Luther and the Arrogance of Books

In 1539, Martin Luther was asked to write the preface for a compilation of his German writings. Luther met the request, but reluctantly. As a matter of fact, he opposed the project altogether, in the hope, he said, of relegating his entire body of work to history’s dustbin.

My consolation is that, in time, my books will lie forgotten in the dust anyhow, especially if I (by God’s grace) have written anything good. … There is especially good hope of this, since it has begun to rain and snow books and teachers, many of which already lie there forgotten and moldering. Even their names are not remembered any more, despite their confident hope that they would eternally be on sale in the market and rule churches.

Where others might have indulged in one last swipe at their critics, Luther’s summation seems more like a denouement. Some may detect a note of mock humility here, but Luther was expressing real—but rather odd—concerns about his writings. He wasn’t concerned about what they said. He was concerned that they existed at all.

The most obvious reason for Luther’s concern is that he was worried his followers using his writings to develop a theological system codifying his message of grace alone, in effect creating a system about giving up systems. Yet, his statement also could be helpful in understanding what it means for Christians to write and the place writing should have in Christian intellectual life.

Luther was not the first to raise concerns about writing. Such reflection begins, as so much else, with Plato. In the middle of his Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates spin a tale of two Egyptian gods, Theuth and Thamus. Socrates begins his tale with Theuth, a Prometheus-like figure, bragging about writing, his latest invention for the benefit of humanity. Thamus, though, isn’t impressed. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” Thamus warns. “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

As Eric Havelock has argued, Thamus reflects the uneasiness Plato felt as Greek society adopted the written word. Plato understood the benefits writing brought. Writing offered people the ability to think deeply, permitting high philosophy. It made Plato possible.

However, Plato also believed that writing had a cost. Since they could write things down, people wouldn’t need to remember anything. For the first time, knowing could be severed from the human body. Knowledge would be “out there” on the page, not in the knower’s mind. The text would take on a life of its own, and people would forget any other way of understanding.

The late Jesuit scholar Walter Ong’s history of the transition between speaking and writing, Orality and Literacy, echoes Plato’s concerns. Ong noticed disparities between cultures that primarily wrote and cultures that primarily spoke. Oral cultures know by feeling; literate cultures by reason. Oral cultures understand; literate cultures explain. Oral cultures are defined by their community; literate cultures by their isolation. And, like Plato, Ong suggested that for all writing’s benefits, something irreplaceable was lost in the transition from speaking to books: A different way of knowing that Western literate society, in its hubris, forgot ever existed.

Luther stood at the beginning of another chapter of the age of text. Less than a century before Luther wrote his preface, Gutenberg had invented the printing press. Now, for the first time, the Bible could be put into the hands of everyone. Mass movements could develop. Reformations could happen. If writing made Plato possible, printing made Luther possible.

The ability to print books, though, created an expectation to write books and, in turn, the lure of mass literary success. Writers could become “authors,” original thinkers who “owned” their ideas like property. There could be reputations, cash advances and tenure. Theologians in Luther’s day found the temptation too difficult to resist. Soon, they preened themselves over intellectual minutiae and reputations and wrote snarky reviews of anyone who dared contradict them. The act of writing became an end unto itself. Christian writers could, to borrow Thamus’s phrase, have a show of faith without the reality.

Luther couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy. Such writers, he wrote in the heat of early years of the Reformation, tortured believers with their petty systems and regulations. “The majority deals only with tomfoolery, teaching canon law, papal laws, human teaching, and their own statutes,” he wrote in 1521. “To these things they cling, these they keep, these they teach daily; and they no longer have an opportunity to know the truth.” Libraries became silent Towers of Babel. It would be better, he believed, if they stopped writing altogether.

Luther’s words could expose him to a charge of hypocrisy. Here he was, writing books about the dangers of writing books. However, Luther, like Plato, was after a different sort of understanding than writing alone could give, though he ended in a different place than Plato. Like Calvin, Luther believed that reading scripture correctly was a process guided by the Holy Spirit. “This Spirit can never be contained in any letter. It cannot be written, like the law, with ink, on stone, or in books,” he argued. “Instead, it is inscribed only in the heart.”

Scripture, Luther believed, gives witness to a Truth that lives in everything that exists, a Reality that transcends the marks on the page. We cannot confuse the text with the truth it reflects. No matter how glorious the prose, no matter how authoritative the argument, written words are but traces of a greater truth. For Luther, as for Plato, there was something else than the text, but writing constantly threatened to overstep itself. To forget this would make writing an idolatrous vanity, a flippant academic exercise of epigrams, posturing and twiddle over twaddle.

To resist these temptations, and for the sake of the Gospel, Luther urged his readers to disabuse themselves of their pretensions. “The longer you write and teach the less you will be pleased with yourself,” he concluded in his preface. “When you have reached this point, then do not be afraid to hope that you have begun to become a real theologian, who can teach not only the young and imperfect Christian, but also the maturing and perfect ones.” Christian writing, Luther believed, must never be about personal glory—about selling books and ruling churches—but about the Word itself, which both transcends every word the Christian writer pens.

Luther’s advice is potentially painful for Christian writers, yet also potentially liberating. In today’s publishing world, polemics have become commodities. Everywhere, we find Thomists and Chestertonians, Tillichians and Augustinians. As writers, we fall prey to the same temptations, stalk the same sorts of ideological territories and write the same snarky reviews our predecessors did. And the Gospel suffers for our arrogance. In Christian writing, Luther reminds us, only the Word is necessary. Everything else is so much dust.