Reformed Learning

In an essay on “Reformation” in her recent collection, The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson observes that Latin remained culturally dominant in England even into the age of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Julian of Norwich. Latin’s hegemony “did have the advantage of making the learned classes mutually intelligible across the boundaries of nationality.” Yet this was at the cost of excluding “the great majority of people from participation in the most central concerns of their own civilization” (19).

Contempt for the vernacular buttressed Latin: “Thomas More was scathing on the subject. Despite the examples of John Gower and Julian of Norwich, More scoffed at William Tyndale’s rendering agape by the word ‘love’ in place of the conventional ‘charity.’ Love, he said, was a word that might be used by ‘any Jack’” (19). Therefore a word ill befitting the sacred text. And More’s contempt for the low English of Tyndale’s Bible was not unrelated to More’s call for Tyndale to be burned at the stake. Mixing low English into high texts made Tyndale a subversive.

As were all the Reformers on this point: “All the conflict and denunciation, all the bitter polemic and violence, tends to distract attention from a remarkable and very beautiful fact: the learned men in Bohemia, German, France, and Britain who articulated the faith of the Reform and who created its central documents were devoted to the work of removing the barrier between learned and unlearned by making Christianity fully intelligible in the common language. They were devoted to the work of ending an advantage they themselves enjoyed, by making learning broadly available through translation and publication” (29-20).

A revolution in religious education, accompanied by a bold revolution taste: “these writers heard the beauty in common speech, the very different speech of their various regions, and produced that beauty faithfully in their own use of these languages.” Robinson is rightly in awe of the achievement: “To be sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of anything a culture has stigmatized as a mark of ignorance, or as vulgar in both senses of the word, would have required respect and affection that saw past such prejudices. The ability to hear the power and elegance of these languages would have been simultaneous with the impulse the honor the generality of people by giving them, first of all, the Bible” (20).