Сonveying Love: Amor, Caritas, Affectus and Dilectio in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Its Old English Version

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of the semantic and functional features of the words used by the Venerable Bede in Ecclesiastical history of the English people (as well as in his other historical and hagiographic works) to convey the emotional component of the relationship between its characters, namely the concept of love, and the specifics of its translation into Old English. We have identified and analyzed the Latin words used by the author of Ecclesiastical history to express the concept in question. We came to the conclusion that the main term conveying the concept of love in the most general sense was the word amor. It was used most often by the author of Ecclesiastical history and was a neutral word indicating the presence of a certain attitude / commitment / inclination of one person to another, or to an inanimate object. A positive or negative connotation was imparted to it by the object of love or the character love had. Caritas indicated charity as a Christian virtue, which consisted not in experiencing a special attachment to someone or something but in keeping the commandments. Bede used the word affectus to indicate a feeling of love that was experienced more strongly than was customary in a given situation or between certain categories of people. By dilectio, he apparently understood love for God, which was supposed to underlie relations between Christians, love as a Christian virtue. The translator, unlike the Venerable Bede, used only one word to convey the identified nuances of perception of love. He coped with this task by using linguistic and grammatical transformations. We have identified a certain similarity in their perception of the concept under consideration. At the same time, the translator, apparently, perceived love between secular people as existing not only at the level of feelings, but also at the level of actions. This is evidenced by his use of the combination of the Old English verb lufian and the noun lufu. The same feature, in his opinion, was also characteristic of the feeling described by Bede as affectus. He firmly linked caritas with love for Christ. In addition, the translator mentioned love where it was not used in the Latin text of Ecclesiastical history to mitigate Bede's criticism of the representatives of the Celtic Christianity, which was one of the tasks that he faced when creating the translation.