World-Class Liberal Arts for Lutherans

The point RenMus has been attempting to make—with some success, we hope!—is that a new way in Lutheran higher education can and must be found. Worn out are those attempts to turn essentially parochial institutions into the multi-use, “everything-to-everyone,” institutions we see today. In fact, the success rate for Lutheran colleges that have become everything to everyone if only they might win a few for their coffers is dismally low. The Church’s interest in higher education really cannot be anything other than “a theologically conversant and literate laity and clergy.” All other “objectives” of higher education can be met by large state universities. So let’s leave those objectives to them and attend to our own interests.

Liz Reisberg makes a similar point in today’s Inside Higher Ed in an article titled, “If not a world class research university, then perhaps world class liberal arts?” The piece hinges on two arguments. First, world-class research university is coterminous with big bucks; liberal arts education is relatively much less costly. Second, given the tortuous route of a typcial worker’s “career” these days, liberal arts education is poised today as at no other time to be useful.

Mutatis mutandis, the same arguments Reisberg makes can be directly applied to Lutheran higher education. Chasing the latest professional program is always going to be much more costly than sticking with a solid liberal arts curriculum—and the payoff disappointing to the effort given. And since Lutheran higher education educates for one’s vocation, Lutheranly understood, and not one’s “vocation,” understood as “career,” it uses the human arts (artes humaniores) to that end on the premise that one learns to be a human better by reading Thucydides than by learning the precepts of marketing.

While the first point is one going to the proper management of limited resources, the latter is really a theological, not a merely aesthetic, issue. The Wittenberg Reformers were convinced that the higher education entailment of the Lutheran Reformation was a radical approach to the Western intellectual tradition through the sources themselves. To be sure, other approaches to higher education were wildly popular at their time; Melanchthon could complain with the best of us that students eschewed the liberal arts and chose instead what was “universally more saleable.” But for the Wittenberg Reformers, higher education was a matter of best preparing students to live under God’s call in a world and under orders created by God for men and their benefit. It was not, finally, business prowess or bureaucratic advancement that made for a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way; rather, a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way was one with a deeply cognizant sense of being located in a specific time and place, gifted with a certain wisdom handed down from antiquity and with an eschatological horizon that meant that this world was not all there was. That was the end to which the Wittenberg Reformers put the artes humaniores.

And that’s the end to which their modern heirs should continue to educate. Indeed, Thucydides is still the father of political philosophy, and the eschatological horizon hasn’t changed a bit. It’s only that we heirs of Wittenberg seem to have lost our way between our past and our future. But by approaching things like Wittenbergers, that is, by understanding what we ought to do now based upon where we have come from, based upon what we already know, we can find our way again. 

Can the Lutherans Pull off an Ex Corde Renewal?

Ex corde ecclesiae, John Paul II's Apostolic constitution requesting (or requiring, depending upon your read of the document) greater faithfulness to Catholic teaching in Catholic colleges and universities, has just reached its milestone 20th anniversary. In "Catholic Colleges 20 Years after Ex Corde" in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David House marks the anniversary with a retrospective look at what the papal message has, or hasn't, achieved in Roman Catholic higher education in the United States. Among the positive results, he notes that:

[Roman Catholic] colleges are beginning to recognize that emulating secular institutions might be worthwhile in some instances, but not at the expense of what makes them truly Catholic and, therefore, distinctive.... The importance of theology and philosophy, undergraduate core curricula, and how graduates of Catholic colleges should be distinguishable from those of secular institutions has emerged because of Ex corde. [italics added]

House points out that in the U.S. context in which the Land O'Lakes Statement of 1967 was expressive of the going paradigm in the heady years of and after Vatican II, Ex corde faced some stiff opposition--a corrosive opposition to the Catholic way, a critical rather than a fostering stance.

Heirs of the Wittenberg Reformation might learn a thing or two from Ex corde's success. First, a retrenchment is possible. The Wittenberg way need not be a relic, a something that, à Hegel, has led to another, quite different something. Second, a broad consensus (by which I don't intend to say the creation of a big-umbrella consensus that means nothing) among Lutheran colleges about what is at the heart of Lutheran higher education, and a consistent application of that across the range institutional functions can, in the long run, show some positive gains. But this requires fearless leaders at all levels. Third, the founding of some centers or even entire institutions that can show the way has a leavening affect. Today, "Catholic higher education" is not defined by Georgetown, but by Ave Maria or Belmont Abbey College or Franciscan University of Steubenville. Such colleges and universities stand as a constant reminder to their accommodationist peers that faithfulness to Church teaching and intellectual responsibility not only are not at odds, but may even--and, in fact, must--work in tandem in pursuit of a unique vibrance of faith and learning.

Herman Preus is noted to have said once that the colleges of the Evangelical Lutheran Church won't be steered wrong unless the congregations want it that way. In other words, the health or sickness of the colleges is a symptom, not a cause, of the health or sickness of the congregations. Melanchthon made the opposite case: if you want to ruin the Church, ruin the institutions of higher education. The truth is probably more complicated than either man might have imagined. But it is clear that the two are interrelated--and that the Church of the Augsburg Confession, whether because it is healthy or because it wants to be healthy, requires a distinctively Lutheran higher education of the highest quality. The question is whether we have the will to do it.

