{"id":66927,"date":"2023-05-19T06:00:27","date_gmt":"2023-05-19T10:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=66927"},"modified":"2023-05-15T18:37:17","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T22:37:17","slug":"luthers-rabelaisian-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2023\/05\/luthers-rabelaisian-humor\/","title":{"rendered":"Luther’s Rabelaisian Humor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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As I said in yesterday\u2019s post, in scouring the internet searching for the source of a Luther quote on laughter, I came across several articles on Luther\u2019s humor\u2013his wit, his satires, and even his scatology, which one scholar found similar to that of another Renaissance monk and scholar, the comical but filthy genius Rabelais\u2013and how this relates to his theology.<\/p>\n

Luther is certainly the one major theologian who, in the midst of the most serious and intense reflection, will make you laugh.\u00a0 C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton have that power also, but they are religious writers, not theologians, as such.<\/p>\n

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Carl Trueman, who is both a religious writer and a theologian of the Reformed variety, said this in the conclusion of his book Luther on the Christian Life:\u00a0 Cross and Freedom<\/a>.\u00a0 As published in World<\/em> as \u201cLaughing with Luther<\/a>\u201c:<\/p>\n

Over twenty years ago, I was being interviewed for what would prove to be my first tenured appointment at a university. Halfway through the ordeal, one of the interviewers asked me, \u201cIf you were trapped on a desert island, who would you want with you\u2014Luther or Calvin?\u201d My response was rea\u00adsonably nuanced for a reply to an unexpected question: \u201cWell, I think Cal\u00advin would provide the best theological and exegetical discussion, but he always strikes me as somewhat sour and colorless. Luther, however, may not have been as careful a theologian, but he was so obviously human and so clearly loved life. Thus, I\u2019d have to choose Luther.\u201d Later that day, I was offered the position of lecturer in medieval and Reformation theology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After Trueman expresses his appreciation for the objectivity<\/em> of Luther\u2019s theology, he takes up Luther\u2019s humor:<\/p>\n

In general terms, of course, Protestant theologians have not been renowned for their wit, and Protestant theology has not been distinguished by its laughter. Yet Luther laughed all the time, whether poking fun at himself, at Katie, at his colleagues, or indeed at his countless and ever-increasing number of enemies. Humor was a large part of what helped to make him so human and accessible. And in a world where everyone always seems to be \u201churt\u201d by something someone has said or offended by this or that, Luther\u2019s robust mockery of pretension and pomposity is a remarkable theological contribution in and of itself.<\/p>\n

I think there is probably a theological reason for Luther\u2019s laughter too. Humor often plays on the absurd, and Luther knew that this fallen world was not as it was designed to be and was thus absurd and futile in a most significant and powerful way.<\/p>\n

Luther knew that the tragedy and the comedy of fallen humanity is that we have such a laughable view of ourselves: one that would aspire to tell God who and what he must be. As humans are at once both righteous and sinful, so human existence is at once both heartbreaking and hilarious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eric Gritsch wrote an entire book on the subject:\u00a0 The Wit of Martin Luther<\/a>:, which he summarized in an article entitled Martin Luther\u2019s Humor<\/a>.\u00a0 It begins with this:<\/p>\n

Martin Luther (1483\u20131546) is the only \u201cchurch father\u201d who incorporated humor into his life and work. He did so by posing as a court jester (an advertised self-image), a quick wit, a facetious wag, and a sit-down comedian with humorous comments in more than five thousand \u201ctable talks.\u201d His humor has to be taken seriously as an integral part of his literary legacy in the still-incomplete Weimar Edition of more than a hundred oversized volumes, published since 1883. Though known for many proverbial witticisms (\u201cNo one can become an expert among ignoramuses\u201d), Luther made humor an integral part of his extensive theological reflections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most interesting study to me, literary historian with a specialty in the Renaissance that I am, was The truth of laughter: Rereading Luther as a contemporary of Rabelais Dialogism<\/a>\u00a0in An International Journal of Bakhtin Studies<\/em>, 1 (3), 52-77, by a scholar from the Netherlands named Hub Zwart.<\/p>\n

Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais<\/a> (died 1553) was a French monk, Greek scholar, physician, and satirist, known best for his sprawling comical proto-novels Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/a>.\u00a0 These books capture virtually all of the issues and the accomplishments of the Renaissance and are hilarious, but they are also notoriously rude and crude, turning bodily function jokes into an art form.\u00a0 Rabelais lampoons the corruption of his day, including that of the church.\u00a0 Though he was a monk, he speaks positively of \u201cevangelical preachers,\u201d the E-word referring then to Lutherans, one of the few groups that escape his pen relatively unscathed.\u00a0 Not that he was one, as far as I have found.\u00a0 He was probably closer to his fellow humanist scholar Erasmus.<\/p>\n

