This book has been long in the making. Parts of it, in various stages of completion, have been presented at gatherings of the International Society of Neo-Latin Studies (2012), the Renaissance Society of America (2013), the Classical Association of the Midwest and South (2013 and 2015), the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference (2014), the International Society for the History of Classical Rhetoric (2015), the European Studies Conference (2015),1 the Society of Classical Studies (2016), the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (2016), and the Modern Language Association (2017). To those in attendance, I express my gratitude for their attention, criticisms, and helpful suggestions. The section of the fourth chapter dealing with Bach as a Latin teacher is an abbreviated version of a presentation given at “Lutheranism and the Classics ii,” a conference held at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne in 2012, in whose proceedings it has now been published.2 Throughout the book I have drawn extensively on entries that I originally wrote for Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World.3 Some of the same observations on Luther’s views on tentatio and theological education that I make in the second and third chapters are expanded in an essay on the subject, “The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther, and Theological Maturation,” which will appear in a volume entitled The Hermeneutics of Hell: Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature.
For support provided by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities which I currently occupy, I am most grateful. I am especially appreciative of those fellow scholars who have listened to my ideas, made suggestions, and encouraged me along the way. These include Joel Brondos, Christopher Craig, Luka Ilić, Christian Kopff, Thomas Korcok, Neil Leroux, Oliver Olson, Andrew Pettegree, Alden Smith, Kirk Summers, Terence Tunberg, and Timothy Wengert. The final section of the last chapter owes much to conversations with the late John Shields in the years prior to the publication of The American Aeneas. Joshua Davies, Robert Kolb, and Andrew Weeks read initial drafts of this book and made invaluable corrections, saving me from a host of errors of fact and infelicities of style. The
Let me offer to the reader a preliminary personal observation that may shed light on my motivation for writing this book. This seems especially apropos in view of the distinctively postmodern notion of Karen Halttunen, namely, that of “the barefoot historian.” With this term she hopes to capture “one important creative response to the late twentieth-century critique of the omniscient narrator of professional historical convention.” In an attempt to avoid “the appearance of a dispassionate approach, uncontaminated by partiality or interest, unconstrained by the limitations of a single vantage point,” Halttunen suggests that scholars “acknowledge openly their personal connections with their subject, joining the barefoot historian in asserting that they are in some way native to it.”4
Pursuant to calls such as these for a sort of transparent “presuppositionalism,” if you will, and also in consideration of how many of the following pages will be devoted to the use of Cicero in the classroom, this book is dedicated to the memory of the instructors who labored to instruct the author in the fundamentals of the Latin language and introduced me to the major classical Latin authors, including Cicero. This process began for me when I was a freshman in high school and continued four years later at Northwestern College, a small institution of higher learning in Watertown, Wisconsin, whose aim it was to provide students (all male) with a liberal arts foundation that would prepare them for post-graduate theological study at Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Seminary. In the 1970s when I attended Northwestern College, its curriculum was still focused on the study of ancient languages and literatures—not so very different from a traditional German Gymnasium of the nineteenth century. Indeed, pupils in the preparatory high school attached to the college were still referred to using the old Latin designations for grade levels: Sextaner, Quintaner, Quartaner, and Tertianer. Before entering the College, all freshmen were expected to have had four years of high school Latin, including a year of Cicero.5 In the first year of college Latin, we read Horace, Livy, and Terence. Electives in later years included Plautus and Tacitus; only one class was
It is the author’s hope that any insights gleaned from the following pages may resonate not only with others who underwent the same kind of educational training as he, but also, more generally, with all readers who are interested in understanding more clearly Cicero’s import for Martin Luther and his followers, and in gaining a deeper appreciation of the long-lasting effects Luther and Lutherans had on Cicero’s legacy not only in Europe but also in America.Making Cicero the foundation of the third-year course requires little comment, for Latin without Cicero is like English without Shakespeare. Cicero’s writings and orations constitute a large proportion of classical Latin literature, and his mastery of style has made him the pre-eminent teacher of later generations.7