The Age of the Reformation Part 44

[Sidenote: Luther]

By far the best biblical criticism of the century was the mature work of Martin Luther. It is a remarkable fact that a man whose doctrine of the binding authority of Scripture was so high, and who refused his disciples permission to interpret the text with the least shade of independence, should himself have shown a freedom in the treatment of the inspired writers unequaled in any Christian for the next three centuries. It is sometimes said that Luther's judgments were mere matters of taste; that he took what he liked and rejected what he disliked, and this is true to a certain extent. "What treats well of Christ, that is Scripture, even if Judas and Pilate had written it," he averred, and again, "If our adversaries urge the Bible against Christ, we must urge Christ against the Bible." His wish to exclude the epistle of James from the canon, on the ground that its doctrine of justification contradicted that of Paul, was thus determined, and excited wide protest not only from learned Catholics like Sir Thomas More, but also from many Protestants, beginning with Bullinger.

But Luther's trenchant judgments of the books of the Bible were usually far more than would be implied by a merely dogmatic interest. Together with the best scholars.h.i.+p of the age he had a strong intuitive feeling for style that guided him aright in many cases. In denying the Mosaic authors.h.i.+p of a part of the Pentateuch, in a.s.serting that Job and Jonah were fables, in finding that the books of Kings were more credible than Chronicles and that the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes had received their final form from later editors, he but advanced theses now universally accepted. His doubts about Esther, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse have been amply {569} confirmed. Some modern scholars agree with his most daring opinion, that the epistle of James was written by "some Jew who had heard of the Christians but not joined them." After Luther the voluminous works of the commentators are a dreary desert of arid dogmatism and fantastic pedantry.

Carlstadt was perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis slumbers in fifty volumes in deserved neglect.

[Sidenote: German version]

Among the great vernacular Protestant versions of the Bible that of Luther stands first in every sense of the word. Long he had meditated on it before his enforced retirement at the Wartburg gave him the leisure to begin it. The work of revision, in which Luther had much help from Melanchthon and other Wittenberg professors, was a life-long labor. Only recently have the minutes of the meetings of these scholars come to light, and they testify to the endless trouble taken by the Reformer to make his work clear and accurate. He wrote no dialect, but a common, standard German which he believed to have been introduced by the Saxon chancery. But he also modelled his style not only on the few good German authors then extant, but on the speech of the market-place. From the mouths of the people he took the sweet, common words that he gave back to them again, "so that they may note that we are speaking German to them." Spirit and fire he put into the German Bible; dramatic turns of phrase, lofty eloquence, poetry.

All too much Luther read his own ideas into the Bible. To make Moses "so German that no one would know that he was a Jew" insured a n.o.ble style, but involved an occasional violent wrench to the thought. Thus the Psalms are made to speak of Christ quite plainly, and of German May-festivals; and the pa.s.sover is metamorphosed into Easter. Is there not even {570} an allusion to the golden rose given by the pope in the translation of Micah iv, 8?--"Und du Thurm Eder, eine Feste der Tochter Zion, es wird deine goldene Rose kommen." Luther declared his intention of "simply throwing away" any text repugnant to the rest of Scripture, as he conceived it. As a matter of fact the greatest change that he actually made was the introduction of the word "alone" after "faith" in the pa.s.sage (Romans iii, 28) "A man is justified by faith without works of the law." Luther never used the word "church"

(Kirche), in the Bible, but replaced it by "congregation" (Gemeinde).

Following Erasmus he turned [Greek] _metanoieite_ (Matthew iii, 2, 8) into "bessert euch" ("improve yourselves") instead of "tut Busse" ("do penance") as in the older German versions. Also, following the Erasmian text, he omitted the "comma Johanneum" (I John v, 7); this was first insinuated into the German Bible in 1575.

[Sidenote: English Bible]

None of the other vernacular versions, not even the French translation of Lefevre and Olivetan can compare with the German save one, the English. How William Tyndale began and how Coverdale completed the work in 1535, has been told on another page. Many revisions followed: the Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops'

Bible of 1568. Then came the Catholic, or Douai version of 1582, the only one completely differing from the others, with its foundation on the Vulgate and its numerous barbarisms: "parasceue" for "preparation,"

"feast of Azymes" for "feast of unleavened bread," "imposing of hands,"

"what to me and thee, woman" (John ii, 4), "penance," "chalice,"

"host," "against the spirituals of wickedness in the celestials"

(Ephesians vi, 12), "supersubstantial bread" in the Lord's prayer, "he exinanited himself" (Philippians ii, 7).

We are accustomed to speak of the Authorized Version {571} of 1610 as if it were a new product of the literary genius of Shakespeare's age.

In fact, it was a mere revision, and a rather light one, of previous work. Its rare perfection of form is due to the labors of many men manipulating and polis.h.i.+ng the same material. Like the Homeric poems, like the Greek gospels themselves probably, the greatest English cla.s.sic is the product of the genius of a race and not of one man.

