Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

Bohemian patriots have a saying, "As long as the language lives, the nation is not dead." In an address in 1904 Jorgen Levland, who was afterward Premier of Norway, in a plea for "freedom with self-government, home, land, and our own language," made this statement: "Political freedom is not the deepest and greatest. Greater is it for a nation to preserve her intellectual inheritance in her native tongue."

The revival of the national consciousness in the subject peoples has invariably been connected with the struggle to maintain a press in the native language. The reason is that it was through the medium of the national press that the literary and linguistic revivals took place. Conversely, the efforts to suppress the rising national consciousness took the form of an effort to censor or suppress the national press. There were nowhere attempts to suppress the spoken language as such. On the other hand, it was only as the spoken language succeeded in becoming a medium of literary expression that it was possible to preserve it under modern conditions and maintain in this way the national solidarity. When the Lithuanians, for example, were condemned to get their education and their culture through the medium of a language not their own, the effect was to denationalize the literate class and to make its members aliens to their own people. If there was no national press, there could be no national schools, and, indeed, no national church. It was for this reason that the struggle to maintain the national language and the national culture has always been a struggle to maintain a national press.

European nationalists, seeking to revive among their peoples the national consciousness, have invariably sought to restore the national speech, to purge it of foreign idioms, and emphasize every mark which serves to distinguish it from the languages with which it tended to fuse.[316]

Investigation of these linguistic revivals and the nationalist movement that has grown out of them indicates that there is a very intimate relation between nationalist and religious movements. Both of them are fundamentally cultural movements with incidental political consequences. The movement which resulted in the reorganization of rural life in Denmark, the movement that found expression in so unique an institution as the rural high schools of Denmark, was begun by Bishop Grundtvig, called the Luther of Denmark, and was at once a religious and a nationalist movement. The rural high schools are for this reason not like anything in the way of education with which people outside of Denmark are familiar. They are not technical schools but cultural institutions in the narrowest, or broadest, sense of that term.[317] The teaching is "scientific," but at the same time "inspirational." They are what a Sunday school might be if it were not held on Sunday and was organized as Mr. H. G. Wells would organize it and with such a bible as he would like to have someone write for us.[318]

The popular accounts which we have of religious revivals do not at first suggest any very definite relations, either psychological or sociological, between them and the literary revivals to which reference has just been made. Religious revivals, particularly as described by dispassionate observers, have the appearance of something bizarre, fantastic, and wild, as indeed they often are.

What must strike the thoughtful observer, however, is the marked similarity of these collective religious excitements, whether among civilized or savage peoples and at places and periods remote in time and in space. Frederick Morgan Davenport, who has collected and compared the materials in this field from contemporary sources, calls attention in the title of his volume, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, to this fundamental similarity of the phenomena. Whatever else the word "primitive" may mean in this connection it does mean that the phenomena of religious revivals are fundamentally human.

From the frantic and disheveled dances of the Bacchantes, following a wine cart through an ancient Greek village, to the shouts and groans of the mourners' bench of an old-time Methodist camp-meeting, religious excitement has always stirred human nature more profoundly than any other emotion except that of passionate love.

In the volume by Jean Pélissier, The Chief Makers of the National Lithuanian Renaissance (Les Principaux artisans de la renaissance nationale lituanienne), there is a paragraph describing the conversion of a certain Dr. Kudirka, a Lithuanian patriot, to the cause of Lithuanian nationality. It reads like a chapter from William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience.[319]

It is materials like this that indicate how close and intimate are the relations between cultural movements, whether religious or literary and national, at least in their formal expression. The question that remains to be answered is: In what ways do they differ?