[Pictured above: Lutherstadt Wittenberg, market square.]

Rhetoric, Preaching, and...Homer

Wait! Shouldn’t that say: “Rhetoric, Preaching, and ... Paul,” or “... St. Augustine,” or “... John Chrysostom,” all of whom are stand-outs in Christian preaching? This would be understandable. It was certainly the reflex of Tertullian, and the radical reformers, Müntzer, Karlstadt, and others: Christian things for Christians; leave their own learning to the pagans.

But Melanchthon’s 1523 Encomium eloquentiae or Praise of Eloquence operates with an openness to the rhetorical tradition even of the classical pagans, or perhaps especially of the classical pagans. There, Homer, on the recommendation of Horace, Quintilian, Cicero; on the example of Solon, the just law-giver at Athens (fl. 596 B.C.), and Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens (561–525 B.C., with interruptions), who had the poems of Homer sung in their proper order and a text finalized—there, in Encomium eloquentiae, Melanchthon makes Homer the source and teacher par excellence of rhetoric, an art whose highest usefulness lies in understanding and proclaiming the Word of God. Homer remains the basic source for: the qualifications of a speaker, the arrangement of a speech, the capacity to argue and counter-argue, the ability to describe in persuasive detail; in short, all that is really needed for speaking, for rhetoric—indeed, for the proclamation of the Word.

But how does one “arrive”? How does one achieve the eloquence of Homer? First, one comes to grips with the humanist idea that the ancients are not museum pieces to be observed behind a glass case, but great works of art whose use in education is for them to be imitated. “No one doubts the perusal of good writers is very profitable. In truth, unless you add to this the habit of writing and speaking you will be able neither to understand with sufficient incisiveness their opinion, nor to conceive in your mind the fixed rule for judging and deliberating.” [Kusukawa & Salazar, 70]

Second, even in imitation one does not remain frigid and “scientific.” Indeed, deep and incisive reading is commended. The Encomium eloquentiae is exemplary in this regard (Melanchthon teases out of Homer what the untrained eye would miss; for example he notes that excellence of speech and excellence of mind are made tandem at Odyssey 9.367, σοὶ δ ἔνι μὴν μορφὴ ἔπεων, ἔνι δὲ φρένες ἔσθλαι, “You have both a form of words and an intelligence that are excellent.”) But even intensive and incisive reading does not lead to distance, but to proximity, so that “not only the mouth and the tongue, but also the heart, are shaped by the knowledge of good writers.” [Kusukawa & Salazar, 68]

As noted elsewhere in this blog, this is that business about the text interpreting the reader, not vice versa, the requisite attitude in the Wittenberg way for reading all great works, including and especially the Bible. Tuning the ear to the force of rhetoric in the Greats—Homer, Vergil, Herodotus, Thucydides—in turn allows the tuned ear to tune in to the rhetoric of Scripture, in short, to understand what Scripture, as rhetorical message, wants to say. Indeed, Melanchthon reasons, it was because of the West’s ignorance of classical antiquity from the end of the Carolingian Renaissance until what we now know as the Renaissance that the horrors and atrocities of scholastic theology came to be: “Unless these writings are studied, we shall have a posterity that is in no way more sane than past centuries, when the ignorance of writings had overthrown all human and divine matters. Indeed..., in time past, when God was sorely angered against the Church, writings were snatched away, and ignorance of holy things followed. For when God wanted to speak in our words, those who were inexperienced in the arts of speaking judged foolishly on the divine Word.... And since they had no writings from which to learn how to be wise, the charming men devised that foolish sophistry [note: scholasticism], and began to argue about fabricated compositions of words.... Does it not [now] seem that the [once] neglected writings have sufficiently avenged the affront?... Indeed, when the excellent Father [i.e., God the Father] had begun again to turn His attention to the wretched, and was going to give back to us the Gospel, because of His generosity He also restored [the classical] writings, by which the study of the Gospel would be assisted.” [Kusukawa & Salazar, 74–75]

So, yes! Let it be: Rhetoric, Preaching, and ... Homer! Otherwise you might end up with a theology worthy of the other Homer, and a preaching to match.

Melanchthon and the “Tradition” of Natural Law

At the risk of greatly oversimplifying things, Christianity has treated pagan antiquity in one of two major ways. On the one hand, the pagan antiquities have a long and noble history of coming in for heavy weather in the realm of Christian thought (think: Tertullian). On the other hand, Augustine, for example, thought of the heritage of pagan antiquity as “Egyptian gold,” something to be appropriated by the Church for its purposes. More recently, C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man elaborates his understanding of the natural law (whose clearest distillation is found in the divine Decalogue, Ex. 20) and its representation within not only the cultural tradition of the West, but also of the manifold cultures of the world. Abolition of Man, in other words, represents something of an apologetic for the Christian use of pagan source material.

