Sacred Things: Literature in Light of the Reformation

The Reformers' Views on Literature

Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash

In 1523, the father of the Protestant Movement, Martin Luther, wrote a letter to a friend to congratulate him on a well-written poem. Luther remarked that the only thing he wanted for the youth of his religious movement was education in literary arts, ultimately vowing “that there should be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see clearly that by no other methods is it possible to train men for the apt understanding . . . and felicitous treatment of sacred things.” Luther believed that art should be used to understand the sacred, rejecting the Catholic church’s tendency to replace the sacred with iconoclastic art pieces. Rhetorically, art's purpose was to bring the audience to a greater understanding of God.


However, by 1555, this attitude towards the arts dramatically shifted. Luther’s successor of Protestant thought, John Calvin, “allowed no art other than music, and even that could not involve instruments.” In his religious stronghold of Geneva, Switzerland, Calvin punished those who did not conform to this rule (and others) by death or banishment. Calvin seemed to separate literature from his definition of art, however, because he himself was the author of copious amounts of prose and many poems. Even the straight-laced Calvin realized the power of words, literature, and rhetoric to educate his audience about sacred things.

The Literature Legacy of Reformation Ideals

Today, in 2019, I am working towards becoming a middle-school English teacher. This past spring, I had the chance to work directly with a teacher who shares Luther's and Calvin's views on literature's importance. She used a collection of books, including Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to springboard a discussion about what she called "world on fire" topics. Her students discussed challenges that they and their peers faced daily—hunger, puberty, social struggles, bad family situations, and more—and used the characters from their literature to propose solutions. These students were benefited by their teacher's recognition that language has power to train minds "for the apt understanding . . . of sacred things" pertaining to the human experience. Through the efforts of educators across the globe, the legacy of the Reformation's value of literary art lives on.