Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  And communism, the unflinching enemy of Christianity, the ultimate bugaboo of twentieth-century politics? Surely, More could not have been seriously proposing that! Well, as of the sixteenth century, the only communism ever tried was the communism of monasticism, first exemplified by the primitive Christian Church in Jerusalem, as portrayed in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.… Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (4:32–35).

  I suspect that most, perhaps all, of the philosophical furniture of Utopia found a welcome in More’s mind, especially the means by which his imaginary society protected those who would otherwise have been the poor, the dispossessed, the exploited and abused. And he would have welcomed any society that put less store by personal wealth and vanity. The fascistic aspects of Utopia—how many adults are allowed to live in a given household, how many households can make up a given city, the laws against free travel, even the laws against sexual sin—are far less agreeable to us but may have held some virtue for More. This monk manqué had an undeniable fussbudget aspect to him, a monastic preference for extreme orderliness over any hint of chaos—and chaos, filth, and general disorder were surely thought to be the favored modes of the London poor, if we judge by contemporary descriptions. Nor was sexual sin an unfamiliar flourish at the king’s sportive court. It is this less sympathetic, even crabbed quality in More that Hilary Mantel brings to the fore in Wolf Hall, the first volume of her extraordinary reimagining of the reign of Henry VIII through the eyes of More’s great enemy, Thomas Cromwell.

  The influence that Utopia would have on future literature, as well as on succeeding expressions of political theory and practice, is virtually unequaled in Western history. As early as the 1530s, a Spanish lawyer-bishop, Vasco de Quiroga, established a native society based on Utopia in Michoacan, Mexico, positive traces of which remain to this day. In the same century, Utopia inspired some of the more startling pronouncements of Tommaso Campanella, a wonderfully flaky Spanish Dominican whose utopian fantasy, La città del Sole (The City of the Sun)—in which he advocated community of goods and wives—was published in the early seventeenth century. Maimed and tortured repeatedly by affronted inquisitors, Padre Tommaso managed nonetheless to intervene on Galileo’s side and ended his days as the cherished astrological adviser of Pope Urban VIII.

  Utopia, for all its stylistic limitations, had an impact on the political theories of the so-called Anabaptists, whom we shall soon meet, on the course of European socialism in its many evolving forms, and surely on the Marxists, even if they would dismiss as unrealistic Utopia’s utter lack of theory about how to achieve a workable socialist society. In our time, its impact may be found most signally in its opposites—in imaginative fictions about dystopias, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986). To this list I would add Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (1976), a shockingly entertaining dystopian treat, long out of print (now republished by NYRB Classics), in which the modern history of Europe is reimagined on the basis of the conceit that Luther, rather than being condemned, was eventually elected pope. The granddaddy of all these negative fictions is probably Voltaire’s Candide, written in the mid-eighteenth century but still astringently funny. And, of course, we can hardly omit Oscar Wilde’s immortal comment: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”

  1522–1611: THE WORD OF GOD GOES FORTH—FIRST IN HOCHDEUTSCH, THEN IN SHAKESPEAREAN English

  We left Luther sweating in the crowded room at Worms, where he had taken his historic stand before the Holy Roman Emperor, the princes of Germany, and their assembled wise men and courtiers. What now?

  Had he been left to sort things out for himself, it is unlikely that Luther would have lasted the year. Surely some authority would have arrested, tried, and executed him. Luther had received a safe-conduct from Charles, which the young emperor meant to honor. But once Luther reached Wittenberg, if he did, all bets would be off as to his continued freedom or even continued existence. Frederick the Wise, therefore, sent Luther word that he should expect to be intercepted soon after leaving Worms in the company of his armed guards and would, in effect, be kidnapped by an unidentified band of horsemen, training their bows on Luther’s guards. The interlopers appeared according to plan and took off with Luther, whither no one knew. In all likelihood, Luther himself did not know where he was being taken. The story went round—recounted with varying levels of hysteria—that Luther had been kidnapped by unidentified men and taken to parts unknown. Thereafter, he might as well have dropped off the Earth. No one knew if he was still alive or where he was or under whose constraints, not an uncommon fate for an annoying heretic.

  After a lengthy ride, made more arduous by the twists and turns of the “kidnappers,” who were determined not to be followed, Luther was brought to his hiding place, an out-of-the-way castle called the Wartburg, high in the forested hills overlooking the town of Eisenach. It was to be his “prison” for several months. While there, Luther was closely confined, since it was essential that he not be seen by casual visitors or passersby. While he grew his hair to eliminate his tonsure and a beard to further disguise himself, the increasingly grumpy guest was often reduced to spending long periods in the small room that had been assigned to him. Thus deprived of exercise, he developed a painful case of constipation, which he wrote about to friends in vivid descriptions. He was given the name Junker George, “Junker” indicating a man of noble rank; his only, and very occasional, conversations were with two of Frederick’s trusted friends. His drinking increased as did his waistline. “I sit here idle and drunk all day long,” he complained in one letter.