Within the cacophony raised by Luther’s screeds against Aristotle and pagan philosophy (which he regarded—rightly—as having been misappropriated by scholastic theology) it is difficult to hear anything but a Tertullian-esque stance. But if you listen more closely, you can discover that the situation on the ground in Wittenberg was much more nuanced. Even as Luther was dropping some of his juicier anti-Aristotle comments, his colleague Philipp Melanchthon was working out a theory for the inclusion of the pagan humanities in the Wittenberg arts/philosophy faculty. His ability to do so was opened up by nothing less than Luther’s coming to clarity, in the early 1520s, on the Scriptural distinction between Law and Gospel. Now, with some qualification, the Law could be seen reflected and taught in antique pagan ethics, literature, and philosophy (so Melanchthon).

But how did this come to be? Melanchthon offers a tradition-theory for the presence of the natural law in the pagan works of the West:

[Homer] says, “Ill deeds do not attain to virtue, and even a slow man catches up with a fast one” [Od. 7.329]—that evil deeds do not lead to success or have a good outcome, and that the wicked man, however fast he may be and however versed in deceit, is nevertheless caught, and even by one who is lame. There is no doubt that this kind of saying was first uttered by the holy fathers [i.e., the patriarchs] and transmitted to posterity. Then they were passed on from one to the other, one could say from hand to hand, and finally extended to the men by whom they were included in these written monuments [the classical heritage], so that, put in an illustrious and perspicuous place, they could be kept in the memory of all posterity and beheld with admiration. [“Preface to Homer,” Kusukawa & Salazar, 43; brackets 1, 3, and 4 added]

Herein Melanchthon supplies at least a partial answer to the question on the minds of many a Wittenberg student who had developed Luther’s venemous attacks on Aristotelianizing scholasticism into a self-chosen educational program that rejected all learning but the theological.

Why does pagan learning matter? Because it evidences God’s providential guardianship of His Law, so that, here on earth and among men, the pagan authors can and in fact do offer no little guidance for a proper life. Indeed, because God has made all His established orders holy by, well, establishing them (that of the Church, of the household, of the state), savvy living within those orders is also a holy thing. And the pagan authors can excellently serve this end. Egyptian gold, indeed.

[Graphic: The Blinding of Paul, epitaph for Veit Winsheim, who delivered “Preface to Homer;” City Church, Wittenberg]

Hierosylia--How Sad Can It Get?

Melanchthon had his Declamatio de studio linguarum [CR 11.231–9; cp. Kusukawa & Salazar 29ff.] delivered by Veit Dietrich in 1533 (the same Veit Dietrich credited with the Reformation-era “Gospel collects” that will be known to Lutherans of Scandinavian extraction). I recommend the entire declamation, but draw attention to a final flourish that Philipp, or Veit, leaves with the hearer. Here, the image of plundering the holy places, or hierosylia, expresses the outrageousness of a Church without her languages.

Has artes quas recensui obruere ac delere tristius fuerit quam solem e mundo tollere. Neque vero sine cognitione peregirnarum linguarum retineri earum possessio potest. Qua ex re facile iudicare potest, linguarum noticiam non esse leve aut vulgare Dei donum. Quae autem impietas, quod scelus est, tale donum, cuius usus tam late patet, aspernari, et divinitus illatum in has nationes rursus explodere atque eiicere? Leges publice atrociter puniunt sacrilegia; at maius sacrilegium est, Ecclesiam spoliare linguarum cognitione, quam aurea aut argentea supellectile. Haec enim coelestia dona Evangelio lucem afferunt, et verius sunt Ecclesiae supellex, quam ulla ornamenta aurea. Neque enim dubium est, quin ad hanc utilitatem Deus Evangelio addiderit donum linguarum, ut vocant, ut ad sacras literas explicandas conducant. [CR 11.238]

It would be sadder to crush and destroy the arts that I have discussed [trans. note: the useful arts to Church and state] than to remove the sun from the world; however, neither can possession of them be retained without the knowledge of foreign languages [trans. note: in the usage of this declamation, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin]. From this fact, one can easily come to the conclusion that the knowledge of the languages is not a trivial or mean gift of God. But what godlessness, what a crime, for such a gift to be shunted aside whose usefulness is so obvious and to cast it back and drive it out when it has been brought by dint of God’s disposing amongst these nations. The laws harshly punish acts of sacrilege in public; and it is a greater act of sacrilege to despoil the Church of the knowledge of the languages than of her furnishings of gold or silver. For these heavenly gifts shed light upon the Gospel and are the Church’s furnishing in a more real way than any golden decoration. Nor indeed is there any doubt but that God has conferred the gift of the languages, as they call it [cp. Acts 2; 1 Cor. 14], upon the Gospel for this purpose: to advance the explication of the Holy Scriptures. [trans. Bruss]

Ilias Malorum: Video

Ecclesiae opus est toto illo doctrinarum orbe

In Non posse stare on this blog Carl Springer gives a lively defence of Luther’s estimation that “real theology cannot stand without knowledge of literature.”

Luther’s quip was not an isolated judgment, a one-off, an exception that just proves another rule. It was, rather, a crystalized echo of the entire Wittenberg educational endeavor, that schema in which the Reformation was born and given its shape. Far from being viewed by the Wittenberg Reformers as window-dressing on a theological education, a finishing touch in the formation of theological dandies, the arts provided the intellectual framework in which to do any sort of serious theological work. Without them, conversely, the theological project was bound to fail.

