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homoousios (of same substance) to describe the stuff of which the Son was made and (to quote a
contemporary jeu de mots) “convulsed the Church by a diphthong”; in the fifth century the Nestorians
opposed the ancient Apollinarians and insisted that Christ was two beings, a god and also a man; the
Eutychians, contemporaries of the Nestorians, denied that Christ had suffered as all humans suffer.
Even though the Church instituted the death penalty for heresy as early as 382, the first case of burning a
heretic at the stake did not occur until 1022, in Orléans. On that occasion the Church condemned a group
of canons and lay nobles who, believing that true instruction could only come directly from the light of the
Holy Spirit, rejected the Scriptures as “the fabrications which men have written on the skins of animals”.
Such independent readers were obviously dangerous. The interpretation of heresy as a civil offence
punishable by death was not given legal basis until 1231, when the emperor Frederick II decreed it as
such in the Constitutions of Melfi, but by the twelfth century the Church was already enthusiastically
condemning large and aggressive heretical movements that argued not for ascetic withdrawal from the
world (which the earlier dissenters had proposed) but for a challenge to corrupt authority and the abusive
clergy, and for an individual reckoning with the Divinity. The movements spread through tortuous byways,
and crystallized in the sixteenth century.
A contemporary portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder. (photo credit 3.3)
On October 31, 1517, a monk who, through his private study of the Scriptures, had come to believe that
the divine grace of God superseded the merits of acquired faith, nailed to the door of All Saints Church in
Wittenberg ninety-five theses against the practice of indulgences — the selling of remission from
temporal punishment for condemned sins — and other ecclesiastical abuses. With this act Martin Luther
became an outlaw in the eyes of the empire and an apostate in those of the Pope. In 1529 the Holy Roman
emperor Charles V rescinded the rights granted to Luther’s followers, and fourteen free cities of
Germany, together with six Lutheran princes, caused a protest to be read against the imperial decision.
“In matters which concern God’s honour and salvation and the eternal life of our souls, everyone must
stand and give account before God for himself,” argued the protesters or, as they were later to be known,
Protestants. Ten years earlier, the Roman theologian Silvester Prierias had stated that the book upon
which the Church was founded needed to remain a mystery, interpreted only through the authority and
power of the Pope. The heretics, on the other hand, maintained that people had the right to read the word
of God for themselves, without witness or intermediary.
Centuries later, beyond a sea that for Augustine would have been at the limits of the earth, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who owed his faith to those ancient protesters, took advantage of the art that had so surprised
the saint. In church, during the lengthy and often tedious sermons which he attended out of a sense of
social responsibility, he silently read Pascal’s Pensées. And at night, in his cold room in Concord, “covered
with blankets to the chin”, he read to himself the Dialogues of Plato. (“He associated Plato,” noted a
historian, “ever after, with the smell of wool.”) Even though he thought there were too many books to be
read, and thought readers should share their findings by reporting to one another the gist of their studies,
Emerson believed that reading a book was a private and solitary business. “All these books,” he wrote,
drawing up a list of “sacred” texts that included the Upanishads and the Pensées, “are the majestic
expressions of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac or
this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and are to be read on the bended knee. Their
communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow
of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart.” In silence.
Observing the reading of Saint Ambrose that afternoon in 384, Augustine could hardly have known what
was before him. He thought he was seeing a reader trying to avoid intrusive visitors, sparing his voice for
teaching. In fact he was seeing a multitude, a host of silent readers who over the next many centuries
would include Luther, would include Calvin, would include Emerson, would include us, reading him today.
Socrates in conversation depicted on the lateral face of a second-century sarcophagus. (photo credit 3.4)
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