Creativity in the Early Reformation Period: Technology, Society, and the Magic of Language

7 CREATIVITY IN THE EARLY REFORMATION PERIOD: TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY, AND THE MAGIC OF LANGUAGE Matthias Riedl DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2021.62.2 Abstract: This article takes its point of departure from Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). The purpose, however, is not a detailed historical critique of both books, but to take issue with fundamental claim underlying both publications: the claim that media technology is the creative agent behind early modern social, political, religious, and intellectual revolutions. The article refers to Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Cassirer, and Wilhelm von Humboldt to lay the theoretical groundwork for an alternative claim: creative agency happens in the form of linguistic evocation. The final section of the article provides a brief case study on revolutionary agency, primarily at the example of the radical reformer Thomas Müntzer. It highlights the role of language in the revolutionary transformation of the early reformation period. Keywords: Marshall McLuhan, Eric Voegelin, Hanna Arendt, Ernst Cassirer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Thomas Müntzer, Agrippa von Nettesheim, creativity, media technology, printing press, evocation, magic, reformation, revolution Media as Agents of Change: McLuhan and Eisenstein When Marshall McLuhan published his work The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, he aimed to show that media technology changes human sense perception and cognition.1 Moreover, he claimed that media are not to be seen as mere tools and as strictly separated from our natural sense apparatus, rather they are part of us. They extend and augment and, thereby, alter human sensual capacities. 1 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). Matthias Riedl 8 The introduction of phonetic script and, even more so, the invention of the printing press brought about a homogenized visualization of experience, he writes, at the cost of other senses, such as audio-tactile perception. And because any change in the relation between our senses must have an impact on how we communicate, it also changes our social relations and, ultimately, ‘culture’ as such. A revolution in media technology, such as Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable types, therefore, transforms human nature; it means The Making of the Typographic Man, as the subtitle of the Gutenberg Galaxy suggests. The printing press, thus, appears as the real agent of early modern innovation and creativity. According to McLuhan, it enabled individualism, democracy, capitalism, nationalism, mass society, consumerism or, in short, all decisive features of modern society. Historians tend to explain the early modern dissolution of the linguistic, confessional, and political unity of the West, at least to some extent, by the failure of the church. The schisms, the corruption of the clergy, the failure of conciliarist reform, the decline of scholastic education, and other factors are often named, when the fragmentation of Latin Christianity is to be explained. If, however, the printing press is the actual primal cause of this transformation, then the Church is exonerated.2 It has been noted (and occasionally denied) that McLuhan’s thought is profoundly shaped by his Catholicism. This should not be understood in the banal sense that he hid Catholic dogma underneath the surface of media theory. Rather his book evokes the ideal ‘Catholicity’ – in the etymological sense of oneness.3 This ideal has an individual and a social component.4 The individual component is a 2 “Medieval liturgy was mostly acoustic. Church architecture was, above all, dominated by acoustic concerns, and Latin was used almost exclusively. But in the sixteenth century Gutenberg gave such intense visual stress to the vernaculars that it underlies all of our psychic, political, and spiritual specialization and division. His specialization is particularly noticeable in Protestantism.” Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light. Reflections on Religion (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999) 142. 3 For the biographical context of McLuhan’s Catholicism see Cameran McEwen, “Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerald Manley Hopkins,” Renascene 64, no. 1 (2011): 55-76. McEwen gives special consideration to McLuhan’s concept of a “Catholicity of mind.” 4 For interpretations of McLuhan’s Catholicism with further references to relevant literature, see John Durham Peters, “McLuhans grammatische Theologie,” McLuhan neu lesen: Kritische Analysen zu Medien und Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Derrick de Kerckhove (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008) 61-75, and Read Mercer Schuchardt, “The Medium is the Messiah: McLuhan’s Religion and its Relationship to his Media Theory,” Renascene 64, no. 1 (2011): 55-76. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 9 holistic experience of reality that was supposedly available to the primitive man, before it was broken by phonetic script and typography. The latter media technologies transform human perception toward visualization, serialization, and a linearity – a development culminating in the assembly lines of modern mass production. The social component is the image of future re-unification of mankind in a large-scale re-creation of organic and integral community in the “global village,” once another revolution, this time brought about by electronic media, has undone fragmentation of society. Phonetic script is the original sin, so to speak, aggravated by typography. As is explicitly stated in The Gutenberg Galaxy, this idea is inspired by the work of the Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong, once McLuhan’s doctoral supervisee.5 Likewise, the eschatological outlook on an escape from the sinful state is also taken from the work of a Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.6 McLuhan’s work has a peculiar form. It is largely a collage of works of other scholars, with long quotations often extending over a half a page or more. Inbetween, it offers lengthy, suggestive, occasionally original interpretations of William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and other poets. Yet, it is also interspersed with mnemonic theses in the size and shape of newspaper headlines, ascertaining that the reader draws the right conclusion from McLuhan’s textual sequencing. Often the theses speak about creativity of technology, such as these: Scribal Cultures could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. The uniformity and repeatability of print created the political arithmetic of the seventeenth century and the hedonistic calculus of the eighteenth. 