Here I draw attention to one of the several pieces from Melanchthon’s hand fundamental to understanding this key element in the Wittenberg educational plan, his Oratio de philosophia (CR 11.278–284). Many of these orations have been handsomely translated, edited, and published in Philip Melanchthon. Orations on Philosophy and Education, Sachiko Kusukawa, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), a highly recommended volume for everyone interested in the Wittenberg educational project. What follows here is a handful of “greatest hits” from the 1536 Oratio de philosophia delivered at the conferring of the M.A. in that year.

I ask you...to be warned not only to flee the foolish judgements of those who do not believe that the Church needs liberal education at all...but also to execrate those people themselves like the most loathesome pests and fearful monsters. [Kusukawa, 127]

Altogether the most prevalent in an Iliad of evils is ignorant theology. [ibid., 127]

Since, therefore, ignorant theology has so many ills, it is easy to judge that the Church has need of many great arts. [ibid., 128]

“The many great arts” are necessary, so Melanchthon, because:

there is a certain cycle of arts [orbis quidam artium] by which they are all bound together and connected, so that in order to grasp individual ones many of the others have to be taken on. Therefore the Church has need of the entire cycle of sciences [quare ecclesiae opus est toto illo doctrinarum orbe]. [ibid., 129]

I entreat you, for the sake of the glory of God, which we must set before all other things, and for the sake of the welfare of the Church, which must be most dear to us, to resolve that the most excellent disciplines that philosophy contains are to be safeguarded, and to devote yourselves to them with greater effort, so that you may obtain for yourselves teaching that is genuine and useful for mankind. [ibid., 131]

Finally this:

So let us defend with great spirit the study of letters, and let us consider ourselves put in our position by divine providence, and because of that, let us do our duty with greater care, and let us expect the reward for our toils from God. I have spoken. [ibid., 132]

Et ego.

How to Create and Sustain a Consciously Lutheran Identity

Adam Smith and his idea of specialization have come to roost with a vengeance in the nests of the Leucorean [Wittenberger] university and college. The result? History is the job of the historians; philosophy that of the philosophers; worse, theology, that of the theologians. Lutheran colleges and universities have “specialized” theology out of the life of the faculty, if not de iure, then certainly de facto. What to do?

Precious faculty development dollars need to go to things that colleges and universities need to do largely for purposes of accreditation. What follows is a modest proposal to divert a modest amount of those funds toward understanding Lutheranism within the university. How?

Give an annual, and significant ($100/month/participant), grant to a small and therefore competitive faculty reading group that will read, examine, peruse, discuss, ponder, argue over, and write about a classic Lutheran text, finally producing a cache of essays short or long that bring the text into conversation with their disciplines. This cache of essays should be intellectually responsible (as the object of serious wrangling within the reading group), communicative, and thus also inspiring to others to think about how their own discipline and its bases and preconceptions and fundamentals speak to Lutheran theology, or rather vice versa.

For example, a theater professor might discover that, far from what we Americans think of the provenance of theater in the modern West—that it’s the stuff of dissolute, drug- and sex-addicted oddballs like Poe—it was actually vigorously used during the Reformation and post-Reformation eras by Lutherans (Luther, Melanchthon, Strigelius, von Rist, to mention but a few) frequently for Lutheran purposes. Aha! What a discovery! And this is rooted deeply in Lutheran realism which is a sort of “Egyptian-gold worldliness” (as opposed, e.g., to the non-realism and other-worldliness that permeates Calvinist theology; we Lutherans can sing, “Our God is dead,” it being otherwise difficult to say exactly what happened at the Place of the Skull; but it’s anathema in Geneva. And this difference can be traced to respective stances on realia, or the data of theology and of, well, thought.). Lutheran realism, in turn, lies at the heart of Wittenberg’s pursuit of, e.g., what we know as the hard sciences (on which see the relevant essays by Philipp in Kusukawa and Salazar).

Where to start, then? Oswald Bayer, for example, or Hermann Sasse, or Luther’s Address to the German Nobility, should be, and in fact are, eminently intelligible to anyone qualified to serve on a college or university faculty. But find your own list of goodies—and yet make sure they’re goodies. That’s why you need a learned Lutheran running the show: C.S. Lewis, as fun as he is to read, just isn’t going to cut the mustard here. (This point has been driven home to me in the last month as a clergy reading group I’m in has taken up Mere Christianity, which is woefully inadequate from the perspective of and as a vehicle for Lutheran thinking. Sorry, Clive.).

So why not? Why not give it a shot? Why not “de-specialize” theology? And now I’m talking to you, whoever you are: why not become the Lutheran Socrates? Of the real Socrates Cicero claimed he was the first to bring philosophy from the sky and put it in the streets and marketplace and make it dwell among men. Why not take Lutheran theology from the theology department and make it the province of the whole faculty?

Actually, that’s too soft a peddle. The case really needs to be stated like this: how can we afford not to make Lutheran theology the province of the whole campus? What makes a college Lutheran isn’t just its chapel (the University of Minnesota and Univ. of Wyoming have very fine Lutheran chapels, but they’re not for that reason Lutheran universities). The faculty alone doesn’t do it (there are lots of Lutherans teaching at lots of different places, but they don’t make their colleges Lutheran). Nor does the student body (again, the U of M, etc., etc.). Let all of those things be present; but if the intellectual framework is missing, it means nothing. And the only way you can get the framework is to work at it, and read, and think, and argue, and wonder, and write.

