Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
The Merchant of Venice
Much of what happened next was fairly predictable. Though the Theses were the work of an exceedingly pious monk who had no thought, at this point, of preaching open rebellion against the papal establishment, the pope and his supporters—that is, the personnel and machinery of the entire Roman Catholic Church—reacted much like a unified, living body gathering its strength to expel an aggressive infection. The intellectual assault represented by the Theses was simply too explicit, too extensive, and too memorably articulated to be ignored. This pushed far beyond the in-jokes and allusive indirection of Erasmus’s satires. One didn’t just raise an ironic eyebrow and titter politely behind one’s hand. One was forced to take a stand, stare aut pro aut contra, to come out for or against.
It is tempting, as we look backward to a past that will soon be half a millennium gone, to caricature its principal players: Erasmus, the realistic, immensely learned critic, can so easily be turned into Erasmus the self-protective cynic; Luther, the scrupulously sensitive, wounded intellectual, can be neatly forced to play the fulminating, hysterical extremist, very nearly the psychotic. The latter is the picture that the famous psychologist Erik Erikson painted of his subject in Young Man Luther, invoking twentieth-century clinical clichés—Luther’s supposed fear and hatred of his father, his pathologically induced constipation—that have no convincing basis in the historical record. Luther obviously loved his father, a demanding man, no different from other responsible fathers of his time and place, all of whom—as well as mothers and teachers—thought it imperative to beat children into obedience and conformity. Luther did experience constipation, but most notably in the period in which he was forced into hiding and could not exercise. Luther’s supposed obsession with feces, as illustrated by his conversation, was no different from that of northern European contemporaries. The refined Thomas More’s talk and writing were hardly less full of what an analyst of our time might deem “excessive anality.”
Yes, Luther was a dramatically sensitive human being of a type we have all met. Despite his immersion in the forms and spirit of medieval monasticism—and specifically in the pessimistic severities of Augustinian spirituality—he never gave off the aura of a medieval saint, united mystically to the Godhead and awesomely in control of the passions of his lower nature. Rather, he confessed his personal flaws, publicly and often. And, despite the quirky, neurotic behavior of the novice Luther, the man wasn’t nuts, at least not most of the time.
What is perhaps most refreshing about him is the zinging, often self-deprecating, humor of his growing defiance—what we must retrospectively name his courage, his monumental courage, a demonstration that may be possible only to those who are genuinely humble. As he grew older, he would realistically evaluate his strengths and weaknesses and never overrate his talents. “I am the ripe shit,” he confided to dinner guests as he was reaching the old age of sixty and had scarcely two years left to live. “But then the world is a wide asshole, and soon we shall part.”
Receptivity to challenge is not a virtue of official Catholicism, then or now. As we watch in mute horror the astounding unresponsiveness of the worldwide Catholic episcopate to the seemingly endless contemporary scandals of pedophile priests, we learn that the episcopal repertoire is generally confined to a sequence that begins in blank denial (What on earth are you talking about?), is followed by gestures of false reform (Here is our extensive program of self-correction),1 and ends in the huffy pulling of rank (How dare you!). How much more so was this the expectable pattern in sixteenth-century Europe, which had never experienced a successful challenge to its dominant hierarchy.
What saved Luther and his growing bands of supporters from the fate of the Lollards and the Hussites—that is, from being hunted down and burned at the stake—was the growing power of Europe’s secular princes, no longer simply civil servants to ecclesiastical princes. But such protectors would in due course take their own costly exactions. To flee from the arms of the Roman Church to the arms of the territorial nobility would prove to be something of a devil’s bargain.
To begin with, however, the German (or Germanic)2 nobility looked like a good bet to Luther and to many of the religious dissenters who would follow in his wake. The Alps defined a chasm that was at least as cultural as it was geological. When as a young monk Luther made his one trip beyond the Germanic lands—over the Alps into Italy in early 1511,3 in the very time when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling—he was scandalized by what he saw: men pissing shamelessly in public throughout the streets of Rome; priests hurrying through their masses without appropriate reverence and even telling the reverent Brother Martin to hurry up so they could make use of his assigned altar (no doubt to buzz through their endowed masses); bishops and cardinals openly patronizing prostitutes and keeping catamites; general irreverence and a sense that everything and everyone in society was for sale. For the rest of his life, there was no put-down Luther found more cutting than to dismiss a man as “an Italian.”
Even today the divide between the customs of northern and southern Europe remains vivid and can lead quickly and easily to either misunderstanding or just an ugly display of national prejudice. This continuing divide lies even at the heart of Europe’s current economic crisis. (Why should prudent Germans and Finns bail out improvident Greeks, Irish,4 Portuguese, Spaniards, and—especially—Italians?) In Luther’s day, as the universal language of Latin receded and was replaced by national tongues, by a gathering wave of books and broadsides printed in the vernacular, and by more consciously held national identities, the contrast between the solid northern burgher and the slippery southerner seemed evident. Nor was this an age in which tolerance for difference was lauded as a virtue.