5 “Printing was a kind of disease which Western society was catching […].” Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958) 310. Ong is less concerned with phonetic script. In the context of Ramism, it is print that matters. 6 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy 37, 51, 135. All these references are to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1959). Cf. Hartmut Winkler, “Die magischen Kanäle, ihre Magie und ihr Magier: McLuhan zwischen Innis und Teilhard de Chardin,”McLuhan neu lesen 158-69. Matthias Riedl 10 The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated man, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational man. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.7 Obviously, McLuhan’s theses are of such simplistic sort that they cannot be taken as serious historical arguments. They are better understood as polemical slogans, supported by a collage of multidisciplinary excerpts from the work of other scholars. Rather late in the book, McLuhan explains his method or “mode of expression” as a “mosaic configuration” or “galaxy.” The galaxy does not spell out the interrelation between its components, but rather constitutes a “do-ityourself kit.”8 This takes us to one of the most prominent applications of the do-it-yourself kit, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, first published in 1979. As Eisenstein states already on the first pages, she “had long been dissatisfied with prevailing explanations for the political and intellectual revolutions of early-modern times” and found in McLuhan more satisfactory solutions – despite methodological concerns.9 The title of the 1983 abridged version was The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe and it clarified the main message, namely: the real early modern revolution is a revolution in media technology.10 Eisenstein calls it “the unacknowledged revolution.”11 Even if Eisenstein’s central section on the reformation received most attention from scholars, the book takes a wider look at the European republic of letters in the early modern period. Eisenstein describes her general methodological approach as follows: As an agent of change, printing altered methods of data collections, storage and retrieval systems, and communications networks used by learned 7 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. In the above sequence, the theses appear on pp. 132, 199, 235, 208, 212, 31. Emphasis added. 8 McLuhan speaks here about the approach of Harold Innis, whom he refers to frequently. However, the title of McLuhan’s book indicates that he adopted this method. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy 216-17; cf. 269 and 276. 9 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) xi. 10 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 11 Thus the title of the first chapter in the unabridged version. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 11 communities throughout Europe. It warrants special attention because it had special effects. In this book I am trying to describe these effects and to suggest how they may be related to other concurrent developments.12 As this passage shows, Eisenstein is more careful than McLuhan, when she emphasizes that printing technology is “an” – and not the – “agent of change” in the early modern period. Yet, she is less careful than McLuhan with respect to historical causality. Throughout the book she speaks of the press as the cause and of social transformation as the effect. It is no coincidence that the works of both authors have received renewed interest over the last decades, evidenced by numerous re-editions, a steadily growing secondary literature and a continuous prominence in academic syllabi. In fact, the German academic discussion of McLuhan began only in the late 1980s.13 Part of the reason maybe the adaptability of McLuhan’s theses to certain postmodern discourses. The arguably more important reason, however, was the massive transformation of the media through computer technology. While some media theorists of the internet era declared McLuhan obsolete, because his thought was largely based on the experience of radio and television, others attributed an even greater relevance to the utopian vision of the “global village,” precisely because of the emerging and swiftly expanding cyber space.14 Moreover, the increasing importance of communication through so-called social media has led to a further intensification of the debate over the last two decades. Just a few years ago, enthusiasts were dreaming about a more inclusive, pluralist, and global public discourse, about free-floating information, and about a political culture in the form of a permanent online referendum—a liquid democracy, as some called it.15 Evidence seemed to come from the important role of social media in the socalled Arab spring rebellions, in the decision-making in new political groups, such as the various European “Pirate” parties, or in the mobilization of the OccupyWall-Street movement. Most recently, however, the discourse has become more pessimistic, due to the experiences addressed as cyber-mobbing, shitstorms, fake news and filter bubbles. Currently, the global village seems to disintegrate into tribes and camps, who fight each other with fierce hostility or ignore each other entirely. Further disillusion 12 Eisenstein, The Printing Press xvi. 13 Martina Leeker and Kerstin Schmidt, “Einleitung. McLuhan neu lesen. Zur Aktualität des kanadischen Medientheoretikers,” McLuhan neu lesen 19-48. 