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The Rudolstadt Colloquy
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April 1633
Ed Piazza squirmed as inconspicuously as possible on the hard bench of the University of Jena's anatomy amphitheater, as the debate on differing Lutheran views of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, both up-time and down-time, flew over and around his head in three different languages. Before he'd made the acquaintance of the different parties that existed among Grantville's new citizenry, he had just been naive in his assumption that only his own Roman Catholic church encompassed communicants with views as divergent as those of Francisco Franco and Dorothy Day.
The brightest idea that anyone—anyone at all—had had last winter had been Samantha Burka's suggestion that the growing tensions among the Lutherans of the United States could be dodged by taking advantage of political geography. Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had not only built St. Martin's in the Fields Lutheran Church, of currently uncertain orthodoxy, for the benefit of Grantville's huge influx of Lutheran citizens but had also built it on his own land. True, Rudolstadt was part of the new little United States; but, on the other hand, the United States was a confederation and that territory was not the responsibility of Grantville itself. Thus, the Grantville government could take the high road, virtuously declaring that it did not interfere in ecclesiastical disputes, and dump the whole squabble into the lap of the Rudolstadt administration.
Consequently the count, with the assistance of his chancellor and consistorial advisors, was presiding over this circus, while Ed was watching. In any station of life, a man can find something to be thankful for.
Somebody made another reference to the Formula of Concord. This, Ed had learned in his desperate pre-conference dash through the applicable chapters of the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, supplemented by a briefing book that the new Grantville Research Center had pulled together for him from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, had been produced fifty years earlier as part of a major effort to get all the Lutheran theologians on the same wavelength. It still served as a sort of measuring-stick for orthodox Lutheran views in 1633—and had in the twentieth century as well.
Ed glanced down toward the floor as the conscientious young man at the chalkboard, using his one good arm, quickly wrote the page reference for the audience to follow along. Jonas Justinus Muselius had been in Grantville for almost the whole two years since the Ring of Fire and had a pretty swift head and hand when it came to getting around in three languages at once. He now taught at the new Lutheran grade school next to the controversial church just outside Grantville's borders.
In his own copy of the Concordia Triglotta, Ed leafed over to the proper page in English. The tome not only had the Formula of Concord, Latin and German on the left-hand page and English with a blank column on the right-hand page, but most of the major Reformation documents that had led up to it—the Lutheran catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, etc. Ed guessed that they were lucky that the Lambert kid was a devout Lutheran. He'd had that book, with the whole thing conveniently lined up in all three languages so the content matched on each pair of pages—all 1,285 of them, index included. Every participant in the Rudolstadt Colloquy now had one, included in the registration packet, which made for a hefty weight in the tote bags.
The publisher in Jena had been happy to get the order. He said cheerfully that if he had any copies left over after the conference, he'd just get someone to smuggle them into England and cause that half-Papist Laud some trouble.
Ed's pencil wiggled. A doodle bloomed on the upper left-hand corner of page 123 (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Art. IV. (II.), English version) and gradually expanded to become an illustrated border all the way around the scholastics, the good works, and the "many great and pernicious errors, which it would be tedious to enumerate." The speaker, clearly, had no problems with tedium. It looked like he was going to enumerate them all. The full sleeve of his gown snagged on a corner of the book; its skirt scrunched up under him, even though he had smoothed it out before he sat down.
"What is a colloquy?" Ed remembered asking that question when the project of having a colloquy in Rudolstadt to smooth over the differences among and between the various factions of Grantville's up-time and down-time Lutherans was first brought up. Innocence, blessed innocence! Now he knew. Colloquies were events whereby someone put dissenting parties of theologians and their adherents into a room with spectators and insisted that they keep talking until they reached some sort of a resolution on the controversial issues.
Colloquies did not have time clocks.
This colloquy involved the Flacians, orthodox Lutherans on the model of Matthaeus Flacius Illyricus, and the Philippists, slightly less stringently orthodox Lutherans on the model of Philip Melanchthon—from the 1633 here and now. The two factions had been disputing since Luther's death, and they were disputing still. In addition to these by-now classic components, it had as a plus factor those interesting up-time equivalents, the Missouri Synod, a largely German-heritage and theologically orthodox organization of Lutherans in the up-time USA, and the ELCA, or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which appeared to Ed to be pretty much the outcome of a multi-stage amalgamation of the descendants of Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and some portion of German Lutheran immigrant churches.
The colloquy was thus providing an excuse for half the academics on the continent, plus a few from the British Isles, to see the Americans for themselves while billing the trip to their employers. As a result, it had grown to the point that no place in Rudolstadt, a county seat that had a population of slightly over a thousand residents two years ago and only half again that many now, could cope with the attendance. Therefore, they were having the Rudolstadt Colloquy some twenty miles down the Saale River to the north, in the university town of Jena, whose permanent population regarded it as a great financial boon. A rousing theological colloquy was an event which attracted not only theologians, but politicians, visitors who came for the entertainment, souvenir salesmen, and food vendors. Outside, in Jena's market square, beverage booths were vying with street musicians, while booksellers displayed their wares next to pretzel bakers. Almost every house in the town was crammed to the rafters with temporary boarders.
Ed thought idly that if the debate should degenerate into a riot, anyone with a strong right arm and the three and a half pounds of the Concordia Triglotta in a tote bag could do a lot of damage to an opponent—though, luckily, it was a paperback. In the seventeenth century, book printing and book binding were separate trades, and anyone who wanted a cover on his book usually took it to a binder after he had bought it. True, Count Ludwig Guenther had assured him that any riot was more likely to take place outside in the streets rather than among the participants themselves, but half the people outside—farmers and artisans, students and merchants, journeymen and apprentices, male and female—had bought a copy of the book, too. It was by far the most popular souvenir for visitors to take home.
