Order of Rituals

The Interpretation of Everyday Life

Hans-Georg Soeffner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351293747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Costumbres y tradiciones

To those still accustomed to seeing social order depicted in classes, strata, central groups, or institutions, and who measure and classify the social world according to "centers" and "margins, " modern society presents itself as ambiguous and unmanageable. This is not unprecedented. Human societies often discover themselves in situations in which the traditional grids of order and stratification lose their value and fail to serve as guideposts for individuals.

In The Order of Rituals, Hans-Georg Soeffner aims to answer the question: Through what efforts of order and orientation are loosely organized societies like ours held together? Soeffner focuses on symbolic forms of self-presentation that bring focus and clarity to our lives, such as emblems, fashions, styles, and symbols. As these replace old orders of classes or strata, there is a further consequence. Economically, culturally, and ethnically "mixed" societies not only return to specific visible forms of presentation, but also present themselves and their worldviews as a public stage of life-styles, attitudes, and demeanor.

Soeffner asserts that society preserves certain continuously handed-down forms of action and ritual as specific symbolic forms over a long period of time. The Order of Rituals describes these symbols and routines of everyday life in fascinating detail, coupled with thoughtful analysis. Sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers will all benefit immensely from this book.

1
Luther—From the Collectivity of Faith to a Lutheran-Protestant Type of Individuality

“Why don’t you come by sometime and tell me your story?”

— Citizen Kane

There is a long history, at least in Central Europe, to the present fact that practically everyone can tell their story, practically everyone offers, at all times and places and with great virtuosity, self-thematization, either openly declared or else dressed up as “relationship problems”; that practically every kind of social action, from defense pleas via political legitimations to explanations of “private” decisions, is not only autobiographically tinged, but also deemed explicable by autobiography itself. It is the history of a form of knowledge and representation which was and is clearly marked by the interpretation of reality, world and self in the modern world and the present—it is the history of the social type of presentation of “accentuated subjectivity.”

Some of the conditions for successful, collectively accepted self-thematization are: (1) knowing the techniques of self-observation; (2) the collectively known and societally trained “guidelines” [including “guidelines for suffering,” which supply points of orientation for self-perception (see Hahn, 1982: 407ff.; Hahn, 1984: 229ff.)]; (3) the structural isolation of a “self” that is perceiving itself (Hildebrandt, 1985) and securing the significance of self-perception; (4) historically embedding and preparing the “newly” developing forms of representation and knowledge through existing, institutionally secured and collectively recognized forms of presentation; and (5) social structural and economic changes that present or represent¹ themselves through the “new” form of knowledge in everyday consciousness, and are legitimized “ideologically” by them (see Luckmann, 1980).

Such conditions are neither created by one individual, nor do they emerge “suddenly,” unexpectedly, or—as some seem to find desirable— at a precise historical moment in time. Rather, they tend to be the result of a long development, heralded by “traces” and “isolated tendencies” long before they become collectively accepted. And they point the subsequent interpreter to earlier social structures that only later take on a recognizable form. These structures are but rarely visible to the consciousness of those who live within their confines. And frequently, the quality of these structures and, even more, the ensuing social consequences and effects, are actually in opposition to the intentions and interests of those who, in fact and objectively, helped create those structures. In the following I shall attempt to show this, taking Luther as an example.

Some of these “great individuals,” whose stories to this day illustrate and constitute the everyday, living consciousness of “history,” neither invent new structures nor effect the implementation of the current ones, let alone new ones through their implicit, at times also explicit use of the new structures for political, scientific, or artistic action. Others—among them Martin Luther—are able to find a collective language for already existing social phenomena, which have not and could not formerly be articulated. They supply the intentions, actions, and plans with a representative means of expression, with their own linguistic system of symbols. They combine the collectively existing repertoire of symbols, having listened to the way ordinary people speak, through and into a great defining text, beside which all other texts, everything else, including one’s own life, become no more than background text.

Therefore, apart from their historical meaning, the central significance of the “great articulators” lies in the way they prepare, in an exemplary fashion, the “data” that the later interpreter requires in order to understand fragments and excerpts of the historical developments by analyzing the historical preconditions that brought them about. The following discussion will be about the path that Luther paved structurally, even if not intentionally, and which he in part took himself, from the collectivity of faith and life style to isolation in faith and lifestyle, from collective curriculum vitae to (auto)biography, from observation of the other to observation of the self, from the individual in the world to the world within the individual.

The Old in the New and the New in the Old—Luther and His Name²

Originally, Luther’s family was called “Luder” (Loewenich, 1983: 36). He entered the University of Erfurt under the name “Martinus Ludher Mansfeldt.” In 1517, he changed his name from Luder to Luther, and included his parents in this undertaking. All this is common knowledge. What has been a matter of argument, however, are the reasons he might have had for changing his name. There are two interpretations that refer to language use and polemics in connection with Luther’s name during the Reformation. His opponents, as opponents playing by the rules of proper opposition were compelled to, brought the name “Luder” in connection to lotter (“sloven”), Luderleben (“debauched life”), and Lockerspeise, or Aas (“carrion”), and the odors associated with the latter. In other words, they quoted linguistic usage that was possible at the time and that one finds intact to this day in words like Luder (“scoundrel”) and Lude (“pimp”). The other camp of interpreters, philologically educated as it was, knew the rules of sound change and semantic change, and defended an opposite position. According to their theory, Luder is connected to the word lauter, or “honest.”

