[B-Greek] META/SUN (slightly OT?)

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Jan 12 20:13:28 EST 2004


At 5:47 PM -0600 1/12/04, Christopher Tessone wrote:
>I'm not sure whether this is a little off-topic or not, but I have a
>question about the difference between META and SUN.  I'm reading
>Volume I of Pelikan's "The Christian Tradition", and he's talking
>about the development of doctrine about the Holy Spirit.  In
>discussing St. Basil's conviction that not only trinitarian theology,
>but the baptismal formula instituted by Christ, commits one to the
>divine nature of the Holy Spirit.  Pelikan says this is in response to
>Basil's liturgical usage of the form:
>
>"Glory be to the Father with [META] the Son together with [SUN] the
>Holy Spirit."
>
>Can someone explain the difference between the two "with"
>constructions in this case and its significance in the liturgical
>formula above?  I'm getting the sense of things when I read NT texts
>in Greek, but I'm not sophisticated enough yet to understand what's up
>here.
>
>Thanks in advance!
>
>Yours,
>Chris
>
>P.S. I read the list webpage over to figure out whether this was
>off-topic, and I'm still not sure.  If it's really OT, please respond
>off-list and accept a mea culpa from me.

So long as we leave out the matter of theological implications, it's
perfectly legitimate to talk about the relationship and/or difference
between SUN and META. I think it would be fair to say that they do overlap
considerably in the sense of "association with" and there are prepositional
phrases where SUN + dative would mean pretty much the same thing as META +
genitive. On the other hand, it's my sense that there's often enough a real
difference: that SUN + dative suggests "conjunction" of the persons or
items in view, while META + genitive suggests "concatenation" of the
persons or items in view. If one bears in mind that META + accusative
indicates temporal or spatial postposition, I think one might conceive of
META + genitive as having the sense of "serial linkage." It may very well
be just my fancy, but I can recall years ago noting that the Aeolic dialect
form of META was PEDA and wondering whether there might conceivably be some
relationship between the preposition/adverb and the root PED/POD and its
associations with "foot," "plain," etc. All this is unfortunately very
subjective, but if the two tend frequently to be synonymous, yet it seems
to me there's a difference in that META sometimes means "along with" as
distinguished from SUN as "together with."
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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