14 Leeker and Schmidt 23ff. 15 Christian Blum and Christina Isabel Zuber, “Liquid Democracy: Potentials, Problems, and Perspectives,” Political Philosophy 24, no. 2 (June 2016): 162-82. Matthias Riedl 12 resulted from the economic exploitation and algorithmic manipulation of users by “oligo-capitalist” media corporations,16 the manipulation of democratic elections and, finally, the advance of the surveillance state through precisely those media that once promised an escape from it. While, only a decade ago, it was a sincere and widely shared hope that new media technologies would change our societies for the better, nowadays, an increasing number of people come to believe that modern media might change our social relations and democratic cultures for the worse. Yet, no matter on which side the participants in this discourse stand, in a broad sense they are all McLuhanists. They all believe that media technologies transform culture and society. But is that at all true? Let us take another look at Eisenstein. In her chapter on the reformation, she writes: The advent of printing was an important precondition for the Protestant Reformation taken as a whole; for without it one could not implement a “priesthood of all believers.” At the same time, however, the new medium also acted as a precipitant. It provided “the stroke of magic” by which an obscure theologian in Wittenberg managed to shake Saint Peter’s throne.17 In other words, without the epiphany of the press, Luther’s protest would have remained a provincial farce.18 The reference to magic, even if meant ironically, is not a coincidence. Hartmut Winkler confirms the magical implication of the McLuhanist perspective: In the centre of the magical-metaphysical conception of media stood the construct of the media-apriori itself. Thoroughly in the vein of McLuhan, [media studies] committed to a one-sided perspective on “the media” as cause (Wirkursache) and to study their effects in the social realm. Apparently, the reverse set of questions – how the media themselves come 16 Philip Dingeldey, “A fourth transformation of democracy? Liquid democracy, supranational democracy and the fate of participation,” Law, Democracy and Development 23 (2019): 181-201. 17 Eisenstein, The Printing Press 310. 18 A few paragraphs earlier she writes: “‘Rarely has one invention had more decisive influence than that of printing on the Reformation.’ Luther ‘had invited a public disputation and nobody had come to dispute.’ Then ‘by a stroke of magic he found himself addressing the whole world.’” Eisenstein, The Printing Press 309-10. The citations are from E. Gordon Rupp, Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms (Chicago, IL: Wilcox and Follett, 1951). Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 13 into the world, whether media technology could look entirely different, why certain media assert themselves and others not, in which way they interact with processes of utilization, and in which way they are baked into structures of wishfulness – was systematically obstructed.19 As we have seen, McLuhan’s Catholicism may be a motive behind this obstruction. Whoever explores the socio-historical context of typography inevitably must address the role of the Roman Church. Precisely the indulgence campaigns against which Luther protested that had turned printing into a “growth industry.”20 McLuhan’s magical-metaphysical perspective is also expressed in the following, frequently quoted paragraph from the famous 1967 essay The Media is the Massage: Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways.21 Common sense suffices to see that practically everything in this statement is wrong. Very young children do not learn words and language by absorbing the technology of the alphabet. Very young children learn words in their families and wider social environments through spoken language. In these contexts, they first learn about the meanings carried by words and combinations of words. Surprisingly little has changed in this respect over the millennia. Nowadays, the 19 Winkler 164-65. Translated by the author. 20 “Die Segnungen des Buchdrucks, der um die Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts um sich greifenden Technik der typographischen Reproduktion mit beweglichen Metallettern, wurden konsequent in den Dienst der Ablasskampagnen gestellt: Werbeplakate, Bullen, Instruktionen der Ablasskommissare und die Formulare für die Beichtbriefe, in die nur mehr die Namen der Begünstigten einzutragen waren, verließen die Pressen. Die mit den Türkenablassen und den Ablasskampagnen verbundene Druckproduktion trug wesentlich dazu bei, dass sich der Buchdruck und die Zuliefergewebe zu Wachstumsbranchen entwickelten.” Thomas Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation (Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2009) 82-83. 21 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2001) 8. Matthias Riedl 14 alphabet comes late in child development, typically in the first grade of elementary school; and children do not absorb it in a completely unconscious manner but must learn it, in more or less painful ways. But let us stay with the theme of magic for a while and turn to another set of theories addressing the theme of creativity and social change. Eric Voegelin’s Theory of Political Evocation In the 1940s, the Austrian-American political theorist Eric Voegelin rebelled against a merely doxographic history of political thought, as it was taught to students via standard textbooks. He contemplated the fundamental question of what a political idea really is. The first paragraph of the introduction to his multivolume History of Political Ideas reads as follows: To set up a government is an essay in world creation. Out of a shapeless vastness of conflicting human desires rises a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion, leading a precarious life under the pressure of destructive forces from within and without, and maintaining its existence by the ultimate threat and application of violence against the internal breaker of its law as well as the external aggressor. The application of violence, though, is the ultimate means only of creating and preserving a political