In early 1518, Luther published his first work in German, Sermon on Grace and Indulgence, which restated arguments central to the Theses. Indulgences, wrote Luther, were for lazy Christians, who should not be buying them with their surplus funds but turning over whatever money they did not need to poor people. In August 1518, Luther published his Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses in Latin. Its purpose was to defend his theological orthodoxy against the accusations, mounting on all sides, that he was a heretic. He sent a copy to the pope, along with a respectful letter of introduction. From now on, Luther’s life would be one of heroic hard work—of almost ceaseless writing, in both defense and accusation, and of not a few public appearances in which he would attempt to explain himself to his audiences, some warmly sympathetic, others chillingly condemnatory.
Between 1518 and 1521, Luther made four public appearances in cities beyond Wittenberg—in a time when most people seldom ventured beyond the nearest market town—and published (in addition to the works cited above) eight seminal essays. Indeed, between the Theses of 1517 and his death in early 1546, Luther would write and subsequently publish, on average, a new work every two weeks. In the period of public appearances, and largely as a result of growing opposition, many of his opinions took a more radical turn, after which the course of his intellectual development seemed determined and the historical outcomes irreversible.
In April, Luther set out on foot southeast across Germany for the University of Heidelberg and was received everywhere along his route as a celebrity, greeted enthusiastically even by a local bishop. In his public disputation on Augustinian questions of grace and human nature, he impressed everyone. Martin Bucer, who was in the audience and would become one of his principal intellectual supporters, was fascinated: “[Luther’s] sweetness in answering is remarkable, his patience in listening is incomparable … his answers, so brief, so wise, and drawn from the Holy Scriptures, easily made all his hearers his admirers.” As Richard Marius, one of Luther’s more recent and judicious biographers, remarks: “We could wish that Luther had kept that tone throughout his life. He did not.”
In August, Luther ventured even farther south to the city of Augsburg, where the German Diet, or quasi-parliament, was convening in the presence of the old emperor Maximilian. Pushing sixty, the emperor was fixated on his own approaching death—he always traveled with his coffin—and much more focused on securing as his successor his eighteen-year-old grandson Charles, son of Philip the Handsome and Juana la Loca, than he was on theological questions. Maximilian would manage to secure Charles’s succession by bribing key electors with funds supplied liberally by (who else?) the Fuggers—to the tune of 850,000 gulden in all.
Also present was the papal legate, the Dominican Jacopo di Vio, who called himself Tommaso Cajetan—in tribute to Thomas Aquinas and his own Italian hometown of Gaeta. (In a world where surnames were just coming into vogue and there was no such thing as a defined legal name, many, especially among the intellectuals, took names they felt suited them better than the ones they were born with.) Cardinal Cajetan represented the interests of the pope, who was mainly concerned with preventing the accession of Charles—Francis, the French king, was his preferred candidate—and encouraging a crusade against the Turks. But there was also the bother of that annoying little Augustinian, who had to be put firmly in his place.
Cajetan, whose intellectual contributions are still occasionally praised by right-wing Catholics, was in reality a nap-inducing theologian, more Aristotelian than Aristotle, more Thomistic than Thomas Aquinas; and at Augsburg, where the air was buzzing with intrigue, Cajetan was at any rate wearing his political, not his theological, hat. Luther always looked forward to a debate or at least a lively exchange of views. Cajetan the Italian diplomat simply expected submission. Only after the principal business of the Diet was concluded and Luther had been kept waiting for six days was he allowed to meet with the cardinal, who offered not a conversation but the opportunity for Luther to recant on his knees. After a few mannerly sentences, the meeting devolved into a shouting match, Luther insisting that the matter of whether the pope had the power to release souls from Purgatory be put before a council of the universal church, Cajetan screaming, “Gersonista!” which he thought an unanswerable rebuff. (Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris in the early fifteenth century and much admired for both his intellectual accomplishments and his genuinely spiritual orientation, was a principal architect of Conciliarism, the theory that only a general council, not the pope, can be said to hold ultimate earthly authority in the church. The theory presaged the eventual development of representative democracy in the Western world.)
At the University of Leipzig, much closer to Wittenberg, a great debate took place in the summer of 1519 between Luther and a wily, practiced public speaker who called himself Johann Eck. Born Johann Maier, he had renamed himself after his native city, today spelled “Egg.” (It is easy to make too much of these fashionable name changes: Luther himself had originally given his surname the more homely spelling of “Luder,” which can carry such meanings as carrion, cad, and slut.)5 Eck was a theologian who knew how to win the approval of a German audience with a dazzling display of rapier-sharp invective and an inexhaustible supply of logical objections employed with lightning-quick aggressiveness. The debate, which continued for a week and a half, was thrilling as a top-flight sports tournament to its many spectators. Though Luther was an articulate public speaker and could be cutting both in print and in conversation, he was probably not up to matching the dazzle displayed so effortlessly by his large-lunged opponent. He would ever after refer to Eck as that “glory-hungry little beast.”
