenfold silver of its Saxon heart to write with.

Writing in Saxon is fun. You realise how many realities are hidden behind big, technical, polysyllabic Latin terms — how many things you find it hard to describe without using their pre-assigned labels. You realise how many words you don’t understand: you use the word, another person hears the word, they recognise the word, the conversation carries on. But neither person really grasps the reality underneath the word. Recognition replaces understanding.

I find this happens to me with Church-vocabulary. Common Church parlance involves reams of Greek and Latin technical terms, and often I wonder: do I really understand the things I’m talking about, or am I just a skilled user of Church-words? Am I just a large language model trained on Scripture and theology books? Do I just click GENERATE TEXT when I’m asked question? Or do I really understand the realities underneath the words?

What if I could translate those Latin words — those words that sit on top of raw reality like a rock sits on top of muddy worms and woodlice — into Saxon words? Could I then get closer to the realities? I thought I might try it with something simple, like the Creed. As a disclaimer, I haven’t re-translated the text from the Greek, but instead I’ve taken the English translation I know by heart and replaced the Latin with Saxon equivalents. At times, I’ve gone back to the Greek in order to find the appropriate Saxon word.

Here it is,

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all days, Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who for us men, and to set us free, came down from heaven, and was made flesh of the Holy Ghost and the Unwedded Mary, and became man, and was nailed to the tree for us under Pontius Pilate, and bore, and was buried, and arose again on the third day as is written, and went up into the heavens, and sits at the right hand of the Father, who will come again with burning brightness to cleanse the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who comes forth from the Father, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and raised up above, who spoke through the seers.

In one holy Church: which is of the whole world and from those who were sent forth.

I acknowledge one washing for the forgiveness of sins.

I look to the arising of the dead and the life of the day to come. Amen.

Some explanation.

When you begin to dig below technical words to find the realities hidden beneath, you realise why it was covered up in the first place. Big, abstract words describe big, abstract concepts. Saxon words — with their humble simplicity and coarse imprecision — are sometimes poorly equipped for the refined realm of exactitude Latin words inhabit.

Some words can be switched out easily enough: visible and seen, invisible and unseen, incarnate and made flesh, ascended and went up. Then there are words you can switch, but you feel slightly uneasy switching: Spirit and Ghost, proceeds and comes forth. The uneasiness of switching-out Spirit with Ghost comes from their not having the same semantic circle in modern times as in older times. Spirit evokes gods, angels and demons; Ghost evokes poltergeists and paranormal activity. But really, that’s a modern phenomenon; in Early Modern English Ghost was perfectly acceptable. Switching proceeds with comes forth is another source of uneasiness. Procession feels like a technical term to describe the relationship between the Father and the Holy Spirit; comes forth feels like it could apply to all sorts of things. But coming-forth (or going-forth, coming-out-of) is what is meant by the Greek word ἐκπορευόμενον, which becomes proceed. So the uneasiness is based purely on familiarity with technicality.

Then there are the substitutions which require more thought. The first is of one being instead of consubstantial or of one essence. The knee-jerk reaction in translating Greek is to find a Latin equivalent in English, hence consubstantial for ὁμοούσιον (and basically all other technical words in the Creed). A substance or essence is a being — an existing reality — the thing truly existing ‘under’ the perceptual phenomena. A horse is not a chair, so horse and chair are different beings, different essences. The horse called Lucky Star is different from the horse called Seabiscuit, but they’re both still horses: they’re both the same kind of being2. The thrust of consubstantial is the identity of being between the Father and the Son — they’re both God. He’s not a different being, and certainly not a different created being. Hence, of one being.

The second is for our salvation. Salvation is another one of those ossified Church-words. Salvation is to be saved; it’s deliverance, rescue. It’s being saved-from, delivered-from, rescued-from something. From what? From the tyranny of sin and death and evil spirits. Salvation doesn’t have a nice Saxon equivalent ready-to-hand — not one I’m aware of. Since we can’t work horizontally (exchange word X for word Y, like visible for seen), we have to work vertically (from reality to word). Sin, death and demons hold us in captivity; Christ frees us from this captivity:— He led captivity captive. So, for our salvation becomes to set us free.

Then there is Virgin. Another word I couldn’t find a simple Saxon switcheroo for. My train of thought was that, in ancient times, a virgin was someone unmarried, and someone married was not a virgin (consummation not being a distinct, optional event). A common epithet for the Mother of God is the Unwedded Bride. I thought it best not to reinvent the wheel and to go with something established, justified, and easily understandable.

