Ineffable

Ineffable (pronounced in-ef-uh-buhl)

(1) Incapable of being expressed or described in words; indescribable; indefinable; inexpressible.

(2) Not to be spoken because of its sacredness; too great or intense to be expressed in words; declared as unutterable.

1400–1450: From the late Middle English ineffable (beyond expression in words; too great for words, inexpressible; unspeakable), from the fourteenth century Old French ineffable (which in modern French endures as ineffable), from the Latin ineffābilis (unutterable), the construct being from in- (not; opposite of) +‎ effor (utter) +‎ -bilis (-able), the antonym therefore effābilis (speakable; able to be expressed), from effārī (utter), from fārī (to say; speak), from the primitive Indo-European root bha (to speak, tell, say).  The old English antonym was effable which is archaic and probably extinct except as a literary or poetic device.  Ineffable & ineffaceable are adjectives, ineffability & ineffableness are nouns and ineffably is an adverb.  Although it sounds paradoxical, it can make sense when ineffable is used as a (non-standard) noun so the noun plural can be ineffables.

The meaning "that may not be spoken" is from 1590s and the noun ineffables was for some time a jocular euphemism for "trousers", source of the companion “unmentionables” which survived into the twentieth century to refer to underwear in a similar sense.  The noun ineffably (unspeakableness) dates from the 1620s.  The adjective effable gained its currency in the seventeenth century because of the use in legal jargon to impart "that may be (lawfully) expressed in words" and although long archaic it does still sometimes appear in literary efforts good and bad.

In Christianity, at times the very name of God was held to be ineffable because it was something too sacred to be uttered by earthly lips.  Adonai was an Old Testament word for God (used as a substitute for the ineffable name), from the Medieval Latin, from the Hebrew Adhonai (literally my lord"), from adon, from the Ancient Greek Ἄδωνις (Ádōnis). + -ai (the suffix of the first person).  Jehovah was used in William Tyndale's (1494–1536) transliteration of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH (using the vowel points of Adhonai).  The full name being too sacred for utterance, it appears in four places in the King James Version (KJV 1611) where the usual translation the lord would have been inconvenient and was taken as the principal and personal name of God.

Portrait of Pope Leo X and his cousins, cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, oil on canvas by Raphael (1483–1520).  Leo X got a bit of fun out of life.

The history of the vowel substitution is an example of the sometimes haphazard way in which language evolved in the Medieval period.  It was a loose aggregation of Jewish scribe-scholars called the Masoretes (בַּעֲלֵי הַמָּסוֹרָה in the Hebrew and romanized as Baʿălēy Hammāsōrā, literally “Masters of the Tradition”) who between the fifth and tenth centuries, working out of Palestine and Babylonia, first made the vowel substitution.  Various factions of the Masoretes codified systems of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes (the niqqud) on the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions.  Their work is best remembered for the chanting, defined by the cantillation (the intonation of a sentence, by way of marks which are read as sequences of musical pitches) of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), used by Jewish communities worldwide.  The Masoretes made the vowel substitution a direction to substitute Adhonai for “the ineffable name”.  That was fine but in the West, scholars took it literally as just another word to translate which yielded JeHoVa, the first instance apparently in the writings of the Italian theologian Petrus Galatinus (1460-1540) who held clerical office under Pope Leo X (1475–1521; pope 1513-1521), one of the four Medici popes and remembered (fondly by a few) for his observation “God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it” and although historians have their doubts he ever uttered the words, his conduct while on the throne of Saint Peter made clear if he didn't say it, he should have.  

In modern use the concept of ineffability takes various forms.  There is the idea of what is taboo (that which is by social consensus or convention forbidden to be uttered) which is a shifting set of ideas, subjects and individuals; depending on this and that in one era they may not be mentioned while at other times they may not be criticized.  There’s the notion of it as the indescribable (which can apply equally to extremes of pain and joy) which is really a terms of emphasis which indicates there is not adjective or other word available to encapsulate something so extreme.  In science it describes (actually more “refers to”) those phenomena which may exist but be yet undiscovered because the limitations of language mean it’s not possible even to imagine their existence; the classic Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns, which, upon becoming known become known and sometimes, retrospectively understood known unknowns.

Tomb of Pius IX in the Vatican.

Ineffabilis Deus (Ineffable God) was a statement of dogma issued in 1854 by Pope Pius IX (1792–1878;pope 1846-1878), confirming the long-held belief in much of the Church that the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, was born of an immaculate conception and thus entered the world free of original sin.  Leo’s statement came five years after the circulation to the bishops of the exploratory Ubi Primum (On The Immaculate Conception), a document which might now be called a green paper, seeking as it did their opinion on the matter.   It was their positive reaction which encouraged the publication of Ineffabilis Deus, now recognized as an instance of the doctrine of papal infallibility that was something which would not formally be defined and constitutionally enshrined until the First Vatican Council (1869–1870 and now often referred to as Vatican I).  Papal infallibility is sometimes misunderstood and is actually limited in its application to the times at which when pope speaks ex cathedra (literally “from the chair”): matters of faith and doctrine.  So, like many wise dictators, Pius followed the practice of Catherine the Great (Catherine II, 1729-1796; Empress of Russia 1762 to 1796) who while appearing dictatorial, took care to ensure soundings were taken and her edicts were issued only when she was sure they would be obeyed.  Leo likewise sounded out the bishops.