So share a good book; learn to think Lutheranly with your fellow Lutherans; and most, learn to think about yourself, your work, your discipline like a Lutheran.

Who knows what might come of it?

No Humanism, No Reformation / No Reformation, No [Wittenberg] Humanism

It's a frequent contention that the Reformation had been an impossibility, historically speaking, without the advent of Humanism, and students of the era quickly recognize this fact as they read through the primary sources. The same impulse that animated Humanism, ad fontes, also animated the reformational desire to return to the source of the Church's life, Scripture itself, without the scholastic accretions, the "human traditions," of the Middle Ages. It's like buying a Gucci purse: you can either go to the guy on the corner and get a knock-off, or you can expend a little extra effort and get the real mccoy. So no Reformation without Humanism.

Same goes for the Wittenberg form of Humanism: it, too, is inconceivable apart from the Reformation. The peculiar brand of Humanism that developed in Wittenberg was reformational Humanism, a Humanism deeply informed by the theological thought of Luther and Melanchthon, as we've had occasion to point out here at Renascentes Musae.

In celebration of the phenomenon of Wittenberg Humanism, Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, is hosting a conference entitled "Lutheranism and the Classics." You can read more about it by clicking here. So mark your calendars for 1 and 2 October, 2010, and please join us as we examine, prod, explore, uncover, probe, and revel in the intellectual tradition of earliest Lutheranism.

The Chorale and Classical Lyric Poetry

[Please excuse the length of this post, but please read on!]

Part of our argument at Renascentes Musae is that the fullness of the Lutheran tradition just is not available apart from something we might call Lutheran culture—Lutheran higher culture. Now, to be sure, none of us would be willing to admit that the Gospel is culture-dependent, that what the Gospel is and delivers, the forgiveness of sins through faith alone in Christ alone, requires a certain cultural background. But, together with Scripture (e.g., 1 Tim. 2.2; Phil. 4.8) and the old “standard” Prayer of the Church, we recognize that in human culture certain things can be done or not done to foster or hinder the Gospel. Our confessions recognize, too, the role of human culture in fostering a Christocentric, sacramental piety when they note that ceremonies, the “Latin parts” of the liturgy, and “German hymns” are “needed to this end alone, that the unlearned may be taught” (AC 24.1–9, esp. 1–4).

The passage in AC referred to above was both informed by contemporary practice and informed subsequent practice, particularly in the blooming of the Lutheran chorale. During the 16th and 17th centuries, literally thousands of chorales were written by Lutheran theologians, pastors, and poets in German, Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, and the like. When the preaching of the Gospel flourished so did the singing of the Church, since the Church responds to kerygma by her confession, and her confession is, in a prophetically and apostolically normative way, her song (see, e.g. Exod. 15.1–18, along with Miriam’s song as a coda, v. 21; and Eph. 5.19).

But the Church’s song isn’t just ‘any old song,’ just folk lyric or popular lyric. Addressed by the Most High God in His Word, the Church responds in clothing her song, her offering to God, by singing at the very peaks of human culture. When Paul in Eph. 5.19 encourages the singing of “hymns,” he has in mind that pinnacle of Greek lyric, the hymn.

Greek lyric. A pagan form—now baptized by the Gospel. Tertullian need not have asked, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” because the Apostle had already answered it. Tertullian’s synecdochal “Athens” was Augustine’s Egyptian gold, not intended for making idolatrous calves (Exod. 32), but for the worship of the God of Israel. In the case of the gold from Egypt, it was the substance that was neutral and the form it took (an idol) that was evil; in the case of “Athens,” the heritage of the Greco-Roman world, it was the form (the “hymn”) that Paul viewed as neutral, even if its substance, riddled with the worship of pagan deities, was not.

The Lutheran Reformers understood this well. On the churchly side of culture, all that had gone before was good so long as it did not militate against the Gospel (AC 15); on the secular side of culture, what was best was also good, so long as it could be conscripted into the militia Evangelii, the “service of the Gospel.” And what was best lay in the classical culture of Greco-Roman antiquity (as we’ve had occasion to point out, by today’s standards a quaint notion, but quite serious to the Reformers). To that end, Philipp Melanchthon devoted himself tirelessly to a living appropriation of classical culture so that he himself was regarded among the best composers of, e.g., Greek and Latin epigrams, and so that he inspired an entire Lutheran educational system devoted to the study and living appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity. His students and their own students went on to compose epigrams, propemptica, elegies, plays and sacred poetry (also known as hymns, aka “chorales”) in Greek, Latin, and German. (Here I refer the reader to Manfred P. Fleischer’s, “Melanchthon as Praeceptor of Late-Humanist Poetry,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 20.4 (1989), 559–80.)