Did the pope hold some sort of primacy in the church? That was the central question from which all else must flow. To Eck and to the Catholic tradition that he saw himself upholding, the answer was obvious: Jesus himself had established the papal primacy ofPeter and his successors, as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel (16:18–19) and confirmed by “the fathers”—that is, the principal theologians—throughout church history. Of course, the answer is not really so obvious. The language Jesus uses is metaphorical, far from juridical, and open to a variety of interpretations. Just a few verses later (18:18), he is recorded as saying something virtually identical to a crowd of people identified only as “the disciples.” Many perfectly orthodox fathers, especially among the Greeks, as Luther pointed out, never acknowledged that Peter or his successors had primacy. The Greeks, interposed Eck, lost their empire to the Turks as God’s punishment for seceding from the Roman communion.
For the audience, made up largely of students and teachers from the University of Leipzig, Eck was the established champion; most were rooting for the home team, not for Luther. In any case Luther’s arguments were new to them and required more attention and intellectual discrimination than they were willing to extend. Leipzig was large and venerable; who was this upstart challenger from tiny, new Wittenberg?
By this point in Luther’s thinking, the bishop of Rome had no business claiming a distinctive role in the universal church. Such a role belonged only to a genuine consensus of all Christians—and such a consensus could be provided by a representative general council, though even this did not mean that a general council could not err. There was nothing in the Bible to confirm the inerrancy of a general council. Only the Bible itself was inerrant—and only when interpreted by a true Christian.
Gradually, each of Luther’s seemingly radical opinions was exposed to view, egged on as he was by Eck, who now accused his opponent of being no better than a Wycliffite or a Hussite, deserving to be burned at the stake. Hus, remarked Luther, had been treated badly by the Council of Constance and perhaps condemned unfairly. Indeed, though having yet to read Hus’s principal works, Luther, despite the gasps of the audience, said stoutly that he had come to the conclusion that Constance had erred—and this was one reason he could not claim inerrancy even for a general council. If only the fathers at Constance had treated Hus with the fraternal affection he deserved. “I believe that the Bohemians are men”—something the German audience, victimized in previous decades by the understandable wrath of the Hussites, was rather reluctant to acknowledge—“and that they may be attracted by gentle words but that they are only hardened by being called criminal and by the opprobrious name of heretics.”
The idea of treating people with whom one disagrees in a mild and gracious manner was so alien to the time that it received only whoops and hollers from the assembled listeners. Eck used a number of underhanded ploys to best Luther, perhaps the worst being his pious invocation of the greatest medieval saint, Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan friars. The miraculous stigmata that Francis had received in his body were, according to Eck, proof positive for all to see that God had blessed Francis’s perfect obedience to the pope. In all likelihood, this miracle never occurred.6 That it proves God’s approval of papal primacy is surely a large logical leap, but this sort of crowd-pleasing contortion worked its magic. Luther’s ungenerous reply, suggesting that it might be a better world if none of the fawning, slimy mendicant orders were to continue in existence, though not unlike the view that Boccaccio had put forward more than a century and a half before, brought few to his side.
Luther was disgusted by the treatment he received at the hands of Eck and the audience, who cheered Eck, feasted him, and followed him through the streets of Leipzig. Luther was aware that, aside from Eck’s extraordinary ability as a speaker, he had trouble articulating a clear argument of his own. And Luther suspected, rightly enough, that Eck did not even believe some of the things he appeared to support so roundly. We know from Eck’s correspondence that he had earlier entertained many of Erasmus’s and even Luther’s propositions. But he had turned himself into a public debater whose object was to vanquish his opponent by dramatic verbal pyrotechnics. The public debater was in devoted service to the secret politician, who had set himself the objective of winning the patronage of the pope and the papal establishment, whither he saw his good fortune lay. Luther’s less slick performance was actually motivated by Luther’s truthfulness, his profound wish to say only what he believed to be so. Duke George of Leipzig, one of Eck’s patrons, was astonished by the open candor exhibited by Luther and his fellow reformers, who tended to reject mere verbal cleverness in their attempt to get at the truth. “They do say what they really mean,” remarked Duke George in consternation at such unusual behavior.
For Luther, what had been waged at Leipzig was a pitched battle between Aristotle and Christ. For the schoolmen, the medieval and Renaissance philosophers who depended on the physics and the logic of Aristotle, the world made basic sense and everything in it had a purpose—a cause and an end. In Luther’s eyes, such teaching was pagan claptrap. The world made no sense at all, for it was nothing but a repetitive, everlasting cycle of birth and death to no obvious purpose whatever. Real meaning, meaning that we can care about, meaning for us comes only through the incarnation of Christ, the God-Man. His life, his hideous suffering, his horrifying death, his resurrection—these give us meaning as nothing else can come close to doing. In the Bible, and especially in the anguish of thePsalms (to which Luther was more attached than he was to the gospels, especially the three synoptic gospels),7 Christ speaks to us and we hear his voice, showing us that our experience is his experience and confirming for us the paradox that our seemingly meaningless lives, our secret sufferings—certainly empty of meaning if we remain at the humdrum level of Aristotelian insight—have glorious meaning if taken up into the mystery of Christ.
