Beasts at School: Luther, Language and Education for the Advancement of Germanness

Abstract The article aims at answering three complementary questions – why the implementation of the Lutheran idea of Christian renewal was possible by means of the German tongue alone; how the language can get beyond its merely communicative and descriptive purposes; and finally when can the performative analogy between speaking and being become essential for the language itself? Consequently, it discusses Luther’s concept of language as the primary vehicle for cultural change in terms of religion and confession, the socio-political agenda and national aspirations. Such a concept involved a great deal of theoretical considerations regarding pragmatic and most of all performative effectiveness of language, that altogether enabled Luther to provide his fellow-countrymen with a language which was culturally self-assertive, founded upon usage rather that abstract rules, and therefore understandable to common men, measurably affecting their way of being. For that reason Luther’s educational aims and his reform of divine worship, being the direct beneficiaries of that discovery, were taken into consideration, together with their social impact on the new cultural modes of comprehending the qualities that distinguish one community from another. Accordingly, the article discusses the language discovered by Luther (Hochdeutsch) as a cultural understructure having an effect on every feature that defines Lutheranism (and the Lutheran collective identity in particular) in respect of politics, religion, values and knowledge. For such a language, more than anything else, was able to take all the German peculiarities into account, and to make Germans finally capable of overcoming the spiritual and corporeal supremacy of the Roman Latin (lingua Romana). A closer insight given here into a pre-Lutheran period of that Roman-German cultural encounter leaves no doubt that Luther himself was often following the footsteps of fifteenth-century German humanists like Jakob Wimpfeling, Rudolph Agricola and Conrad Celtis. Although Germans “are and must remain beasts and stupid brutes,” as Luther declared, nonetheless language, by means of education, and divine worship could finally liberate those beasts from Roman-Latin standards, that is from a foreign way of speaking and being.