ANTO ́NIA SZABARItranslated and spoken by Calvinists were blasphemous words that could and should be
parodied.
If the Reformation—rather than the Enlightenment, as has often been assumed—can
be said to create the modern structure of the public sphere, that is because it calls into
question all conception of the public sphere as transparent: curses can be prayers and
prayers curses. Enlightenment or secularist theories of the emergence of the public realm
have missed the Reformation’s genuine modernism, which consists in bringing out the
potentially contentious, ‘‘excitable,’’ character of religious and, perhaps, any speech. Lu-
ther is a case in point, anovuminexplicable in the terms of classical rhetoric and Human-
ism, inexplicable also within the secularist modernist paradigm.
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