Context: Augustine issues a command to the family of the redeemed.
Meminerit sane in ipsis inimicis latere cives futuros, ne infructuosum vel apud ipsos putet, quod, donec perveniat ad confessos, portat infensos. . . .
I want to make the sentence mean something like this:
Let it [the family of the redeemed] remember that among the enemies [the pagan enemies of the city of God] themselves lie hidden future citizens [ of the city of God] lest it [ the family of the redeemed ]think it pointless that it carries them along in their bitter hostility, until they become confessing [Christians].
But I can’t rationalize the grammar, because the verb perveniat is singular. All the other third-person verbs (meminerit, putet, portat) are singular, and the assumed antecedent of each one is “the redeemed family of the saints”.
I must be missing something, for this book has been read since the fifth century, and there is no way I can be right about this.
As I see it, perveniat has the same subject as the other verbs, the familia et civitas:
“lest it think it pointless that,
until it reaches acknowledgers,
it is bearing with haters.”
Slightly less literally, maybe: “…lest it think it pointless (even for them) that, until it finds them to be acknowledgers, it is bearing with them as haters.”
But I’m not too happy about translating perveniat ad by “finds them to be”. It is too static, I feel, and it obscures the fact the familia et civitas is moving.
Ah yes, “comes upon” looks good. And preserving the -os/-os parallelism with -ing/-ing is nice too. There is also p…iat/p…at but that may be harder to duplicate in the translation.
The imagery of the city of Christ “moving” towards the confessos seemed important to me and it echoed the use by Augustine of peregrinatur (at the very beginning of the work) and peregrina to describe it.
I know these words can have a more static meaning (“sojourn abroad”, “foreigner”) but passages like this one reinforces my feeling there often is movement implied (“wander/roam”, “wanderer”).
I checked a couple of translations to see what was made of this in book I,1 and here. Some go for the static meanings (“sojourn”/“foreigner”) and others go for the “wandering” idea. I’ve also found a couple of articles on how Augustine used the words peregrinor/peregrinatio/peregrina, how he may have helped shaping their meaning towards “pilgrim”/“pilgrimage”, etc. I have plenty to read now. Thanks for posting about this!
I’ve only read the beginning (and cursorily at that) but I think this article does a pretty good job at succintly describing the situation in the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate (starting at the bottom of p.39).
To try and summarise it, there are two words used in the Septuagint: προσήλυτος in juridic contexts (Pentateuch), πάροικος in (mostly) non-juridic contexts. In these OT cases, the Vetus Latina renders προσήλυτος as proselytus, while the Vulgate always translates it as peregrinus. On the other hand, πάροικος is variously translated in the VL (∅, incola, inquilinus, peregrinus) and consistently as pereginus in the Vulgate. Which means Jerome conflated the two Greek words into peregrinus, while the Vetus Latina used by Augustine showed more variation.
But that’s just for the OT, and the author of the article shows that things can be different in the NT, using Ephesians 2:19 as an example.
I haven’t gone much further than that but it is an interesting rabbit hole so I’ll keep reading. Although like every rabbit hole, the more you read, the more things to read you add.
