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Coming to Judgment

The poet Wolfgang Goethe apologized for his famous autobiography this way:

The individual is lost to us, the memory of him disappears, yet it is important to him and to others that it be retained.
None of us is more than an individual nor can one take interest in anything other than the individual. The generality takes care of itself, insists on itself, maintains and expands itself. We use it, but love it not.
We love only the individual, and that accounts for our joy in presentations, confessions, memoirs, letters and anecdotes about departed, even insignificant people.
The question as to whether one dare to write one's own biography is a gaucherie. I call him who does so the most courteous of all people.
If one just conveys oneself, one's motive for doing it makes no difference.
It is not at all necessary that one be blameless or that one's accomplishments be excellent and unimpeachable, only that something be done in which another may take profit or delight.
--Biographische Einzelheiten

But Martin Luther was more importunate:

Some people probably think the office of the scribe easy and trifling, while to ride in armor and suffer heat, frost, thirst and other discomfort, now that they call real work. . . . A pen is not heavy, true; nor comes the tool of any trade more easily to hand than that of the writer. One needs only a goose feather, and can find it anywhere, for free. At the same time though, it does take hard work and endurance in the best part (the head), with the noblest organ (the tongue), and of the highest accomplishment (language).
Once upon a time some prominent men came to our dear, praiseworthy Emperor Maximilian, grumbling that he was sending mere scribes on important diplomatic missions. He told them that if his courtiers were not up to the job, then the scribes had to do it. Besides, he said, I can create a knight myself, but I cannot create a scholar.
So you, too, are going to find a lot of big bullies who think the very name "scribe" not even worth mentioning. Do not let their little games trouble you, just go ahead and play your own. Be a scribe before God and the world. In their very blustering and swaggering, they do you their greatest honor. They raise a plume on high, up onto their hat or helmet, to proclaim in very deed that the goosefeather rules the world. They can neither perform their feats of arms nor live in peace without it, much less go promenading around. Just look where they elevate the tool of our trade, the sweet feather--and rightly so. As to their own implement, the sword, why they dangle that down around their bottoms. That is the right place for it. It would not fit very well on their heads. Up there must flutter the quill.
Sermon on Schools

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