Fr Reggie Foster and his book

Joseph Shaw bids farewell to the King of Catholic Latin

Fr Reginald Foster, uncrowned King of Catholic Latin, died on Christmas Day 2020, at the age of 81. He was a Discalced Carmelite, and to say that he was an eccentric would be an understatement. There are traditionally-minded Latinists all over the world with fond memories of his classes, but I’ve found him difficult to take seriously since he told an interviewer, in 1994, that he liked to celebrate Mass in the nude.

In 2015 his teaching system was crystalised in the form of a massive tome, the Ossa Latinitatis Sola, with help from collaborators. Although I confess, I am still only about half-way through it, after a year, I think I can give readers a general impression of the distinctive Foster approach.

Foster frequently boasts that he doesn’t use grammatical tables: no amo, amas, amat or mensa, mensa, mensam. Again, he regards the usual names of cases and tenses as potentially misleading, so creates entirely new ones. The Accusative becomes ‘the object function’, and the Ablative ‘the by-with-from function’. Tenses become ‘Time 1’, ‘Time 2’ and so on, with variants to distinguish active and passive, and indicative and subjunctive. Conjugations of verbs are renamed ‘Blocks’, and Declensions of nouns are ‘Groups’.

Foster introduces each new point of grammar not with a neatly labelled table, but with a paragraph of dense, though folksy, prose, in which he simply tells you what the different endings are for the tense or group of nouns at issue are, noting how they differ those of similar words. He then illustrates their usage with a few examples, and moves on. There are no exercises. Foster insists that the best way to get an understanding of a point is through seeing it illustrated in Latin writing, and the book includes an enormous quantity of Latin text. However, this is not arranged by difficulty or by what kind of grammatical point it might illustrate, and there is no apparatus of vocabulary, translation, or other help to assist the student. Clearly a Latin teacher is needed to take advantage of this material.

Does the Foster system work? The idiosyncratic terminology must have contributed to a feeling of solidarity among the select gang taught by Reggie. I don’t suppose this was his explicit

Fr Reginald Foster: mixed feelings about the past intention, but the book contains little insider jokes, and the slang of a clique. The pronouns are called ‘the sixteen’ because there are sixteen of them, like the choir, and isn’t that just hilarious? The exceptions to some rule or other are called ‘the thirty-two’ (is this a joke too?). This makes for camaraderie on a summer course but doesn’t work so well in a book.

Foster’s new terminology has the potential to mislead just as the traditional one did, because no terminology is perfect. The ‘object function’, after all, has other uses besides denoting the direct object of a verb. Foster likes the massive Lewis and Short dictionary, and refers to the venerable Latin grammar book Gildersleeve and Lodge, but these will tell you (for example) that the pronoun ad takes the accusative, not the ‘object function’. This means that if you want to follow Reggie, you have to know both his terminology and the normal kind. Given this, I can’t help but think the new terminology is a bit self-indulgent.

There is also something deeply strange, if not actually autistic, about the idea that ‘Time 1’ and ‘Time 2’ is easier to understand and remember than ‘Present’ and ‘Imperfect’. By the time we get to ‘Time 4s’, the Pluperfect Subjunctive (I think—I may have lost track), I was just begging him to stop.

As I ploughed through the book I kept wondering if Foster, and perhaps the best of his devoted students, was blessed with a photographic memory. The lesson most clearly imprinted on my mind from the book is the huge value of those maligned tables. One little table contains such a vast amount of information, so simple to find and remember, and so easy to compare with other tables to see exactly how one noun or verb differs from another. To get this information from Foster, you have to wade through paragraphs of meandering verbiage, which are not cross-referenced. For those who find Foster’s approach easy to follow, I have nothing but respect: their powers of recall clearly exceed mine. But to claim that his approach is superior defies common sense. Some may be intimidated by tables, but doing without them does not open up Latin to the less gifted: it is just as likely to close it to them.

