In 1517, it is said, Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of a Church, signaling the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Oh, sure, there’s some debate about whether he did actually nail anything to that door; and, oh sure, it overstates the case if that story creates the impression that there was something magical about the nails, around which history then somehow pivoted. A lot has been written about that. Here, I am interested in a different question: why did this attempt at Reformation succeed when so many before had failed? (A related question–why is this called the Reformation, but the emergences of, say, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches are called schisms?–is a matter for a different post.) One traditional answer focuses on print; I want to address a related angle–reading.
Long before Luther or Calvin, indeed for centuries before what has come to be known as the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church (whose name, local–Rome–and universal–Catholic, attests to earlier splits within Christianity) had successfully faced down threats to its unity in Western Europe. The Cathars, from a region of France centered on the town of Albi,
wanted to “purify” the Church. Their name descends from the Greek work for “purification,” a word likely known best in “catharsis.” They were dualists, something long rejected by the Church (as early as Augustine’s reaction to the Manichaeans), and vegetarians, and believed there should be only one sacrament (as opposed to the Catholic Church’s seven), and they denied the existence of Purgatory (from which, 800 years later, the Church would also distance itself). The Cathars were defeated with a Crusade and the original Inquisition in the early thirteenth century. To mark its victory, the RC Church built an unusual, fortress-like red-brick Cathedral.
The interior is filled with painted imagery.
In fourteenth-century England, of course, Wycliffe, who, like Luther, opposed transubstantiation, led the translation of the Bible into English. In the early fifteenth century, Bohemian Jan Hus was executed in Constance after opposing the Roman Catholic Church on theology and, like Luther, on practices such as indulgences.
But none of those earlier reformers had the same splintering impact on the Roman Catholic Church, then the Church of western Europe. It would be a century before Luther and Calvin would have their much greater successes against the Church. There are many reasons why Calvin and Luther succeed where so many others had not. Particularly important, though, is the reformers’ increasing focus on literacy. The Cathars, for example, may have wished to purify the church of iconography, but painting and sculpture were never the Roman Catholic Church’s weakness. (See, for example, the Sistine Chapel.)
With literacy in Latin highly restricted, and the Bible’s availability in the local languages equally restricted, it was on questions of literacy, though, where the Church was particularly vulnerable. Wycliffe and Luther of course focused on these dual issues, working to translate the Bible while also casting the Church’s position on translation as part of a larger pattern of exclusion.
Groups such as the Cathars, Wycliffe’s Lollards, Hus’s Moravians, etc., had prepared the way for Reformation, it is true, but the focus on literacy in Luther and Calvin not only distinguished them; it is also coincided with the continent-wide spread of the printing press. It was one thing to see in advance the press’s possibilities for getting the Bible to the laity, as Wycliffe did. Later generations, though, were relying on increasingly familiarity with print. Relatedly, these later generations of Reformers were also drawing on what print had made possible for texts written in the vernacular. By the time Luther and Calvin come along, western Europe has established vernacular literary traditions, providing cultural and linguistic resources on which their project of translation could draw. Nonetheless, the poets’ success at printing literature in their native languages would still not have been sufficient for the effects Luther and Calvin had in European history. Part of their success has to do with their attention to literacy itself, i.e., to how to read, a question made all the more pertinent by the translation of the Bible and by the democratization of reading, both of which follow from print.
In short, Luther and Calvin were modernizers of literacy, paying attention to literacy in the condition of print. If printing modernizes writing, the Protestant reformation modernizes reading. This, it seems to me, is why the Reformation of the sixteenth century succeeded where so many earlier attempts had failed to break the power of the Vatican over the religious life of Western Europe. The Cathars would not be able to defeat the Church on the question of painting and images—one of the Church’s strongest suits. Where the Church was weak was on the question of literacy. Wycliffe arose too early for printing. Luther and Calvin–not far from the region of the Rhine where Gutenberg worked–were not.
For Anthony Giddens, the premodern tends to the oral, and the modern toward the written, or, by the sixteenth century, toward print. In the sixteenth-century, Luther and Calvin brought modernizing skepticism to the analysis of literacy, to different results. Luther, for example, is part of a larger movement attempting to reverse the influence of Aristotle, a movement that affects natural philosophy or early science as well (as can be seen from Copernicus to Francis Bacon). In “An Appeal to the Ruling Class,” Luther regrets that in the universities “little is taught of the holy Scripture or the Christian faith; the blind pagan teacher, Aristotle, is of more consequence than Christ” [[470]]. It is Aristotle’s affect on how the Roman Catholic Church reads Christ’s words from the Last Supper on which Luther focuses in his crucial discussion of literacy, in “The Pagan Servitude of the Church.” Through Aristotle, Luther claims, the Roman Catholic Church treated “this is my body” as if Jesus had said “This becomes my body.” For Luther, “is” (rather than becoming or representing) is what “is” means, so there is no need for transubstantiation, which would require, among other things, becoming. To Luther, the human body did not have to transubstantiated in order to be the corporeal habitation of the divine. As a corollary, then, divinity is everywhere for Luther–once one reads both the Bible and the world in that way.
Bruce Gordon, Professor at the Yale Divinity School, will be speaking about “The Bible, Authority and the Struggle for History in the Reformation,” at Clemson on November 9th. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7 p.m. in Holtzendorff Hall, room 100.