As 1519 nears its end, we find Luther already in possession of almost all of his signature positions:
· The arguments over Christian history—or rather over the historical development of authentic Christian theology—will never be resolved on historical grounds alone. True doctrine must be grounded in the text of Scripture, which is its only sure foundation.
· We have misunderstood what Scripture means when it speaks of justification. Only God is just; and he is just because he is merciful. Unlike us, God is supremely free; he could have been vindictive and merciless. But he chooses to forgive us our sins; it is he who justifies us. We cannot justify ourselves.
· It is this force of forgiveness that rules the universe, not the blind physical laws of Aristotle. At the heart of the universe is the benignity of God.
In stumbling upon this last insight, the brooding, often morose Luther confided that “I felt myself absolutely reborn, as though I had entered into the open gates of paradise itself.”
There are, of course, many subsidiary developments beyond these three, but virtually all additional developments are built upon these central insights. Soon enough, for instance, Luther, provoked by the pope’s unyielding high-handedness, will begin to mock him as a diabolical temptation, the Whore of Babylon and/or the Antichrist prophesied in Revelation. On another front, he will elaborate on his theory that the local prince, whoever he may be, acts as the mouthpiece and enforcer of God’s will, following occasionalPauline affirmations that appear to point in the same direction. Luther, however, seems normally to find the prince more reliable than any church official. His teaching on predestination—that God has willed from all eternity that some shall be saved, others damned—will wobble back and forth over time. In later life, he will recommend not thinking about the difficult subject at all, if one can banish it from one’s mind. But all these positions seem to me to lack the centrality of the first three, especially given the mutability of the subsidiary positions—or at least their evolution—over time.
Even Luther’s seemingly strict adherence to the truth of the Bible has its limits. Though no infants are baptized in the course of the New Testament, Luther will continue to insist on infant baptism throughout his life, as well as on many other traditional beliefs unprovable from Scripture, such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In a letter of 1528 to two radical pastors, he will indeed demonstrate that he continues to stand up for almost the entirety of Roman Catholic tradition: “We confess that under the papacy much Christian good, indeed all Christian good, is, and so it has come to us. Namely, we confess with the papacy that there is a correct Holy Scripture, a correct baptism, a correct sacrament of the altar, a correct key to the forgiveness of sin, a correct teaching office, a correct catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the articles of faith [of the traditional creeds].” Quite a mouthful from the world’s first Protestant.
The best route to understanding Luther’s theological positions may lie in appreciating the man’s psychology. He was a natural conservative, someone who preferred black-and-white statements to unnecessarily clever and elusive formulations, someone more at home with the literal than the metaphorical, someone who respected tradition and wished only for necessary changes and adjustments.8 This corner of his psyche he may be said to share with a great many men and women throughout history.
But there is another corner that seems to belong only to the period that begins in his time and continues into ours, for in Luther we sense—for the very first time in biographical history—what may best be called existential terror or what Marius labels Luther’s “devouring fear of death.” Luther, commenting on the Fifth Psalm, finds the life of the believer filled with “pain, temptation, doubt, and fear.” Even for the theologian, the Christian expert, “living, no, on the contrary, dying and being damned makes the theologian—not understanding, reading, or speculating!” The boy who pledged to devote his life out of fear has become a fear-beset adult.
It is not so very surprising that Luther was often misunderstood in his time. He might have been better appreciated in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or in the twentieth by Sartre or Camus or even perhaps in the twenty-first by an intensely existentialist black-metal band such as Wolves in the Throne Room, who might consider this text of Luther’s for their next concert: “We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance and not on the move. At the time of dying, however, this is hazardous and useless, for then death looms large of its own accord.” See the smoke and gloom, hear the screams and growls; for each of us, claims Luther solemnly, must confront the tragedy of mankind’s earthly destiny. Luther never loses completely the fear that he may be damned—though, often enough, his fear of Hell sounds more like the agnostic’s fear of slipping into nonexistence than like anything to be found in any tradition of Christian theology.
It strikes me as pleasingly ironic that the defiant language of Luther in his darkest moments can be so reminiscent of the so-called “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can.…
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.…
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
Hopkins was a great Victorian poet, and his language is denser than Luther’s, which can be prolix. But the two often seem to be speaking about a similar experience, near despair despite a muscular faith. Hopkins was a retiring convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, homosexual in predisposition and probably bipolar, who spent much of his brief and sickly adult life as a Jesuit priest in an uncomfortable exile in Ireland. On the face of it, he would not seem to have much in common with the far more vigorous Luther, publicly and intellectually engaged with his time and with many of its principal players. (Indeed, in his greatest poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins dismisses Luther as “beast of the waste wood”—and we can imagine what Luther would have had to say about Hopkins.) But it may be that the “dark night of the soul” is a phenomenon more common to sensitive Christian believers (or perhaps to sensitive believers of any sort) than has been widely appreciated.
