Anton Martin Slomšek (Ponikva 1800 – Maribor 1862), Catholic bishop, poet and pedagogue, was one of the key figures in the Slovenian national movement. With his writings and pastoral work, Slomšek was the main barrier against the Germanization of Slovenians in Carinthia and Styria.
Slomšek entered the seminary of Klagenfurt/Celovec in 1821, where he was ordained priest in 1824. On the day of his ordination, he took a vow to devote all his spare time to the cause of Slovenian language and culture. Refusing an offer to continue his theological studies in Vienna, he served as a country chaplain until he was appointed spiritual director of the Klagenfurt/Celovec seminary in 1829. In 1846, he was ordained bishop of the Carinthian-Styrian diocese of Lavant.
As early as 1821, Slomšek organized Slovenian language courses at the seminary. These he officially established after returning as spiritual director. A grammar, Inbegriff der slowenischen Sprache, remained unpublished. In his lectures, he criticized the school system which taught Slovenian pupils exclusively through German; priests in particular needed, he stressed, a thorough knowledge of Slovenian for their pastoral work. His sermon on Pentecost Monday 1838, Dolžnost svoj jezik spoštovati (“The duty to respect one’s own language”), invoked the religious occasion (the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, endorsing the multilingual nature of the community of believers) to provide language loyalty with a theological basis, and denounced the defection from one’s native Slovenian – even under enforced Germanization – as an offence against the divine will.
Slomšek’s poems, mostly didactic and for a juvenile readership, were written over a prolonged period (Šola vesela lepiga petja za pridno šolsko mladino, “The joyful school of singing for diligent youth”, 1853). Some early texts from the 1820s were more literary in their ambition, e.g. the long poem Huda ura (“The tempest”), influenced by Friedrich Schiller’s Lied von der Glocke (which Slomšek translated into Slovenian).
Slomšek also gained fame with his religious (meditative and homiletic) prose writings. His book for girls, Krščansko devištvo (“Christian virginity”, 1834), containing lively hagiographies of female saints, each of them concluded by a couplet or a quatrain, had an immense success because of its serene and optimistic moral character. Writings for priests include Mnemosynon slavicum (1840), a liturgical compendium with explanations of sacred services in Slovenian in poems and orations.
Slomšek devoted much of his energies to the problem of school education, which at the time was exclusively German. He wrote most of the earliest bilingual and Slovenian-only schoolbooks. He encouraged Sunday schools, informal lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic, taught by priests after Sunday Mass through the medium of Slovenian; his textbook Blaže ino Nežica v nedelski šoli (“Blaise and Agnes in the Sunday school”, 1842) became his most famous work. As a senior school-inspector from 1844 on, Slomšek further propounded his pedagogical ideals: a harmonious mix of moral and practical education should benefit both the individual and the community.
As a bishop from 1846, Slomšek initiated a series of reforms, most importantly the establishment of the Slovenian publishing enterprise Družba sv. Mohorja (St Hermagoras Society, 1851), which published and distributed books nationwide and in large print-runs for its members, penetrating into small villages and fostering literacy and reading-culture in wide circles. The territorial review of his Lavant diocese also had an important impact. He aimed to bring into his diocese ethnic Slovenians who hitherto, in the neighbouring Carinthian and Styrian dioceses, had been forced to use German as the only vernacular in religious affairs; a boundary review on ethnic principles was resisted and in the event followed administrative department borders; but the new delimitation (1853-59) was nonetheless a great improvement for the public-official use of Slovenian and made the Lavant diocese – with Maribor as the new diocesan see – the heartland of Slovenian Styria.
Slomšek’s ultimate motivation was moral-religious; all his cultural efforts were dedicated to the regeneration of faith and morals, and in this way, to the development of a Catholic-Slovenian culture. He was the only Austrian bishop of the time who did not receive any of the Empire’s orders of merit – a consequence of his efforts against the Germanization of Slovenians. However, Slomšek’s view that religious life should be founded on the national language – not only for pragmatic reasons, but because nationality, in his view, is grounded in natural law and in the will of God – was a major force for the consolidation of Slovenian in the Habsburg Empire.