Crucified is tricky; mainly because cross is also Latin, and you need the latter word to explain the former. The implement that Christ was nailed to is a cross, but if you look in Scripture and the Church’s hymnography, the cross is also called the tree:— The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew, hanging him on a tree. That word for tree — ξύλον — also means wood, or a piece of wood, a log. So we have, equivalently, nailed to the tree or nailed to the wood.3

Suffered with bore. In modern times, suffer is used in the sense of undergoing pain or hardship — physical, emotional, or existential. But this is a special sense of the word. The original sense, the sense being used in the creed, is simply to undergo something, or to have something happen to you. It’s the opposite of action: it’s passion. It’s being acted upon, rather than acting. It’s the passive voice, not the active voice. It’s the man was eaten by the zombie, not the zombie ate the man. Suffered doesn’t just refer to the pain Christ felt during the Passion, it refers to the Passion itself4. Bore was chosen over underwent to emphasise that, although the Passion is an undergoing, it is a voluntary undergoing — it is enduring-for-the-sake-of. For Christ is the one who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness.

Glory is a fantastically baffling word — outranked only by grace in the Top 10 Words English Speakers Use But Can’t Explain5. It’s sprinkled liberally in prayers and services according to ancient recipes, like a spiritual sort of verbal seasoning. It’s one of those words, making up the bulk of any language, that is expected to be understood from repeated use in context. I admit that I spent more time on glory than on all the other words in the Creed combined. This is firstly because of the bizarre etymology and polysemy of the word glory and its Greek equivalent, δόξα. Secondly, it’s because words are not solely semantic, but also have an evocative function. There are all sorts of word-formulations which have the same broad meaning, but evoke very different images, feelings, and responses. Words shouldn’t just point to a reality, they should — as far as their power allows — make that reality present. It’s this second aspect that I’ll focus on.

One sense is The Glory of God. This is God’s radiant manifestation and glowing magnificence — the Light of Tabor, the burning thorn bush, the columns of smoke and fire, the bright cloud that overshadows mountains, rivers, tabernacles, temples, and fills the fiery throne room of God, where the Seraphim sing day and night but dare not look. It’s difficult to find a one-word Saxon equivalent for this concept. Shining, glow, brightness — these are, as far as I’m aware, what we have to work with. The unfortunate thing is that glory is a lovely deep guttural word that conveys the thumos of God’s blazing radiance in its sound much better than shining — which can ring a bit thin. This is one of those cases where a word is Latin in origin but Saxon in character. No one said, however, that we have to limit ourselves to one word. Why not one word and an adjective? The point is to evoke something more awe-full than the shining of a star, something that would make a man fall on his face and cry out that he’s annihilated. Think dread, awful, burning. I must have thought through every possible combination of these six words, and I settled finally on burning brightness6.

I settled on this for two reasons: (1) alliteration is at the heart of Saxon style; (2) because we have judge to substitute in the same sentence. God will come with glory to judge the living and the dead. But what does that mean? Judgement — as a pattern greater than its legal manifestation — is making the crooked thing straight, the imbalanced thing balanced, dividing between good and evil, separating wheat and chaff, silver and slag. This is evident in the polysemy of judge’s synonym try — one can both try someone for theft and try metal ore to purify it. In essence, the same thing is happening in both cases: a division, a separation, and a restoration to right order7.

When God judges, He removes impurities through the purging fire of His presence. Sometimes that’s the passions lurking in our hearts; sometimes that’s the cities lurking in the valleys (the ones ruled by demon-kings). It makes sense, then, that God would come with the burning brightness of his glory: to shine on the things hidden in darkness:— For nothing is hid, that shall not be made manifest; nor secret, that shall not be known and come to light; and to burn away all that cannot abide with His holiness:— But if any man buildeth on the foundation gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, stubble; each man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and each man’s work, of what sort it is, the fire shall prove it.

Now judge, try, and prove are all trapped behind the Latin curtain — tantalizingly out of reach. The Saxon words for judgement just aren’t in use any more. Almost all the legal vocabulary in Old English was replaced by Old French words that made their way into Middle English — judge, justice, jury, trial, try, prove, evidence, verdict, sentence, crime, court. The only survivors I’m aware of is deem and doom. Deem, however, has certain accepted patterns of usage (e.g., he has been deemed worthy), while doom usually has a negative connotation (e.g., he is doomed to roam the earth) — dooming someone to eternal life is just something you can’t say in English.

Yet again we have to think vertically rather than horizontally. We mentioned earlier that judgement and purification are related. In purification, a thing is separated from anything that is not it. In the metal analogy, silver is the thing we want, the slag is the thing we want to get rid of — the stuff that’s not the silver. In the language analogy, we want to get rid of the Latin words and keep the Saxon words. This phenomenon is structurally the same as that of cleaning and cleansing. When we clean something, we wash or scrub or brush away anything that is not the thing — dirt, dust and grime — to leave the thing itself unmixed with anything else and purified. A judgement is a cleansing. We might say, then, with symbolic accuracy but poetic license, that God will come with burning brightness to cleanse the living and the dead.

