The writings of Luther, an isolated thinker in an isolated town, appeared quickly in Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Holland, and other nations.
Luther’s predecessors — other would-be reformers — didn’t have this technology, and worked in obscurity.
But there’s more to the Reformation than merely Luther’s access to mass communication. The printing press was a revolutionary invention, no doubt, which changed the world. But many people had access to printing presses. Why did Luther become so prominent? Because he had something to say.
The medium is important, but so is the content. Historian Jonathan Kay writes:
A simplified version of the Reformation that many people hold in their heads typically goes something like this: Disgusted by the corrupt sale of indulgences, Martin Luther rose up against the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. And thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, he was able to get his message out quickly and widely.
“In this way” Luther’s Reformation was “as much about a communications revolution as it is about a phase shift in Christian theology.”
“All that is true,” grants Kay, “but” scholars who “study the process by which Luther developed, refined and published his ideas,” find “another, overlapping truth.”
Luther had more to offer than contempt for a handful of dishonest priests who were exploiting the Roman Catholic system. Luther had a thought-out, systematic, articulated worldview.
While Luther was indeed able to leverage a communications technology unavailable to his reform-minded predecessors, he did the vast bulk of his work in isolation at the friary of the Hermits of St. Augustine. And even once he’d gone public, it took years for religious authorities to fully digest the importance of his ideas.
Luther spent hours, days, weeks, and months reading and reflecting. The Reformation was not a reflexive reaction to a corrupted system. It was the emergence of a new thought system, based on a careful analysis of the old thought system. Luther knew the Roman Catholic system well, and even admired parts of it. He could often explain it better than its defenders.
But he’d also analyzed its faults and flaws. He’d traced the ripple effects of those errors as they affected other parts of the system. He understood that systematic thought has to be rigorously and carefully thought out. Such thinking takes time, isolation, and long periods of silence.
Modern professional culture encourages collaboration through instant communication and globalized networks. But Luther’s legacy as one of history’s most influential thinkers shows us that there are certain epic projects — such as the systematic rethinking of foundational dogmas — that require time to mature and space to germinate before they are safe for universal exposure. Without that window, they die.
Luther was not obsessively quiet. He delivered insightful lectures and stirring sermons to large groups. He did not hide his thoughts: he published more handbills, fliers, broadside, songs, poems, and flysheets than any other person of his time or earlier.
His voluminous production was, however, the fruit of contemplation: hours spent alone, reading and thinking.
From Isaac Newton to Immanuel Kant to Albert Einstein, this pattern can be seen.
The lesson for the twenty-first century is this: collaboration is good, communication is good, but it is a necessary precondition for individuals to be able to clear their desks and minds, to focus without interruption, and to thoroughly explore their thought and their thought’s objects.
That is one of the many lessons that Luther’s Reformation still offers, five centuries later.