“Okay. So what?” the reader may ask. Indeed. But the proof is, as they say, in the pudding. The lyrical production of the Reformers and their heirs down through the Age of Orthodoxy is nothing if not stunning—and deeply indebted, both self-consciously and unself-consciously—to Greco-Roman antiquity. This was driven home to me over Holy Week and through a conversation I had about it with Mark Preus, who himself has a blog devoted to the “revival of the Lutheran hymn.”

Gerhardt, Melanchthon & Pindar. On Easter Sunday at our church, St. John’s Ev.-Luth. in Topeka, we sang “Awake, My Heart with Gladness” (“Auf, auf, mein Herz”) by Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676), a Lutheran pastor who was the beneficiary of a fine Melanchthonian education. The Gerhardt chorale is, at the end of the day, a Christianized Pindaric victory ode, and Gerhardt himself points to this in the hymn. (Did Gerhardt know Pindar? Could he have? Yes. Among Melanchthon’s many accomplishments, he also produced a text, translation, and praefatio to Pindar’s victory odes; see CR 19.187ff. along with CR 9.673–4.) At the end of the fifth line of the second stanza of Gerhardt’s German chorale, we hear Christ’s cry at the devil, “Viktoria!” (in Latin, no less, which evokes the classical world, a point obscured in the English translation). The very term alludes to Pindar’s epinician (victory) odes, perhaps his most famous production. Gerhardt’s debt to Pindar is also betrayed in the final verse, where the believer looks forward to being brought to “this portal / that leads to bliss untold” and upon which “this rhyme immortal / Is found in script of gold.” Gold as a topos in this context is clearly not from Scripture. But it is Pindaric—in fact, the topos of gold in Pindar is practically emblematic of Pindar’s poetic oeuvre, so much so that Olympian 7 for Diagoras of Rhodes was even inscribed in gold on the temple walls (cp. “this portal”) at Lindos. In “Awake, My Heart,” Gerhardt thus figures Christ as an Olympic or Pythian victor—not over other human competitors, but over sin, death, and the devil. And in a final Pindaric turn, Gerhardt further lends the victor glory of Christ, by way of a “crown” (gekrönt), to all who have suffered with Christ here, just as the Pindaric victor brings his own glory to his homeland.

Heermann & Sappho. Another classical borrowing resides in the beloved chorale “O Dearest Jesus, What Law Hast Thou Broken” (“Herzliebster Jesu”) by a poet of the generation before Gerhardt’s, Johann Heermann (1585–1647). The ‘invention’ of the sapphic stanza, three lines of 11 beats followed by a fourth line of five beats, is credited to the poetess Sappho of Lesbos. In the ancient world it was profoundly associated with erotic lyric (see, for example, Catullus c. 51, which ‘translates’ Sappho fr. 31). Sapphic lyric poetry also has a strong element of wistfulness about it, a feature found also in the Roman lyric that uses the sapphic stanza. These elements come out forcefully in Heermann’s “Herzliebster Jesu.” The poem itself is composed in sapphic stanzas. Furthermore, the very first word of the hymn, “herzliebster” (“my heart’s dearest”) is an erotic evocation, unexpected in the liturgical performance setting of the poem but very much in line with Heermann’s metrical choice. And the love theme persists throughout the poem, touched throughout by the wistfulness the permeates sapphic lyric. Again, Heermann’s encounter with sapphic verse, which motivates this famous chorale, was mediated through his Melanchthonian education.

These are but two examples of a phenomenon that has gone little explored but is key to understanding the richness of Lutheran higher culture. To put it in terms that hit a little closer to home: the lyric treasury of the Lutheran chorale, the very guts of the Lutheran Gottesdienst, is virtually inconceivable apart from the Christian Humanism that is woven into the Wittenberg Reformation. Which is to say that Lutheran higher culture, to be a living thing and not a relic, (forgive the compounding of images) requires rich fertilization in the soils of Christian Humanism.

Reason and the Limits of Her Whoredom

The troubling thing about great one-liners is that they take on a life of their own. Joe the Plumber quickly became an imaginary friend of John McCain's who had taken up in a shoebox under the latter's bed (so Saturday Night Live). "Reason, that whore," [WA 51.126.7] one of Luther's most famous quips, has also taken on a life of its own, haunting, as an imaginary friend, the recesses of the Lutheran mind, an invective turned as invective against "fideistic" Lutheranism. Sola fide, however, does not mean checking the hat of Reason in the narthex and it never did. To the contrary, it means, quite reasonably and on the basis of the clear words of Scripture, that salvation is appropriated to the individual through faith, not works. Reason becomes a whore only when, following her natural inclinations, she prostitutes herself out to the Law and reasons on the basis of the Law and the putative goodness of her master, the Old Adam, that she can and must do something to settle accounts before God's judgment. There she plays, and is, the harlot, dispossessing the soul of her spouse, Christ.

But as we have had occasion to point out elsewhere, Lutheran confessional theology reserves, with Scripture, a wide playing field for reason--for reason where she is Mistress, not madame. The following elegiac epigram was composed by Philipp Melanchthon on Book 7 of Plato's Republic which, as the epigram is entitled, is a "commendation of Dialectic."

Sermonis certas tradit Dialectica leges,

Quaque via poßis prendere vera, docet.