The man next to him shifted restlessly. Ed looked over and saw that his Latin text had acquired an even more elaborate decoration than his own, in pen rather than pencil. The thin-faced little man returned the glance, with a surreptitious grin, and penned a question in the margin of page 122.
You American?
Yes. Ed Piazza. Grantville.
Leopold Cavriani. Geneva. Beer when they stop?
The two men came out of the university grounds into what Ed still couldn't help thinking of as a picturesque, old-fashioned, German town that would delight any right-thinking tourist. It was, he reminded himself, a picturesque contemporary German town in which dozens of people who lived in what they considered to be modern times were standing around an old-time West Virginia fiddler. He was sitting on an upside-down keg that had once held imported Norwegian salted herring and playing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" A skinny teenaged German girl was selling the sheet music.
Ed chalked up one more "Benny sighting." Old Benny Pierce, a childless widower, had been 79 at the time of the Event. He must be 81 now, Ed thought. Benny kept wandering around south central Thuringia with the single-minded focus of preventing the legacy of Mother Maybelle Carter from being lost. Some people—especially his nephew's wife Doreen—worried that he was going to get himself into trouble. But, after all, even Doreen admitted, you couldn't keep a grown man pinned down. Still, Ed did sort of try to keep track of him. There was no predicting where, when, or if he might someday need to be bailed out, since the grandly-named Department of International Affairs was still doing double duty as the Consular Service.
The weather was nice: that is, it wasn't actively raining. Yet. Ed and Cavriani took their beers to an outdoor table behind the restaurant. "Ahh," Ed said, as he sat down.
"Do you prefer 'Signor' Cavriani?" The Italian that Ed had learned from his grandparents was rusty, but serviceable.
"Not for a long time," Cavriani replied in German. "My first language is French. Seventy years or so ago, my grandfather was a university student, thinking modern thoughts. Seventy years ago, those thoughts were about Protestantism, naturally, but he was in Naples. So he found it prudent to leave. Of course, it's much easier to leave Naples than to leave a lot of these inland places—he just took a boat to Marseilles and from there went over to Geneva. He wrote home, telling his family that if they would send him enough money to buy citizenship, he would open up a branch of the firm. They did, he did, and we're still there—Cavriani Frères de Genève. Neapolitan politics are fun, of course. I still keep my hand in, a bit. Just as a hobby, you know."
"And Cavriani Frères deals in . . . ?"
Cavriani waved his hand. "Oh, a little of this, a little of that. You could think of us as brokers, I suppose. I rather like your up-time word—facilitators. Smoothers of paths. Those who make the rougher places plain."
Ed's mouth quirked. "You're in road construction?"
"We can ensure that a road is constructed. Or that a boat is built and crewed. That an enterprise is financed. Or even, sometimes, that an idea is spread. As the fiddler whom you watched is ensuring that an idea is spread."
Ed cocked his head. "Would it be indiscreet to ask just whom, or what, you have been facilitating in or near Grantville?"
"Ah," said Cavriani. "Not at all. My meetings with Count August von Sommersburg, if not public as to their specific content, have not been concealed. Nor has their general purpose, which is financing the expansion of his slate quarries southwest of Grantville. I assure you that my presence is known to your Saale Development Authority. I paid Mr. Bolender at the Department of Economic Resources a courtesy call as well."
Ed thought privately that if Count August was slick, his backer was likely to be even slicker. Nonetheless, Cavriani was a pleasant man to have as a new acquaintance. But "facilitators" usually were pleasant. Amiable. Courteous and easy to talk to. It was part of their stock in trade.
Cavriani was continuing. "If we could meet for dinner, I would be happy to explain the proposals we will be presenting."
But Ed had an out, at least temporarily. "Unfortunately, Monsieur Cavriani, I have a prior commitment." Ed dangled a tidbit of information to gauge Cavriani's reaction. "Margrave George of Baden-Durlach—who, as you know, is here as King Gustavus Adolphus' personal observer—has invited several gentlemen to a private supper this evening."
Ed was gratified to see Cavriani's eyes brighten, ever so slightly. He thought that, undoubtedly, the man would make it his business to find out just which among the "several gentlemen" in attendance at the colloquy would be meeting with the margrave, and equally undoubtedly would know the answer before the dinner even took place. And why not? Information would certainly be one of the major trade items purveyed by Cavriani Brothers of Geneva (not to mention by Cavriani cousins, current Cavriani in-laws, and potential husbands of Cavriani daughters, sisters, and nieces, wherever they might be found). It would be very surprising if the firm didn't have permanent correspondents at every major Imperial and CPE post office, picking up the news as fast as it came in.
Ed glanced down at his watch. "But our break is over. Back to the discussions."
They returned their beer mugs to the vendor. Ed noticed that, under the stern eye of Jena's new Public Health Security Force, the booth actually had a couple of pans of dishwater in the rear, and a boy who was washing the mugs before the owner re-used them. He refrained from commenting that the practice would be even more helpful if they occasionally changed the dishwater. One step at a time. Apparently the sanitation squad hadn't gotten to Chapter Two.
Knowing I'm on the street where you live . . .
