by Ivan Illich
This analysis of the correlation between needs, commodities, and satisfaction provides an explanation for the limitless demand that economists and philosophers today tend to postulate, and for which empirical evidence seems not to be lacking. The social commitment to the replacement of vernacular activities by commodities is, in fact, at the core of today’s world. On this ground alone, ours is a new kind of world, incomparable to any other. But as long as this trend subsists, ours is also a world in which the increase of supply of those kinds of things that teachers or fuel lines make will correspond to increasing frustration. In a world where ‘enough’ can be said only when nature ceases to function as pit or as trash can, the human being is oriented not towards satisfaction but towards grudging acquiescence.
Where shall we look for the roots of this inversion of values, for this transformation of human psychology in the pursuit of the domination of nature? To say that the roots of this inversion lie in the ‘rise of capitalism’ would be to take the symptom for the disease. Socialism that enshrines at its core the provision of goods and services to each one according to his or her needs is just as much dependent on the belief that needs correlate to commodities as any of those doctrines that socialists call ‘capitalist.’ The root of the inversion is much deeper. It is, of course, of a symbolic, religious nature, and demands an understanding of the past and the future of ‘education,’ the issue that has brought us together. If we examine when and how ordinary everyday language became teachable, we might gain some episodic insight into this event.
Nobody has ever proposed to teach the vernacular. That is, at least as I use the term, impossible and silly. But I can follow the idea that the colloquial is somehow teachable down into Carolingian times. It was then that, for the first time in history, it was discovered that there are certain basic needs, needs that are universal to mankind and that cry out for satisfaction in a standard fashion that cannot be met in a vernacular way. The discovery might be best associated with the Church reform that took place in the eighth century and in which the Scottish monk Alcuin, living a good part of his life as court philosopher to Charlemagne, played a prominent role. Up to that time, the Church had considered its ministers primarily as priests, that is, as persons selected and invested with special powers to meet communitary, public needs. They were needed to preach and to preside at functions. They were public officials analogous to those others through whom the state provided the defense of the commonweal against enemy and famine, or the administration of justice or public order and public works.
To call public servants of this kind ‘service professionals’ would be a double mistake, a silly anachronism. But then, from the eighth century on, the precursor of the service professional began to emerge: church-ministers who catered to the personal needs of parishioners, equipped with a theology that defined and established those needs. Priests slowly turned into pastors. The institutionally defined care of individual, the family and the community acquired unprecedented prominence. Thus, the bureaucratic provision of services that are postulated as a ‘natural’ need of all members of mankind takes shape long before the industrialization of the production of goods. Thirty-five years ago Lewis Mumford tried to make this point. When I first read his statement that the monastic reform of the ninth century created some of the basic assumptions on which the industrial system is founded, I had many reasons to reject this insight. In the meantime, though, I found a host of arguments — most of which Mumford seems not even to suspect — for rooting the ideologies of the industrial age in the Carolingian Renaissance. The idea that there is no salvation without personal services from the institutional church is one of these formerly unthinkable discoveries without which, again, our own age would be unthinkable. No doubt, it took 500 years of medieval theology to elaborate on this concept. Only by the end of the Middle Ages was the pastoral self-image of the Church fully rounded. Only during Vatican Council II, within our own generation, will the same Church that served as the prime model in the evolution of secular service organizations align itself explicitly with the image of its imitators. But what counts here, the concept that the clergy can define its own services as needs of human nature and make this service commodity into a necessity that cannot be foregone by any single human being without jeopardy to eternal life. This concept is of medieval origin. It is the foundation without which the contemporary service or welfare state would be inconceivable. Surprisingly little research has been done on the religious core concepts that fundamentally distinguish the industrial age from all other societies. The decline of the vernacular conception of Christian life in favor of one organized around pastoral care is a complex and drawn-out process that I mention here only because it constitutes a necessary background for the understanding of a similar shift in the understanding of language.
Three stages can be distinguished in the evolution of the vernacular into industrial uniquack — a term that James Reston first used when Univac was the only commercial computer. The first step is the appearance of the term ‘mother tongue’ and monkish tutorship over vernacular speech. The second is the transformation of mother tongue into national language under the auspices of grammarians. The third is the replacement of schooled and educated standard language based on written texts by our contemporary, medium-fed, high-cost idiom.