order, it is not its ultimate reason: the function proper of order is the creation of a shelter in which man may give to his life a semblance of meaning.22 Remarkably, this programmatic statement likens the origin of political order to an act of creation. Certainly, man does not create the cosmos, as God does; rather man creates an analogy to the cosmos, a cosmion. Voegelin takes the analogy even further when he writes that man creates out of a “shapeless vastness,” reminiscent of the tohu wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2. The exact wording, however, is taken from Walt Whitman’s famous poem “Passage to India” (1871), responding, among others, to the opening of the Suez Canal.23 In many ways, “Passage to India” is a poem about 22 The introduction survived only in a barely legible manuscript. A transcription is now available in volume 19 of the Collected Works, as an appendix to the first volume of the posthumously published History of Political Ideas. Eric Voegelin, “Introduction,” History of Political Ideas. Vol 1: Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 19 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997) 225. 23 Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” Selected Poems 1855-1892: A New Edition, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999) 315-23. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 15 human creativity. It seems to say that the glorious technological innovations of man, such as the Suez Channel or the Pacific Railroad, create bridges between the dispersed parts of mankind; they achieve globalization, as it were, undoubtedly following a providential plan. “The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,” are Whitman’s prophetic words. Yet technology leaves unanswered the true spiritual questions of man. Science might discover the structures of the physical world, but physical nature continues to appear as cold to the human soul, as alien and ‘unnatural.’ Alluding to the spirituality of the Upanishads, Whitman explains that only the poet can truly span the earth, by meditating on the common ground of all being, and by uniting with the creative centre of the cosmos: Bathe me, O God, in thee – mounting to thee, I and my soul to range in range of thee. O Thou transcendent! Nameless – fibre and the breath! Light of the light – shedding forth universes – thou centre of them! Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving! Thou moral, spiritual fountain! Affection’s source! Thou reservoir! (O pensive soul of me! O thirst unsatisfied! Waitest not there? Waitest not haply for us, somewhere there, the Comrade perfect?) Thou pulse! Thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, Athwart the shapeless vastness of space! How should I think – how breathe a single breath – how speak – if, out of myself, I could not launch, to those, superior universes?24 Voegelin’s allusion to Whitman makes sense since both authors analyze the longing of the soul for meaning and since both contemplate the creative centre of order. Yet, at this point the difference could not be more radical. Whitman’s faith allows for the optimistic outlook on the reunion of the soul with the Divine as its “perfect Comrade.” In the moment of union, the seemingly incompatible natures of physics and of the soul will be revealed as consistent and congruent emanations from the same creative centre. Then, the technological and the poetical achievements of mankind will be known as subjects to the same Divine Providence. Voegelin, in contrast, shows no trace of mystical optimism. It is human creativity, not providence, which establishes the meaning structures into which emotions, aspirations, appetites, and desires may be integrated. Humans need to create their 24 Whitman 321. Matthias Riedl 22 Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have before. The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves […].49 Another thinker who devoted extensive research to this phenomenon, is Helmuth Plessner in his study on human expressivity.50 All three authors, Plato, Arendt, and Plessner, refer precisely to the dimension that is missing in Voegelin’s “Introduction,” namely the insight that the evocative act responds to a concrete experience – sensuous or intellectual – of a concrete person. Evocation is the calling forth of an experience into the intersubjective realm. In the early Voegelin, in contrast, the evocative act is seen as motivated by existential angst alone. Man creates not for a concrete reason but because otherwise there would be nothing but the “shapeless vastness” of unstructured desires and emotions. Voegelin’s anthropology describes man as a deficient animal, leading an incomplete existence, which needs to be complemented by the meaning structures of the cosmion.51 Voegelin corrected these shortcomings in his later works, when he characterized the symbolic structures of social order no longer as seemingly arbitrary evocations but as articulations of existential experiences, i.e., experiences of order and participation.52 But this change of perspective does not eliminate the problem of magic. Yet, even if we have clarified the original motive for the evocative act with the assistance of Plato and Arendt, other questions are still 49 Arendt, The Human Condition 50; cf. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Vol. 1: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) 98. 50 Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975) 321-41. 51 Similar views are found in Johann Gottfried Herder and Arnold Gehlen. Clifford Geertz, apparently unaware of the earlier Mängelwesen-theories, described symbolic orders as necessary “cultural programs” for ordering man’s behavior, as he would otherwise be an “incomplete, unfinished animal.” Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 42-46. 52 In 1966, Voegelin wrote that the creation of political order is “the process by which concrete persons create a social field, i.e., a field in which their experiences of order are understood by other concrete men who accept them as their own and make them into the motive of their habitual actions?” Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis. On the Theory of History and Politics, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 6 (Columbia, MO, and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002) 400. The magic, obviously, is lost. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 23 open: How does this transformation work, which first turns the experience of a concrete person into a meaningfully structured sound, not only recognizable but also, to some degree, understandable? How can it happen that, in a second stage of the process, the auditors imagine that the experience of the speaker and their own experiences are of the same kind? How does it work that the mere reception of words transforms a multitude of more or less contingent auditors into a structured community with common aims and convictions, potentially the nucleus of a new major society, a nation, a state, a church? In other words, is the problem of evocation really solved? In the next step, we are helped by Ernst Cassirer, whose Philosophy of Symbolic Forms played an important role in shaping Voegelin’s vocabulary of “experience” and “symbolization.”53 Cassirer defined his concept of symbolic form as follows: “By ‘symbolic form’ we mean any energy of the mind [Energie des Geistes], through which a meaningful content of the mind is connected with a concrete sensuous sign and is internally assigned to it.”54 Cassirer’s philosophy is only of secondary importance here; because of its neglect of the political and its idealist conception of the mind it does not connect well with Voegelin’s theory. The interesting part of Cassirer’s definition is the concept of energy which refers us back to Agrippa of Nettesheim. Agrippa, as we remember, spoke of an energia quadam, an energy by which the speaker can cause a transformative impact on his human and nonhuman environment. In Cassirer, this energy is more clearly described as the energy which transforms an inner content of the mind into the symbolic form of language; in other words, an energy which gives experience an effective form. Cassirer does not justify his choice of words but instead betrays his source, the late work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. In On the Multitude of Human Language Structures and their Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind, written in the early 1830s, Humboldt wrote: Language, if conceived in its real essence, is continuously and permanently transitory. Even its preservation in script always remains an incomplete, mummy-like conservation, which again requires to be re-sensualized in recitation. It is therefore not a work (ergon) but an activity (energeia). Its true definition, therefore, can only be a genetic one; because it is the eternally 53 Eric Voegelin, “The New Science of Politics,” Modernity Without Restraint, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5 (Columbia, MO, and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000) 96. 54 Ernst Cassirer, Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997) 175. Translated by the author. Matthias Riedl 24 self-reiterating mental labour of making the articulate sound capable of expressing thought.55 In Humboldt’s work, we observe how, by means of comparative linguistics and philosophical anthropology, the problem of magic transforms into observations on the human situation: on the physical and mental constitution of man, on historical and social constraints, but also on the essential liberty of human intellectual activity. We see how the magic is gone in the same moment as Humboldt understands that language is not essentially the work of a nation, finished and codified, subject to logical rules of vocabulary and grammar. He sees that it is not the work (ergon) of the human mind but its actual and permanent activity (energeia), or put differently, that understanding means speaking.56 Humboldt also seems to be the first philosopher to maintain that language does neither reproduce an objective external reality nor a subjective inner reality but that it permanently creates and recreates the ‘standpoint’ from which we perceive internal and external reality. The last quotation from Humboldt here shows that he, like Voegelin, identified the sphere of the political as the primary sphere of perception that is formed by language: Just as a single sound intervenes between the object and man, language as a whole intervenes between man and the internal and external nature which are affecting him. He encloses himself in a world of sounds in order to perceive and process the objective world. These articulations in no way transgress the measure of simple truth. Since man’s perception and action entirely depend on his imagination, he lives together with objects exclusively in the way language conveys them. In the same act, in which he spins language out of himself, he spins himself into language; and every language draws a circle around the nation it belongs to – a circle one can only leave by entering another one. Learning a foreign language should therefore mean the same as gaining a new world view […].57 55 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in fünf Bänden. Bd. 3: Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963) 418. Translated by the author. 56 Cf. Hans Schwarz, “Enérgeia, Sprache als (Humboldt),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer and Gottfried Gabriel (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1971-2007) 2:492-94. 57 Humboldt, Werke 3: 434. Translated by the author. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 25 The aim here is not to build a linguistic theory by complementing Voegelin’s unfinished framework with seemingly suitable building blocks; the aim rather is to show where the origins of social creativity are to be sought for: in the complex ways in which humans communicate meaning through language and not in the technologies employed for this purpose. For good reasons, this article makes little reference to modern sociolinguistics or the even younger sub-discipline of political linguistics, concerned with political rhetoric. Any attempt at understanding creativity cannot begin there, because in these disciplines, the existence of societies is always presupposed, wherefore the decisive moments of socio-political creation, the evocative acts, never come into sight. Thomas Müntzer’s Revolution The final section of this article is devoted to a brief case study taking us back to the question raised at the beginning: what are the creative processes that lead to religio-political transformations in the early modern era. Despite their theological and political differences, chief protagonists of the early reformation, such as Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt, and Thomas Müntzer, were masters of language: their actual creativity lies not in the use of media, but in their use of the vernacular. Eisenstein rightly remarks that, already in the years 1517 to 1520, Luther’s writing had been sold in hundreds of thousands of printed copies. But what would have been the numbers, had Luther written exclusively in Latin? Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer, all built on the vernacular theology that had been created by late medieval mystical preachers, especially by the Dominicans Meister Eckhardt, Henry Suso, and Johannes Tauler, but they were no longer addressing monks and nuns. Thus, the reformers created an entire linguistic universe, in which lay people could discuss all religious and social matters, and articulate internal and external experiences. They were teaching the people a new language, so to speak. Already the pre-Gutenberg era had witnessed a massive rebellion in Bohemia and the (albeit temporary) religio-political breakaway of a major European region from the Roman Church.58 The decades leading up to the rebellion see an exponential growth of vernacular preaching and an interrelated, swiftly growing spiritual sensitivity of the laity, even in the countryside.59 The same can be said about the early reformation period. In 1979, Elizabeth Eisenstein certainly had a 58 This fact is conspicuously downplayed by Eisenstein. Cf. Eisenstein, The Printing Press 310f. 59 See Pavel Soukup, “Jan Hus as a Preacher,” A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. František Šmahel (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2015) 96-129; especially the quantitative data on pp. 96-98. Matthias Riedl 26 point when she complained about the neglect of technological developments by intellectual historians. Nowadays, the slogan “No Reformation without the printing press!”60 has become a commonplace and has overshadowed the agitative and formative force of the vernacular.61 More recent research shows that it was not the printing press that created a public sphere for vernacular theology; rather it was the growing desire for vernacular theology that caused the enormous output of print shops.62 In the background of the desire is the declining faith in the Latinspeaking clerical church and its sacraments as a safe way to redemption. If we look at the evocation of new communities in the early reformation period, the case of Martin Luther is most surprising, since the foundation of a church was not planned; it rather happened to him.63 Since Luther had declared the Pope to be the Antichrist and since he had shaken the institutional foundations of the Roman Church – indulgence and absolution, sacramental ordination, scholastic 60 The slogan was coined by the German reformation scholar Bernd Moeller in same year 1979, in which Elizabeth Eisenstein published her Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Bernd Moeller, “Stadt und Buch. Bemerkungen zur Struktur der reformatorischen Bewegung in Deutschland,” Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Göttingen: Klett-Cotta, 1979) 30. 61 Joachim Bauer, Stefan Michel, Alternative Predigt? Beobachtungen zur kursächsischen Predigerlandschaft neben Luther, Karlstadt und Müntzer bis 1525 (Mühlhausen: ThomasMüntzer-Gesellschaft, 2018). 62 “Dass die Druckproduktion infolge der Reformation dauerhaft angestiegen ist, wird man als Konsequenz einer nachhaltigen Wirkung infolge eines spezifischen Funktionsgewinns des volkssprachlichen Buches zu interpretieren haben.” Thomas Kaufmann, “‘Ohne Buchdruck keine Reformation’?” Buchdruck und Buchkultur im Wittenberg der Reformationszeit, ed. Stefan Oehmig (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015) 31. 63 In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann beautifully described this counter-intentional evocation of church community at the example of a religiously inspired émigré to America: “But then a new wave of religious emotion had swept over him, and he followed the inner call to lead the spare, totally isolated life of a hermit in the wilderness, thinking only of God. But as it often happens that the fugitive, in fleeing humankind, may find his life entwined with his fellow man, he, too, soon found himself surrounded by a host of admiring followers and imitators of his seclusion; and instead of being rid of the world he was promptly, on a moment’s notice, made head of a community that quickly developed into an independent sect, the Seventh Day Baptists, whom he ruled all the more absolutely since, to his knowledge, he had never sought out leadership, but had been called to it against his wishes and intentions.” Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. John Woods (New York: Vintage International, 1999) 71-72. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 27 theology, dogma, canon law –, his followers were looking for alternatives. Naturally, Luther’s evocation of an invisible Church as the true kingdom of Christ was not suitable for revolutionary agitation, and it was not meant to be. But while Luther was reluctant to create a new church, alternative religio-political evocations soon emerged from the circle of his followers, for instance, Andreas Karlstadt’s evocation of a “Christian City.” Luther intervened forcefully and reclaimed his leadership over the German reform movement. But by negativepolemical evocation, his own church was slowly taking institutional shape, with censorship as one of its first visible features.64 A positive and revolutionary evocation of community, in contrast, we find in Thomas Müntzer. Already in his 1521 Prague Manifesto, he announced that from his preaching activity a renewed apostolic church (renovata