Renascentes Musae: How you say 'dat?

22 November, 2009

How you say 'dat?

Renascentes Musae (reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh).

That's right. Reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh. We use phrases like ad fontes!--back to the sources--but to the Wittenberg Reformers, the analogue to the Reformation of the church was the REBIRTH of the Muses, literally, "the Muses in the process of being re-born, or renascentes Musae." In Wittenberg, the Renaissance was concomitant and not parallel to, but inextricably bound up with, the Reformation of the Church. The religious Reformation, that is, the call to repentance and faith in the One Lord, Jesus Christ, the Redeemer from sin, death, and the devil, was, from beginning to end, a university movement. It began in the lecture halls (or the Schloßkirche door) of Wittenberg; and it came to its consummation there, more or less, at Bergen Abbey. Called Kloster Berge in German, in the 1570s it was an institution dedicated to learning; and it was here that the formulators of the Formula of Concord hammered out their great, learned consensus that this is what Scripture teaches and what we must believe and confess. The intellectual toolbox of the consensus at Kloster Berge was an intense reckoning with the Western theological tradition, a keen use of the tools of dialectic, and a deep, intense knowledge of the languages of Scripture and the West.

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How you say 'dat?

Renascentes Musae (reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh). That's right. Reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh. "The rebirth of the Muses," or, literally, "the Muses in the process of being re-born." That was Reformation-Era code for the kind of university reform that accompanied the Reformation, a revitalization of higher education that eschewed the scholasticism of the Late Medieval world for a bracing encounter with the classics, the literae humaniores, of both the pagan and Christian world, along with the intellectual tools needed for such study: the ancient languages (classical Greek, classical Latin, and Hebrew), rhetoric & dialectic. This blog is devoted to searching for and articulating a theologically faithful and intellectually responsible rationale for Lutheran higher education on the basis of Wittenberg Christian Humanism and to imagining what renascentes Musae might look like in 21st-century North American confessional Lutheranism. Need we mention it? Opinions expressed by an individual author are not necessarily those of all authors. Not only that--if we can't vouch for one another's opinion--it goes without saying that authors also speak on their own behalf and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions that employ them.