The terms and the concepts of mother tongue and mother country were both unknown until the High Middle Ages. The only classical people who conceived of their land as related to ‘mother’ were the early Cretans; memories of a matriarchal order still lingered in their culture. When Europe took shape as a political reality and as an idea, people spoke ‘people’s language,’ the sermo vulgaris. ‘Duits’ means precisely that. In patriarchally-minded Roman law, a person’s vernacular was presumed to be his or her patrius sermo — the speech of the male head of the household. Each sermo or speech was also perceived as a language. Neither the early Greeks nor people in the early Middle Ages made our distinction between mutually understandable ‘dialects’ and distinct ‘languages,’ a distinction that people on the grassroots level of India equally do not yet make. During the last three decades I have had the opportunity to observe many hundreds of highly motivated and intelligent foreign academics seeking entrance to village life in South America and then in Southeast Asia. Again and again I was struck by the difficulty these people have, even when they are trained as social scientists, in understanding the lucid simplicity with which people can identify with one — or with several — forms of vernacular in a way in which only the exceptional poet can live a taught language with every one of his fibers. The vernacular was, in this sense, unproblematic up until the eleventh century. At that moment, quite suddenly, the term ‘mother tongue’ appears. It appears in the sermons of several monks from the Abbey of Gorz and marks the first attempt to make the choice of vernacular into a moral issue. The mother Abbey of Gorz in Lorraine, not far from Verdun, had been founded in the eighth century by Benedictines, over a church dedicated to St Gorgonius. During the ninth century the monastery decayed in a scandalous way. Three generations later, by the tenth century, the Abbey became the center of Germanic monastic reform; parallel, east of the Rhine, of the Cistercian reform Abbey of Cluny. Within two generations, 160 daughter abbeys, founded (or engendered) by Gorz were scattered all through the Germanic territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Gorz itself was located near the dividing line between Romance and Frankish vernaculars, and the monks from Gorz wanted to stop the challenge or advance of the competing monks from Cluny. They made language into an issue and a tool for their claim.
The monks of Gorz launched into language politics by attaching to the term ‘language’ a curious epithet, namely, ‘mother’ — an epithet that was ideologically charged at that time in a manner that is, again, difficult for us to grasp. The symbolic maternity of the Church, the universal maternity of the Virgin Mary, was central to the experience of personal life and of cosmic reality with an intensity that you can glean only by reading the o
riginal poetry of the time or by sitting quietly in front of one after another of the great statues representing Romanesque art. By coining the term ‘mother tongue,’ the monks of Gorz elevated the unwritten vulgate, vernacular ‘Duits’ into something that could be honored, cherished, defended against defilement and otherwise treated as mother should be. Language was consecrated through its relation with maternity and, at the same time, maternity was alienated by one more step into a principle over which the male clergy could claim power. Mother was now honored and managed, cherished and used, protected in her purity and forged into a weapon, guarded against defilement and used as a shield. The professional pastorate, which today we would understand as a service profession, had made an important step in acquiring responsibilities in the performance of maternal functions.
From the Frankish of the eleventh century the term was translated into low Latin as materna lingua and thus spread throughout Europe, only to be rediscovered and retranslated into various forms of the vulgate in the early fifteenth century. With the concept of ‘mother tongue,’ of a supra-regional colloquial with highly charged emotional value and a broad audience, a condition was created that called for the invention of moveable type and print. Gutenberg made his invention when the language that he needed for its acceptance was ripe.
The next step in the mutation of the vernacular coincides with the development of a device by which the teaching of mother tongue could be taken over by men. The medieval preachers, poets, and Bible translators had only tried to consecrate, elevate, and endow with the nimbus of mystical maternity that language that they heard among the people. Now a new breed of secular clerics, formed by humanism, consciously used the vulgar as raw material for an engineering enterprise. The manual of specifications for correct sentences in the vernacular makes its appearance.