  Though Luther never doubted the wisdom of Frederick’s precautions, this remarkable level of inactivity might have led to permanent physical and psychological damage—except that Luther soon stumbled upon an all-consuming project: the translation of the whole of the Bible from its original languages into idiomatic German. Such a project would be exceedingly daunting to almost anyone in any age, but there were excellent reasons in the year 1522 for judging that the task would prove utterly impossible.

  For starters, the entire library of scholarly aids available to us was then lacking. Besides the very recent publication of Erasmus’s intercolumnar texts of the New Testament, there was no published assistance of any kind. There were of course many editions of Jerome’s Vulgate in the Latin of the late fourth century AD, but more and more educated readers were coming to doubt its trustworthiness. There were no reliable dictionaries of either ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament, or Hebrew, the language of almost all of the Old Testament. The science of textual analysis would not get under way much before the nineteenth century, and in any case there was nowhere to be found a reliable collection of ancient manuscripts (certainly not outside the papal library, which was hardly available to Luther).

  German was at this time barely a language in the sense that we would today assume. There was high German and low German, and there were a large number of dialects, Saxon, Bavarian, Hanoverian, Swabian, and the Schwyzerdütsch of the Swiss being only the most common. There was no German literary language, no written examples of classic masterpieces that could serve as models of style and substance. German was, like most European vernaculars beyond the Italian models of Dante and Boccaccio, still a language coming into being. Of course, it was spoken everywhere—in one form or another—by ordinary, unliterary folk without shame or inhibition. But writers and professors, lawyers and princes, if they wished their words to be understood clearly and definitively, still spoke and
wrote in Latin. Luther had already broken with this convention by occasionally publishing in German. But the Bible? Even the innovative Erasmus had published his New Testament in Greek, Jerome’s late Latin, and his own more pristine classical Latin, but not in any vernacular. No attempt had been made to translate the Bible into German since a group of unidentified scholars had made a translation into Middle High German in the fourteenth century, a translation of the Vulgate only, certainly not of the Hebrew or the Greek. Like Wyclif’s first translation into English in the same period, it follows the Vulgate with a painfully literal awkwardness.

  Three months or so into his new project, Martin Luther had finished his historic translation of the New Testament. He had not simply translated the Christian scriptures; he had invented literary German. He did this by peopling the books of the New Testament with ordinary Germans, speaking as colorfully as they did in real life. Such language was hardly unknown to Luther, who enjoyed the frank concreteness of German vocabulary and often availed himself of it in public and private. He had chosen the German that the imperial Saxon court used in official business with its unlettered subjects, which was also the form of German that he and the largest plurality of Germans were familiar with. But he swiftly transformed the rigidities of this official legalese by mixing it with the earthy German of daily intercourse. As he himself tells us, he listened to “the speech of the mother at home, the children in the street, the men and women in the market, the butcher and various tradesmen in their shops.” More than this, the translator exhibited a thrillingly expressive ease that harkened back to the traditions of medieval mystics and poets. As would soon become evident in his inspiring hymns, Luther was himself a genuine German poet, even a composer with a natural feeling for the rhythms of speech and the melodies of phrases.

  In making his translation accessible to the man and the woman in the street, he translated the coinage of the ancient world into its Germanic equivalents: the shekel became the Silberling, the Greek drachma and the Roman denarius became the groschen. He did the same with measures and titles, the Roman centurion turning into a Hauptmann. Wherever possible, he employed the alliteratively striking phrases of the common people: Geld und Gut (gold and goods), Land und Leute (country and countrymen), Stecken und Stab (stick and staff), Dornen und Disteln (thorns and thistles). Using the German language’s tendency to heap words on words in new combinations, he enriched the language with his own evocative new combinations, such as Gottseligkeit (God’s happiness, or salvation).

  Once set in type and printed, the translation was received like rain in a desert. A shocked Johannes Cochlaeus, who had been present at Worms and would remain one of Luther’s fiercest and most unyielding opponents, had to admit: “Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the Gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.” The condescending Cochlaeus was one doctor of divinity who had no interest in debating theological points with women and other “ignorant persons.” The distance between traditional, academic Romanists like Cochlaeus and on-the-ground Germanic evangelists, such as seemed to be sprouting up everywhere, shows itself here as virtually unbridgeable.

  A far more considered and balanced assessment of Luther’s achievement was made in the nineteenth century by the great Swiss Presbyterian scholar Philip Schaff: “The richest fruit of Luther’s leisure in the Wartburg, and the most important and useful work of his whole life, is the translation of the New Testament, by which he brought the teaching and example of Christ and the Apostles to the mind and heart of the Germans in life-like reproduction. It was a republication of the gospel. He made the Bible the people’s book in church, school, and house. If he had done nothing else, he would be one of the greatest benefactors of the German-speaking race.”