Terminological confusions aside, many intermediate Latinists like myself will benefit from reading through this book, simply because it is always helpful to read a new different explanation of a grammatical point. Sometimes Foster comes out with really helpful ways of putting things. And sometimes he’s not so great. I actually think the prize for this aspect of Latin pedagogy belongs to that staple of the old-fashioned schoolroom, Kennedy’s Latin Primer: for clear and succinct explanations, Kennedy is hard to beat, and he provides excellent examples. Foster’s exempla are not invariably well chosen: Martial’s epigrams, for example, appear to be as incomprehensible in Reggie’s English translation as they had been in Latin.

Something which may annoy Mass of Ages readers is that while Foster talks about reading the Latin of all eras, he hardly ever refers to the liturgy, quotes the post-Vatican II obscure ‘neo-Vulgate’ bible in preference to St Jerome’s, and ignores Medieval Latin. One linguistic development found in the ancient Vulgate, relating to participles, he rejects as ‘spaghetti Latin’; the expanded role of the subjunctive in Later Latin he regards as a symptom of ‘corruption’. This is not the broadmindedness one would expect from a custodian of the vast and rambling mansion which is Christian Latin.

Foster’s purism also affected the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, in which he was closely involved. This can be found on the Vatican website, and is certainly good for a laugh: ‘jeep’ is autocinētum locis iniquis aptum, a snack bar thermopólium potórium et gustatórium. It is reminiscent of the Académie Française trying to insist that the French for a newspaper ‘scoop’ is the headline-friendly une information en exclusivité. What Latin authors comfortable in their own skin, from Cicero to Albert the Great, did, when a new word was needed, was to use loan words and new coinages.

Devotion to the neo-Vulgate is also nurtured by J.F. Collins’ Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin, and Louise Riley-Smith’s A New Approach to Latin for the Mass. It seems strange, in teaching Christian Latin, to use a 1960s-era pastiche instead of the real thing, a text at the foundations of Catholic culture, which guided scholars and inspired poets for more sixteen centuries.

One of the puzzles of the Catholic world since the 1970s is the prickly attitude some Latinists have towards the ancient Latin liturgy and tradition. Perhaps they feel they have to work harder than others to prove their loyalty to the brave new world ushered in by the reform. In interviews Foster complained about the ‘polarisation’ of the question of Latin in the Church: he found it annoying that Latin was regarded as a part of a package with theological conservativism, and he struggled, in vain, to overturn the stereotype, with the help of profane language and a blue boilersuit.

I heard an intriguing anecdote about him from a former student. Something came up in a class which reminded him of the Dies Irae. To the astonishment of the students, Foster started singing it, in cracked voice, but with a perfect recall of the melody. Then he stopped himself with a dismissive remark: ‘oh well, that’s all over now’. Foster, like others of his generation, no doubt had mixed feelings about the past, and may not have wanted to acknowledge all of them. He, too, was a victim of the post-Conciliar crisis.

Foster was clearly an inspirational teacher, and to be fair to all involved, attempts to capture in text-book form the humour, energy, and charisma of a great teacher often fall a bit flat. I fear that this has happened in this case. What I can do, however, is to recommend once again the Latin Mass Society’s own beginners’ ‘teach yourself’ Latin coursebook, Simplicissimus, available from our online shop, with exercises and answer key, carefully chosen illustrative passages with translations, vocabulary lists, and lots of lovely tables at the back. All the examples, exercises, and passages are taken from the ancient liturgy, including its ancient Vulgate lectionary. If you have a vague idea what ‘Ecce Agnus Dei’ and ‘Gloria in excelsis’ mean, you have a head start. You can also sign up for online or residential courses (see announcements in this edition of Mass of Ages.)

On two points we can all agree with Reggie: that you don’t have to be a genius to learn Latin, and that, as he put it, ‘it’s out of this world!’

Ossa Latinitatis Sola ad Mentem Reginaldi Rationemque: The Mere Bones of Latin According to the Thought and System of Reginald (2015) by Fr Reginald Foster and others. 736pp.