Exorcising the family

The Protestant Reformation had well-known effects on the nuclear family, but Rosenstock-Huessy notes that a parallel movement occurred in the Roman Catholic church after 1500, when Catholics began to “lay far more stress on the cult of St. Joseph and on the conception of the Holy Family.” As a result, in Catholic and well as Protestant countries, the family was remade from a social and economic unit into a spiritual unit: “every family was not cemented into a spiritual unt while before it was purely hereditary and economic. By the reading of Scripture, the singing of hymns, the common prayer at meals in the native tongue, in the homes of lay families, these homes gained a new power.”

Rosenstock-Huessy suggests that a kind of exorcism took place after 1500: “medieval men were haunted by ghosts and demons; and these were survivals of pre-Roman times. Only inside the consecrated church buildings would a man before the year 1500 feel quite safe from them. The Reform went after these remnants of the spirits in the house and the barn, yard and field and highway. Luther’s fight with the devil and his marriage were of one piece.”

The exorcism and “spiritualizing” of the family had significant consequences. The specific “new power” of the family was the power to “preserve their holds over its members despite their choosing new professions.” While once a son would be knit to his father through a common profession, “now a son who became a lawyer while his father remained the farmer still could recognize his father as his spiritual elder. The central truths of life the son had learned from his father. The family loyalty now outgrew the material identity of father’s and son’s activities. They could recognize each other in the spirit.”

Further, the family became the location for the maturation and ripening of the father and mother: They “attained maturity through being intimately responsible for the lives in [their] household, ruling and teaching them.”