In any case, Satan, the Archdevil and ruler of Hell, looms ever larger in Luther’s imagination, his figure encountered everywhere. Luther disparaged the miracles that occurred at Catholic shrines as “works of Satan, permitted by God to tempt your faith.” He believed in the power of witches to do grievous harm, opening wounds in the bodies of their victims, causing storms and crop failures and killing livestock. He thought that Satan could appear as a human temptress and, through anal intercourse with a man, conceive a devil child. Though these vivid imaginings sound no more modern than the early Middle Ages, the admonitory figures of Luther’s nightmares combine with his profound fears of Hell and nonexistence to fashion a soon-to-be-middle-aged man of restless energy and ceaseless activity.
In the spring of 1520, Luther produced two tracts. The first, On the Papacy in Rome, Against the Famous Romanist at Leipzig, is a freewheeling attack on positions proposed by a Leipzig monk who had argued for absolute papal sovereignty over church and state. It is written in German, full of the sort of sarcasm and cutting humor that made it a “must-read” for Luther’s growing audience. The second, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, also in German to render it accessible to even the least literate German prince, is one of the most important statements of the gathering Reformation. In it Luther openly pits the legitimate power of the prince—or secular ruler—against what he claims to be the stolen power assumed by the clergy, especially by the pope and his bishops. For the necessary reformation to take place, the prince must assume his legitimate power over both secular and religious realms. The Address represents a giant step toward building the necessary theoretical underpinning for what will soon become the national churches of Protestant Europe.
That many princes (and other secular rulers) were at last growing powerful enough to defy ecclesiastical prescription and punishment9 surely made Luther’s argument appear more realistic than it might once have been, but a certain lack of realism is still discernible in his highly theoretical construct, which lacks any feeling of intimate acquaintance with persons of power or their accustomed ways of thinking and acting. Indeed, monk Luther knew no princes. Even his local magnate, the unusually avuncularFrederick the Wise, who had lent Luther his silent patronage, was a distant figure, known to Luther through correspondence with one of Frederick’s secretaries. The two never met. But black storm clouds were gathering over Luther’s head. He would soon need from the princes all the help he could get.
Johann Eck was in Rome, where he was helping the chancery compose Exsurge Domine, the historic papal bull that would demand Luther’s recantation under pain of excommunication. The term “bull” derives from the Latin word bulla or seal, suggesting that what is sealed comes from the hand of the pope himself. The document begins with a quotation from Psalm 74: “Arise, Lord, and judge the case before you.” It goes on to excoriate Luther, his teachings, and his followers in no uncertain terms, enumerating forty-one separate errors that must be summarily rejected. Employing the customary papal “We,” it bemoans the pope’s supposedly heroic efforts to pull the errant monk back from the brink: “Regarding Martin, dear God, what have We failed to do, what have We avoided, what paternal love did We not exercise, to call him back from his errors?” Henceforth, no one under any circumstances may “read, speak, preach, praise, consider, publish, or defend” any of Luther’s writings. Rather, these are all to be burned publicly by everyone who does not wish to be burned himself or, in a nice nod to gender inclusiveness, herself. (Indeed, the thirty-third of Luther’s forty-one heresies is that he doesn’t believe that God wants heretics burned at the stake.) The bull raises its skirts before Luther’s “abusive language”—which “vile poison,” we are told, is “the custom of heretics”—and condescends as from a great height to “the German people” for whom “our predecessors and We Ourselves have always had a particular fondness.” The bull has Eck’s characteristic smugness and sense of superiority stamped all over it.
Erasmus was more than a little worried. He had been writing to Luther, originally in admiration, more recently in words of caution. Once it came to his ears that there was a saying making the rounds that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched,” Erasmus’s anxiety was much stoked up. Please, advised Erasmus, write and speak with greater restraint—and whatever you do, leave me out of it. “Otherwise, you will make suspect those who might serve you better, were they not compromised.” Why not write something pious and devotional, thus helping to calm things down?
As in most periods of history around the planet, a proclamation or a new law cannot become effective till it is universally proclaimed or distributed. In September, Eck arrived in Germany, attempting to promulgate the bull. But he had to stay out of Frederick the Wise’s Saxony, where he knew he would be unwelcome, and not a few other princes refused their cooperation. Even the University of Leipzig, sounding muted notes of German nationalism, refused to be drawn into the distribution. As Eck went on his way, he kept adding the names of additional “heretics” to the bull, wherever he discovered new opponents or was sent additional denunciations by the papal chancery. Luther replied briefly that the bull was the work not of the pope but of Eck himself, who understood Scripture “as well as an ass knows how to play the lyre.”
