I was asked a few years ago how an atheist like me could square his atheism with his fondness for snippets of church Latin. It does seem an odd affectation—I wasn’t raised Catholic, and a couple of years of Latin classes in a public high school in Oklahoma back in the Jurassic hardly qualifies as any Latin at all for those who truly know it. Amo, amas, amat, Gallia in tres partes divisa est, and the ablative absolute are just the beginning of a long quest, and I was forced off the trail early.
My response to being caught in this seeming contradiction—that I was an atheist “d’expression chrétienne”—was admittedly flippant, but it was also accurate. My atheism was assembled in the back rooms of the western culture I grew up in. The only tools I could find there, at least early on, were those left behind by the Catholic Church in its long retreat, the only materials its doctrinal remnants worked over in the centuries since with more or less success by the secular carpenters who preceded me. Small wonder, then, that Deo gratias, or sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saecolorum, still seem appropriate to express the awe I feel for that branch of the human experiment I’m descended from, even though I’m as aware as Nietzsche ever was that God is dead. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa….
