The Reformation

by Will Durant

  God is all things, all things are God. The Father begets me, His son, without cease. I say more: He begets in me Himself, and in Himself me. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.... My eye and God’s eye are one eye.20

  In each individual there is a fragment of God; through it we can communicate directly with Him, and can identify ourselves with Him. Not through church ritual, not even through the Bible, but through this cosmic consciousness alone the soul can approach and see God. The more one renounces individual and worldly aims, the clearer and more farseeing this divine spark becomes, until at last God and soul are one, and “we are totally transformed into God.”21 Heaven, purgatory, and hell are not places; they are states of the soul: separation from God is hell, union with Him is paradise.22 Some of these propositions smelled of heresy to the Archbishop of Cologne. He summoned Eckhart to trial (1326); Eckhart affirmed his docile orthodoxy, and proposed that his statements should be viewed as literary hyperboles. The bishop condemned him nevertheless. The friar appealed to Pope John XXII, and then escaped the faggots by a timely death (1327).

  His influence was spread by two Dominican pupils who knew how to keep his pantheism within safe bounds. Heinrich Suso tortured himself for sixteen years with ascetic austerities, cut the name of Jesus into his flesh over his heart, claimed to have received into his mouth blood from the wounds of Christ, and wrote his Little Book of Eternal Wisdom in German because, he said, it was in German that God had revealed it to him.23 Johannes Tauler called Eckhart his “most holy Master,” and preached at Strasbourg and Basel the doctrine of mystic union with God. It was to Tauler that Luther ascribed a book, Deutsche Theologie, which moved him deeply with its simple creed: God, Christ, and immortality.

  The Church looked with some concern upon mystics who ignored most of her dogmas, neglected her ritual, and claimed to reach God without the help of priests or sacraments. Here lay in germ the Reformation doctrines of private judgment, and every man a priest, and justification not by good works but by transcendent faith. The Church held that supernatural revelations could come from demons and maniacs as well as from God and the saints, and that some authoritative guidance was needed to keep religion from disintegrating into a chaos of individual visions and theologies. That difference of view still divides honest men.

  V. THE ARTS

  The Gothic style lingered in Germany long after it had given way, in Italy and France, to the classic influences of the Renaissance. Now it crowned the thriving cities of Central Europe with churches not as overpowering in grandeur as the great shrines of France, yet lifting the spirit with a quiet beauty and unpretentious dignity. Uppsala began its cathedral in 1287, Saxon Freiberg in 1283, Ulm in 1377 (with the highest Gothic tower in the world), Vienna its Stefansdom in 1304, Stralsund its Marienkirche in 1382, Danzig another Marienkirche in 1425. Aachen and Cologne added the choirs of their cathedrals, Strasbourg completed the “frozen music” of its cathedral in 1439; Xanten built a graceful Collegiate Church of St. Victor, which was destroyed in the second World War. Nuremberg gloried in four famous churches that gave piety a schooling in art and taste. The Lorenzkirche (1278–1477) owed to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its stately portal and resplendent rose. The Stefansdom, or Cathedral of St. Stephen (1304–1476), was a beloved landmark; its steep roof covered nave and aisles in a single span, and fell to Mars in 1945. About 1309 the Sebalduskirche rebuilt its aisles; in 1361 it raised a new choir; about 1498 it completed its western towers; from 1360 to 1510 it installed magnificent stained glass. The Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady (1355–61), with its richly sculptured vestibule, was almost demolished in the second World War, but is already restored; and every day at noon the four manikin electors in the famous clock of the façade bow to Charles IV in untiring acknowledgment of his famous Bull. Sculpture was still crude, but churches in Breslau and Hallgarten, and the Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg, received stone or wood Madonnas of some nobility.

