THE SCANDAL OF RELIGIONIndeed, I pray thus orally every day and in my heart [mit dem herzen], without inter-
mission, and all those who believe in Christianity pray thus with me. And I am well
convinced that God will hear our prayers.^1Luther published these words in 1531, against an anonymous ‘‘papist’’ pamphleteer
who had sold his ‘‘mean-spirited little book [Schmachbuchlin]’’ in the previous year at the
fair of Leipzig—one of the publishing centers of Catholic propaganda. The author of the
pamphlet to which Luther responds could have been Georg, the staunch Catholic duke
of Saxony, or any of the numerous monks and lay publicists who worked under his
patronage. Luther feels that the anonymous book calls for a counterattack against all
papists, admitting that, although he will aim at the ‘‘sack,’’ he may hit the ‘‘donkey.’’ With
this proviso, Luther is referring to the religious practice of correcting the other’s error in
the name of charity. Luther’s curses, aiming at the errors (‘‘the sack’’) but possibly injur-
ing the persons (‘‘the donkey’’), show little concern for brotherly love. Furthermore, Lu-
ther is distinguishing between the formal level of belief, which one carries like a sack, and
the psycho-physical human being, the donkey, suggesting that the actual consequences of
his objections to Catholic dogma may involve his adversaries’ affective reactions. With
this statement, Luther signals that he is self-consciously stretching the limits of the
religiously sanctioned rhetoric of blame and correction circumscribed by Christian moral-
ity to create a more effective and injurious language. Just how far does Luther stretch
conventional rhetorical and religious practices? What are the consequences of his rudeness?
Luther’s rhetorical practice at once evokes existing conventions and calls these con-
ventions, along with established authorities and the entire rationale of Christian society,
into question. He relies on a tradition of verbal violence rooted not only in satire and the
rhetoric of blame,pugna verborum, but also in inherently religious forms of speech such
as ritual cursing and Bible-based provocative and violent language. Many of Luther’s
insults are drawn directly from or mimic the Bible, whose language, he insists, is inher-
ently contentious, a ‘‘war cry.’’^2 The practice of cursing to which Luther has recourse is
not alien to the enormous textual canon under the power and jurisdiction of the Church,
which availed itself of ritualized curses and anathemas against heretics and those responsi-
ble for ‘‘scandals.’’^3
The provocative nature of Luther’s rhetoric lies in the claim that it is not provocative
at all, a claim that is designed to disarm all critics by implicitly accusing them of the error
they seek to correct. As we will see, this essentially satirical reversal of positions is intri-
cately tied to Luther’s theology of the performative and to his reading of the Bible-based
notion of ‘‘offense’’ or ‘‘scandal.’’ Luther does not simply indulge in negative forms of
speech. He seeks to justify his use of rhetorical conventions such as thepugna verborum
and the religious conventions such as cursing. As a result, he succeeds in disengaging the
definition of violent and nonviolent, pious and impious language from the external, fixed
norms (both rhetorical and moral) that determine the medieval and early modern ethics
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