Ac velut in coenum incautus si forte viator

Labitur, atque udo polluit ora firmo:

Surgit, & immundis sordes detergit ocellis,

Abluit & turpi squalida membra luto:

Sic hebetes oculos acuit Dialectica mentis,

Lynceus ut videas lumina vera puer.

[Philippus Melanchthon, Epigrammatum libri sex, ed. Petrus Vincentius (Wittenberg: haeredes Johannis Cratonis, 1579), Liber Quartus, N2 43 recto et verso.]

Discourse’s sure regulations within Dialectic discovered

Teach you the road on which you pow’r upon truth may lay claim.

Just as the footman, unheeding, perchance may stumble in puddles,

Visage and face with the damp earth and its filth befoul:

He then arises and scrubs from his eyes, unclean, their foulness,

Washing that unsightly sludge, cleansing his aspect of filth:

So, just so, Dialectic can sharpen the mind’s blunt vision

That, like Lynceus, you, too, with acuity, see!

[Trans. J.S. Bruss © 2010.]

Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and sometimes nice girls dress in provocative clothing (is it pressing too far to mention Dostoyevsky's Sofia Semyonovna Marmeladova?). The God who communicates to humans through His Word, who inscripturates Himself in human language, does that because He has given the capacity to reason. Just let reason be--and remain--modest, Mistress of her realm, not madame in a street where she has no business.

Non posse stare sinceram theologiam

Dear readers,

In my first posting to this blog, I would like to explicate a bold statement of Luther’s, both in terms of what it must have meant at his time and what it could possibly mean today: Ego persuasus sum, sine literarum peritia prorsus stare non posse sinceram theologiam [“I am convinced that without literary training, pure theology is not able to stand upright;” WA Br. 3.50].

Luther most likely has in mind here the study of what we today would call “the Classics.” (In sixteenth century Germany, “German literature” did not yet exist as a disciplinary subject any more than “English literature” did; there was nothing but Greek and Latin and possibly Hebrew) So “literary” here should be understood to refer to ancient texts like Aesop’s fables, Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical writings, Terence’s comedies, Virgil’s Aeneid, and, of course, the Bible, among others. And by “training,” Luther meant the development of a set of intellectual skills that built upon the work begun in the trivium at a young age and that continued throughout the course of one’s education and life.

Ah, the trivium. These foundational elements of a traditional liberal education (careful, attentive reading; clear, sensible thinking; eloquent, persuasive speaking and writing) were seen as having practical applicability in the 16^th century (just as they had had for Ambrose and Augustine and Chrysostom in the 4^th) for a wide spectrum of jobs and professions that required verbal acuity. (For more on the three cornerstones of a liberal education, namely, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the reader may wish to check out a web site that I have developed on the subject. Click here.)

Luther was not a reactionary. He was interested in educational reform and attacked the cathedral and monastic schools of his own day with his customary scatological vigor. (He referred to textbooks used in monastic schools as “asses’ dung.”) And he was no elitist, either. He wanted education to extend much more broadly to all elements of society, to include most notably girls. But in other ways his reformation of education was conservative, reflecting his reformation principles in general. He did not throw out ecclesiastical elements unless he felt they were entirely out of sync with the Gospel. He reformed them. Like fellow humanists, his instinct was not to go a little ways backward but to return all the way to the historical roots, ad fontes [“to the fountainheads”].The curriculum of the Lutheran gymnasium would not have struck Isidore of Seville or Martianus Capella or Varro as all that unfamiliar.

One could describe Luther’s approach to intellectual formation as “backing into the future.” Ordinarily, humans can guess at what the future might hold, but the only thing they have a fairly good shot at understanding is the historical past. So instead of facing the blank future and turning our back on the richly detailed past, as we are used to doing today (especially in America), the “premodern” pedagogical idea was to move into the future backwards, as it were, keeping one’s eyes fixed on what could actually be seen, known, and studied, namely, the past. Over the centuries, Lutherans have learned to worship as Lutherans by singing the ancient melodies of the church in the words of David, and Ambrose, and Luther, and Catherine Winkworth. Even so, when it comes to learning how to read and think and speak, the Lutheran mind has traditionally been trained by studying the language, thought, and art of Isaiah and Plato, Paul and Cicero, Virgil and Bach, and others who have historically shaped the Lutheran tradition. This isn’t an entirely reactionary ideal, because it is only by understanding fully one’s historical identity that it will be possible to bring the past alive for the future. As Goethe put it so memorably: "Was du ererbt hast von deinen Vätern, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen” [“What you have inherited from your fathers, make an effort to possess it for yourself.”]

The significance of Martin Luther’s enthusiastic and weighty support of the liberal arts often goes relatively unnoticed. His scholarly colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, aptly dubbed praeceptor Germaniae, certainly did much more of the actual work in helping to shape the curriculum of Lutheran schools and universities along humanistic lines than Luther did. All the same, imagine what would have happened if Luther’s support for the classical curriculum had been only luke warm! He made it clear often and unmistakably that he valued the ancient languages highly. He praised the works of Virgil and Cicero and Aesop in hyperbolic terms. And he let everyone know that he cherished the art of music next to theology itself. Without his personal and public advocacy for the liberal arts, it may well be that the anti-intellectual ideology of contemporaries like Carlstadt and the Anabaptists would have won out in the 1520s.

