Page:The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.djvu/227

 have his body in bondage and apt to spiritual things, and to do his calling". Translated by Richard Taverner, Philadelphia Publications Society, 1888. (Latin juxta vocationem suam.)

3. According to the lexicons, kindly confirmed by my colleagues Professors Braune and Hoops, the word Beruf (Dutch beroep, English calling, Danish kald, Swedish kallelse) does not occur in any of the languages which now contain it in its present worldly (secular) sense before Luthur's translation of the Bible. The Middle High German, Middle Low German, and Middle Dutch words, which sound like it, all mean the same Ruf in modern German, especially inclusive, in late mediævel times, of the calling (vocation) of a candidate to a clerical benefice by those with the power of appointment. It is a special case which is also often mentioned in the dictionaries of the Scandinavian languages. The word is also occasionally used by Luther in the same sense. However, even though this special use of the word may have promoted its change of meaning, the modern conception of Beruf undoubtedly goes linguistically back to the Bible translations by Protestants, and any anticipation of it is only to be found, as we shall see later, in Tauler (died 1361). All the languages which were fundamentally influenced by the Protestant Bible translations have the word, all of which this was not true (like the Romance languages) do not, or at least not in its modern meaning.

Luther renders two quite different concepts with Beruf. First the Pauline κλήσις in the sense of the call to eternal salvation theough God. Thus: 1 Cor. i. 26; Eph. i. 18; iv. 1, 4; 2 Thess. i, 11; Heb. iii. 1; 2 Peter i. 10. All these cases concern the purelt religious idea of the call through the Gospel taught by the apostle; the word κλήσις has nothing to do with worldly callings in the modern sense. The German Bibles before Luther use in this case ruffunge (so in all those in the Heidelberg Library), and sometimes instead of "von Gott geruffet" say "von Gott gefordert". Secondly, however, he, as we have already seen, translates the words in Jesus Sirach discussed in the previous note (in the Septuagiant ἓν τῷ ἔργῳ σου παλαιώθητι and καί ἕμμενε τῷ πόνῳ σον), with "beharre in deinem Beruf" and "bliebe in deinem Beruf", instead of "bliebe bei deiner Arbeit". The later (authorised) Catholic translations (for instance that of Fleischütz, Fluda, 1781) have (as in the New Testament passages) simply followed him. Luthur's translation of the passage in the Book of Sirach is, so gar as I know, the first case in which the German word Beruf appears in its presant purely secular sense. The preceding exhortation, verse 20, στήΟι εν διαθήκη σου, he translates "bliebe in Gottes Wort", although Sirach xiv. 1 and xliii. 10 show tthat, corresponding to the Hebrew תק, which (according to quotations in the Talmud) Sirach used, διαθήκη really did mean something similar to our calling, namely one's fate or assigned task. In its later and present sense the word Beruf did not exist in the German language, nor, so far as I can learn,