Degrees of Contempt
“whom I […] had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely”
In 1559, the Dionysius Lambinus wrote to his fellow French humanist Marcus Antonius Muretus with a list of corrections to the Latin phraseology in Muretus’ new book. One of these was the following:1
In chapter 6 you write: ‘to scorn his life for the fatherland.’ I should rather have written: ‘to contemn’. For we are said to scorn things that we reject, repudiate, and cast off; and to contemn things that are trivial to us; things of which we make little. Thus the good authors write: ‘to contemn life; money; honours’: not ‘to scorn them’. But: ‘to scorn pleasures; base company; the pursuit of wicked deeds.’
In other words, both contemnere and spernere involve things that one turns away from, but whereas you might say contemnere of things that are intrinsically neutral or even good—only not right for you—spernere is said of things that are hateful in themselves. A soldier who sacrifices his life contemns it; a despairing man who kills himself spurns it.
This distinction has its parallel in a point of English usage. Here is a passage in Jane Eyre:2
‘Never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely’: what does this mean? The difference between hating and despising is in fact identical to the one between spernere and contemnere which Lambinus pointed out to Muretus. You can despise riches, wealth, and brainless youths; but they are not evil in themselves, it’s just that you can do without them. Paradise Lost has some good instances of the word:
Nor fail’d they to express how much they prais’d
That for the general safety he despis’d
His own (2.480–2).
…featherd soon and fledge
They summ’d thir Penns, and soaring th’ air sublime
With clang despis’d the ground (7.420–2).
…Godhead; which for thee
Chiefly I sought, without thee can despise (9.877–8).
Hence when we read in the King James Bible (Genesis 25.34):
Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils, and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.
…we are not to understand that Esau thought the birthright was a bad thing: rather that he set a low enough price on it it to sell it for some stew. The underlying Hebrew is:
וַיִּבֶז עֵשָׂו אֶת הַבְּכֹרָה
which is actually not all that clear, as וַיִּבֶז can shade in meaning from Latin contemnere to spernere, or from despise to hate. Nevertheless the ancient translators were guided by common sense to the former and milder option. The two Greek versions we have are the Septuagint’s
καὶ ἐφαύλισεν Ἡσαῦ τὰ πρωτοτόκια
and Aquila’s
ἐξουδένωσεν Ἡσαῦ τὴν πρωτοτοκίαν.3
These make Esau out to have thought the birthright cheap enough to sell for a life-restoring meal. He did not think it was a bad thing in itself, which is obviously illogical. But even these Greek translations were not satisfactory to Jerome, who must have wondered why Esau was said to reckon the birthright at naught in the first place, especially in light of Esau’s complaint a couple of chapters later (27.36) that Jacob took the birthright away from him. After selling it, plainly Esau did not think his lost inheritance was a trivial thing (let alone a hateful one), only that it had been necessary to sell it. Jerome therefore gave a little gloss in his translation:
Et sic accepto pane et lentis edulio comedit et bibit et abiit parvipendens quod primogenita vendidisset.
And thus, taking the bread and meal of lentils, he ate and drank and went away, reckoning little of the fact that he had sold his birthright.
Gian Michele Bruto, Epistolæ clarorum virorum (Lyon: Apud hæredes Sebastiani Gryphii, 1561), p. 422.
[Charlotte Brontë], Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1847), vol. I, p. 286.
See Frederick Field, ed., Origenis Hexaplorum quæ supersunt, vol. I (Oxford, 1875), p. 40. Field offers his own translation Et sprevit Esavus primogenituram, which Lambinus would have condemned.
I see also a similarity to the comparison of ‘respect’ and ‘love’.