Ed Piazza's attendance at the Rudolstadt Colloquy had not been uncontroversial within the Grantville administration. To quote Mike Stearns' explosion of the previous December: "Damn it, Ed. We've got six to a dozen major projects going and all of them need you more than we need to have you sitting in on an academic debate and listening to a bunch of guys argue about who's going to be the minister of one single Lutheran church."
Ed hadn't kept on top of every turn of the kaleidoscope for the past twenty years, watching Grantville High School's cliques and allegiances shift on the basis of both current interests and longstanding family feuds, for nothing. If any occupation could have prepared a resident of Grantville to conduct early modern diplomacy, it was experience as a social studies teacher and high school principal.
"Look, Mike," he said patiently, "we can't just do things according to our own priorities. We have to factor in the priorities of our allies. Yes, they're arguing about who's going to be minister at St. Martin's. Okay. Point One. Specifically, they're talking about whether the minister, whoever Count Ludwig Guenther's appointee turns out to be, will be a Matthaeus Flacius Illyricus-style Lutheran or a Philip Melanchthon-style Lutheran. Point Two. Even more important for us, they're arguing about whether, if he's a Flacian, he can exclude all of the followers of Philippist-style teachings who are now living in Grantville from taking communion. And, I suppose, vice versa. I'm still not sure on that one."
"That still doesn't mean that you can afford to spend a week listening to them. Much less two weeks. Or three. Or a month!"
Ed continued unperturbed. "Point Three. More generally, the result of this specific decision about this church just outside of Grantville is going to be a weather vane about the overall direction that the Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt consistory is going to take. If they do make an exception from strict Flacian orthodoxy for the church serving Grantville—or the churches, since Count Ludwig Guenther is building another one on the other side of town to take up some of the overflow—then he'll be getting requests for exemption from other congregations in the county, and he knows it. If the theology faculty at Jena swallows hard and accepts an exemption in this county, they know that similar requests will be coming in from every other little city, county, and dukedom in Thuringia. What's more . . ."
Mike groaned. "There can't be more."
"Yes, there can be more. There is more. Point Four. Every Lutheran ruler in the CPE is sending a 'personal observer.' Which means that they're sending their chancellors. Gustavus Adolphus is sending a 'personal observer,' for Chrissakes! He's sending Margrave George of Baden-Durlach, and even if the man is old and getting very, very, tired, he's still been one of the most consistent defenders of the Protestant cause from the very beginning of this war. Don't count him out just because he lost a battle in 1622. He's never given up and he's taken exile rather than compromise with the Imperials."
Ed paused, then started again. "Listen, Mike. This colloquy is a big deal. Colloquies are academic debates, in a way, but they're academic debates on steroids. They're academic debates that affect the real world. If this war wasn't on, they wouldn't be sending 'personal observers.' They would be coming themselves: John George of Saxony, Wilhelm of Hessen-Kassel—even though he's a Calvinist himself—George of Hessen-Darmstadt, the Anhalt mini-princes, all of the Saxe-Whatever dukes. Reuss. Probably Brandenburg, even though the elector himself has turned Calvinist like Hessen-Kassel, because he's taken the unusual measure of not imposing his faith on anyone but the court personnel. Most of his subjects are Lutheran. Maybe even Prussia. The Prussian duke will be sending an observer if he has someone suitable on retainer who can get here in time. Count Anton Guenther of Oldenburg is coming in person, but there has to be something else behind that. If it weren't for the war, Gustavus Adolphus himself might have come. When the Reformation got started, the Holy Roman Emperor sat in on some of the religious debates."
Mike looked sour. "It didn't do the Holy Roman Emperor a lot of good, either. They've been having religious wars ever since."
Ed sighed. "Sometimes, a smaller scale can be more effective. The theologians will debate and discuss. The 'personal observers' will listen and report back. And, Point Five. At some point, while the public debate goes on and on, the 'personal observers' will get together and pool the collective wisdom of the 'patrons' of German Lutheranism about the way to go. If the 'way to go' turns out to be maintaining orthodox exclusionism, the different Lutheran parties will be back at each other's throats and the CPE will fall apart. If it turns out to be enforced mutual coexistence, no matter how much the theologians argue, we've maybe got the lever in place with which we can move the rest of Germany when it comes to religious tolerance. Capisce?"
"So the Lutheran princes will tell the Lutheran churches what to do." Mike pulled a sour face. He knew that he would have to live with the "established church" phenomenon, but he didn't have to like it.
"For the time being." Ed leaned back, touching his fingertips to one another in a reflective manner. "There really have been quite a lot of changes in the past century. Lay patrons still appoint ministers to the Lutheran churches—that's true enough. Connections still help in getting an appointment—that's true, too. But they can't appoint just any ne'er-do-well cousin who needs a sinecure. Not anymore. They pick off a list of church-approved candidates who've finished a theological course, sometimes at a university and sometimes at a seminary, and who have been examined and approved by their own church board for the principality—the consistory, it's called, mainly, or sometimes the general synod. There's no rule about what it's called. It works pretty much the same in the Calvinist principalities. Actually, a lot of it has rubbed off on us Catholics, as well. Compared to the middle ages, one thing that Europe has now is a clergy that's a lot more literate, a lot more educated, and a lot more committed to the job."
Ed grinned. "Of course, all of those things mean that as a general rule they spend a lot more time reading and arguing about fine theological points than back in the days when quite a few rural priests could barely stumble their way through the liturgy. Not to mention that the fashion for long sermons means that the parishioners hear a lot more about points of theological controversy, too. A fair number of homilies seem to encapsulate the major points that the local pastor intends to make in his next letter to a neighboring minister with whom he disagrees about the nature of the Real Presence or the significance of Christ's Descent into Hell."