There are, of course, a number of other ingredients besides “literary training” which Luther considered crucial for theological formation, including the generous gifts of the Holy Spirit, prayer, meditation, and, most famously, the experience of wrestling with Satan’s attacks (tentatio or Anfechtung). None of these other constituent elements, however, lend themselves as readily to the conventional classroom instruction that makes up so much of the Lutheran theologian’s formal education as literary study, an important component of the bonae artes (cf. WA TR 3.312).

So, of all the arts one could study, why should literary studies be considered so essential for sincera theologia? The Lutheran reformers were deeply concerned to distinguish their approach to theology from that of contemporary Roman Catholics or “enthusiasts” who relied far less heavily on the written word of God. Grammar, rhetoric, logic, history, and the study of languages and literature were so important to Lutherans because of their distinctive emphasis on sola Scriptura. Historically Lutheran clergy and laity haven’t interpreted dreams or heeded an inner voice or listened to the siren songs of charismatic leaders in order to discern the will of God. No, they have read, interpreted, taught, preached, and sung the written message of the Scriptures. Without the ability to read God’s word accurately and sensitively what other source for inspiration and guidance from above could a Lutheran theologian have? Without the verbal skills to expound, declare, and apply the Word of God to contemporary situations and audiences, how could a Lutheran theologian effectively function?

But, someone might object, that was then and this is now. The world has changed radically since Luther’s day and never more so than in our own lifetime. Screens have replaced books. Numbers trump words. There is a real and growing reaction in American higher education against the traditional liberal arts. Students are gravitating in ever increasing numbers to majors like Nursing and Pharmacy, demanding ever more applied courses (e.g., “Spanish for Engineering”), and they are growing increasingly impatient with coursework that does not have an obvious connection with vocational preparation. It is somewhat gratifying to discover that such indifference to literary studies or even to the life of the mind is not at all new. At Luther’s time there was a common saying: Gelehrte sind verkehrte [“the learned are crazy”] and Luther himself was keenly aware of this opposition. In his 1524 address To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, Luther bluntly described as “brutes and stupid beasts” those educational minimalists of his own day who questioned why it was necessary to teach “Latin Greek, and Hebrew and the other liberal arts” instead of just using “German for teaching the Bible and God’s word, which is enough for our salvation” [LW 45, 341 ff.]

Some might argue that Lutheran higher education is somewhat immune from the current educational trend here identified. Seminaries and schools of theology still do value the liberal arts and literary studies, don’t they? Possibly. But while it is not uncommon for Lutheran seminaries to recommend an undergraduate major in the Classics for undergraduates who are planning to study theology, how often is fundamental preparation and demonstrable aptitude in the liberal arts actually required? And no wonder, when so many second-career candidates, with an undergraduate degree in engineering or business, are admitted to seminaries with the sole proviso that they take a crash course in New Testament Greek, if that. And how seriously are the liberal arts really taken as part of the training of parochial school teachers, “directors of Christian education,” “staff ministers,” and others whose jobs will require them to deal on a daily basis with the Word of God?

These curricular suggestions sound awfully Euro-centric today. Christianity has spread to continents of which Luther wasn’t even aware. What about “literary training” in Chinese or Spanish, some might ask. Why not indeed? Suggesting the study of one set of curricula doesn’t necessarily have to be an attack on the other. Why not encourage real glossalalia? The study of Latin could be just the beginning. At the same time, realistically speaking, vita brevis est, ars longa. It is unlikely that any student could ever master more than just a couple of languages (to say nothing of bodies of literature) in a lifetime. And it is important to appreciate the serious particularity inherent in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Curricular proposals can be very broad. Learning objectives can be as sweepingly ambitious as we want to make them. But life itself is quite particular. It was to a particular region of the world, at a particular point in history, and in the midst of a particular cultural milieu that God sent his only Son to be born. Everyone has to start somewhere. Why would Lutheran theologians not start by immersing themselves in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world in which Jesus lived and where the first apostles began their evangelical work?

This all will seem excessively “ivory tower” to some. What about all the practicing theologians today who spend little of their time in the study and must work in the bustling modern world? They manage schedules and budgets, handle difficult personalities, plan for the expansion of physical plants, etc. Maybe these untheological duties might be better delegated to others who are better trained in these areas and who are not theologians. But even so, the liberal arts don’t have to be regarded as entirely useless in this regard. Luther saw precisely this kind of education as a great “ornament, profit, glory, and benefit, both for the understanding of Holy Scriptures and the conduct of temporal government” For him, it wasn’t only about the studying per se, but also what could be done with the results of that study. A liberal education, it has been said, “desires to educate for wisdom and virtue, not power and vanity; finds tiresome the present age’s preoccupation with utility, speed, novelty, convenience, efficiency, and specialization; and refuses to justify education as a means to wealth, power, fame, or self-assertion” [see Richard M. Gamble, The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being (Wilmington, 2007), xviii]. If Lutheran theology is a theology of the cross, it is hard to imagine any education more practically suited for the development of sensitive, persuasive, and wise exponents of it than the kind Luther prescribes.

Posted by Carl P.E. Springer