Deep Calls to Deep

The title of this review, of a period of time after WWII when religious conversions were running high, is "Shallow Calls to Shallow." It's a reference to an old Latin phrase, which literally translated is as it appears in the title of this post.

But as often is true, you have to go to the original to grasp what is really being said. It isn't "deep," not in the sense that we use the word now if we should say that a man or a woman is "deep."

The original Latin is this: Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.

In the Proverbs, it refers to the depths of the oceans, unimaginable and impenetrable. In later Latin use, it refers as you would expect to Hell. The word "invocation" has come to us with powerful, magical connotations.

By contrast, maybe the shallow isn't so bad. It's weak, but weakness means that it lacks power. Power is not an unalloyed good.

5 comments:

douglas said...

Weakness can also make one vulnerable to power- power both within and outside of one's control. So I'm not sure power isn't still at play in some cases...

E Hines said...

Power not being an unalloyed good doesn't make it an unalloyed bad.

Power is just a tool, and like any tool, it's what it's used for that is good or bad.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

It is true that I omitted to note that weakness is not all good, or that power is not all bad. This was done much in the same way that one might give a sermon on how wealth cannot satisfy every human need, even the greatest needs, without dwelling much on the fact that wealth certainly can satisfy a great many human needs. The audience can be assumed to have that part down.

Janet A. Roesler said...

The origin of the Latin phrase is in Psalm 42: “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.”

Grim said...

Yes, that's right. In my mind it was Proverbs, but one should never trust one's memory about a citation. Especially since it is now so easy to look things up, as it didn't used to be.