Mike's eyebrows were still raised—high.
Ed persisted. "Shall I go over it again? We can't just do things according to our own priorities. We have to factor in the priorities of our allies. Mike, we're living on their street. They're our neighbors. They care about this. They really, really, do. Therefore, we care about this. Whether you want us to or not. And we will send a delegate of equal status to the chancellors of all those allied territories. That's me."
"So everything else gets dropped for a month?"
"No. I'll just make Arnold Bellamy 'acting.' He's perfectly capable of keeping everything else on track. If I die of the plague or get thrown off a damned horse and break my neck, he will be doing the job. That's why there's a Deputy Secretary of State."
Mike frowned a little, thinking that almost a year ago, when Grantville's delegates first met with Gustavus Adolphus, Ed hadn't been anything like this assertive. He had stood there looking very behind-the-scenes, very advice-but-not-policy, very subordinate-in-a-clear-hierarchy-of-authority. He'd had a lot of on-the-job experience as Secretary of State since then, of course, but still, how had he changed so much?
Then Mike reconsidered, and decided that it was last April that was the aberration. Ed's whole career track had been aimed at being a principal: not a vice-principal or a deputy principal. He'd run the high school with a fair amount of input—there was a faculty senate and a student council. He'd run it with good cheer, common sense, and an even temperament. But somehow no one, neither teachers nor kids nor even the county superintendent of schools, had doubted that the hand that directed Grantville High School belonged to Ed Piazza. Before the RoF, after the mine had closed, Ed had managed the single largest enterprise in Grantville, from the standpoint of budget and personnel, and he'd never been afraid to make a decision once he had the data on which to base it.
"What if I directly order you not to go?" he asked.
"If you directly order me not to go, I will stay here. But I will continue to think that you are wrong." Ed leaned forward in his chair. "Don't just take it from me. Ask the rest of the cabinet, if you want to. Bring it up for debate. But I should go. From beginning to end. That's where I stand."
They also serve who only sit and sit.
Ed had only brought the essentials for this stay in Jena. In his view, the essentials included an old aluminum Drip-o-lator and a thermos bottle with the kind of top that nested six different sizes of plastic cup. He could remind himself a thousand times that this was not a quaint Renaissance Faire staffed by costumed reenactors but rather the modern world—insofar as there was a modern world. Nonetheless, the thought of beer for breakfast turned his stomach. His wife Annabelle had concocted some reusable filters out of an ancient roll of gauze she had turned up somewhere. Turkish coffee arrived in beans rather than pre-ground, but he'd managed to modify a peppermill to deal with that problem. He stood in the public room of the Black Bear Inn the next morning, brewing coffee with a dramatic flourish for the benefit of his entourage.
Since the secretary of state's support staff in Jena consisted entirely of kids who had gone to high school since he joined the staff, they expected the flourish—even early in the morning. They would have been disappointed not to have it. Before he became principal, Mr. P.'s "extracurricular" had been directing all the school plays—usually teaching by doing. Ed could drop into any role. His students never quite understood how, when a demonstration was called for, a burly man of about five and a half feet, wearing a yellow polo shirt, could turn into an imaginary six-foot-tall rabbit (Harvey), a psychopathic killer (Night Must Fall), a Russian empress (Anastasia), or a ditzy spinster (Arsenic and Old Lace)—without even putting on a costume. When he became principal, his first addition to the staff had been Amber Higham as a full-time drama teacher, but he had still dropped in on the rehearsals whenever he could find a minute.
But they all knew his favorite role. "Hey, Mr. Piazza," said Tanya the radio operator, as Ed poured boiling water into the Drip-o-lator, "Give us the serenade."
The serenade was Ed's glory. Six times, during his life, he had been called to this acme of thespian desires—in high school already; in college; while he was in the army, during an R&R in Guam; three times for community theaters. He had met Annabelle during the first community theater version. It was never enough. There couldn't be too many productions. So as Leopold Cavriani came in, hoping to extract data about the previous evening's conclave of chancellors, he found the odor of coffee, six apprentice diplomats (only one of whom officially worked for the Department of International Affairs) sitting around their breakfast table wearing borrowed St. Mary's second-best choir robes that they tried to pretend were seventeenth century academic gowns, enthusiastic applause, and the secretary of state, garbed in a matching choir robe, throwing himself into a glorious basso rendition of "Some Enchanted Evening" as the sun rose.
That was another thing that Ed had learned about colloquies. They started early. The participants were not inclined to waste daylight.
"Ah, M'sieu Cavriani, good morning. Do join us. My staff—Tanya Newcomb, our tech. She's based in Grantville, in my department. I've borrowed two of them from our administrative delegations assigned to the cities of the U.S., just for the conference, to broaden their perspective a bit. Peter Chehab, Suhl; Joel Matowski, Fulda. Zack Carroll—he's in the army and will be sent to Erfurt in the fall. By the way, his sister Sara just graduated from our high school this spring and joined the army, too. Jamie Lee Swisher—she's been working as a page at our National Library, but she did such a good job getting stuff together for this conference that I've borrowed her—and if I can, I'll steal her for my permanent staff. Staci Matowski—she's taking teacher training and we hope to have her in the social studies department at the high school in a few more years. Right now, her folks said that she could come along because she's Joel's sister and he could keep an eye on her."
