# 78. The Art of Printing

*In celebration of the five hundredth birthday of its creator*

There can be no doubt that the physiognomy of intellectual life, within which modern man stands, is a creation of the last four centuries. Anyone who looks back into history feels a jolt of culture at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that has few equals in the development of mankind. Whatever school conferences may say in favor of the study of the ancients, every unprejudiced person feels today how immeasurably closer to him is everything that the development of the spirit has brought forth since that turn of time than everything that came before. He feels the coherence of this spiritual development, and to him what has gone before seems like a strange, self-contained world. Compared to its predecessors, this culture of the last few centuries has something of a victor's confidence, a victor's strength, a certainty about the future. To admit this, one need not join the usual condemners of medieval intellectual life. We can maintain a clear view of the heights of thought to which, for example, Thomas Aquinas rose. But did this way of thinking have within it the victorious power that is inherent in the culture of modern times? After all, it was Thomas Aquinas who had to capitulate to the most blind superstition. The year of his death is also the year of the first official burning of witches. The Church has long resisted such beliefs; its science has not had the power to overcome them. Before the sixteenth century, there really were natural scientists who used methods and carried out experiments in the same spirit as ours. One need only remember the ingenious *Roger Bacon*. What did the people take the results of their physical experiments to be? As the result of magic. It was not until the sixteenth century that the belief in the naturalness of natural processes began its conquest of the world. Only since then has it felt the power within itself to achieve victory.

The centuries preceding the sixteenth prepared this belief. The German mysticism of *Tauler* and *Master Eckhart* struggled not to owe the truth to a supernatural revelation, but to allow it to flow naturally from the human soul. And as soon as the belief that revelation was to be sought in man himself became firmly established, the need of the individual to take a direct and active part in the development of culture had to awaken more and more.

This paved the way for a new way of communicating discovered truths. People had to come to terms with themselves about things that they had previously sought the advice of particularly gifted people. The direct influence of such people lost its power. People no longer wanted to just listen; they wanted to think. A kind of communication was needed that was detached from the immediate presence of the personality.

The fact cannot be denied that historians of intellectual life have little to say about the centuries of the Middle Ages. What was going on there was agreed upon by a few. Intellectual life only gained richness when the number of those participating in it became large.

Johannes Gutenberg called on mankind to participate in this way. He handed over to the world what had previously been the property of a few. He replaced an artificial selection of spiritual leaders with a natural one. It was a coincidence that among the few who took part in intellectual life in the Middle Ages, there was a chosen one. This changed when the art of spreading education to the widest circles was invented. How differently can the cheap book select from the masses of people those who are called to promote culture than the artificial selection principle of the Middle Ages!

And this spread of culture was one of the greatest conceivable historical necessities in the sixteenth century. The arena on which human destiny was played out was vastly enlarged. The world in which man had to develop his activities became a more extensive one as a result of the discoveries and the associated expansion of all traffic relations. An immense sum of human power, which until then had lain idle, had to be called upon to cooperate in world affairs. This power rested bound in the people, in the individuals. The individual had to intervene more powerfully in the course of development. In order to do so, the individual's field of vision had to be enlarged. The art of printing released countless forces that were bound up in personalities.

The other discoveries and inventions presented man with greater tasks than he previously had to conquer. The art of printing gave him the opportunity to solve these tasks.

It is deeply symbolic that the new art did not emerge from the circles of scholarly education. A man of practice has arrived at it. A personality detached from his profession, from his family. Johannes Gutenberg had grown out of the circumstances of his environment as a single man, purely on his own. He did not work within a tradition, like the representatives of the scholarly class. He is the type of modern man who wants to achieve what he needs, not through the traditional possessions of an association from which he has outgrown, but who rather wants to make his own way, on his own ability.

It was not the traditional powers that grew out of medieval culture that were able to create the new art, but modern man, the self-reliant individual, who is the result of the social conditions that were transformed at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

What is the significance of all the arguments about the fatherland of the art of printing? Gutenberg's fatherland is the modern cultural world. He had to grow out of all paternity to genuine modern humanity in order to create the international art of printing for mankind. Since before the *Linde* created his monumental work on the art of printing, all dispute about other shares in the invention has been put to rest. And it is our feeling that an uprooted, a typically modern man has created the hallmark of modern times.

The Gutenberg celebrations became more brilliant from century to century. Nothing is more natural than this. For mankind is becoming more and more aware of what it owes to Gutenberg. Every day realizes new things that he has made possible.

Dr. Heinrich Meisner and Dr. Johannes Luther have produced an extraordinarily commendable work to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Johann Gutenberg's birth ("Die Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst"). In an appealing, transparently clear manner, they describe the practices and ideas of antiquity and the Middle Ages, which can be seen as a kind of preparation of mankind for Gutenberg's art. The culture of woodblock printing, the immediate predecessor of typography, is particularly well described. These characteristics show how the need for the art of printing was born out of the masses' thirst for learning and education. Those who recognize the signature of intellectual life in the last four centuries as an anti-ecclesiastical one may welcome the fact that the authors do not overestimate the influence of the Church on the spread of Gutenberg's art. The Church only retreated from the new education that came to it in the letters and was wise enough to reckon with a cultural factor whose effect it could not stop. Rather, it would have been in their spirit to continue the policy that found such blatant expression at the Council of Toulouse in the prohibition of Bible reading and ownership for lay people.

Gutenberg's personality, his life and his deeds are clearly characterized, the spread of printing in the first decades vividly described. The authors have shown a happy gift in grouping the factual material, which is not easy to deal with. The fact that their presentation is perfectly in line with current knowledge of the subject, and that anyone can therefore inform themselves from the book in a contemporary manner, seems to be a superfluous remark compared to the qualities of the authors.

The fashion of the time to overload books with illustrations benefits one thing here. It is highly desirable for those who wish to form an idea of the first stages of printing that the first prints should appear before their eyes in illustrations.

There will be few cultural achievements in whose history such wide circles are interested as in the art of printing. The book takes this into account in every respect. It certainly deserves to become popular.