  The cities beautified not only their churches but their public buildings, their shops, and their homes. Now rose those gabled and half-timbered houses that give the German towns a wistful medieval charm for idealizing modern eyes. The Rathaus, or Council Hall, was the center of civic life, sometimes also the rendezvous of the greater guilds; its walls might bear frescoes, and its woodwork was usually carved with Teutonic fullness and strength. The Grosse Saal of the Rathaus at Bremen (1410–50) had a ceiling of carved beams, a winding staircase with posts and railing of carved wood, and gaudy chandeliers in the shape of ships. The Rathaus of Cologne (1360–1571), which had seated the first general convocation of the Hanseatic League; of Münster (1335), where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed; of Brunswick, a fourteenth-century gem of civic Gothic; of Frankfurt-am-Main (1405), where the electors dined a newly chosen emperor: all were destroyed in the second World War. In Marienburg the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order built their massive Deutschordenschloss (1309–80). In Nuremberg the Rathaus confronted the Sebalduskirche; it was built (1340) to hold the fully assembled Reichstag of the Empire; half a dozen restorations have left little of its medieval form. In the market place before the Frauenkirche a Prague sculptor, Heinrich Parler, raised the Schöner Brunnen, or Beautiful Fountain (1361 f.), crowded with statues of pagan, Jewish, and Christian heroes. With its sculptures, churches, and secular architecture Nuremberg, in the three centuries between 1250 and 1550, represented the German spirit at its highest and best. The meandering streets were mostly narrow and unpaved; yet the future Pope Pius II wrote of Nuremberg:

  When one comes from Lower Franconia and perceives this glorious city, its splendor seems truly magnificent. Entering it, one’s original impression is confirmed by the beauty of the streets and the fitness of the houses. The churches... are worthy of worship as well as of admiration. The imperial castle proudly dominates the town, and the burghers’ dwellings seem to have been built for princes. In truth the kings of Scotland would gladly be housed so luxuriously as the common citizen of Nuremberg.24

  In the German cities the industrial and minor arts—in wood, ivory, copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold—reached now the full ripening of their medieval growth. Artists and weavers composed amazing tapestries; the wood engravers prepared for Dürer and Holbein; the miniaturists illuminated fine manuscripts on the eve of Gutenberg; woodworkers carved gorgeous furniture; and the metal founders cast for the churches, in the fifteenth century, bells whose beauty of tone has never been surpassed. Music was not merely an art; it was half the leisure life of the towns. Nuremberg and other cities staged great carnivals of popular drama and song. The Volkslied expressed the pious or amorous sentiments of the people. The middle classes made a mass attack upon the problems of polyphony; the guilds competed in gigantic choruses; butchers, tanners, bell casters, and other mighty men contested the Meistersinger prize in tumultuous vocal tournaments. The first famous school of Meistersinger was established at Mainz in 1311; others rose at Strasbourg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Würzburg, Zurich, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Prague. Students who passed through the four degrees of Schüler, Schulfreund, Dichter, and Saenger (scholar, friend of the school, poet, and singer) earned the title of Meister. The romantic and idealistic strain of the minnesingers was brought to earth as the German burghers tied their lusty realism to the wings of song.

  Since the business class dominated the cities, all the arts except church architecture took a realistic turn. The climate was cold and often wet, discouraging nudity; the pride and cult of the body did not find a congenial home here as in Renaissance Italy or ancient Greece. When Konrad Witz of Constance painted Solomon and the Queen of Sheba he dressed them as if for a winter in the Alps. A dozen cities, however, had schools of painting in the fifteenth century—Ulm, Salzburg, Würzburg, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Munich, Darmstadt, Basel, Aachen, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Colmar, Cologne; and samples survive from all of them. We read in a chronicle of 1380: “There was in Cologne at this time a famous painter named Wilhelm, whose like could not
be found in all the land. He portrayed men so cunningly that it seemed they were alive.”25 Meister Wilhelm was one of many “primitives”—Meister Bertram, Meister Francke, The Master of St. Veronica, The Master of the Heisterbacher Altar—who, chiefly under Flemish influence, created a discipline of mural painting in Germany, and suffused the traditional Gospel themes with an emotional piety traceable, it may be, to Eckhart and the other German mystics.

  In Stephen Lochner, who died at Cologne in 1451, this preliminary development ends, and we reach the zenith of the early school. His Adoration of the Magi, now a prize of the Cologne Cathedral, can bear comparison with most paintings produced before the middle of the fifteenth century: a lovely Virgin at once modest and proud, a delightful Infant, the Wise Men of the East very German but credibly wise, the composition orthodox, the coloring bright with blue and green and gold. In The Virgin of the Rose Trellis and The Madonna of the Violet, ideal young German mothers, of a soft and pensive beauty, are portrayed with all the technical resources of a medieval art visibly moving toward modernity. Germany was on the threshold of its greatest age.