Cavriani recognized them—not the individual young people, but the type. He had been one, at their age. His son had recently become one. Trainees: the pool from which the designated successors would someday emerge. The only really, ah, interesting thing about the American staff was that half of them were girls. He stashed this in his mental file, for future consideration. Obviously, he couldn't put his daughters—four girls to one boy! What had Potentiana been thinking of as she conceived?—as assistant factors in most of their branch offices. It just wasn't feasible in the environment of European business. But, in a couple of years—maybe in this Grantville . . . If daughters could become contributing members of the firm, it would far more than double their personnel. In this generation, the Cavriani Frères were very short on Cavriani Fils. He would think about it. Idelette was fifteen now . . .
As soon as they were sufficiently fortified with coffee and hard rolls, Ed collected his tote bag and joined Cavriani for the walk over to the medical school. Cavriani was clearly pumping for information, but at least Ed had something to offer that was both news and would shortly be public anyway. He said solemnly, "No, Margrave George's guests found that the situation is not yet opportune to move the colloquy toward a conclusion. Late yesterday afternoon, the delegation from the University of Tuebingen theological school arrived. Nothing will be decided until they have had their chance to speak. Anything else would be gravely discourteous."
Cavriani nodded with equal gravity. Both men knew what this meant in terms of hard-bench-days.
The delegation from the University of Tuebingen theological school included all of the faculty and most of the students. Down toward the southwest, in Swabia, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar (theoretically on behalf of the French component of the League of Ostend, but mainly for himself) and Gustav Horn (for Gustavus Adolphus and the CPE) had spent the past six months campaigning with a lot more energy than generals usually brought to the late autumn, winter, and spring seasons. Both of them were young men—Horn just turned forty and Bernhard a good decade younger. Both were energetic; both were ambitious; both had funds. They both regarded war as a combination of job and sport.
The results had been rather hard on the civilian population of the Duchy of Wuerttemberg. Among other consequences, the University of Tuebingen had closed down for the spring semester. Since staying in Tuebingen did not appear to be the best of options, any theologian who could get out of town had prudently withdrawn to Darmstadt. With a colloquy on the spring schedule, the Tuebingen Ensemble had just relocated again. After three months of exile from their classrooms, they would certainly be prepared to speak. At length.
Andreas Osiander had been a rather heterodox theologian—the Flacians had hated him. His grandson, Professor Lukas Osiander Jr., was one of the most vociferous spokesmen in favor of strict orthodoxy. He was a controversialist. He was a polemicist. He was willing to take on the Catholics and he did. He was willing to take on the Calvinists and he did. It was to be anticipated that he would relish a chance to confront not just the concept of open communion among different schools of Lutheranism, which was technically the subject of the colloquy, but more generally the dangerous underlying ideas of religious tolerance and separation of church and state. Professor Lukas Osiander Jr. was able to recognize the thin edge of a wedge when he saw one.
Cavriani winced—at the prospect of another two weeks of non-stop quotations, Ed presumed. "And, I suppose, the Jena faculty has welcomed these reinforcements with open arms?"
Ed shook his head. "Not so entirely as one might think. They're orthodox here, of course, very orthodox. But, generally, their approach isn't as confrontational as the Tuebingen style. Additionally, along the way, Osiander has attacked the works of Johann Arndt. He's proclaimed that Arndt's 'True Christianity' is contrary to the proper Lutheran doctrine of justification. Arndt was the pastor who inspired the dean of the Jena faculty to enter the ministry. . . ."
"Ah." Cavriani's hand circumscribed a spiral in front of him. "Indeed, so much of life is like that. It's not what you know, but whom you know."
The colloquy came to order.
There could be no doubt about it: the theologians of Tuebingen knew really a lot about the doctrine of ubiquity. They appeared to know even more about the supposed or alleged errors that Philip Melanchthon had made in regard to the doctrine of ubiquity. They were prepared to pursue every detail of how these errors had been maintained by Melanchthon's successors and followers since 1560.
It was not as if the communion question that was now plaguing St. Martin's in the Fields in the County of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt was new. The Tuebingen delegation was prepared. As far as its members were concerned, they already had the answers, fully worked out. Wuerttemberg's consistory in Stuttgart, which was basically the Tuebingen theological faculty wearing different hats, had been through this only a few years ago before—with a lot of publicity—in the case of that irritating, arrogant, hard-headed, and (God be praised) recently deceased native son of the duchy, the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler.
Professor Osiander was loaded for bear, Ed thought.
"No minister of the church, who wants to be a true caretaker of God's secrets, may admit a person in communion who outwardly boasts of the true evangelical religion, but in the articles of faith is not exact in all things."
Ed looked for Gary Lambert, who was in his place on the bench, far enough around the curve of the anatomy theater from Ed to be visible. He was nodding solemnly, as if to say, "Of course!" Gary was the sole representative in Grantville of the Missouri Synod, the conservative American up-time branch of the Lutheran church.
"No one who maintains a formal membership in the Lutheran church, but who privately deviates from sound doctrine, obscuring it with dubious meanings and absurd speculations, both being confused and confusing others, may be admitted to communion."
Ed frowned and penned a note to Cavriani. How do they know whether or not he's deviating, if he does it privately?
Cavriani cocked his head, then scribbled. I suppose when they go to the pastor to make confession and pre-register for communion, he asks them.
Ed frowned again, grateful for the comparatively large blank spaces in the Concordia Triglotta that had resulted when the three different languages used more or fewer words to say the same thing. Catholics go to confession. Protestants don't go to confession.
Cavriani scribbled another response: Lutherans do. Maybe not where you came from. Or when you came from. But they do here. Or now. Whatever.