Even from the very beginning it was such to some extent. Tyndale could hardly have known Wyclif's version, which was never printed and was rare in ma.n.u.script, but his use of certain words, such as "mote,"

"beam," and "strait gate," also found in the earlier version, prove that he was already working in a literary tradition, one generation handing down to another certain Scriptural phrases first heard in the mouths of the Lollards.

Both Tyndale and Coverdale borrowed largely from the German interpreters, as was acknowledged on the t.i.tle-page and in the prologue to the Bible of 1535. Thus Tyndale copied not only most of the marginal notes of Luther's Bible, but also such Teutonisms as, "this is once bone of my bone," "they offered unto field-devils" (Luther, "Felt-teuffem"), "Blessed is the room-maker, Gad" (Luther, "Raum-macher"). The English translators also followed the German in using "elder" frequently for "priest," "congregation" for "church," and "love" for "charity." By counting every instance of this and similar renderings, Sir Thomas More claimed to have found one thousand errors in the New Testament alone.

[Sidenote: Popularity of Bible]

The astounding popularity of the Bible, chiefly but not only in Protestant countries, is witnessed by a myriad voices. Probably in all Christian countries in every age it has been the most read book, but in the sixteenth century it added to an unequaled reputation {572} for infallibility the zest of a new discovery. Edward VI demanding the Bible at his coronation, Elizabeth pa.s.sionately kissing it at hers, were but types of the time. That joyous princess of the Renaissance, Isabella d'Este, ordered a new translation of the Psalms for her own perusal. Margaret of Navarre, in the Introduction to her frivolous _Heptameron_, expresses the pious hope that all present have read the Scripture. Hundreds of editions of the German and English translations were called for. The people, wrote an Englishman in 1539, "have now in every church and place, almost every man, the Bible and New Testament in their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Table Round . . . and such other whose impure filth and vain fabulosity the light of G.o.d hath abolished there utterly." In Protestant lands it became almost a matter of good form to own the Bible, and reading it has been called, not ineptly, "the _opus operatum_ of the Evangelicals." Even the Catholics bore witness to the demand, which they tried to check. While they admonished the laity that it was unnecessary and dangerous to taste of this tree of knowledge, while they even curtailed the reading of the Scripture by the clergy, they were forced to supply vernacular versions of their own.

[Sidenote: Bibliolatry]

Along with unbounded popularity the Bible then enjoyed a much higher reputation for infallibility than it bears today. The one point on which all Protestant churches were agreed was the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. The Word, said Calvin, flowed from the very mouth of G.o.d himself; it was the sole foundation of faith and the one fountain of all wisdom. "What Christ says must be true whether I or any other man can understand it," preached Luther. "Scripture is fully to be believed," wrote an English theologian, "as a thing necessary to salvation, though {573} the thing contained in Scripture pertain not merely to the faith, as that Aaron had a beard." The Swiss and the Anabaptists added their voices to this chorus of bibliolatry.

[Sidenote: _Abeunt studia in mores_]

Since studies pa.s.s into character, it is natural to find a marked effect from this turning loose of a new source of spiritual authority.

That thousands were made privately better, wiser and happier from the reading of the gospels and the Hebrew poetry, that standards of morality were raised and ethical tastes purified thereby, is certain.

But the same cause had several effects that were either morally indifferent or positively bad. The one chiefly noticed by contemporaries was the pullulation of new sects. Each man, as Luther complained, interpreted the Holy Book according to his own brain and crazy reason. The old saying that the Bible was the book of heretics, came true. It was in vain for the Reformers to insist that none but the ministers (_i.e._ themselves) had the right to interpret Scripture.

It was in vain for the governments to forbid, as the Scotch statute expressed it, "any to dispute or hold opinions on the Bible"; [Sidenote: 1550] discordant clamor of would-be expounders arose, some learned, others ignorant, others fantastic, and all pig-headed and intolerant.

There can be no doubt that the Bible, in proportion to the amount of inerrancy attributed to it, became a stumbling-block in the path of progress, scientific, social and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin. Rational biblical criticism was regarded by Luther, except when he was the critic, as a cause of vehement suspicion of atheism. Some texts b.u.t.tressed the horrible and cruel superst.i.tion of witchcraft. The examples of the wars of Israel and the text, "compel them to enter in," seemed to support the duty of intolerance. Social reformers, like {574} Vives, in their struggle to abolish poverty, were confronted with the maxim, mistaken as an eternal verity, that the poor are always with us. Finally the great moral lapse of many of the Protestants, the permission of polygamy, was supported by biblical texts.

[Sidenote: The cla.s.sics]

Next to the Bible the sixteenth century revered the cla.s.sics. Most of the great Latin authors had been printed prior to 1500, the most important exception being the _Annals_ of Tacitus, of which the _editio princeps_ was in 1515. Between the years 1478 and 1500, the following Greek works had been published, and in this order: Aesop, Homer, Isocrates, Theocritus, the Anthology, four plays of Euripides, Aristotle, Theognis, and nine plays of Aristophanes. Follow the dates of the _editiones principes_ of the other princ.i.p.al Greek writers:

1502: Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus.

1503: Euripides (eighteen plays), Xenophon's _h.e.l.lenica_.