  VI. GUTENBERG

  What put an end to the Middle Ages? Many causes, operating through three centuries: the failure of the Crusades; the spreading acquaintance of renascent Europe with Islam; the disillusioning capture of Constantinople; the resurrection of classic pagan culture; the expansion of commerce through the voyages of Henry the Navigator’s fleet, and Columbus, and Vasco da Gama; the rise of the business class, which financed the centralization of monarchical government; the development of national states challenging the supernational authority of the popes; the successful revolt of Luther against the papacy; printing.

  Before Gutenberg nearly all education had been in the hands of the Church. Books were costly; copying was laborious and sometimes careless. Few authors could reach a wide audience until they were dead; they had to live by pedagogy, or by entering a monastic order, or by pensions from the rich or benefices from the Church. They received little or no payment from those who published their works; and even if one publisher paid them they had no copyright protection, except occasionally by a papal grant. Libraries were numerous but small; monasteries, cathedrals, colleges, and some cities had modest collections, seldom more than 300 volumes; the books were usually kept inside the walls, and some were chained to lecterns or desks. Charles V of France had a library renowned for its size—910 volumes; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had 600; the library of Christ Church Priory at Canterbury was probably as large as any outside of Islam, having some 2,000 volumes in 1300. The best publicized library in England was that of Richard de Bury St. Edmunds, who wrote affectionately of his books in The Philobiblon (1345), and made them complain of their maltreatment by “that two-legged beast called woman,” who insisted on exchanging them for fine linen or silk.26

  As schools multiplied and literacy rose, the demand for books increased. The business classes found literacy useful in the operations of industry and trade; women of the middle and upper classes escaped, through reading, into a world of compensatory romance; by 1300 the time had passed when only the clergy could read. It was this rising demand, even more than the increased supply of paper and the development of an oily ink,27 that led to Gutenberg. Moslems had brought paper manufacture to Spain in the tenth century, to Sicily in the twelfth; it passed into Italy in the thirteenth, into France in the fourteenth; the paper industry was a hundred years old in Europe when printing came. In the fourteenth century, when linen clothing became customary in Europe, castoff linens provided cheap rags for paper; the cost of paper declined, and its readier availability co-operated with the extension of literacy to offer a material and market for printed books.

  Printing itself, as imprinting, was older than Christianity. The Babylonians had printed letters or symbols upon bricks, the Romans and many others upon coins, potters upon their wares, weavers upon cloths, bookbinders upon book covers; any ancient or medieval dignitary used printing when he stamped documents with his seal. Similar methods had been employed in the production of maps and playing cards. Block printing—by blocks of wood or metal engraved with words, symbols, or images—goes back in China and Japan to the eighth century, probably beyond; the Chinese in this way printed paper money in or before the tenth century. Block printing appeared in Tabriz in 1294, in Egypt toward 1300; but the Moslems preferred calligraphy to printing, and did not serve in this case, as in so many others, to carry cultural developments from the East to the West.

  Typography—printing with separate and movable type for each character or letter—was used in China as early as 1041. In 1314 Wang Chên employed nearly 60,000 movable wooden type characters to print a book on agriculture;28 he had tried metal type first, but had found that it did not take or hold ink as readily as wood. Movable type, however, offered little advantage or convenience to a language that had no alphabet, but had 40,000 separate characters; consequently block printing remained customary in China till the nineteenth century. In 1403 a Korean emperor printed a large number of volumes from movable metal type; characters were engraved in hard wood, molds of porcelain paste were made from these models, and in these molds metal type were cast.

  In Europe printing from movable type may have developed first in Holland; according to Dutch traditions not traceable beyond 1569, Laurens Coster of Haarlem printed a religious manual from movable metal type in 1430; but the evidence is inconclusive.29 Nothing further is heard of movable type in Holland till 1473, when Germans from Cologne set up a press in Utrecht. But these men had learned the art in Mainz.

