A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  He questioned celibacy; in this, he was surely on to something. “Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit wine and abolish women?” He said the pope often erred. He said anyone could be his own priest. Excommunicated by the young Medici pope in 1521, he faced the Emperor Charles in Worms, Germany, a few months later for his civil punishment. But by then, peasants and lesser nobles had taken up his cause. The monk had started a movement, born partly out of rising Teutonic nationalism. “I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against my conscience,” he said at his trial. The emperor was not moved; he branded Luther a “notorious heretic.” Execution would surely follow. The trial of Martin Luther was “the greatest moment in the modern history of man,” as Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian philosopher, called it. “It ranks with the 1066 Norman conquest and the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta and the 1492 landing of Columbus in the New World,” wrote Eric Metaxas, a recent Luther biographer.

  Luther fled, protected by his supporters. His notes from the underground were extraordinary: sermons and missives, but also something monumental, for it was during his time in exile that he translated that Bible into one that is still used today. He encouraged monasteries and convents to open their doors, and their occupants to live free lives. He married a nun on the run, Katharina von Bora, who was twenty-six years old when Luther was forty-one, and much more attractive than the jowly, raisin-eyed monk, judging by their portraits. He enjoyed having a woman next to him in bed, recalling the smell of the sheets, “a pair of pigtails lying beside” him. The Luthers had six children, and took in four orphans, the large clan residing in the former monastery in Wittenberg where all the heretical thought had been hatched. His ideas produced a much bigger family. In 1526, nine years after Luther first raised his voice, the rulers of nearly three hundred smaller German states opted for Lutheranism over the church of Rome. In 1536, Denmark officially adopted the new faith as the state religion. Norway soon followed.

  Had Luther’s public life ended there, his writings the basis of a church that now claims 72 million worshippers worldwide, his reputation would have been sterling. But like the institution he so skillfully attacked, Luther took a dark turn. When peasants who were inspired by his ideas on spiritual independence and human dignity revolted against their feudal lords, Luther cheered on the killing—of his followers. He was supposedly their champion, and yet he saw the Peasants’ War as a mob uprising that must be crushed. “Let whoever can, stab, strike, strangle,” he wrote. “If you die doing it, good for you!” The conflict left more than eighty thousand dead, among the poorest and most desolate members of German society.

  With Jews, Luther was even more malevolent. He clearly hated Jews—“miserable, blind and senseless people”—and wrote some of the most repulsive things ever expressed by a respected man of God about them. His work not only fed the prevailing ignorance of medieval anti-Semitism, but it pushed that ancient animus to new levels. “They are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which has not been stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury.” Jews drank the blood of Christian children, a hoary lie, retold by Dr. Luther. Jews poisoned the wells of Christians. Jews were filth who “ate the shit” of Judas, “the vilest whores and rogues under the sun,” he wrote in his infamous tract On the Jews and Their Lies. He urged people to burn down synagogues, to set fire to Jewish homes or cover them with dirt “so that not a single human being will see a stone or cinder, for ever and ever.” How could this be the same monk—the great humanist—who had opened a big vein of common sense?

  When King Henry II said, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” his words led to the murder of one man, Thomas Becket. But Luther’s words were marshaled, four hundred years after he wrote them, by Nazis in his native land to justify the greatest crime in history—the murder of 6 million Jews. Certainly, Lutheranism was not the basis of Nazism. But when it was convenient, the Hitler cult found much to admire in his philosophy. At Nuremberg in 1946, one of Nazi Germany’s leading ideologues said Martin Luther should be the one on trial.

  I ask the museum director, Gabriel de Montmollin, about Luther’s abhorrent side. There is very little on reformed Christianity’s hatred of the Jews in this otherwise masterly showcase of the Protestant world. Apologists for Luther say the hatred came near the end of his life, when he was old and cranky. He wrote 110 books or tracts throughout his time as the Reformer, and should not be judged by one invective. The director furrows his brow and seems to be in genuine anguish as we discuss this question. He knows better. Luther had a well-documented hatred of Jews going back to 1514—three years before writing 95 theses, more than thirty years before his death. “The Reformation, you know . . . it has some problems with memory,” he says. Ah, problems with memory, the root of so much repetitive history.