1504: Demosthenes.

1509: Plutarch's _Moralia_.

1513: Pindar, Plato.

1516: Aristophanes, New Testament, Xenophon, Pausanias, Strabo.

1517: Plutarch's _Lives_.

1518: Septuagint, Aeschylus, four plays.

1525: Galen, Xenophon's complete works.

1528: Epictetus.

1530: Polybius.

1532: Aristophanes, eleven plays.

1533: Euclid, Ptolemy.

1544: Josephus.

1552: Aeschylus, seven plays.

1558: Marcus Aurelius.

1559: Diodorus.

1565: Bion and Moschus.

1572: Plutarch's complete works.

Naturally the first editions were not usually the best. {575} [Sidenote: Scholars.h.i.+p] The labor of successive generations has made the text what it is. Good work, particularly, though not exclusively, in editing the fathers of the church, was done by Erasmus. But a really new school of historical criticism was created by Joseph Justus Scaliger, [Sidenote: J. J. Scaliger, 1540-1609] the greatest of scholars. His editions of the Latin poets first laid down and applied sound rules of textual emendation, besides elucidating the authors with a wealth of learned comment.

The editing of the texts was but a small portion of the labor that went to the cultivation of the cla.s.sics. The foundations of our modern lexicons were laid in the great _Thesaurus linguae Latinae_ of Robert Estienne (first edition 1532, 2d improved 1536, 3d in three volumes 1543) and the _Thesauris linguae Graecae_ by Henry Estienne the younger, published in five volumes in 1572. This latter is still used, the best edition being that in nine volumes 1829-63.

So much of ancient learning has become a matter of course to the modern student that he does not always realize the amount of ground covered in the last four centuries. Erasmus once wrote to Cardinal Grimani: [Sidenote: November 13, 1517] "The Roman Capitol, to which the ancient poets vainly promised eternity, has so completely disappeared that its very location cannot be pointed out." If one of the greatest scholars then was ignorant of a site now visited by every tourist in the Eternal City, how much must there not have been to learn in other respects?

Devotedly and successfully the contemporaries and successors of Erasmus labored to supply the knowledge then wanting. Latin, Greek and Hebrew grammars were written, treatises on Roman coinage, on epigraphy, on ancient religion, on chronology, on comparative philology, on Roman law, laid deep and strong the foundations of the consummate scholars.h.i.+p of modern times.

{576} [Sidenote: Idolatry of ancients]

The cla.s.sics were not only studied in the sixteenth century, they were loved, they were even wors.h.i.+pped. "Every elegant study, every science worthy of the attention of an educated man, in a word, whatever there is of polite learning," wrote the French savant Muret, [Sidenote: 1573]

"is contained nowhere save in the literature of the Greeks." Joachim du Bellay wrote a cycle of sonnets on the antiquities of Rome, in the spirit:

Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome.

"The Latin allureth me by its gracious dignity," wrote Montaigne, "and the writings of the Greeks not only fill and satisfy me, but transfix me with admiration. . . . What glory can compare with that of Homer?"

Machiavelli tells how he dressed each evening in his best attire to be worthy to converse with the spirits of the ancients, and how, while reading them, he forgot all the woes of life and the terror of death.

Almost all learned works, and a great many not learned, were written in Latin. For those who could not read the cla.s.sics for themselves translations were supplied. Perhaps the best of these were the _Lives of Famous Men_ by Plutarch, first rendered into French by Amyot and thence into English by Sir Thomas North.

[Sidenote: Value of cla.s.sics in 16th century]

Strong, buoyant, self-confident as was the spirit of the age, it bore plainly upon it the impress of its zealous schooling in the lore of the ancients. In supplying the imperious need of cultured men for good literature the Romans and Greeks had, in the year 1500, but few rivals--save in Italy, hardly any. To an age that had much to learn they had much to teach; to men as greedy for the things of the mind as they were for luxury and wealth the cla.s.sics offered a new world as rich in spoils of wisdom and beauty as were the East Indies and {577} Peru in spices and gold. The supreme value of the Greek and Latin books is that which they have in common with all literature; they furnished, for the ma.s.s of reading men, the best and most copious supply of food for the intellectual and spiritual life. "Books," says Erasmus, "are both cheering and wholesome. In prosperity they steady one, in affliction console, do not vary with fortune and follow one through all dangers even to the grave. . . . What wealth or what scepters would I exchange for my tranquil reading?" "From my earliest childhood," Montaigne confides, "poetry has had the power to pierce me through and transport me."

In the best sense of the word, books are popular philosophy. All cannot study the deepest problems of life or of science for themselves, but all can absorb the quintessence of thought in the pleasant and stimulating form in which it is served up in the best literature.

Books accustom men to take pleasure in ideas and to cultivate a high and n.o.ble inward life. This, their supreme value for the moulding of character, was appreciated in the sixteenth century. "We must drink the spirit of the cla.s.sics," observes Montaigne, "rather than learn their precepts," and again, "the use to which I put my studies is a practical one--the formation of character for the exigencies of life."

[Sidenote: Ancient masters of literary style]