  Johann Gutenberg was born there of a prosperous family about 1400. His father’s name was Gensfleisch—Gooseflesh; Johann preferred his mother’s maiden name. He lived most of his first forty years in Strasbourg, and appears to have made experiments there in cutting and casting metal type. Toward 1448 he became a citizen of Mainz. On August 22, 1450, he entered into a contract with Johann Fust, a rich goldsmith, by which he mortgaged his printing press to Fust for a loan of 800 guilders, later raised to 1,600. A letter of indulgence issued by Nicholas V in 1451 was probably printed by Gutenberg; several copies exist, bearing the oldest printed date, 1454.30 In 1455 Fust sued Gutenberg for repayment; unable to comply, Gutenberg surrendered his press. Fust carried on the establishment with Peter Schöffer, who had been employed by Gutenberg as typesetter. Some believe that it was Schöffer who had by this time developed the new tools and technique of printing: a hard “punch” of engraved steel for each letter, number, and punctuation mark, a metal matrix to receive the punches, and a metal mold to hold the matrix and letters in line.

  In 1456 Gutenberg, with borrowed funds, set up another press. From this he issued, in that year or the next, what has been generally considered his first type-printed book, the famous and beautiful “Gutenberg Bible”*—a majestic folio of 1,282 large double-columned pages. In 1462 Mainz was sacked by the troops of Adolf of Nassau; the printers fled, scattering the new art through Germany. By 1463 there were printers in Strasbourg, Cologne, Basel, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. Gutenberg, one of the fugitives, settled in Eltville, where he resumed his printing. He struggled painfully through one financial crisis after another, until Adolf gave him (1465) a benefice yielding a protective income. Some three years later he died.

  Doubtless his use of movable type would have been developed by others had he never been born; it was an obvious demand of the times; this is true of most inventions. A letter written in 1470 by Guillaume Fichet of Paris suggests how enthusiastically the invention was welcomed: “There has been discovered in Germany a wonderful new method for the production of books, and those who have mastered the art are taking it from Mainz out into the world.... . The light of this discovery will spread from Germany to all parts of the earth.”31 But not all welcomed it. Copyists protested that printing would destroy their means of livelihood; aristocrats opposed it as a mechanical vulgarization, and feared that it would lower the value of their manuscript libraries; statesm
en and clergy distrusted it as a possible vehicle of subversive ideas. It made its triumphant way nevertheless. In 1464 two Germans set up a press in Rome; in or before 1469 two Germans opened a printing shop in Venice; in 1470 three Germans brought the art to Paris; in 1471 it reached Holland, in 1472 Switzerland, in 1473 Hungary, in 1474 Spain, in 1476 England, in 1482 Denmark, in 1483 Sweden, in 1490 Constantinople. Nuremberg with the Koberger family, Paris with the Étiennes, Lyons with Dolet, Venice with Aldus Manutius, Basel with Amerbach and Froben, Zurich with Froschauer, Leiden with the Elzevirs, became humming hives of printing and publishing. Soon half the European population was reading as never before, and a passion for books became one of the effervescent ingredients of the Reformation age. “At this very moment,” writes a Basel scholar to a friend, “a whole wagon load of classics, of the best Aldine editions, has arrived from Venice. Do you want any? If you do, tell me at once, and send the money, for no sooner is such a freight landed than thirty buyers rise up for each volume, merely asking the price, and tearing one another’s eyes out to get hold of them.”32 The typographical revolution was on.

  To describe all its effects would be to chronicle half the history of the modern mind. Erasmus, in the ecstasy of his sales, called printing the greatest of all discoveries, but perhaps he underestimated speech, fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, law, even the lowly common noun. Printing replaced esoteric manuscripts with inexpensive texts rapidly multiplied, in copies more exact and legible than before, and so uniform that scholars in diverse countries could work with one another by references to specific pages of specific editions. Quality was often sacrificed to quantity, but the earliest printed books were in many cases models of art in typography and binding. Printing published—i.e., made available to the public—cheap manuals of instruction in religion, literature, history, and science; it became the greatest and cheapest of all universities, open to all. It did not produce the Renaissance, but it paved the way for the Enlightenment, for the American and French revolutions, for democracy. It made the Bible a common possession, and prepared the people for Luther’s appeal from the popes to the Gospels; later it would permit the rationalist’s appeal from the Gospels to reason. It ended the clerical monopoly of learning, the priestly control of education. It encouraged the vernacular literatures, for the large audience it required could not be reached through Latin. It facilitated the international communication and co-operation of scientists. It affected the quality and character of literature by subjecting authors to the purse and taste of the middle classes rather than to aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons. And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time.