THE SCANDAL OF RELIGIONcongregations and churches that began to proliferate in Europe and throughout the world
during the Reformation), whom it permits to accuse and ostracize those whom it deems
to be ‘‘other.’’Scandalas a polemical term undid the moral-religious unity of the public
space, all the more so as various groups tried to enforce their norms of morality and piety.
A careful look at Luther’s theology of offense reveals, however, a point of even greater
division than the fragmentation of the homogeneous public space into heterogeneous
and, possibly, hostile groups representing different beliefs and norms. The French author
Montaigne sums up Luther’s public effect: ‘‘I note that Luther has left behind in Germany
as many—indeed more—discords and disagreements [autant de divisions et d’altercations]
because of doubts about his opinions than he himself ever raised about Holy Scripture.
Our controversies are verbal ones.’’^49 Montaigne’s nominalist disclaimer that religious
controversies are merely verbal disputes reveals his anxiety about the power of words to
divide. While writing these lines, he was no doubt also thinking of France, caught both
in an on-going civil war, the ‘‘wars of religion,’’ and in a fierce pamphlet war. Luther’s
objections to Catholic dogma and to the moral and political order represented by the
Church, Montaigne claims, have had grave effects on society. But disagreements about
dogma or about the right interpretation of Scripture do not stop at the formal level
of beliefs. Montaigne’s important insight is that disagreements about dogma are also
disagreements among people, and this social effect of dogmatic disputes is the principal
problem. Although aiming at ‘‘the sack,’’ Luther hit those who carried their beliefs on
their backs; he upset people, who in turn upset each other. In hisHow to Do Things with
Words, Austin terms this capacity of language to produce effects outside the locutionary
act ‘‘perlocutionary’’: ‘‘Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain
consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the
speaker, or of other persons.’’^50 The greatest ‘‘scandal of religion’’ in the sixteenth century
is precisely this perlocutionary aspect of dogmatic disagreements, that is, their capacity to
offend people and, spreading, to create a ‘‘hydra’s head’’ of argumentation.^51 This is why
the consequences of Luther’s theology of offense have to be measured by the proliferation
of slanderous books whose principal aim was to offend the adversary.
In the early years of the Reformation, German Catholics were reluctant to give up
their long-won position ofauctoritasby arguing with a monk from Wittenberg. For this
reason, the number of Catholic pamphlets published in German against Luther is rela-
tively small in comparison with the number of pamphlets produced by Luther’s ‘‘media
campaign.’’^52 French Catholics were much less reluctant to engage in a pamphlet war with
their French-speaking Protestant adversaries. Just to mention one example, the pamphle-
teers Artus Desire ́and Fremin Capitis did not shy away from parodying Protestant French
translations of the Book of Psalms, de facto espousing Luther’s and the Reformers’ view
that it is not the external, formal characteristics of a speech act but the consciousness of
the speaker that determines whether it is blasphemous or not. Thus the words of Scripture
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