Translation And Power: The Reformation And The Vernacular
TRANSLATION AND POWER: THE REFORMATION AND THE VERNACULAR
In 1520, Luther took the decisive steps that would lead to the fledgling Reformation breaking free from the limited confines of aca-demia, and becoming a popular movement. He began writing works in German, rather than the more scholarly Latin. Luther would continue to use Latin when it suited him; after all, he wanted his ideas to travel throughout Europe, and Latin was the cosmopolitan language of his day. Yet Latin was a language of exclusion, which ensured that common people could not share in the political and religious discussions of the elite. Luther chose the most accessible and inclusive language of the region to reinforce his message of reform. The arcane language of the Church would be set aside in order to allow Luther to speak directly to his fellow Germans in their native language.
Luther, however, recognized that language was not the only factor in reaching a wider audience. He needed to adapt his writing style as well. He, therefore, published three popular pamphlets in 1520, arguing the case for reform with wit and vigor. The first of these—The Appeal to the German Nobility, published in August 1520—was perhaps the most important. In it, Luther set out—in German—the need for reform, and castigated the Church and its clergy for their unwillingness to deal with the matter. So if the Church would not reform itself, what could be done? Luther's answer was as simple as it was radical: the German laity should press for the reform that the Church sought to evade.
Luther now added a more fundamental demand. The laity should have the right to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Why should they depend on the Pope to interpret the Bible for them? Were there not vested interests here? What was special about the Pope, anyway? And why did the Bible have to be locked away from the people, imprisoned in the fetters of a dead language that only a charmed circle could read? Why could not the educated laity be allowed to read the Bible in their own languages for themselves, and form judgments on whether what the Church taught and practiced was in line with the biblical material?
Erasmus produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament in 1516, based on the original Greek texts. That was useful, in Luther's view. But most laity could not read this learned language. What they needed was the New Testament to be translated accurately into the language they used in their everyday lives. Giving the laity access to the Bible in their own language would let them see how they had been duped by the clergy. Having realized the need for such a translation, Luther decided the task was too important to leave to anyone else. He would do it himself, and translate the New Testament into German.
Making the Bible available in the German language thus became a priority. Luther argued that the medieval church had built walls around the Bible, in an attempt to exclude ordinary Christians from reading and interpreting it. The Bible was treated as a fortified city with walls designed to keep the ordinary people out. Luther saw himself as a latter-day Joshua. He would cause the walls of this new Jericho to come tumbling down. The medieval Church, he argued, tried to exclude the laity from reading the Bible, by preventing it from being read in a language they could understand. He, Luther, would change all that. The Bible would be available in German! And so the massive task began, in which Luther would painstakingly translate the Bible from its original languages into the everyday language of his people.
If the Bible was available in the vernacular, all could read it and judge the teachings of the Church for themselves. Power could thus pass from the hierarchy of the Church to its ordinary people. The Reformation was a movement of popular empowerment, in which the laity would be given the right to judge the Church, and demand its reform and renewal. Not surprisingly, this was seen as profoundly threatening by the Church establishment, which promptly made every attempt it could to suppress Luther's ideas. On June 15, 1520, the papal bull Exsurge Domine was issued, condemning Luther's teachings, and giving him sixty days to retract his opinions or face being denounced as a heretic. This was accompanied by the public burning of Luther's books in the Piazza Navona in Rome, and demands for his books to be destroyed.
These repressive measures met with severely limited success. Germany at this time consisted of a myriad of territories, governed by princes, each of whom treasured his independence. In the case of Saxony, in which Luther was active, the local prince was Frederick the Wise. Although he was a traditional Catholic who had no wish to quarrel with his Church, Frederick saw no reason to take action against Luther, despite urgings from Rome to suppress the upstart priest who was causing such difficulty for papal authority in the region. Luther had succeeded in mobilizing popular opinion behind his stand. The papal bull was pelted with filth and torn down by mobs in many German cities and universities. Erasmus dismissed the bull with contempt. Luther's crime, he argued, consisted in two matters. “He has attacked the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.” The real threat of Luther's revolt, as Erasmus so clearly realized, was to the power and wealth of the Church.
This is precisely what many in the Church feared. Lay access to the Bible was about power as much as it was about encouraging personal spirituality. Pressure for the Bible to be placed in the hands of the ordinary person was an implicit demand for the emancipation of the laity from clerical domination. One incident in the history of this period can be noted to illustrate this point—the Great Disputation at Zurich, which took place in January 1523.
The Reformation in the Swiss city of Zurich began in January of 1519, after Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) was installed as the “people's priest” in the closing months of 1518 at the Great Minster, which still dominates the old city. Zwingli's demands for reform—especially his insistence that the Bible should be the norm of all church teachings and practices—gradually met with acceptance within the city. At some point in 1520, the Zurich city council required all its priests to preach according to Scripture, avoiding “human innovations and explanations.”
A minor crisis arose in Lent 1522, when some of Zwingli's followers broke the fast traditionally observed at this time of year. During a period in which it was traditional to eat only vegetables or fish, it seems that some of Zwingli's supporters succumbed to the sensuous and forbidden pleasures of some kind of sausage. (Sadly, the precise details of the matter have been lost to us.) The city council reaffirmed their commitment to the observance of the Lenten fast a few weeks later on April 9, and fined Herr Froschauer—a prominent Zurich printer—a trivial amount for allowing it to be broken in his house. There the matter might have rested, as the city council clearly hoped it would.
Zwingli was having none of this, however, and saw it as a convenient moment to force an issue. Seven days later, he published—on Froschauer's presses, as it happened—a treatise arguing that he was aware of no place in Scripture that required that believers should abstain from eating meat during Lent. A similar debate also developed during the same year concerning clerical marriage. Aware of growing tensions over the progress of reform in Zurich, the city council decided to hold a public debate, and invited Zwingli to present the case for the Reformation, and the bishop of Constance to send representatives to oppose the Reformation and argue for the retention of traditional Catholic beliefs and practices.
The debate was held on January 29, 1523, at the Zurich town hall. All of Zurich's citizens were invited to hear the debate, and judge the issues for themselves. The outcome was a personal triumph for Zwingli. The bishop of Constance's representatives insisted on speaking in Latin, a language understood by relatively few of the worthy citizens of Zurich. Zwingli spoke in Swiss German, the native language of his people. The impressions created were as memorable as they were permanent. Catholicism was perceived as alien to Zurich. The use of the vernacular was decisive in winning the debate for the Reformation. It offered power and choice to the people, bypassing the vested interests of social and ecclesiastical elites.
As events at Zurich made clear, the citizens of Europe could offer a compelling challenge to the power and authority of the Church. It was all part of the great pattern of the age—the shift of influence from traditional authorities to the rising mercantile classes. The key to the theological empowerment of the laity was to allow them to read the Bible for themselves, and act on what they found. The pressure for the translation of the Bible, and publication of the resulting translations, became irresistible.