ecclesia apostolica) would emerge. This community of saints would survive the ravage of Turk and Antichrist and would then receive, from Christ’s own hands, the dominion over a purified world for all eternity.65 In this future theocracy, “the God of the Gods will appear on Zion forever.”66 Müntzer was not as easily silenced as Karlstadt. As an itinerant preacher he created an enormous uproar in a number of larger and smaller cities. Wherever he arrived, he followed the same basic strategy.67 First, he identified the most important competitors, priests, friars, and soon the followers of Luther; next, he denounced them as preachers of a fictious faith and ridiculed them in sermons. Then, he established his own teaching of the “true” faith as a radical alternative. Finally, he explained that there were only two choices: to be with him or against him, to be with Christ or Antichrist. It is amazing to see how quickly the linguistic 64 Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017) 206-37. “Over the next years, and through a series of polemics, pamphlets, letters, disputes, and negotiations with his rivals, Luther tacitly abandoned the project of reforming the Church. Instead he began to create a church of his own.” Roper 333. Cf. Heinz Schilling, Martin Luther. Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs (München: Beck, 2013) 415-17. 65 Thomas Müntzer, Thomas-Müntzer-Ausgabe. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Helmar Junghans and Armin Kohnle (Leipzig: Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 200417) 1:427. For context and a detailed source analysis see Matthias Riedl, “Thomas Müntzer’s Prague Manifesto: A Case Study in the Secularization of the Apocalypse,” Éthique, politique, religions 4 (2014): 47-68. 66 Thomas-Müntzer-Ausgabe 1:440. 67 See Matthias Riedl, “Apocalyptic Violence and Revolutionary Action: Thomas Müntzer’s Sermon to the Princes,” A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse, ed. Michael A. Ryan (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016) 275-76. Matthias Riedl 28 evocation of two antagonistic collectives created actual social realities. Wherever Müntzer arrived, he managed in a very brief period to split the populace into two parties, his followers and his enemies, who would soon start to fight each other. In most cases, Müntzer’s conduct led to his expulsion by municipal or territorial authorities. Not so in the city of Allstedt, where the entire citizenry submitted to his spiritual leadership and Müntzer could finally begin to shape the community he had imagined. In a first stage, he translated the Latin Mass into German, a pioneering step in the German reformation. Lutherans accused him of merely translating the text without revising it according to reform theology. But this is not a fair allegation. In many instances, Müntzer purposefully changed the wording to evoke the counter-image of Luther’s invisible church. Wherever the original texts address “the people,” “the faithful,” or simply “humans,” Müntzer put “the elect.” The German mass put a lay community in the position to sing responsorials, psalms, and canticles in their own language and to grow in the awareness that preacher and audience constituted a visible community of God’s elect.68 Contrary to previous practice, Müntzer faced the community and not the altar when celebrating the mass, adding further to a sense of eschatological equality. Soon, Müntzer announced the creation of a new covenant with God; and the linguistic evocation in his sermon instantly took institutional form: “After the mass, the crowd moved to the cellar of the town hall and entered their names in the new list of the covenant.”69 The people must have felt some magic in this revolutionary moment, when they signed up for salvation. And, maybe, the experience of a formative force radiating from speech constitutes the core of what we otherwise address as charisma. Hans-Jürgen Goertz writes about this moment: “The new convenient replaces the old legal order; it is a revolutionary institution, the first organizational consequence from his revolutionary theory.”70 This is correct, but in-between theory and institution lies speech, linguistic evocation. Müntzer initiated religiopolitical discourses, which did not only allow for explaining all the misery that people were confronted with; it also enabled people from all standings to integrate into the discourse and, thus, become part of new social structures. 68 For the interrelation of ecclesiology and liturgy in the early reformation period see: Artur Göser, Kirche und Lied: der Hymnus ‘Veni redemptor gentium’ bei Müntzer und Luther. Eine ideologiekritische Studie (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995). 69 Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Thomas Müntzer. Mystiker. Apokalyptiker. Revolutionär (München: Beck, 1989) 114. Translated by the author. 70 Goertz 115. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 29 The evocation of the new covenant was a spectacular success. Thousands flocked to Allstedt from neighbouring communities, until the processions were violently stopped by frightened territorial lords, executing the 1523 imperial decree against reformation preaching. An angry Müntzer turned to the higher authority of the Saxon Elector, evoking in ever more fantastic images. In his famous Sermon to the Princes, he explained that his movement was the apocalyptic stone from the Book of Daniel, rolling toward the destruction of the idol, meaning the entire religio-political order. The princes could either roll with the people or be rolled over.71 But Müntzer was no less creative in evoking negative images of the enemy. Already in his earlier Prague Manifesto he had painted the powerful image of a Catholic clergy, ordained by Satan and anointed with the oil of sinners.72 Addressing the rulers of Saxony, he likened the cooperation of secular lords with Catholic prelates to “eels and snakes coupling together immorally in one great heap.”73 The propagation of such images needed no printing press, by word of mouth people learned what Müntzer had dared to speak into the face of the mightiest princes. A related area of creativity is