In the first week of October, Luther published in Latin his most incendiary tract, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The original Babylonian “captivity” referred to the exile of Judeans in the great Mesopotamian city of Babylon after the conquest of Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC, as recorded in the Second Book of Kings. By the time Revelation, the final book of the Bible, was written at the close of the first century AD, Babylon had become the fabled capital of all evil and a code word for pagan Rome and its power. In the medieval period during which the Francophile popes resided not in Rome but in Avignon, people spoke of “the Babylonian captivity of the papacy.” Now, Luther awarded the prize for the epicenter of all evil to the papacy itself, seen as keeping the church in infernal bondage to all forms of perversity and sinfulness.
In the Babylonica, Luther came out of the closet, so to speak, casting aside all Erasmian caution and explicitly reciting his objections to papal teaching exactly as he saw (and felt) them. The pope is anti-Christ, his authority illegitimate and his sacramental system a fraud. “Neither pope nor bishop nor any man has the right to impose one syllable of law on the Christian man except the Christian give it his consent.” Marriage, though no sacrament, is an ancient human institution, which the church should not attempt to regulate with its infinite series of legalisms and the jockeying required by the church’s marriage courts. “Today’s Romanists have become salesmen. And what do they sell? Penises and vaginas.” There are, at most, three sacraments, not seven,10 ordained by Scripture: baptism, Eucharist, and confession (though this third would be gradually downgraded by Luther to such an extent that it would become at last almost invisible). The Eucharist (or mass) requires no specially ordained priest, only the community of believers, to make it happen. Christ is really present in this sacrament, even though the papal teaching of transubstantiation is nonsense, since it is based not on Scripture but on Aristotle, who is also nonsense. Because the Christian always remains simul justus et peccator (both justified and a sinner), the only sin we need take with ultimate seriousness is unbelief.
Erasmus read the tract in early 1521 and was horrified. What good could Luther possibly expect to come from such patent intemperance? Most upsetting of all, rumors were circulating that Erasmus was the secret author of the Babylonica. From this time onward, the tentative alliance between Erasmus and Luther was broken.
Once Luther had got these aggressive arguments off his chest he seems himself to have realized that he had gone too far in provocation. His next piece of writing, almost certainly his finest, was The Freedom of a Christian, which he finished in November 1520 and which makes many of the same arguments as the Babylonica, if in more considered prose and more elevated style. But there was no denying that Luther now stood foursquare against the institution of the papacy and a long line of papally sponsored theological development.
In early December, many German towns, encouraged by Eck and other Romanists, burned the works of Luther in ominous public ceremonies overseen by the shadowy figures of local executioners. On December 10, the people of Wittenberg made their own bonfire, throwing books of canon law and anti-Luther tracts into the flames. Luther, standing amid the revelers, contributed Wittenberg’s own copy of Exsurge Domine. Henceforth, as Erasmus had feared, the battle was joined. There could be no going back.
Frederick the Wise appears in virtually all historical accounts a paradoxical, even an imperspicuous figure. He died as he lived, a Catholic, never immoderate yet pious and traditional in his devotions. But he was immovably on the side of fairness and rationality and against all violence and cruelty. He even disapproved of execution as a form of punishment: “An easy thing to take a life,” he mused, “but one cannot restore it.” In the course of his long reign, there were no wars within his territories, nor did he ever declare war against another land. He was in these ways most uncharacteristic of his time. He trusted, moreover, in his own deep responsibility to protect those whose lives were lived within his realm, those formally “under his protection.” And he was, if the category of a slightly later age may be applied to his, a German patriot. More than any other figure of his time, he was Luther’s good luck.
Frederick not only refused to distribute Exurge Domine; he actively lobbied for a public hearing for Luther, to be held not in Rome—whence, he was certain, Luther would never return—but in Germany, where fairness might be possible. He had cast his electoral vote for the new emperor, the now-twenty-year-old Fleming Charles, and against the pope’s French candidate. He was owed some consideration.
The next Diet would be held in the spring of 1521 at Worms, south of Frankfurt, where the gangling young Charles V, who, thanks to the long tradition of royal inbreeding, had a projecting lower jaw that made him resemble a somewhat awkward gorilla, would preside, appearing for the first time to his German subjects. Though Frederick tried valiantly to rally Charles to Luther’s side, Charles, an outsider with no especially German sympathies and already making his own private political calculations, knew how important unity of faith would be to his success as ruler of his vast and diverse territories, no portion of which loomed larger than the German-speaking lands.
Luther, though sick with anxiety, decided—in the manner of Paul submitting to Caesar—to respond positively to Charles’s mandate to appear at Worms. “If Caesar calls me, God calls me,” he wrote to Frederick, professing his belief in the God-given role of princes rather than priests. “If violence is used, as well it may be, I commend my cause to God.” And though Charles had promised his imperial safe conduct, the fate of Hus in similar circumstances was never far from Luther’s consciousness.
On the morn of April 16, after a two-week journey, a trembling Luther, accompanied by a few friends, made his humble entrance into Worms in a borrowed two-wheeled Saxon cart. All along the way, save as he passed through Leipzig, he had been met by large crowds of well-wishers, nowhere more lavishly than at Frankfurt, home of German literacy, already the host to the great annual book fair that continues to this day. At Worms, the infamous monk, now—as was widely known—excommunicated by the pope, was jostled by two thousand supporters, all of whom wished to welcome him and help to escort him to his lodging. Those who did not swarm in the street took up their clamorous positions on the roofs of houses. Luther could hardly have hoped for a heartier welcome.
