HEIR

Quite a few crime movies — Double Indemnity, for example — involve a will or an insurance policy or some sort of legal or business vehicle by which Mr. Smith can be made rich by the death of Mr. Jones, or Mrs. Smith by hustling Mr. Smith into eternity, or Romulus by clearing his brother Remus out of the way, and so on. The unwise King Lear plans to divide his kingdom among his three daughters and their husbands, and sets up a public show that flatters his ego and rewards hypocrisy. He does it, he says, “that future strife might be prevented now.” The terrible irony is that his abdication provides the occasion for strife. What do you call a creature without a head? Some monstrous or unnatural thing, for sure.

Of course, we could avoid all such arguments by levying inheritance taxes so steep that there wouldn’t be much left for anybody to fight over. But that gets human nature wrong, I think. Charles Péguy, in almost the only free-verse poem I really like, The Portal to the Mystery of Hope, writes that no man works except for his children. He’s thinking of the land a farmer works, but also the tools, their handles worn smooth by long use, so that when the son takes up his father’s scythe, he will be grasping the same wood that his father grasped. Man lives both in time and beyond time.

When I visited my Italian cousins in southern Italy, I walked over cobbled lanes that were at least 800 years old, and the town itself is more than 2000 years old, founded first by Carthaginians. My cousin Peppino showed me his strip of land, a vertical strip down the mountain from the town on the southwestern side. It belonged to the family, as other parallel strips belonged to other families. Who knows how many centuries these were passed along from generation to generation? I find such stability to be comforting. It says, “You are the heir of many people before you, and what you give in turn will outlast your time on earth.” And there is our Word of the Week: heir.

There may be another way to avoid strife, and that’s suggested by the Greek word for heir: kleronomos. You’re a kleronomos from the casting of kleroi — lots. That was sometimes the custom in ancient Greece. If a man had two sons and wanted to divide his land between them, he might come up with two portions and mark them by signs on two pebbles. Then the sons choose, and what they get, they get. I suppose they might trade, if it was mutually agreeable, but they wouldn’t have the old man to blame; only the lots. By the way, the word lot as applied to a parcel of land comes from America and her first settlements. People would come to a new place and divide up the land, and then they would settle who got what piece by drawing lots.

Of course, the idea of being an heir is crucial in the New Testament. God wants sons, not slaves. Those who obey the Lord out of fear are still servile — though they are not doing anything wrong, and it is always better to obey than to disobey. Those who obey out of love are sons, adopted sons and daughters, made one with the Father in Christ Jesus. That’s what Saint Paul says, again and again, and if we are sons and daughters, then we are “heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ.” And that’s not just a hope for some thing that will make us happy. “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance,” says the Psalmist.

And what about the word, heir? Like a couple of other silent H words — honor, hour, herb, and in some pronunciations, homage — it comes to us through French, and the French inherited it from Latin: French heir, Latin heres. Old French lost the h-sound at the beginning of words taken from Latin, but then there were words they got from the Germans, who did pronounce their h’s, and the French imitated them, until eventually they started dropping the h for those words too. Right now, they aspirate the h when it begins a word like hardware, from English — and there are a lot of such words, and it’s long been a sign of poor education if you get mixed up as to when to aspirate the h and when not to. But that’s been the case for a very long time. As early as Augustine’s Confessions, people got snippy over whether you pronounced that consonant or dropped it in speech. Augustine says that they worried more about that than about removing somebody from the the ’uman race.

“Birth of the Heir,” William Redmore Bigg. Public Domain.

I’ll grant that it’s hard to express this eternity in poetic form. The Scriptures are pretty chaste about it, but also suggestive. God has set his glory above the heavens: and that means above even those signs in the skies by which we measure time. For “in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,” and that suggests that time begins only when God wills it to be so, for there was evening and there was morning, one day — the oneness of the first day echoing the oneness of God who made it. “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” says Jesus, and that includes everything in the universe, “but my words shall not pass away.” How man, resurrected into life eternal, will experience this mode of being, this City of God, I do not know, because it has not been revealed, but, as Saint John says, “we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.”

The word itself is fascinating. The -ternal part of it is just a suffix. It’s the e- that contains the root, which comes from the ancient Indo-European root aiw-, for the force of life, long life, and the everlasting. It shows up all over the daughter limbs of the great tree. In Greek, it gives us aiei, always; also aion (English eon, borrowed from the Greek) for an age, especially if it is long or indeterminate, so that the phrase aion aionion is typically translated as for ever and ever. In Latin it gives us the noun aevum, roughly the same as Greek aion, so that aevum aevorum means, literally, the age of ages, also forever. In Welsh, with the Celtic cousin of the same word, you get oes oesoedd, same sort of phrase, and same idea. In German, you get the adjective ewig, meaning everlasting, which then becomes the foundation for the noun Ewigkeit, “everhood,” so to speak — eternity. English ever is also a cousin, as is another word that’s often mispronounced because it’s spelled exactly like a completely different word to which it is not related. That’s the word aye, from Old Norse ei, pronounced like the letter A and not like the letter I, when it means “always,” as in the archaic phrase you see sometimes in hymns and in early Modern English works: “for aye,” meaning forever.