Mikhail Bakhtin<\/a> was an influential Russian thinker and literary theorist, one of whose books was Rabelais and His World.<\/a>\u00a0In it, he related Rabelais to the spirit of the medieval carnival<\/em> (as in Mardi Gras), defined his style as \u201cgrotesque realism,\u201d and looked at the social role of laughter, arguing that \u201claughing truth \u2026 degraded power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zwart relates what Bakhtin says about Rabelais to Luther, who at least once refers to Gargantua <\/em>and so probably read him.\u00a0 Zwart, drawing on Bakhtin,\u00a0 says that medieval scholasticism, like the church and the society as a whole, was hierarchical, formalistic, and abstract, with the effect of promoting \u201cgothic terror\u201d (think the continual worry about Hell and the threat of thousands of years in Purgatory even for the saved).\u00a0 \u00a0The exuberance of Rabelais in society and Luther in religion countered that strict and claustrophobic system.\u00a0 Their earthiness and emphasis on the body in its \u201clowest\u201d functions countered the abstract, disembodied nature of medieval thought, and the \u201cgothic terror\u201d was countered with the joyous freedom of laughter.<\/p>\n

Zwart says that in the conventional reading of Luther \u201cwe are urged to distinguish between the theological content of his work \u2013 which is to be preserved and purified \u2013 and the vulgar remainder, the grobian<\/a> elements that are abundantly present in his writings (and even highly characteristic of his style), but must be regarded as irrelevant or even inconvenient from a theological point of view.\u201d\u00a0 But instead of trying to clean up Luther, Zwart tries to relate the two dimensions:<\/p>\n

My re-reading of Luther, however, starts form the contention that it is impossible to detach \u2018official\u2019 content from the vulgarities and obscenities of his language, simply because there is a fundamental congeniality between the both. It was the basic mood of laughter that allowed him to discern a new and liberating truth in a setting that was still dominated by gothic terror.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Zwart says of Table Talk<\/em>, \u201cthe laughing tone, the carefree vocabulary, the gross exaggerations, the fearless truth and the astonishing, uninhibited scholarship of Luther\u2019s Tischreden<\/em> are quite in accordance with the speech genre referred to by Bakhtin as \u201cthe Banquet form of speech, liberated from fear and piousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says of Luther\u2019s conversion, \u201cwe are faced with a Gestalt-switch \u2013 a sudden transformation of a gloomy catholic into a jolly protestant, a sudden shift from gothic horror into Renaissance gaiety \u2013 due to the decisive experience of laughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recall that Luther was trying to reform an all-controlling church and an all-controlled society.\u00a0 Zwart says that Luther\u2019s style\u2013including his humor with all of its satire, coarseness, and insults\u2013helped to achieve that.\u00a0 Here are some samplings of what he says:<\/p>\n

Laughter is the sudden awareness of the lack, the shortcomings, the vulnerabilities of established discourse, of the official truth, otherwise held to be eternal and indisputable. . . .<\/p>\n

Extra-temporal truths were exposed to ridicule, due to the techniques of laughter. As was explained above, one such technique consisted in degrading lofty discourse by reconnecting it with corporeal life, notably the body\u2019s lower stratum. In Luther\u2019s work, this technique is very important. It is quite prominent in his Prandial Conversations, but present in other, more \u2018official\u2019 works as well. Verbal abuse, relying on degradation, is a characteristic ingredient of his style. The persistent reference to bodily life is inherent to his carefree vocabulary, allowing 12 him to articulate his fearless truth. . . .<\/p>\n

By verbal degradation, the terrible powers of the church became humanized, the intimidating vertical distance of the Word suddenly found itself reduced. Excremental abuses indicated that all human beings, whether Pope or peasant, are basically equal because the daily life of our bodies (notably their lower half) is basically equal. And this has a crucial topological effect. Due to carefree abuse, the frightening silhouettes of Pope, Cardinals and all the other once dreaded spokesmen of verticalized official truth are familiarized into human beings quite like us. . . .<\/p>\n

Like in the case of Rabelais, Luther\u2019s language and laughter destroy the \u201cfalse idealization\u201d of the established speech genres and render them implausible, in order for new forms of communication to become possible. The essence of his method consists in the destruction of habitual matrices \u2013 such as the identification of ecclesia with the Church of Rome, or the identification of Divine Justice with Divine Punishment \u2013 and the subsequent creation of unexpected associative matrices, including the most surprising logical links and linguistic connections \u2013 a freeing of consciousness that had become imprisoned within a tyrannical discourse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a fascinating article, but I have some caveats, and not just because some of the quotations he gives includes language that violates the standards of appropriateness held by this blog.\u00a0 It has long been observed that much of what Luther writes cannot be printed in Lutheran publications.\u00a0 Which itself is extremely funny.<\/p>\n

But Bakhtin\u2019s Marxism is evident in his class warfare rhetoric and in his fondness for revolution.\u00a0 (Marxists consider Luther to be a social revolutionary, though using the language of religion, to overthrow the feudal order, which is a good thing, though the subsequent bourgeois order would later be overthrown by the proletariat.)<\/p>\n

Zwart also exaggerates the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.\u00a0 \u201cRabelaisian\u201d humor, including satires on the corruption of the church as well as a measure of scatology, can also be found throughout medieval comedy, most notably in Chaucer.\u00a0 In fact, it was commonplace in comical and satirical\u00a0 literature through the 18th century, including with the clergymen Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift, up until the Victorian age.\u00a0 Perhaps cultures that didn\u2019t have indoor plumbing were more frank about bodily functions and that we post-Victorians with our squeamishness and proprieties are the true outliers.<\/p>\n

At any rate, Luther himself would sometimes confess that his vituperations were sometimes out of line and fell short of the love of neighbor and the love of enemies that Christ calls for.\u00a0 And it is never a good idea for those of us who are not comic geniuses like Luther and Rabelais to try to do what they did.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n