  Luther at one point tried to reach out to Jews. He thought his new Bible would show them the way. When they didn’t convert, he got angrier and turned uglier. If they couldn’t see the way, something must be deeply wrong with them. His written screed against Jews was sixty thousand words of aggressive loathing. Montmollin, who spends his days sifting through and explaining the original documents of Protestantism, has concluded there is no way to consider the good of Luther’s revolution without taking into account the bad of his most odious exhortations. He feels the same way about his own faith, such as it is. “I’m interested in the questions of Christianity, not the answers.”

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  THE QUESTIONS HAVE DRIVEN me as well. But looking for answers, and my intent to find a living faith along the Via Francigena, takes me a few doors away, to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Geneva. It looks like a pleasant house, which it once was. An American in his late thirties, the Reverend Andy Willis, is the pilot of this 250-year-old ship of belief. Married, father of a preschool-age son, he is a product of St. Olaf College and Princeton’s divinity school, with the Minnesota Nice manners of his native Midwest. He was a pastor in the West Bank of Palestine—yes, there is a Lutheran congregation in one of the world’s most precarious spots—and ministered close to my home for three years, at a church in Olympia, Washington. This gives us an opportunity to discuss a true miracle: the time when the Seattle Seahawks came from twelve points down late in the fourth quarter, then picked up an onside kick and scored a touchdown in overtime, to beat the Green Bay Packers, sending our boys to the Super Bowl.

  I was expecting white bread and mush from modern Lutherans, but see no such thing here. There are forty-four nationalities in his church; a third of the worshippers are from Africa, the fastest-growing region for the faith. And there are many young people with families. The church is often filled for Sunday service, which includes drums and guitar. The Jesus conjured up for this congregation would never have followed Martin Luther’s call to slay peasants or burn down Jewish homes.

  “Christ was born among the powerless,” Willis likes to say. “He lived among the vulnerable. He died alongside criminals.” For his Easter sermon, he was provocative and encouraging. “Sneaking life into a tomb—that’s what Easter is all about! Easter is God whispering to us: ‘Nothing can keep my love in a grave.’”

  This is a forward-looking congregation, built on the best words of yesterday. “You can’t be glib about the fact that for so much of the history of religion, humans have gotten this wrong,” Willis says. During the five-hundredth anniversary of the founding act of Lutheranism, the Reformer’s positive ideas still have a prominent place in the historic home of early-day Protestants. But his worst ideas are not completely forgotten. “I’m really wary of celebrating Luther too much, because he was a deeply flawed human being,” says this Lutheran minister, a fascinating admission.

  He admires the pope, and Francis has reciprocated to the faith of the renegade monk. The pope held a prayer service not long ago with global Lutheran leaders to
commemorate the defiant act of a man his predecessors would have charred to a crisp. The pope said Luther was right about many things. “With gratitude, we acknowledge that the Reformation helped give greater centrality to sacred Scripture.”

  Now that they are free of state attachment, while being ridiculed or ignored by modern secularists, the two branches of Christianity find they have much in common.

  But as with the encouraging reaction to the archbishop of Canterbury’s surprising past, you have to wonder if it’s too late—Christians, opening their hearts to one another despite doctrinal differences, just as Christianity is dying in so many parts of Europe. The newfound tolerance, the embracing across the lines, the forgiving and forgetting, the freedom to express ideas that once led to bloodshed and banishment—it’s not unlike a deathbed conversion.