Cavriani flipped over to a largely empty page. It's the old "laudable custom" maneuver. Luther threw out five of the seven Catholic sacraments in the sense that he defined them as "not sacraments." But since the people were attached to them, they turned into "laudable customs" and kept hanging around. That's why we proper Calvinists think they're still half Catholic. Confession is a laudable custom; marriage ceremonies are a laudable custom; ordination of ministers is a laudable custom; confirmation is a laudable custom. I think some of them still perform last rites.
Professor Osiander, at the podium, was not showing any sign of winding down. "Anyone who does not wish to commit to the definite form of pure doctrine, and shrinks from subscribing to the Formula of Concord as the symbol of the orthodox Lutheran church founded in the Holy Scriptures, may not be admitted to holy communion. Unless such a person drops his erroneous opinion and harmonizes his beliefs with those of the church, he must and shall be excluded. A minister who so excludes a person who denies the omnipresence of the Body of Christ—as the Calvinists do and as these crypto-Calvinists who are a malignant growth within Lutheranism do—acts in a manner that is clearly pleasing to God."
Dramatically, Ed thought, this would be a fine conclusion, and a really good place for Professor Osiander to stop and let everybody else get some lunch.
Professor Osiander, however, was drawing another breath. He clearly did not approve of people who thought for themselves in matters of religious doctrine, "being carried away according to their own judgment in matters of faith."
Ed thought that this was a distinctly peculiar opinion on the part of someone who claimed to be a successor of the man who started the Protestant Reformation by insisting that he had to rely on the conclusions of his own conscience and not on what someone else told him. Evidently, for Professor Osiander, the "priesthood of all believers" didn't have room for all of "all."
Gary Lambert, again, was nodding solemnly. His up-time opponent Carol Koch, Grantville's ELCA representative to the colloquy, on the other hand, was scribbling madly, trying to keep notes.
Ed thought for a moment. He didn't think that Grantville's ELCA Lutherans had deliberately chosen Carol as their delegate in order to "make a statement" about the role of women in the church. There just weren't many up-time Lutherans in Grantville. None of them were natives of the town. It hadn't been a Lutheran kind of place before the Ring of Fire. Gary was the only one who had belonged to the Missouri Synod except for his wife, who had been at work at the hospital in Morgantown when it happened. The ELCA—Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, to use the full title—had had a grand total of ten members. Ten adults, anyway, and three teenagers who had to be pretty close to eighteen by now, if the Kochs' two weren't already older than that.
According to the story Ed had heard, the ELCA bunch, however many, had met at the Sutters' house. Billy Nelson and Melvin Sutter had declined the honor of presenting their case—before the Ring of Fire, Billy had been a truck driver and Melvin had run a filling station. Ron Koch, the only mining safety engineer in town, clearly couldn't be spared for a week or a month—he didn't have a deputy. Those three were the ELCA's sum total of adult men. There really was only one person who could take the time. Ron's wife.
"You'll just have to do it," Roberta Sutter had said. The victim—um, nominee for the honor—had been looking appalled. Roberta had reached into the armory that was available to her in her secondary role as president of Grantville's genealogy club. "Your mother's father was a minister. Your mom was an organist. You're bound to have inherited some kind of a knack for it. You'll have to do it, Carol."
When the colloquy finally—finally!—broke for lunch, Ed saw that Benny Pierce was once more established on his herring keg in the market square. The girl who had been selling the sheet music yesterday was singing. She had a high soprano, a little reedy, but with good carrying quality—a mountain kind of voice. Ed waved Cavriani to go on to the beer stand and wandered over. She was singing "Lorena"—not the soupy Civil War ballad, but Mother Maybelle's "The Sun Shines No More on Lorena," in which a slave, taken to Kentucky when his master moved, hears many years later that his wife has died back in Virginia. She was singing it in German: "Und man sagt mir, Lorena, Du bist tot." The more sentimental members of the audience had tears dripping from their eyes. Ed never ceased to be astonished at how smoothly a lot of English verse, such as, "And they tell me, Lorena, you are dead," went into German, and vice versa.
Benny stopped playing, leaned back, and stretched his arms. "Hi'ya, Ed. Meet Minnie Hugelmair. Minnie, this guy here is Ed Piazza. If anything happens to me, head for Grantville and ask for him. Play something—keep 'em entertained." He handed his fiddle over to the girl.
As Minnie started a skipping rendition of "Wildwood Flower," Benny said, "Y'know, Ed, if you felt like it, you could radio down to Grantville and ask someone to bring me up my autoharp when they're coming. Dave and Doreen have got the key to my bedroom. It's in there. I rented out the rest of the place. We're doing pretty good here. I think we'll stay to the end of this foofara, so there'll be time for it to catch up with me."
"Sure, Benny, I can do that. People go back and forth every day, so it won't take long."
"Minnie should do real good on the autoharp." Benny studied his calluses. "It might be that you'll be hearing from her ex-boss. I helped her run away."
"Might be?"
Benny grinned. "I don't guarantee he'll figure out that I'm the one who helped her. He didn't seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. I expect he's more likely to think it was a young guy who wanted to put his hand up her skirts than an old guy who wanted to put her hand on a fiddle bow. But anyway, he was as mean as a generous skunk and she's better off working for me, even if she was indentured to him for another three years."
"Where were you when you, ah, provided this assistance to a damsel in distress?"