insults. Martin Luther enriched the German language with many innovations, ranging from proverbs to swearwords.74 Müntzer was no less fanciful. He crafted new adjectives like hodenseckysch (scrotum-like) and hurnhengestig (stallion-like-hot for prostitutes).75 And he addressed the Pope as the pisspot of Rome and Luther as a sack of maggots or as the softly living flesh of Wittenberg. Luther paid back in kind, addressing Müntzer as the Satan of Allstedt and a swarming spirit. Yet, the purpose of these insults was not polemics alone. The pictorial character of their insults, often with sexual connotations, provoked the imagination of the auditors and made them laugh. Most people may not always have known the precise content of Luther’s or Müntzer’s teaching, but they knew by what names the reformers called the Pope and by what names they called each other. Well-crafted insults are like magic spells; with reference to Agrippa of Nettesheim, they may be seen as a form of negative linguistic energy which ridicules and, thereby, deprives the opponent of power. 71 Riedl, “Müntzer’s Sermon to the Princes” 261-62. 72 Thomas-Müntzer-Ausgabe 1:436-37. 73 Thomas-Müntzer-Ausgabe 1:314-15. 74 Cf. Hartmut Günther, Mit Feuereifer und Herzenslust. Wie Luther unsere Sprache prägte (Berlin: Dudenverlag, 2017). 75 Cf. Ingo Warnke, Wörterbuch zu Thomas Müntzers deutschen Schriften und Briefen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). Matthias Riedl 30 It seems that Müntzer was on the best way to becoming more popular than Martin Luther. Certainly, his reform project, which aimed at a complete renewal of the religio-political order, was more attractive to many than Luther’s Fürstenreformation.76 When the peasants began to revolt against their lords, Müntzer shifted his attention from the towns to the countryside. He became the preacher of an army which carried a rainbow flag, the symbol of God’s postdiluvial pact with Noah.77 The evocation of the covenant reached ever wider segments of society. Horrified Luther agitated fiercely against his chief rival, also by means of the printing press. Eventually, he succeeded, but not because he was more widely published than Müntzer. Luther succeeded because his model of reform appealed to the mighty and left the established princely powers in place. Ultimately, Müntzer was not stopped by the printing press, but by an army and a headsman. Müntzer was no less eager than Luther to see his pamphlets printed. The prints were often produced under precarious and clandestine circumstances. They were circulated in underground circles and discussed within the incipient Anabaptist movement. But in the second half of the 1520s, after all uprisings had been crushed, all leaders executed, and all revolutionary hopes evaporated, not a million printed copies of the Sermon to the Princes would have revived the rebellion. The experiential situation was now a different one. Conclusion Since Michel Foucault, discourse analysis tends to search for the power mechanisms behind the production and containment of discourses. Moreover, discourses themselves or the ominous “will to power” seem to constitute the real agents of history, while the “subject as an agent of change” disappears.78 But the Foucauldian perspective is no less one-sided than the McLuhanist one. It is true that Foucault increased awareness of the fact that experience and symbolic articulation occur in discursive environments and are never purely “subjective,” but his approach cannot explain the immense creativity of individual agents. The sensuous and intellectual experience of the reformer is real; it is an internal reality, 76 Schilling 304-10. 77 Goertz 145. 78 See Foucault’s programmatic inaugural lecture at the Collège de France: Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 51-78. Cf. Mark Bevir, “Foucault, Power, and Institutions,” Political Studies 47 (1999): 349. Creativity in the Early Reformation Period 31 which desires to become an external social reality, through the articulation of experience in symbolic narratives. The linguistic evocations of the early reformation period initiated the transformation and re-shaping of the European religio-political order, even if they are not the only factors in the play. They created the cosmions, which allowed millions of people to reintegrate their individual existence, after the old symbolic orders could no longer integrate desires for salvation and protect from notions of meaninglessness and despair. In this process, the printing press was a powerful tool, but at no point it was the agent of change and the source of creativity. The source of creativity was the experience of religiously and politically sensitive individuals. But experience and sensitivity are not enough: it also needed the rare linguistic and symbolic resourcefulness of the likes of Luther and Müntzer that allowed for an evocation of alternative realities, for transforming experience into discourses and, consequently, new social forms. The intention of this article is not to deny the role of media technologies in the transformation of societies; this would be a foolish endeavour. The intention is rather to express a warning against establishing simplistic causalities. Such a warning may be topical today for the reasons outlined in the beginning. We should be careful ascribing too much creativity to the media also in in our own days, creativity in a constructive or destructive sense. Media technologies play an enormous role in the proliferation of discourses, of destructive ones, such as conspiracy theories, but also of constructive ones, creating awareness of social discrimination or environmental pollution. These discourses are shaping new social and political realities: protest movements, political parties, and interest groups. However, then and now, it is people who speak, with or without the use of technology. BIBLIOGRAPHY Agrippa of Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius. De occulta philosophia. Lyon: Godefroy et Marcellin Beringen, 1550. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Vol. 1: Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Arendt, Hannah. Vita Activa oder Vom tätigen Leben. München: Piper, 1998.