The publication of the first grammar in any modern European language was a solemn event, in late 1492. That year the Moor was driven from Granada, the Jews were expelled from Toledo, and the return of Columbus from his first voyage was expected any day. That year, Don Elio Antonio de Nebrija dedicated the first edition of his Grammatica Castellana to his Queen, Isabel la Católica. At the age of 19, Nebrija had gone to Italy, where Latin had least decayed and was best cultivated, to bring back to life in Spain the one language that as a young man he had considered worthy and that, in his opinion, had died in barbarian neglect in his home country. Hernán Núñez, a contemporary, compared him to Orpheus bringing back Euridice. For almost a generation he was in Salamanca, at the center of renewal of classical grammar and rhetoric. Now, in his fifty-second year, he finished his grammar of the spoken language and, shortly afterwards, the first dictionary that already contains a word from overseas: ‘canoa-canoe,’ which Columbus had in the meantime brought back with the first sample Indian.
As I said, Nebrija dedicated his grammar to Isabel, who was a very uncommon woman, too. In battle she dressed as a knight and at court surrounded herself with humanists who consistently treated her as an equal. Six months earlier, Nebrija had sent a draft of the book to the queen. For this draft she had expressed her gratitude and admiration for the author who had done for Castillian what, so far, had been done only for the languages of Rome and Greece. But with her appreciation she also expressed her perplexity. She was unable to understand to what use such a grammar could be put. Grammar was a teaching tool — and the vernacular was not something anybody could ever be taught. In her kingdoms, the queen insisted, every subject was destined by nature for a perfect dominion over his tongue. This royal sentence expresses a majestic principle of political linguistics. In the meantime, this sense of vernacular sovereignty has been largely administered away.
In the introduction to the first edition which was published in late 1492, Nebrija defends his undertaking by answering the queen. I have translated parts of his three-page argument, because any paraphrase would water it down:
My illustrious Queen. Whenever I ponder over the tokens of the past that writing has preserved for us, I return to the same conclusion: language has forever been the mate of empire and always shall remain its comrade. Together they start, together they grow and flower, together they decline.
Please note the shift from ‘mother’ to ‘mate’. He enunciated the new betrothal of ‘armas y letras’ — the military and the university. Please note how the ever-changing patterns of vernacular speech may now be held up against a standard language that measures their improvement and their debasement.
Castilian went through its infancy at the time of the judges … it waxed in strength under Alphonse the Wise who gathered laws and histories and who had many Arabic and Latin works translated.
Indeed, Alphonse X was the first European monarch who used his native tongue to insist that he was no longer a Latin king. His translators were mostly Jews, who preferred the vulgar tongue over the Church’s Latin. Please note Nebrija’s awareness that the standard language is strengthened as it is used for the writing of history, as a medium for translation and for the embodiment of laws.
Thus our language followed our soldiers whom we sent abroad to rule. It spread to Arragon, to Navarra, and hence even to Italy… The scattered bits and pieces of Spain were thus gathered and joined into one single kingdom.
Note the role of the soldier who forges a new world and creates a new role for the cleric, the pastor educator.
So far this language of Castile has been left by us loose and unruly and therefore, in just a few centuries, this language has changed beyond recognition. Comparing what we speak today with the language of 500 years ago, we notice a difference and diversity that could not be greater if these were two alien tongues.
Please note how in this sentence language and life are torn asunder. The language of Castile is treated as if, like Latin and Greek, it were already dead. Instead of the constantly evolving vernacular, Nebrija is referring to something totally different: timeless colloquial. He clearly reflects the split that has come into Western perception of time. The clock had come into the city, had been lifted onto a pedestal, had been made to rule the town. Real time, made up of equal pieces of equal length no matter if it was summer or winter, had first come to dictate the rhythm in the monastery and now began to order civic life. As a machine has governed time, grammar shall govern speech.
But let us go back to Nebrija:
To avoid these variegated changes I have decided to … turn the Castilian language into an artifact so that whatever shall be henceforth written in this language shall be of one standard coinage that can outlast the times. Greek and Latin have been governed by art and thus have kept their uniformity throughout the ages. Unless the like of this be done for our language, in vain your Majesty’s chroniclers … shall praise your deeds. Your labor will not outlast more than a few years and we shall continue to feed on Castilian translations of strange and foreign tales (about our own kings). Either your feats will fade with the language, or they will roam among aliens abroad, homeless without a dwelling in which they can settle.