"Minnie wasn't distressed. Minnie was mad. He'd promised to pay out her wages yearly and went back on the bargain—said that according to the law, he didn't have to pay until her indenture was up. She only stole what he owed her—not a pfennig more. Well, I watched to make sure that's all she took. Left to herself, she can be a lying little sneak, but what can you expect? She's the first real, live, foundling I've ever come across. I thought that was real interesting. She's going to be the best fiddler I've ever taught. Oh, the other? Somewhere up around Halle, on the other side of the river. I'd hitched a ride on a barge."
Somewhere up around Halle, on the other side of the river equaled Saxony. Mentally, Ed moved the concept of possibly needing to bail Benny out to a slightly higher rung on his ladder of priority items for the Department of International Affairs.
Waving to them both, he picked up his beer and joined Cavriani, who had acquired two bratwurst as well as a beer, plus two of Ed's staffers for company. Ed joined them happily. Among the advantages of being a Roman Catholic "personal observer" at a Lutheran conference was that he never had to sit among the head table guys when the topic was theology. They only needed him when the subject veered into politics. Behind him, he could hear that Benny was handling the fiddle again. Minnie started to sing "Coal Miner's Blues." By the time the lunch break was over, they'd made it through "Bury Me Beneath the Willow" and a bilingual version of "When the Roses Bloom in Dixie Land."
They had also attracted a new audience that Ed recognized—the delegation of Tuebingen theology students. Minnie started to sell music again, while Benny treated them to "San Antonio Rose."
It was hard, hard, hard to go back to Professor Osiander, who, when they slid into their seats a few minutes late, was announcing that: "Christ, who is the purest bridegroom of His church, does not share His love, as expressed in the sacrament, with those who have vain and blasphemous opinions."
Osiander explained the rationale which had led the Tuebingen faculty to this conclusion in the most minute detail, with frequent references to the Concordia Triglotta, throughout the afternoon. He defined "church" and he defined "sacrament." He defined "vain" and he defined "blasphemous." He advanced comparative instances of usage of the words in the Bible, both in Hebrew and in Greek, along with variant translations into Latin and German.
Then he defined "opinions."
Ed had picked up a rumor that there had once been an attempt to assassinate Professor Osiander during one of his sermons. Now if I had been on the jury . . . he thought. On his right, Leopold Cavriani was sleeping quietly.
Cavriani, in fact, had not been sleeping. He had been pondering the question of who had been doing the German translations for Benny Pierce. He thought that Secretary of State Piazza must be so familiar with the words of Benny's songs in English that he really hadn't paid any attention to the German lyrics. Cavriani had paid attention and he knew enough of both languages to catch that, "When the roses bloom in Dixieland, I'll be coming home to you" bore a reasonable relationship to "Als die Rosen naechst im Suden bluh'n, kehr ich ein, mein Schatz, bei dir."
But the next verse of the English, which talked about birds singing music to the sweetest girl that the boy ever knew, bore no relation at all to: "Wenn wir endlich von dem Kriege ruh'n, kehr ich ein, mein Schatz, bei dir!"
The English words said nothing at all about finally resting from this war. There was a reason why he had made that "ensure that an idea spreads" comment to the American. He'd been vaguely disappointed that Piazza hadn't picked up on it. This evening, he thought, he would see where the old man and the girl went after they packed up in the market square. It would be interesting to find out who their associates were.
"My life hasn't been much, really," Benny said to Cavriani. "I graduated from eighth grade, but that's as far as it went. Fought in the Second World War. Down in Italy, it was—your name sort of rings a bell, but we've got a lot of Italians in Grantville, too. Got married. Mary Ann's family came from Lebanon. She was Catholic. I've got to say that bothered me a bit—we were Methodist teetotal at home and I was really brought up on the 'no popery' line. But she switched over, so it was fine. I used to play 'The Romish Lady' in her honor. Hmm . . . haven't played that one in quite a while. Maybe I can polish it up tonight. If you come by the market tomorrow, I'll play it for you."
Benny stopped talking for a moment to eat before his grilled cheese sandwich got cold. "These aren't bad, are they, Mr. Cavriani? They aren't burgers, but they aren't bad. Do you really want to hear more? Well, I worked in the mines most of my life. After the mine exploded at Farmington in sixty-eight—that was bad, seventy-eight men killed; only four got out—Mary Ann carried on 'til I gave in and quit. I was forty-seven then and went to driving the trucks; did that for twenty-three years. I'd figured on keeping on 'til she could collect her social security, but she died in ninety-two, before she'd even applied. I'd fiddled all my life, but after I lost her, I started fiddling pretty much full time. Galax; other competitions. Even did a few gigs at the big Tamarack tourist center down by Beckley. Wish you could have seen that place—it had quilts, jams, hand-carved duck decoys. You'd have liked it, I think. A marketplace with a roof over the top."
Benny looked at his new friend, who nodded solemnly. Cavriani wasn't able to identify half the references, but they weren't going past him. He was storing them in his mind, to be written down later in the evening and checked out as soon as he had a chance.
Cavriani glanced at Minnie, who quite obviously didn't understand what Benny was talking about either. But, right now, she didn't care. Cavriani had ordered two whole sandwiches and a large glass of milk for her. Minnie was apparently a focused woman: she was definitely going to finish eating it all before the men stopped talking and left the Freedom Arches. For a minute, Cavriani was afraid that she'd try to cram that last half-sandwich into her mouth all at once and try to wash it down with the rest of the milk, but Benny started talking again.
"Well, anyway. Then we landed here. Sort of cramped my style, at first, but then I figured that I could hitch a ride on the carts going off to markets and I started bumming. In the beginning, all I could do was instrumentals. A guy can't sing with a fiddle under his chin. Sometimes, I'd put the fiddle down for a couple of minutes and do a verse. That went over okay, I guess. But I knew it would be better if folks could understand the words."
