The swan is coming
The end of Volume 3 — looking forward
We are standing at the edge of the world as it was.
It is approximately 1500 AD. Gutenberg's press is forty-five years old and there are printers in every major European city. Erasmus has a Greek New Testament almost ready. The Ottoman Turks are in Constantinople. The Spanish are in the Americas. The Renaissance is in full flower. The great cathedrals are mostly built.
And in a monastery in Erfurt, Germany, a young man named Martin Luther is entering the Augustinian order, terrified of God, desperate for peace, about to read Augustine more carefully than Augustine has been read in a thousand years.
The questions Wycliffe asked are still in the air. The questions Hus died for are still unanswered. The Lollard networks are still alive in England. The Hussite movement is still alive in Bohemia. The humanist scholars are producing tools — Greek texts, critical editions, better translations — that will make the questions impossible to ignore.
The institution that burned Hus does not know what is coming. The institution is busy — fighting over Italian city-states, commissioning Michelangelo, building Saint Peter's Basilica with money from the sale of indulgences. The money from the indulgences is flowing north into Germany.
In Wittenberg, a professor of biblical theology is preparing lectures on the Psalms. His name means free man in German. He does not feel free. He is about to discover why.
Volume 4 opens tomorrow.
“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
— Martin Luther, Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521 AD
“Behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright in him, but the righteous will live by his faith.”
The righteous shall live by faith. Four words from a minor prophet in the eighth century BC. Paul quotes them in Romans. Augustine reads Romans. Luther reads Augustine. The Reformation begins.
The chain again. The unbroken, improbable, often-interrupted chain of a word passed from hand to hand across thirty centuries, landing finally in a monk in Erfurt who needs it more than he knows.
You are in the chain. You received something from someone. You will give it to someone else. The word that has been moving since Habakkuk is still moving.
Volume 3 is over. The darkness is about to break.
Volume 4 opens with a thunderstorm and a vow, a monk who can't find peace, and a door in Wittenberg.
Turn the page.