  But for all the astonishing literary triumph of Luther’s translation, did he go too far in setting these ancient (and quite various) texts in a then-modern German context? Did he on occasion even mistranslate in order to push his own theological agenda? A fair answer to each of these questions must be: “Sometimes, yes.”

  Each translator (of even far simpler texts than the New Testament) is inevitably faced with the problem that a concept familiar, even taken for granted, in one language is unfamiliar in another. (One of the most compelling educational reasons for studying a language other than one’s own is the familiarization it offers with alien ways of thinking and perceiving.) Luther’s Germanicization of the New Testament progressed so far that the distance between sixteenth-century Germany and first-century Palestine was all but erased. Let one especially extreme example serve my point.

  In Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, just after his sensational Hymn to Love (Chapter 13), he devotes a long passage to one of his recurrent headaches: the “speaking in tongues” that had become a feature of some Christian assemblies. “Speaking in tongues” actually meant speaking nonsense, since no one could understand the speaker, but some Christians were certain that their supposedly mystical babbling was a gift of the Spirit. Paul, trying to avoid an outright confrontation with these folk, suggests that there isn’t much point to speaking in tongues if no one understands what you’re saying: “Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me” (1 Cor 14:11). To a Greek speaker like Paul, the meaning of the word “barbarian” was pellucid. Greeks had long ago invented the word because they in their monumental superiority thought that non–Greek speakers spoke nonsensical baby talk (“bar-bar-bar”). Only the commodious Greek language could express all human thought.12

  The Romans, in their turn, thought that all non-Romans—except the Greeks, whom they feared might be their intellectual (though not their administrative) superiors—spoke inferior languages that no Roman (or Greek) needed to know. This is why we know that Jesus and Pontius Pilate spoke Greek together; Pilate, the Roman official, would hardly have bothered to learn Aramaic, let alone Hebrew. To the Romans the ultimate barbarians were the uncivilized Germans, who lived beyond the Rhine and the Danube, hunted like savages, and were always threatening to invade Roman territory.13

  So how does Luther translate “barbarian” into German? Where the word “barbarian” occurs in Paul’s letter, Luther supplies in his German translation the word undeutsch (not-German)! So the barbarians have become those who are not German. The assumption of the translator is that his audience will perceive anything not-German as inferior, as appositely barbarous. In supplying undeutsch, Luther cancels out long swaths of history and leaves in their place only an unwarranted sense of national superiority. Here is a rather determinative clue that the European Reformation does not lie solely in the blindness and blunders of Rome but also in the very large collective ego of the northern Europeans, whose resentment against those who were always assumed to be their cultural superiors is now reaching its boiling point.

  Far more serious, however, is Luther’s purposive mistranslation of a far more central Pauline text, Romans 3:28, which reads in the King James Version: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” To the word “faith” Luther attached the word “alone,” which does not appear in the text of the Bible, thus changing the meaning of Paul’s statement (allein durch den Glauben, “alone by faith” in the German word order) for the sake of backing up his own professed faith. But this misstatement also cancels out the entire point of the Letter of James—“by works a man is justified and not by faith only” (James 2:24)—which Luther derided anyway as “an epistle of straw.” So, the true Christian can pick and choos
e among the inspired writings.

  Nor did our translator stop there: “If your papist makes much useless fuss about the word ‘sola,’ ‘allein,’ tell him at once: Doctor Martin Luther will have it so, and says: Papist and donkey are the same thing”—and then goes on at some length, full of insulting invective and embarrassing egotism.

  It would take Luther more than a decade to finish his translation of the Old Testament, which would be published in its complete version only in 1534, long after he had returned in safety to Wittenberg. In translating the New Testament, Luther had relied for his Greek text on Erasmus’s second edition. For his Hebrew, he was fortunate in having the definitive Masoretic text, which had first been published in Brescia less than three decades before he began his great task. Nonetheless, Luther’s most troublesome challenge came in his attempt to translate the linguistic subtleties of the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Job. Luther’s Hebrew was several degrees less secure than his Greek, but the truth is that a translator needs a thorough familiarity with—and deep love of—his own language much more than he needs the same for the language he means to translate. And though Luther had a growing group of learned advisers, including several rabbis, to help him through the Hebrew texts, he never stopped amending his translations, correcting misprints, improving phrases, and heightening the melody and even the symmetry of his work.

  Despite the ban on Luther’s Bible throughout several large German-speaking lands, such as Saxony, Bavaria, and Austria, Hans Lufft, the Wittenberg printer, sold about a hundred thousand copies in the first forty years that the complete text was in circulation. This was a staggering number for a book at this time and suggests that the text was read by millions. The huge number of reprints made by other printers is inestimable. Though this trade in Bibles made fortunes for many, Luther never collected so much as a Pfennig, nor did he wish to receive any monetary reimbursement.