The Gothic Vocabulary of Fear

The Gothic lexical field of fear differs sharply from that of the New Testament Greek it translates, as well as from those of the modern languages that gloss Gothic in dictionaries and grammars and the analogous fields in the other old Germanic languages. For example, the frequently attested West-Germanic cognates of dread (OE ondrædan, OHG intratan, and OS antdredan) are semantically distant from the morphologically analogous, but independently formed Gothic hapax undredan 'to take care for.'¹ What follows is intended to demonstrate that the Gothic lexicon distinguishes between different kinds of fear according to their cause, operation, and moral value determined by the disposition of the sufferer. Moreover, the Gothic language uses its capacity to distinguish between prudent and ignominious fear through vocabulary to underscore the distinction between faithful and faithless fear that is established largely through narration and dialogue in the Greek New Testament.

The fundamental divide in the Gothic semantic field of fear lies between expectant fear and shocked fear. Expectant fear, indicated primarily by agis, may be associated with trembling and may lead to action. Shocked fear, most often indicated by faurhtei, is associated with surprise and paralysis. The semantic field thus divided is crossed again by an ethical distinction between reverent fear of high moral value and mundane fear that reveals a deficiency of faith and consequently has low moral value. Reverent fear is most commonly indicated with a member of the agis family, and mundane fear with a relative of faurhtei. The ethical distinction between reverent and mundane fear is suggested in the Greek source text by the opposition of δειλία to φόβος, but the distinction is more thoroughly lexicalized in the Gothic translation, so that it organizes the whole semantic field and restricts the translation of Greek words that imply no moral judgment, such as ἔκστασις.

The lexical field of fear in Gothic may be divided into six word families: agis, faurhtei, usgeisnan, afslauþnan, usfilmei, and gaþlahsnan.²

Table 1.

Gothic Words for Fear: Corpus-Wide Frequency by Word Family

Of these six families of words for fear, only agis and faurhtei have cognates meaning fear in modern English and German. Both nouns are usually glossed with 'Furcht' or 'fear', with 'Schrecken' or 'terror' added to agis, and a similar pattern appears in the glosses on the cognate verbs.⁴ The modern glosses link the words to the same conceptual domain and suggest that there is something more severe and immediate about agis than faurhtei, but the dictionaries do not show how the words are used in context to distinguish between related emotions that differ in their cause, operation, and moral value.

Words for emotions have their own special problems: except for obvious metaphors, few of the words for emotions can be given satisfying etymologies. Moreover, while the human capacity for emotion is universal, both the words and the emotions they represent are in part shaped by societal conventions that are subject to change.⁵ Hans-Jürgen Diller offers a plan for investigating the semantics of emotion words by using clues from syntactic as well as narrative context to describe the operation of emotions, their causes, and the identity and condition of the experiencer,⁶ with attention to genre.⁷ Diller defines emotion as "a transitory state of mind (not a disposition) experienced by a human (or a human-like character) and caused by some event or circumstance."⁸ For my purposes, the disposition is the set of qualities and attitudes that make a person likely to react in certain ways to events or circumstances. The difference between an emotion and a disposition is stability: a disposition, though it may change, is durative and relatively stable, whereas an emotion is inherently unstable and transitory. I shall define fear as an emotion, particularly the state of mind that arises when a person recognizes his vulnerability or relative weakness.⁹

Fear in the New Testament can be divided roughly into categories defined by cause: fear of the divine presence, amazed fear in the face of miracles, fear of other people, fear of natural...