In the triple crown, laying down the law: Dream of Innocent III and the Confirmation of the Rule (1452) by Benozzo Gozzoli (1421-1497), San Francesco Gallery, Montefalco, Italy.

Still, it’s a potent authority to possess in an absolute theocracy and as the Ayatollahs in Iran are discovering, has its limitations if imposed beyond the limits the people will accept and they’d do well to recall the shrewd observation of one pope that “when one is infallible, one has to be careful what one says”.  What was codified at Vatican I (in Pastor aeternus (literally “Eternal Shepherd” and the First Dogmatic Constitution of the Church of Christ)) really wasn’t new in that historians have cited several instances in medieval theology and although noting alluding to the concept appears to exist in ancient texts, there’s no known discussion of the idea that even a bishop might sometimes be wrong until the Council of Antioch (264) but the sense of the Church’s enduring permanence of rightness does for centuries seem to have been thought implicit.  The theological basis of a pope’s authority come from several Biblical texts, most notably Matthew 16: 18-19 in which is described the delegation of authority Christ passed to St Peter, something which the early Christians held was inherited by his successors.  Of subsequent political interest was that authority in some sense also accrued to Rome because Peter was held to be the its first bishop and was there martyred, things of real significance in the centuries which followed when alternative “popes” in other places contested the rights to power and devotion.  However, although the patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria both staked apostolic claims, they fell to Islam while Constantinople, although a military and political power, had no apostolic tradition.  Contested though it sometimes was, Rome’s primacy was established early and it endured although, this did seem to encourage a bit of mission creep, Innocent III (1160–1216; pope 1198-1216) going further than most in asserting ultimate authority in matters temporal as well as spiritual, his omnibus claim of ratione peccati (by reason of sin) probably leaving nothing of the affairs of man beyond a pope’s reach.

Pope Nicholas III in triple crown.

Interestingly, historians regard the emergence infallibility in a recognizably modern form owes much to a legal device.  After Pope Nicholas III (circa 1225–1280; pope 1277-1280) arranged for the worldly goods of Franciscans to be assigned to the papacy so the monks might live in the poverty their vows demanded, one legally-minded Franciscan expressed concern an anti-pope (there were fakes from time to time) might misuse this confiscatory power.  He therefore argued that infallibility existed but that each edict was absolute and no pope could go back on the utterances of his predecessors. So papal, bound by precedent, infallibility was not sovereignty because a pope was bound by the statements of his predecessors.  Squabbles followed, sometimes essentially about money and sometimes the apparently abstract issue involving the authority to create saints, something actually of real significance because of the importance the cults of saints had assumed in the numbers of adherents (and thus their money) the various orders could attract.  More seriously, the Western Schism (1378-1417) introduced what some held to be heretical: that the Church should not be ruled by a sovereign pope, authority instead vested in Church councils, the intellectual rationale being that while a single pope could be in error, the collective of a council could not.  From this can be traced the beginnings of the idea that papal infallibility was defensible (and perhaps even desirable) if limited to matters of faith and morals.  However, there is nothing in the papers left by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) from which it would appear even an inference could be drawn about infallibility and the rise of science and the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hardly provided fertile ground to pursue the matter.

Pope Pius XII while Apostolic Nuncio to Germany (1920–1930), leaving the presidential palace in Berlin after celebrations marking the 80th of president Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934), October 1927.

Yet it was in the nineteenth century, as modernity began to intrude even on the Church that the notion was asserted and embedded in the constitution.  Without any explicit precedent in theology or canon law, Pius IX decreed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary to be infallible and this seems to have been the definitional marker used at Vatican I which declared a pope was infallible when speaking ex Cathedra on matters of faith and morals.  Still, even that may have been a double-edged sword for although, by the mid-nineteenth century the matter of Mary’s initial sinfulness was probably of interest to a relative few, Pius IX’s Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors (1864)) which was a strident attack of much that was liberal and modern was controversial; the council may have decided that the limits of infallibility were as importance as its existence.  Tellingly, the only other statement issued ex Cathedra came in 1950 when in his bull Munificentissimus Deus (The most bountiful God) Pius XII (1876-1958; pope 1939-1958) defined the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

Pope Benedict XVI in Mercedes-Benz ML 430 popemobile, driving through Via Condotti before a prayer at the statue of the Virgin Mary during the annual feast of the Immaculate Conception at Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Steps), Rome, 8 December 2012.

No pope has since spoken ex Cathedra although during the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962-1965), in his encyclical Lumen Gentium (literally “Light of the Nations” (1964) and an update to the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church of Christ) Paul VI (1897-1978; pope 1963-1978) did stretch the definition a bit by defining papal infallibility as that spoken by a pope on a matter of faith and morals either ex Cathedra or in an ecumenical council.  Among Vatican-watchers, there does seem now a view the Holy See has embarked on a strategy of “Infallibility by stealth”, imposing doctrinal orthodoxies and shutting down debate by clever phraseology.  Still, technically, it remains an authority unused since 1950 and Benedict XVI (b 1927; pope 2005-2013, pope emeritus since), always at his happiest dancing on the head of a pin, was often at pains to differentiate between his solemn (but not infallible) pronouncements made as pope and anything else he’s ever said.  The modern popes would appear more aware of their own fallibilities than their predecessors.