On Luther's Emotional Language: A Review by Timothy Wengert
“Laßt uns fröhlich springen!”: Gefühlswelt und Gefühlsnavigierung in Luthers Reformationsarbeit: Eine cognitive Emotionalitätsanalyse auf philologischer Basis. By Birgit Stolt. Berlin: Weidler, 2012. 350 pp.
Birgit Stolt, the premier scholar of Luther’s language in the world, provides the reader a rich harvest from a lifetime analyzing Luther’s thought as reflected in his words. Combined with her Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Herzens (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), this book should be required reading for every serious scholar of Luther. Translation of one or more chapters from the book’s second major section in Lutheran Quarterly some time in the future might help overcome ignorance of her scholarship in the English-speaking world, which must content itself with articles from Lutheran Quarterly in 1994 and from the Seminary Ridge Review of 2002 (the latter reprinted in this book).
What Oberman and his students did for Luther’s relation to the late Middle Ages, Stolt has done for Luther’s language—especially for Luther’s emotive style and how he joins intellect and affect in the human heart. She gathers together a lifetime of engagement with Luther’s language, as a professor of German in Sweden, and overturns some of the most prevalent errors in Luther studies—perpetrated by historians, translators, systematic theologians, and even the reviewer of this volume alike. While her initial work in the 1960s on Luther’s Table Talk and on his tractate on Christian freedom was often ignored or dismissed, one hopes that a new generation of scholars will take seriously her insights into Luther’s language and rhetoric and their emotive power.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents recent research on the role of emotion in thinking and speaking, with the first chapter discussing how various cultures express such emotions, research that she then applies to Luther’s “world of feeling.” A second chapter on the role of fear and love brings new insight into that famous duo from the Small Catechism but also examines Luther’s bilingual world, arguing that Luther and his colleagues were equally at home in two languages (German and Latin) and that the two continually influenced one another. A final chapter examines fear, love and trust and how they interact in Luther’s thought. Here Stolt reminds us of the importance of Luther’s experience as a family man, where he saw how fear, love and trust combined in his own children (see the Table Talk, no. 3566a) or how God, like a parent, overlooks the stench of a child out of love.
The second part consists of previously published articles, many of which provide harsh criticism for the revision in the 1970s of Luther’s Bible translation, in large part because the academic scholars ignored the emotional, sacral world that Luther sought to capture with his translations. (There is also a brilliant article on Luther’s letters of comfort to Melanchthon from the Coburg.) Scholars misinterpret Luther’s famous line, “Look the people in the mouth” (“Schau das Volk aufs Maul”), not only because they imagine the word “Maul” was already a crude expression in the sixteenth century but also, as she proves repeatedly, because they ignore how Luther captured the sacral nature of especially the New Testament, where already Luke and Matthew were imitating Hebraic formulae preserved in the Septuagint (e. g., the overuse of the word “and,” the phrase “it came to pass” and “behold”), words that also have not fared well in modern English translations. Using the egregious, “Hello there Mary,” from an English paraphrase that made it into print in German, Stolt shows that even Luther’s famous discussion of the Angel’s greeting at the Annunciation was not reduced to vulgar speech but that Luther assumed that Gabriel, who spoke Hebrew in heaven, used on earth a particular sacral form of greeting already reflected in the book of Daniel. She summarizes her findings on Luther’s translating skills as “… at the same time tradition-bound, humanist and modern. In the concrete address of the angel [Gabriel] he reflects late-medieval thinking; in hermeneutical procedures he reflects humanist approaches to texts; in pragmatic translation methods, where he takes the situation, personal idiom … and ritualized speech into account (as well as considering the language and speech, or [language] system, and the distinction between meaning, signification and sense), he stands at the pinnacle of the science of speech and translation in our own day” (260f).
Only very rarely could the author’s argument be improved, as when she argues (282) that Luther’s Bible was not in “pocketbook format” and therefore meant for Christian worship rather than for private reading. While her conclusion is spot on, even Luther’s Bible found use in a wide variety of contexts (note the Small Catechism’s woodcuts and Household Chart [Table of Duties]). Luther’s Bibles themselves contained not only sacred text but also illustrations, prefaces and glosses, proving that the audience for such a translation was much wider than simply the worshiping community and included the worshiping community of Christian households. Yet even this small correction simply supports her central argument: that Luther created a Bible text filled with sacral and common language, with information and emotion, designed to stimulate simultaneously the intellect and the affect of the hearer. When reading this book, one may well be moved (as the title says) to jump for joy.