In the afternoon of the next day, Luther found himself before the emperor and his family, the assembled princes of Germany, the papal nuncios, and assorted courtiers, clerks, and clerics. In the alcove of a window was piled an enormous number of books. Johann von der Ecken, chief official under the archbishop of Trier (and no relation to the Eck at Leipzig), pointed to the pile of books and asked Luther to acknowledge his authorship of them all. We know that, because Luther was almost inhumanly productive, this great pile would have appeared to many less industrious souls as an impossible achievement—short of diabolical assistance. Even Luther seems to have hesitated before claiming them all, so the titles were read aloud, making a long and increasingly incredible list, after which Luther acknowledged authorship.
“Will you then recant?” asked Ecken immediately. Luther, who had vainly hoped to be allowed to argue his case before the court, asked for time to consider his response on account of the momentousness of what he had written about, namely the Word of God. After long moments of silence, the young emperor agreed to a day’s consideration, ruffling Ecken’s feathers.
Late the next afternoon as the sun was already beginning to sink beneath the horizon, a much larger audience, hoping no doubt for an explosive encounter, filed into a much larger room, which became so crowded that only the emperor himself was provided a chair. The body heat in the room was such that Luther in his woolen monk’s habit was sweating profusely. He could not, he told the emperor, simply renounce all his works outright because they were of such differing kinds. Some were so simple and pious that no one could object to them. To renounce such books would be to renounce Christian doctrine, as accepted universally. A second class of books involved denunciations of the immoral lives of so many Romanists—“all this sink of Roman sodomy,” as he had termed it elsewhere—and their tyranny over the great and good German people. His audience, by and large, was almost as receptive to this second demur as it was to his first.
In a third class of books he had replied to attacks against him and, he confessed, had not always been mild in his answers. For “we must weigh carefully how wonderful and how awful our Lord is in his secret counsels. We must be sure that those things we do to banish strife … do not rather lead to a flood of unbearable evil.” Our desire for peace can so easily undo us just as it undid “pharaoh, the king of Babylon, the kings of Israel.” So too could even “the government of this young, noble prince Charles—on whom next to God we hope for so much—become sick unto death.” Of course, these princes, these “exalted men,” need “neither my teaching nor my warning,” but “I must not shun the duty I owe my Germany. And so I commit myself to your majesty and to your lordships. I humbly beg you not to condemn me without reason because of the passions of my enemies.” Then, to signal that he had nothing further to add, he pronounced his resounding “I have spoken.”
He had succeeded in making the speech he was to have been forbidden to make. Ecken, furious, shouted that he had failed to answer the question put to him and was, rather, calling into question “the most sacred orthodox faith” and waiting “in vain, Martin, for a disputation over things that you are obligated to believe with certain and professing faith.” In at least the public stance of men such as Ecken, all theological questions had already been answered. It was time simply to recant “without horns or teeth,” ordered the offended Romanist.
“Since then your majesty and your lordships,” replied Brother Martin, “desire a simple reply, I will answer ‘without horns or teeth.’ Unless I am convinced by Scripture and by plain reason (I do not believe in the authority of either popes or councils by themselves, for it is plain that they have often erred and contradicted each other) in those Scriptures that I have presented, for my conscience is captive to the Word of God, I cannot and I will not retract anything, for it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen.”
A slightly later printed version of Luther’s remarks adds the sentence “Here I stand; I can do no other” before “God help me,” but the accounts of what Luther said that were taken down as he spoke do not include this sentence. Is this, then, just another mythological addition to the story, like the nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses to Wittenberg’s church door? I don’t think quite. Surely scribes, hired by the opposing side, can’t always be trusted, especially to record every rhetorical flourish. And Luther himself never disowned the additional sentence, which is certainly consistent with the spirit he displayed in his reply.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” snapped King Lear at his one loving daughter, as if he had just been reading Aristotle. In logic, as in evolution and in all forms of development, nothing can come of nothing; rather, everything has a precedent: something that went before, something from which the phenomenon under study springs and takes its being. The one exception would seem to be the cosmos itself, which appears, whether in ancient theologies or in modern science, to emerge ex nihilo, from nothing. But everything else known to us has a cause, a trigger, a parent, a thing from which it sprang.
In this series of books, The Hinges of History, we are looking especially at dramas of origination. We are attempting repeatedly to answer the questions: How did x or y get started? How did this or that valued aspect of our contemporary lives come to be? How far back into the past can we legitimately push its origins? In the previous volume, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, we found the earliest evidence for feminism, science, and the plastic arts as we know them in the high Middle Ages—in the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the early fourteenth centuries.