What we can deduce from these opposing interpretations is the irritating fact that, as so often, quasi-scientific—in this case, philological—arguments are wielded in a rhetorical tournament jostling for the correct worldview. Contradicting the above, it has recently been proven with great philological accuracy (Moeller and Stackmann, 1981) that the change from Luder to “Luther” referred neither to lotter (“sloven”) nor to lauter (“honest”), but rather, that the change came about because at the time he changed his name, Luther was signing letters he wrote to his friends (e.g. Spalatin, Melanchton, and Lang), with the name Eleutherius (i.e., “the liberated one”, “the one who feels free”). This “derivation” from the Greek is symptomatic of that mixture of allusion and interpretation, using etymologies, which was commonly used in the Humanistic Circle (Humanistischer Kreis). Luther applied the same stylistic devices weighed down with self-interpretation.

Luther used the signature Eleutherius only between 1517 and 1519. There is a definite chronological correspondence between his use of the Greek epithet and the changing of his German name. The Greek epithet appears shortly before his Theses, that is, before their publication. In 1519, it disappears abruptly. Moeller and Stackmann put forth the theory that the connection between the name change and the epithet Eleutherius expresses latently in 1517 what later becomes manifest in the idea: Luther’s new conviction that he had become free from other human beings through his servitude to God. Luther’s new self-concept—“freedom through servitude”—was first symbolized in the Greek epithet and finally confirmed in the symbolic/pragmatic name change. Luther’s writings develop and explicate theoretically in retrospective what had already been accomplished symbolically in the act of representing a conviction.

If one interprets this biographical detail in the life of the translator, theologian, and truth seeker more exactingly, then one sees a characteristic image become manifest in the symbolic act of Luther’s name change. That is, the new name “Luther”—retaining the “old,” the family, and religious tradition except for the one letter, which he replaces by two others—symbolically joins the past with the new conviction expressed in an “old” language. The name thus is more reformed in the symbolic new formation than it is actually newly formulated.

The contradictory unity of “liberty and servitude,” symbolically implied in the name change, refers, through Luther’s seemingly magic use of linguistic symbolism, to an encompassing symbolic pattern of world and self-interpretation, to the allusion or re-evaluation of his own life as well as of the world via symbolic acts. At the same time, the symbolic act or symbolic context lends all the individual elements and individual experiences a consistent, uniform meaning. This becomes visible in the issue of mind-body or soul-flesh. Flesh, or body—material housing of the soul and/or mind in our culture usually suffers a bad reputation—gains its meaning and worth, if any, through its visible or suspected symbolic connection to its tenants, who are considered superior to the lodging (i.e., through the soul and the mind, which in their turn represent a superior or the Supreme Being of whom they partake). If soul and mind are free, then so is the whole person. In short: Along with his name change, Luther has not only pulled a new spiritual cloak around his old Adam; the old Adam becomes a whole new person. The symbolic conversion becomes a real one.

Christian tradition knows many precursors to this conversion figure. Luther chose one of the most prominent, albeit not as exemplum vitae, but rather as a form of existence. He chose that inquisitive rager Saul, on whom suddenly, on his way to Damascus (Acts 9) “a light shone from heaven,” who heard a voice saying “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”³, who was the only one among his companions to understand the voice, who became blind and finally regained his sight from out of the blindness—who turned from a Saul into a Paul.

Almost 1500 years later, this story can be told in a different way. It is given a different context and a different milieu, but remains perfectly recognizable. Saul’s journey to Damascus becomes Luther’s return from Gotha to Erfurt. The fledgling law student—Luther’s father wants his son to make his career in this field—has bought the necessary books in Gotha. On his return, he experiences a “frightening apparition from heaven.”⁴ He secretly sells all his law books, gives a goodbye dinner for his friends in Erfurt, and goes “immediately to the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt that same night. For that was what He had ordered, and became a monk.” In the Erfurt monastery of the Augustinian hermits, he first is named Augustinus⁵ after the saint of his order, another conversion story. But already shortly thereafter, he is called “Martinus” again. And then the revived Acts of the Apostles and Luther’s own self-interpretation permanently gain the upper hand. Professor Nathin, one of Luther’s theological superiors, recommends him to the nuns in the convent of Mühlhausen as a “second Paul,” who “was miraculously converted, just like the apostle” (Friedenthal, 1983: 59ff.).

