A Working Life in Wittenberg
As priest and professor Luther went on with his unusual routine in church and university. Frederick had set him an annual pension of 200 gulden (about $5,000 in the book's conversion), and the students who sat in his classes each paid a small sum according to their means. Luther lived in the Augustinian monastery with another monk who, like him, wore ordinary dress, and a student served him.
He himself described the heavy work of these years. His bed, soaked with sweat, went untouched for a whole year; after the exhausting labor of the day he laid his head down at night so tired that he never thought of his troubled life. Hard work increased his appetite, and he wrote that he ate like a Gypsy and drank like a German, thanks be to God, Amen. He spoke so boldly, simply and warmly that his hearers were spellbound. His only amusements were chess and playing the flute, but his happiest hours came when he was attacking and abusing the pope's partisans. The book calls him the most obstinate and unconquerable fighter in history. His writings are nearly all combative and scolding, and at the same time mixed with humor.
The Language of the People
Luther had let his opponents publish their works in Latin for a few scholars. When he addressed Christendom as a whole, he too wrote his beliefs in Latin. But most of his polemical writings were written in German or at once translated from Latin into German, since the revolution he led was a national one. Among German authors, the book says, none can be found whose works equal his in firmness and clarity of style, bluntness and sharpness, pleasing images and metaphors, and the popular words of the German people.
Luther used the new art of printing effectively and was in fact the first to make the press an instrument of war and propaganda. In an age with no newspapers or magazines, books, tracts and private letters were the only means of spreading ideas. Because of Luther's revolt, the number of printed German books rose from 150 in 1518 to 990 in 1524, and four fifths of them were written in support of the Reformation. At a time when learned books sold poorly, Luther's books were among the most widely printed in Germany. Besides bookshops they were sold by traveling peddlers and by students; at a single fair at Frankfurt 1,400 copies were sold. Even in Paris in 1520 they found more buyers than any other books. From 1519 his books were exported to France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and England. In 1521 Erasmus wrote that Luther's books were seen everywhere in every language and that the excitement he had aroused among the people was unbelievable. The reformers' zeal for books shifted the center of printing from south to north Europe. The invention of printing produced the Reformation; Gutenberg prepared the ground for Luther.
The German Bible
Luther's most remarkable work is his German translation of the Bible. Before him the Bible had been translated into German eighteen times, but all from the Latin Vulgate of Jerome, and those versions were faulty and clumsy in style. Translating from the original languages was hard. There was as yet no Hebrew or Greek dictionary in German; every page of the Bible held hundreds of obscure points that made the translators' work difficult; and German itself was still raw and immature. For the New Testament Luther used the Greek text, which Erasmus had edited, with its Latin translation, in 1516. He finished this part in 1521 and it was published the following year. After years of exhausting effort (the book's number of years is garbled, and the translation of the Old Testament was in fact a work of about a dozen years), with the help of Melanchthon and some Jewish scholars, he also rendered the Old Testament into German. With all their flaws these translations are historically important, because they gave German literature new life and made the dialect of Upper Saxony the literary language of Germany.
Because he wrote deliberately in the speech of the common people, the book says, his translations lacked literary polish. Luther himself explained the method: one should not learn German from Latin letters like cattle; one must learn it from the mothers in their houses, the children in the lanes, and the common man in the marketplace, and take their help in translating, for only then will the people understand us and know that we speak German to them. Luther's translation did for Germany what the King James Bible did for England a century later (the book's sentence is partly garbled here). It made the German language live, and it is still counted among the finest prose works of German literature. During Luther's lifetime 100,000 copies of his Bible were printed at Wittenberg, and more in unauthorized editions elsewhere. Although banned in Brandenburg, Bavaria and Austria, it spread more widely than any other book in Germany. Translation of the Bible revived the vernacular languages and literatures alongside national movements, replaced Latin, and hastened the decline of the universal Church in lands where Latin had not firmly taken root.