When did ego—the personal “I,” the self as we now understand it—come to be? Where do we find its earliest expression? Well, there is certainly ego in the Renaissance artists and, further back, in the self-promotion of a salesman such as Columbus. But nowhere in our earlier history does the force of ego ring so fully and defiantly as in the scene at Worms, where Brother Martin—this “pile of shit,” as he so often called himself—dared to say “No” to the assembled forces of early modern Europe, to the entire panoply of church and state, and to cite his own little conscience (surely a negligible phenomenon to the majority of his listeners) as the reason for his absolute, unnuanced, unhedged rebellion. For this reason, though we can certainly name many of his immediate predecessors (and have done so earlier in this book), we must pause before the figure of Martin Luther and acknowledge both his astonishing contemporaneity and our, perhaps somewhat uncomfortable, brotherhood with him.
Thus, it is this scene that is memorialized in the epigraphs at the outset of this book. Appropriately, I believe, Martin Luther’s statement about his conscience is followed by the statement of the self-named Martin Luther King Sr. (named “Michael” by his parents), whose admiration for the original bearer of his name was lifelong. For Dr. King senior, the essence of the first Martin Luther was the man’s courage; and once he saw “the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right” exhibited by the Roman Catholic presidential candidate he had no intention of voting for,11 King switched his vote (from Nixon to Kennedy) and his lifelong political allegiance (from Republican to Democratic). King’s son, Martin Luther King Jr., would in his brief life prove the most courageous and transformative figure of my generation of Americans, likely even of my generation of human beings.
In the end, the cultural forces that brought about such transformation need not be belittled by evidence that a heightened sense of ego may have led also to a heightened egotism. Egotism, that is, a false or disproportionate value placed on personal, subjective experience and on individual identity, has certainly accompanied the deepening of subjectivity and cheapened it throughout our contemporary world. The current inflation of ego in the self-presentation of so many public figures does not, however, erase the startling moral value of what Luther did, nor can it erase what subsequent men and women of courage have achieved in every hour since then, or what they continue to achieve in our time.
1 Evidence of false reform is abundant. Most recently, Seán O’Malley, the current cardinal archbishop of Boston, brought in to amend the mistakes of his predecessor Bernard Law, Cardinal Coverup himself, issued a partial list of clergy accused of sexual abuse, this nearly ten years after the Boston scandal broke. All of the 132 names on the published list were previously known to the public, though O’Malley managed to declare that he was publishing the list “after serious and thoughtful consideration and prayer.” What the cardinal failed to mention was that, in addition to consulting God, he had spent considerable time in conversation with his attorneys.
2 The principal tribes of northern Europe—the Franks, the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Swiss, the Dutch, the Flemish, the English—were of Germanic, rather than of Celtic or Greco-Roman, origin.
3 Luther said he made his Roman visit in 1510, though the best evidence suggests that it was made, by our reckoning, in January 1511, which was then part of 1510, since the new year did not commence till March 25, the feast of the Annunciation (and, therefore, of the supposed conception of Jesus).
4 As an extremely British Brit once explained to me, “Ireland is a Mediterranean island lost in the Atlantic.”
5 Nor should one assume that this fashion for name-changing was confined to the period under study. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, Adolf Hitler’s father would change the family surname from Schicklgruber to Hitler. The changes seem always to tend in the direction of greater dignity. It is a bit difficult, after all, to imagine “Heil, Schicklgruber!” catching on, even among the most devoted fascists.
6 This is the position of Donald Spoto, Francis’s most recent and reliable biographer.
7 Though Luther loved the Psalms, which he took (as did most of the previous Christian tradition) to be the voice of Jesus, he was less attracted to the three synoptic gospels, surely a confused position for one who thought of himself as “evangelical.” But as pointed out above, not all of Jesus’s sayings in those gospels can be neatly squared with Luther’s (or Paul’s) “justification by faith.” Luther did, however, hold the Fourth Gospel, John’s—the least ancient, least historical, and most layered with the theology of the developing church—in high regard.
8 My local Lutheran church, whose pastor is a respected figure, well known for both her social activism and her openness to alternative sexual lifestyles, is adorned with a large sign of welcome claiming, “We are completely open—in every way!” Luther might have found such a slogan enraging or hilarious, but his comment would not have been printable in any church bulletin.
9 Not many years later, the English reformer and translator William Tyndale would remark that though the Venetians had been placed under papal interdict again and again, they discovered that “they shat as well as they ever did.”
10 In fairly late Catholic tradition seven sacraments are designated: baptism, Eucharist, penance (or confession), confirmation in the faith, priestly orders, matrimony, and extreme unction (or final anointing before death).
11 Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested during a peaceful sit-in and incarcerated by the flagrantly racist state of Georgia. There was understandable anxiety that he might never be seen alive again. Senator Kennedy, beginning his run for the U.S. presidency, intervened publicly on King’s behalf, thus casting a spotlight on Georgia and forcing its minions to release their prisoner. At the time, it was a most unlikely move for a prominent white politician to make, especially toward the anti-Catholic South, at least some of whose votes Kennedy would need to win the national election.