  The Reverend Willis smiles at my analogy. He says the future of Christianity, what he hears from young congregants, is to be more meditative, more authentically spiritual, at a time when digital distractions have such a hold on us. “Our attention is a commodity,” said Willis during one recent sermon on this topic. “We hand over our power to whatever is loudest. Nothing is left for the softest voices.”

  The pastor still struggles with his beliefs, which is one of the qualities that make him so likable. He’s well educated, articulate. and soulful. And yet, he has to suspend reason and no small amount of logic to continue doing what he does every day. He’s a man who seems at home with his own uncertainties. “The question of faith is chilling, frankly, but also very honest. I went through this in college, when you have to make a break with the shallow image of God. You have to take doubts seriously.”

  NINETEEN

  A THEOCRACY ON THE LAKE

  Before leaving Geneva, I have to visit a martyr. That would be Michael Servetus, medical doctor, theologian, mapmaker, a fugitive wanted by three countries and two religions. A Renaissance man before the term, he was one of the brilliant, gutsy early voices of reformed Christianity. He fled to Geneva for the same reasons that other persecuted men and women came here in the sixteenth century, transforming the little town that rose where the lake drains into the Rhône River to a home for breakaway thinkers. For a moment the doors were opened in a place living by words that now serve as a civic motto, words that adorn a prominent bas-relief: City of Refuge. Huguenots facing pogroms in Catholic France poured into Geneva. So did many others who challenged those who guarded the vault of theology. Four national languages are spoken in the twenty-six cantons of Switzerland—French, German, Italian, and an old Latin dialect, Romansh—but the lingua franca of Geneva is tolerance. Yes, the Swiss have long hidden the money of warlords, corporate criminals, Nazi thieves, and villains in Bond movies. But before that, they hid people of conscience. That is, until Michael Servetus showed up and begged another religious refugee, John Calvin, to protect him.

  I’m waiting for an evening breeze and cooler temperatures before hiking up into the part of the city where I can spend some time with Servetus. He’s not easy to find—the tribute to him is known locally as the “Lost Monument”—and not much talked about either. But then, people in Seattle seldom bring up the fact that the largest city in the world named for a Native American once passed a law making it illegal for a Native American to live there.

  Casey and I load up on market cheese and fruit, and then settle into lakeside chairs for a sampling of those UNESCO-certified wines. We watch white swans make precision landings on the water, foreground for a tableau of lake, snow-crowned mountains, passing boats, and puffy clouds. He’s impressed by Switzerland. So am I. In the villages and houses along the lake you still see a lot of what Hemingway called “the cuckoo clock style of architecture.” But the stereotype of fondue-dipping, Heidi-loving, strangely indecipherable Swiss seems bogus to both of us. Every nationality under the sun is here, with more than just a representative sample; half the population of Geneva is resident foreign nationals. No one laughs at my French, though most quickly switch to English when I open my mouth. What is truly shocking are the prices. You need to take out a line of credit before coming to a mountain kingdom that boasts four of the six most expensive cities in the world. We burst out laughing the first time we ordered two coffees and a cookie in a nondescript café and did not get change back from the equivalent of a twenty. And that was the cheap place.

  With the onset of early evening, we’re back at a variant of one of our perennial arguments, er . . . discussions. Then he makes a confession. “I’m not an atheist, Dad.” I reassure him, with the parental and Seinfeldian response: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” If he’s now treading water in a pool of agnosticism, I hope he’s thinking it through, and not just trying to please. I hope, also, that he’s not parked there for life, waiting, say, for science to prove the case one way or the other—because that will never happen. Of late, science is moving closer to proving how life got started in the first place, something Darwin was dark about. A young MIT professor, Jeremy England, says that if you direct a strong enough light or heat source on inanimate clumps of atoms—poof, life will form. This thermodynamic theory has rattled traditional theologians—“God Is on the Ropes,” was one headline—but it shouldn’t. Where did the inanimate clumps of atoms come from? You could argue that it was God who put the ingredients in place for that life-burst of creation to happen. In fact, that’s what I argue with Casey now.