Timothy Wengert
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Birgit Stolt, the premier scholar of Luther’s language in the world, provides the reader a rich harvest from a lifetime analyzing Luther’s thought as reflected in his words. Combined with her Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Herzens (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), this book should be required reading for every serious scholar of Luther. Translation of one or more chapters from the book’s second major section in Lutheran Quarterly some time in the future might help overcome ignorance of her scholarship in the English-speaking world, which must content itself with articles from Lutheran Quarterly in 1994 and from the Seminary Ridge Review of 2002 (the latter reprinted in this book).
What Oberman and his students did for Luther’s relation to the late Middle Ages, Stolt has done for Luther’s language—especially for Luther’s emotive style and how he joins intellect and affect in the human heart. She gathers together a lifetime of engagement with Luther’s language, as a professor of German in Sweden, and overturns some of the most prevalent errors in Luther studies—perpetrated by historians, translators, systematic theologians, and even the reviewer of this volume alike. While her initial work in the 1960s on Luther’s Table Talk and on his tractate on Christian freedom was often ignored or dismissed, one hopes that a new generation of scholars will take seriously her insights into Luther’s language and rhetoric and their emotive power.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents recent research on the role of emotion in thinking and speaking, with the first chapter discussing how various cultures express such emotions, research that she then applies to Luther’s “world of feeling.” A second chapter on the role of fear and love brings new insight into that famous duo from the Small Catechism but also examines Luther’s bilingual world, arguing that Luther and his colleagues were equally at home in two languages (German and Latin) and that the two continually influenced one another. A final chapter examines fear, love and trust and how they interact in Luther’s thought. Here Stolt reminds us of the importance of Luther’s experience as a family man, where he saw how fear, love and trust combined in his own children (see the Table Talk, no. 3566a) or how God, like a parent, overlooks the stench of a child out of love.
The second part consists of previously published articles, many of which provide harsh criticism for the revision in the 1970s of Luther’s Bible translation, in large part because the academic scholars ignored the emotional, sacral world that Luther sought to capture with his translations. (There is also a brilliant article on Luther’s letters of comfort to Melanchthon from the Coburg.) Scholars misinterpret Luther’s famous line, “Look the people in the mouth” (“Schau das Volk aufs Maul”), not only because they imagine the word “Maul” was already a crude expression in the sixteenth century but also, as she proves repeatedly, because they ignore how Luther captured the sacral nature of especially the New Testament, where already Luke and Matthew were imitating Hebraic formulae preserved in the Septuagint (e. g., the overuse of the word “and,” the phrase “it came to pass” and “behold”), words that also have not fared well in modern English translations. Using the egregious, “Hello there Mary,” from an English paraphrase that made it into print in German, Stolt shows that even Luther’s famous discussion of the Angel’s greeting at the Annunciation was not reduced to vulgar speech but that Luther assumed that Gabriel, who spoke Hebrew in heaven, used on earth a particular sacral form of greeting already reflected in the book of Daniel. She summarizes her findings on Luther’s translating skills as “… at the same time tradition-bound, humanist and modern. In the concrete address of the angel [Gabriel] he reflects late-medieval thinking; in hermeneutical procedures he reflects humanist approaches to texts; in pragmatic translation methods, where he takes the situation, personal idiom … and ritualized speech into account (as well as considering the language and speech, or [language] system, and the distinction between meaning, signification and sense), he stands at the pinnacle of the science of speech and translation in our own day” (260f).
Only very rarely could the author’s argument be improved, as when she argues (282) that Luther’s Bible was not in “pocketbook format” and therefore meant for Christian worship rather than for private reading. While her conclusion is spot on, even Luther’s Bible found use in a wide variety of contexts (note the Small Catechism’s woodcuts and Household Chart [Table of Duties]). Luther’s Bibles themselves contained not only sacred text but also illustrations, prefaces and glosses, proving that the audience for such a translation was much wider than simply the worshiping community and included the worshiping community of Christian households. Yet even this small correction simply supports her central argument: that Luther created a Bible text filled with sacral and common language, with information and emotion, designed to stimulate simultaneously the intellect and the affect of the hearer. When reading this book, one may well be moved (as the title says) to jump for joy.
Timothy Wengert
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
