Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan Read Free Book Online

private collectors vied with the clergy for trophies. A bishop of Lincoln, frustrated at his cathedral’s lack of valuable objects, bit off a piece of the finger of St Mary Magdalene displayed at Fécamp. Erasmus pointed out that enough wood to build a battleship was said to have come from the True Cross; as well as its sliver of the cross, the abbey of St Denis outside Paris claimed to have part of the crown of thorns, a holy nail, the hand of St Thomas and the chin of St Mary Magdalene.
    In Tyndale’s own childhood diocese of Worcester, the bishopric was held successively by three Italians from 1512. They lived in Rome, on the fat of their Worcester stipends, and never set foot in England. The rector of Slimbridge, in whose parish Hurst Farm lay, was an absentee appointed by Magdalen College at Oxford. From 1509, the living was held by John Stokesley, whom we shallmeet later as a heretic-hunter; there is no record of his having visited it. Many English priests were so ill-educated that Tyndale claimed that twenty thousand of them could not have translated into English the line from the Paternoster: ‘ fiat voluntas tua sicut in coelo et in terra ’, ‘thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’.
    Leo was little worried by the lack of reform, or by the professor of theology at the obscure new university of Wittenberg. Luther appeared to be a throwback to the old heresies for which Wycliffe and Huss had been burnt. To a large degree, he was; but he had arrived there by a different route. In his mid-thirties, the stocky son of a prosperous and godly copper miner from Eisleben, he suffered a spiritual crisis. His life was earnest; he prayed, he fasted, he carried out penances and made lists of his sins. ‘And yet my conscience kept nagging,’ he wrote. ‘It kept telling me: “You fell short there … You were not sorry enough … You left that sin off your list.”’ Redemption, he feared, was denied him. He sought to ease the pain in his soul with ‘human remedies, the traditions of men’. His efforts seemed only to increase his troubles. He read and reread Augustine and Paul, until, of a sudden, six words of Paul – ‘the righteous shall live by faith’ – bit into his conscience ‘as flashes of lightning, frightening me each time I heard them …’.
    A thought followed, of deep ill omen to traditional faith: ‘If we as righteous are to live by faith, and if the righteousness of faith is to be for salvation to everyone who believes, then it is not our merit, but the mercy of God.’ Man was too steeped in vice and sin to save himself. No penance, good works, fasting, pilgrimage, indulgence or alms-giving – none of the traditional medicines of the Church – could redeem him. Righteousness was a gift promised by Christ to all who had faith in him. It flowed directly from God, without the priestly or institutional intercession of the Church. The Christian was justified per solam fidem , by faith alone. A mortal assault on the Church followed from this. Luther rejected its ‘human remedies’; its traditions, the papacy paramountamong them, were a cowl that concealed faith. Its greed and decadence, its shameless use of ‘the threat of the stake and the shame of heresy’ to terrify its critics, and the ‘loose blabber’ of its priests, prevented the faithful from understanding the manifest things of God.
    As he pondered his insights, Luther ‘felt as though I had been reborn altogether and had entered Paradise’. In the same moment, he wrote, ‘the face of the whole of Scripture became apparent to me’. This immodest claim might have remained mere bravado without the printing press. The hand-copied book was an expensive and fragile rarity, prepared by a team of scribes and illuminators. Lollard tracts and their bulky Bibles were individual labours of love, not mass items sold at a profit. The press stood supply and cost on their head. Luther was a writer of verve and dash, a populariser and born