  “Sure, but there’s no proof of that,” he says. “Some would say it’s ‘lazy’ to remain agnostic. I say it’s intellectually honest. Which is more lazy: claiming you know without evidence, or waiting to be convinced?”

  I remember a line I saw in the Jesuit residence where I worked off my high school tuition. It was a quote attributed to another Jesuit, the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955. He said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. But spiritual beings having a human experience.” But that’s not the one I mention. Understandably, there were a lot of quotes by persuasive Jesuits spread all over the old school. The one I tell Casey is “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.”

  He thinks about it for a minute, and smiles. “What about alcohol?” We both laugh. “I’m just trying to keep you from getting too sure of your views,” he says.

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  —

  IF JOY INDEED signaled proof of God, then John Calvin’s Geneva must have been a godless place. Let us lace up our time-traveling shoes once again and wander back to Old Town, where we were earlier today, to see what became of the Reformation once it got established—free of Rome, free to make its own rules, free to show the world a more authentic, more tolerant face of Christianity. It can start fresh, returning the faith to its early beginnings. If only.

  In Saint-Pierre Cathedral, less than a decade after the death of Martin Luther, looms a small pastor with a long, pointy beard. John Calvin has tight-set eyes, a cap with earflaps, a vicious temper that makes children tremble. He’s frail, thin, a whiff of a man, but inexhaustible in his certainties. City and church are one and the same in the Protestant Republic of Geneva. Calvin is in control, though he’s subtle about the true extent of his power. Religious police, aided by spies, go house to house to ensure that proper dishes are set with the proper meal, that clothes are only cut from the approved colors, that music will not be made from forbidden instruments. Dancing is prohibited. So is flirting. So is card playing. So is naming your children after anyone but biblical figures. Fornication could result in execution. Same with a homosexual act.

  All inhabitants have to denounce the Catholic Church. All have to attend sermons, up to seventeen a week. Bells, songs, pictures, statues, candles, books—strictly regulated. A woman cannot wear rouge, or certain types of shoes. A man cannot curse or hunt. Calvin’s own sister-in-law is banished for adultery. In defense of “sure truth,” as Calvin calls it, a heretic can be murdered by righteous citizens, with God’s blessing.
Geneva is a city of just over 10,000 people. And in Calvin’s Geneva, 58 people will be put to death and 76 banished. The church-state execution that still resonates is that of Michael Servetus.

  Not only is every part of life regulated, but it’s also predestined. Where you end up, after death, has nothing to do with a life of earthly merit. We are all “totally depraved,” Calvin preaches, though a few have been chosen at birth to make it to the highest level of the hereafter. Every minor act of being, from tripping over your husband’s wooden shoes to eating an apple on Thursday, was part of a carefully crafted master plan, all of it drawn up and obviously known by God. My question for the Calvinists has always been: Why bother? Either go out with a bang, knowing you’re doomed no matter what you do. Or go out with an even bigger bang, knowing it’s the back nine of eternity for you, oh lucky soul. But no, those who were sure they won the predestination lottery lived dour lives under the glare of taut-faced authoritarians.

  Calvin is the preeminent Protestant theologian of his day, succeeding Luther. If you laugh during one of his sermons, you can be whipped or put in jail. The same penalty applies if you refuse to call him “master” when you greet him on the street. If you question him in print, as did one worshipper who put up a poster accusing Calvin of hypocrisy, you can be tortured for a month, under threat of execution. Calvin left us a firsthand account of how he operated, in a sworn statement from 1545. A suicidal friend of his plunged a knife into his stomach. Calvin was called to the home. While the man bled, Calvin rebuked him, telling him he’d been seduced by the devil. He’d offended God, and must repent. “Then we prayed as the situation required, recognizing and confessing the error of his action,” he wrote. Only after repeated assurances that the badly wounded neighbor had begged for forgiveness did Calvin allow him to be treated.