Saul/Paul is more than a mythical pendant to Martin Luther. Paul became not only an “identification figure” for him, but also the crown witness of the “Holy Scripture”—a crown witness, however, who never saw Jesus, but only knows Him from the acolytes’ stories and sermons. A crown witness, in other words, who possesses authority not through his presence or participation in the event, but rather through his convincing interpretation of what he has heard. And, conversely, the reported stories attain their meaning and authorization not through the eyewitness, but rather, through the interpreter. Consequently, in Luther’s prologue to his Romans theology, he says, “This Epistle is the true central piece of the New Testament and the truest Gospel” (Luther, 1983b). Accordingly, it is here, in Romans 3:28, that we find the focal point for the development of Luther’s theology: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.” This “alone”— sola fide—Luther adds to the “old” faith, the “old” text, the same as he added the “th” to his name. Here, too, he is following the example of his model, who signalled his conversion by changing one letter of his name, albeit the first one. He changes the old interpretatively—only seemingly in a minimal way—by centering it in one specific meaning.

But stories and myths would not exist, or continue to exist, if they weren’t capable of rejuvenation while maintaining their structure. They connect predecessor and successor, make visible the repetition and, at the same time, vary the material, actualize it, revitalize it.⁶ Thus, the “second Paul” from Erfurt has Saul/Paul as his model. The Saul from the New Testament for his part refers to a Saul from the Old Testament who also tenaciously pursues a just man. The Saul from the New Testament and his successor were able to convert “to redemption”; the Old Testament Saul, on the other hand, unwillingly performed a negative conversion “away from redemption,” an act from which he never recovered, all his efforts notwithstanding. Saul/Paul are here—prior to the works of Jesus, “David’s son”—still split into two actors: Saul and David.

The former becomes disobedient to his God. God loses “interest” in him (I Samuel 15). The other, David, is selected in order to replace the former. Saul tries to appease his Lord through visible deeds and sacrifices. His attempts are to no avail. David, the newly elect, has no works to show (yet), but still is preferred, “For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (I Samuel 16:7). The leitmotif of Lutheran theology is sounded here in no uncertain terms. Not the works, but faith alone; not that which is visible from the outside, but the “interior” that is invisible to others, the heart decides on the path toward attaining “justice before God.” Already here, Lutherism and Calvinism become recognizable in their structural opposition.

But in Luther’s real existence, too, this interesting—not only for sociologists—approximation of life to theology and vice versa take place. The Old Testament Saul is not only “rejected” by his God, he is also punished with the “distressing spirit” (I Samuel 16:16) or, in modern parlance, with melancholy and despair. When that “distressing spirit” comes over him, the only thing that can help him is harp music. David is a virtuoso on the harp and thus Saul’s therapist: “And so it was, whenever the spirit from God was upon Saul, that David would take a harp and play it with his hand. Then Saul would become refreshed and well, and the distressing spirit would depart from him” (I Samuel 16:23).

For Luther, who suffered bouts of deep depression all his life, it was music more than anything that helped soothe sadness and despair—to be exact, helped against “Satan, the spirit of melancholy.” When he was suffering from those attacks, friends would bring him his lute. And Luther—reportedly a master of this difficult instrument—would begin to play. Luther himself expressed his understanding of music by quoting the old patterns, as “prologue to all good breviaries” (1538).⁷

His state improves. The evil spirit leaves him.⁸ David-Martinus-Paul II (let us remain in the terminology of myth and legend) hold their own against Saul I-Saul II and their evil spirit, a spirit that can completely besiege a human being, overpower him, and drive him to suicide.⁹

What is divided up between two people in the Old Testament, between the one rejected and the one elected (Cain/Abel, Saul/David), between two antipodal Doppelgänger, in the New Testament is transferred, especially through Paul’s writings, onto the individual. The double structure becomes the characteristic of the individual, his essential and by the same token antipodal possibilities. The conversion is the visible realization of this double structure within one person, made manifest through action. Conversion is a specific form of presentation and self-interpretation, which we have inherited from our Judeo-Christian tradition and which seems to persist, albeit with new contents.

Luther’s way of dealing with his own name and the concomitant acceptance and “lived appreciation” of examples passed down through a “holy text,” no matter how marginal they may have appeared initially, connote a thoroughly symbolic self-perception that marked Luther’s perception of his life. They connote the contradictory unity of “being free in respect to others and in respect to the world” on the one hand, and “servitude to God” on the other. In this context, “servitude to God” conceals the fact that Luther, when he uses the term “freedom” in general, goes much further: It is his conviction that humans without God are fundamentally unfree. God alone is free and in possession of a free will, the only subject entitled to freedom in general and, thus, also freedom concerning His will. “Human will” on the other hand, according to Luther, “is set down in the middle. Like a beast of burden, if God sits on it, then his will and direction are as God’s, like in the Psalm, ‘I have become a beast of burden and I am always with You.’ If Satan sits on it, then his will and direction are as Satan’s. And it is not in the realm of his free choice to run to one of the two riders nor to seek out one or the other; for the riders themselves fight in order to keep him or claim him.”¹⁰

Upon closer inspection, this much-quoted simile of the human will as beast...