Back to glory and its second sense: Glory to God, to glorify, to ascribe glory. This sense is one of honouring, respecting, praising, and celebrating. The two senses of glory — blazing splendour and joyful praise — are intimately related, even if they might not seem so at first. When we praise, celebrate, or honour something, we make-glorious the thing being praised. We honour the achievement of the athlete with a shining medal; we celebrate a birthday with bright candles and colourful decorations; we praise God by hanging candlelit chandeliers of glowing gold and making them dance. There is also the sense of raising up, of lifting up, of exalting the thing being praised. One way of doing this is by physically raising the thing praised (the athlete is lifted up on a podium) or by lowering ourselves in its presence (God is bowed and prostrated to). All of these senses come together into one symbolic unity in the Middle English word stellifien — to glorify, to deify, to make into a star — a star is a shining thing raised up above us8.

One substitution that has some nice explanatory weight is prophets with seers. Both prophets and seers in some sense tell the future — they prophesy. This is the etymology of the Greek προφήτης, a before-sayer, one who fore-speaks or foretells. A prophet is also the one who speaks the words of a god or interprets their will. The two meanings can be seen to hinge on each other: the will of a god will be told to a people by a prophet (e.g., Jonah tells the Ninevites, Repent and ye will be saved), the god’s will then comes to pass (they repent and are saved), and the words of the prophet are seen to have fore-said what will happen.

Prophets, however, are not just the ones-who-foretell, but also the ones-who-see:— And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. The prophet of the God of Israel is the one whose mind is cleansed of impurity and, hence, can see spiritual realities as they are. The prophetic literature is apocalyptic literature — a revealing, an uncovering, a disclosing of things hidden from sight (in Greek, an ἀποκάλυψις). In Old English we have wītga for prophet or seer — a wiseman. Wītga is related to wīs — wise — which in turn derives from a Proto-indo-european root meaning ‘to see’. Seer can be seen as a Saxon way of referring to God’s prophets through their noetic and visionary role over their oracular role9.

Then we have this rolling succession of thumping adjectives: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church10. Those two words, catholic and apostolic, I think are the most technical and information-rich words in the Creed. I mean this in terms of Latin exactitude — the concepts being conveyed simply can’t be conveyed in one or even two Saxon words. Where one can, one should strive for parsimony, but where one can’t, one is of course allowed a little leeway. The most succinct construction I could come up with to explain catholic was of the whole world (in the sense of universal), and the same for apostolic was of those who were sent forth (which is the meaning of ἀπόστολος, one-sent-forth). This is also the only part of the Creed where I’ve changed the sentence structure dramatically, owing to the phrases used.

We’re nearing the end with baptism. Baptism means to submerge or immerse in water. The two Saxon semi-equivalents are sinking and dunking. One sinking for the forgiveness of sins — I feel this substitution sets up an extra barrier between us and the reality, since we’re not used to using the word in this way. One dunk for the forgiveness of sins — the reader can draw their own conclusions. One going down — this isn’t very specific. Again, it looks like the scriptural approach might work best.

In Scripture, baptism is called a burial:— Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death — having been buried with him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of God. It is also called a washing:— And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptised, and wash away thy sins, calling on his name — according to his mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit. In the Creed, the emphasis is more on baptism as the vehicle for forgiveness of sins, rather than as participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. So, while ‘one burial for the forgiveness of sins’ would be perfectly acceptable, in the end I went with ‘one washing’.

We’re left with only one word to explain: age. Luckily, it doesn’t require much explanation. Throughout Scripture, an era, epoch, age, or time is referred to as a day. We have the Day of Judgement, also known as the Day of the Lord; the era of Noah is referred to as the days of Noah; and the Prophets refer to coming ages with the introductory phrase:— in that day. The day is true atom of time. The week is the God-given molecule. The year is a Cherubim, and the seasons are its four faces. All subdivisions thereof are an attempt by Man to count and conquer the seas of change. The day, bounded by the sunrise and the sunset, is the archetypal natural duration. It makes, then, the perfect symbol for any period of finite extent. The age to come, of course, is not a day that fades into night, but a day unending11. Replacing age with day not only preserves the sense of an era, but adds the sense of an epoch totally without darkness: an age of neversetting sun.

And now for the conclusion, although I’m not sure what to conclude. Does a tour of a place have a conclusion? Or does the guide just say goodbye and leave you to your own devices, to look around again with a different pair of eyes? I’ve done my best to give you a guided tour of some ossified Latin church-words, to set them in a new light with Saxon restatements, and to pack in as many uncited Scriptural quotations as common decency allows. If you like, you can go back the way you came and have a good look around.

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all days, Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who for us men, and to set us free, came down from heaven, and was made flesh of the Holy Ghost and the Unwedded Mary, and became man, and was nailed to the tree for us under Pontius Pilate, and bore, and was buried, and arose again on the third day as is written, and went up into the heavens, and sits at the right hand of the Father, who will come again with burning brightness to cleanse the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who comes forth from the Father, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and raised up above, who spoke through the seers.

In one holy Church: which is of the whole world and from those who were sent forth.

I acknowledge one washing for the forgiveness of sins.

I look to the arising of the dead and the life of the day to come. Amen.