The old man had ordered a kettle of boiling water for a beverage, and had dropped some odd dried roots into it. He poured some of it out into a mug and rinsed his mouth.
"Sassafras tea, if you're wondering. I told you I was brought up teetotal. Still am. Want to try some?"
Cavriani had consumed stranger things when he was doing his training in the firm's various branch offices. His digestive system still remembered Aleppo well. "Aendere Laender, aendere Sitten," he murmured. "How did the Americans say it? 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.'"
He nodded. Benny poured three mugs and gave the third to Minnie before continuing.
"At first, I just did the towns and villages around Grantville. After about a year, I guess, I worked myself all the way up to Magdeburg, mostly playing one night stands—stayed a little longer in Erfurt when I passed through. Well, anyway. In Magdeburg, I met this kid who's a friend of Jeff Higgins' wife. He writes poetry in German, and said that if I sang my stuff for them, he had a friend who would copy it into sheet music. I could sell that, and make a bit more. And he'd translate the words of some of them into German for me, free. Real nice of him, I thought. He did three that first trip, but every time I run across him, he's done a couple more."
Cavriani nodded. His face showed genuine interest. Benny loved an audience.
"I didn't do so good at singing the German words, but most people didn't care. At least, they got the idea. Then I found Minnie. She can really sing them. He brought four new ones for me when he came down for this foofara. So he's the one you want to talk to, I guess. Name's Joachim. Let me write it down—they spell it like that, but they say it just like Yokum in the L'il Abner cartoons."
Benny was starting to wind down. His hands met behind his neck and he pushed his elbows and shoulders back.
"Well, Mr. Cavriani, I must say that it's been a pleasure. I do thank you for the invitation. But I'm getting to be old bones. If I'm going to polish up 'The Romish Lady' before tomorrow, we'd better be going."
"The pleasure was all mine," said Leopold Cavriani. He meant it. Sincerely.
It was Benny's favorite hymnbook. His grandma had a whole stack of them, bound in red oilcloth covers. Apostolic Hymns. A Collection of Hymns and Tunes for all Occasions of Religious Worship and Social Singing. Containing Selections of Upward of Fifty Ministers, Music Teachers, and Singers. And a Comprehensive Gamut by Prof. Blackburn, Pilot Oak, Ky., edited by Elds. J. V. And R. S. Kirkland, Fulton, Ky., Assisted by Prof. A. M. Kirkland, Como, Tenn. J. V. & R. S. Kirkland, Fulton, Ky. Copyright 1898. It was thin enough to fit in the larger bib pocket of his overalls. Whenever he felt like Mother Maybelle's "Lonesome Homesick Blues" were going to take him over, he pulled it out to remember the sing-alongs they used to have.
Funny how things worked out. He had a brother and two sisters. He and Mary Ann never had any kids. Emmie and Lester never had any kids; Lester had been dead for years and he didn't think that Emmie would last much longer—she was the oldest. Homer and Hattie's kids had been left up-time; Hattie had died in ninety-eight and Homer sure wasn't well. Betty and Fletcher had a boy and a girl, but then of those two, Louise and Bill didn't have any kids and she wasn't likely to have any now, being forty-three. One little baby. Betty's great-grandson, Dave and Doreen's grandson, born in February. Benny had been back to see him once, already. Suddenly, he decided. He was going back to Grantville to see that little buster again before he started his summer tour.
Well. Back to the hymnal. He'd already taught the whole "Rudiments" to Minnie. What is a lyric? What is a tune? What is pitch? Treble clef. Base clef. Whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes, with how to draw them. The most frequently used times, such as 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4, with how to accent them. Rests, measures, bars; how to draw them. It was only six pages. The kid who had turned his vocal music into sheet music had acted like it was manna from heaven.
No. 35. "The Romish Lady." Benny loved "The Romish Lady." Political correctness had never advanced very far into the life he lived. He loved all eleven verses of it.
So, it turned out the next day, did the members of the Lutheran theological faculties of the universities of Jena, Wittenberg, and Tuebingen, with assorted associates and accompanying students.
There was a Romish lady brought up in popery,
Her mother always taught her the priest she must obey.
O pardon me dear mother, I humbly pray thee now,
For unto these false idols I can no longer bow.
Professor Osiander cast a rather apprehensive glance in the direction of the U.S. Secretary of State. Herr Piazza was known to be a Roman Catholic.
Assisted by her handmaid, a Bible she concealed,
And there she gain'd instruction, till God his love revealed.
No more she prostrates herself to pictures deck'd with gold,
But soon she was betray'd, and her Bible from her stold.
But Herr Piazza was calmly drinking his beer and grinning. "Just wait," he said to Cavriani. "It gets better."
As Benny proceeded through the verses, the issue of whether it got better or worse was probably a matter of interpretation. The comparatively few English speakers in the square summarized the plot development for their friends:
With grief and great vexation, her mother straight did go,
T'inform the Roman clergy the cause of all her woe.
The priests were soon assembled, and for the maid did call,
And forced her in the dungeon, to fright her soul withal.
"I've got to have him sing this for Spee and Heinzerling," Piazza said to Cavriani. "In it's own way, it's a classic."
Before the pope they brought her, in hopes of her return,
And there she was condem-ned in horrid flames to burn.
Before this place ...That ends the preview. Probably in the middle of a sentence. Sorry.