Scripture Above Tradition
After spending years studying and translating the Bible, Luther, following the medieval belief in its divine origin, made it the foundation of his faith. Though he did not object to certain traditions not found in Scripture, such as infant baptism and the keeping of the Sabbath on Sunday, he would not let the Church add to Christianity doctrines and practices without scriptural warrant, such as belief in purgatory, forgiveness of sins by buying indulgences, and the worship of the Virgin and the saints. Lorenzo Valla's treatise, which showed the document known as the Donation of Constantine to be the oldest fraud in history, had already shaken the faith of thousands of European Christians in the authenticity of religious tradition and the validity of church decrees. Luther himself translated it into German in 1537. Many Christians regarded tradition as man-made and without authority, but nearly all Europeans regarded the Bible as the word of God directly revealed.
Faith Against Reason
Luther also thought reason weak and powerless before faith and divine revelation. He wrote that we poor humans boldly try to grasp the greatness of God's incomprehensible wonders and look like blind moles at the light of the Creator's glory. Man, he added, cannot accept both Scripture and reason, because the two do not agree. All the articles of Christian faith that God has revealed are, in the scale of reason, impossible, meaningless and false: what is more meaningless and impossible, to our imperfect and deceiving reason, than that Christ at the Last Supper gave us his flesh and blood to eat and drink, or that the dead will rise from their graves on the last day, or that Christ, the Son of God, was conceived in the womb of the Virgin, born, grew to manhood and finally died on the cross in pain and suffering? Reason, he said, is the greatest enemy of faith. (The book then quotes a long, violent and coarse passage in which Luther attacks reason with the harshest images, calling it the devil's "harlot" and urging that it be trampled and drowned. It is omitted here, with a note that these words are among the most extreme of his career.)
Luther also condemned the scholastic philosophers who were so devoted to reason and tried to prove Christian doctrine by it, reconciling Christianity with the philosophy of Aristotle, which he called "damned, vain and a cunning idolatry."
Yet Luther himself followed reason in two matters. First, he put preaching, not ritual, at the center of religious teaching. Second, from the first day of his revolt he declared that every believer has the right to interpret the books of Scripture for himself without the Church's mediation. Luther took agreement with the teaching of Christ as the test of the authenticity and authority of a biblical book. He said that any book of the Bible whose content contradicts Christ's teaching is not from God, even if written by Peter or Paul, and that whatever agrees with Christ's teaching, even if it came from Judas, Pilate or Herod, is the word of God. For this reason he set little value on the Epistle of James, whose content conflicted with Paul's view of justification by faith, and called it an "epistle of straw." The Epistle to the Hebrews also lost credit with him because it does not allow repentance after baptism, and so supports the Anabaptists. At first Luther also thought the Revelation of John an unintelligible book of promises and threats without order and worthless for its purpose, and said of one apocryphal book that it should be thrown into the Elbe. Later critics have judged most of Luther's views on the Bible sound, despite his tangled logic. He said that none of the prophets' teachings was written down at the time, that their disciples and followers collected their words, and that the Book of Proverbs is not Solomon's work. Luther's Catholic opponents thought his views biased and one-sided and predicted that his criticism would lead other critics to deny the authenticity of other books, until no Bible remained as a basis of faith.
Apart from these cases, Luther held the Bible to be entirely and literally authentic and divinely inspired. He said that if the story of Jonah and the whale were not in the Bible he would sneer at it as a fable, and he held a similar view of the stories of Eden and the serpent and of Joshua and the sun. Since Scripture is heaven-sent, he held, these stories along with its other narratives must be taken as certain and real. Erasmus's allegorical reading of Bible stories, meant to fit them to reason, seemed to Luther a kind of irreligion.
Having found peace of mind not in philosophy but in faith in Christ as revealed in the Gospel, Luther looked on Scripture as his last refuge. Against the humanists, who loved the classics of the pagan age, he held the Bible to be not the product of human thought but a divine gift to console mankind. He wrote that far more than human reason, this book teaches us how to see and feel and cling to faith, hope and charity, and that when Satan has us in his clutches it shows how these virtues dispel the dark, and that after our poor, mean life in this world there is another that lasts forever. When asked on what ground he knew the Bible to be the word of God, he answered simply: its teaching, for only men inspired by God could found so deep and consoling a faith.