A Critical Difference
Although Luther and Katharina shared a sense of isolation and abandonment in their march to the ascetic, they entered the monastic life under very different circumstances. Later in life, Luther claimed he became a monk with great reluctance; at times, he even implied that he had been forced toward the monastic life. Sometimes, as was mentioned earlier, he blamed his parents’ severe disciplinary tactics for driving him to the monastery. Other times he suggested his vow to St. Anne forced him to commit to the cloistered life. Yet Luther’s demeanor in the early months of his enclosure indicates that he felt not resentment or bitterness but contentment and a sense of acceptance. Luther knew exactly what he was giving up to become a monk—a law degree, an illustrious career, a comfortable life—yet he did so anyway, in spite of his father’s ire, and he remained committed to his vows, in spite of long periods of dark wrestling and despair.
Even in the midst of his deepest struggles, Luther never lost sight of his monastic vows and his commitment to obey God. He felt compelled by a sense of obedience to honor his vow, but beneath that ran a deep current of spirituality and faith and a powerful desire to live the most pure and holy life possible. Even his obsessive need to prove himself as the best, most dedicated monk points to his zeal for God and his deep spiritual convictions.
Katharina, on the other hand, didn’t choose to become a nun out of a deep and abiding faith and a desire to commit her life to God. Rather, she entered the convent because she had to; her father made that decision for her. Katharina may well have been a deeply faithful person, but the fact is, she didn’t commit her life to Christ in the same way and with the same intention that Luther did. This critical difference, as we will see, not only fueled Katharina’s decision to flee the convent, it also informed her views on marriage in general and, more specifically, impacted her relationship with Martin Luther.
5
The Road to Damascus and a Nail in the Door
Little land, little land,
You are but a heap of sand.
If I dig you, the soil is light;
If I reap you, the yield is slight.1
This little ditty, written by Luther after his arrival in Wittenberg, tells you everything you need to know about his first impressions of the town. Compared to bustling Erfurt, Wittenberg was a quiet village of about 2,500 residents. The town took its name from the sand dune—witten-berg, “white hillock”—upon which it was built.2 By the time Luther lived there, the dune had largely diminished, leaving the area flat, sandy, and nondescript, the Elbe River flowing along one side of the town, a moat surrounding the other side. Wittenberg’s architectural highlights included a castle, the village church, a handful of small chapels, a Franciscan monastery, and the Augustinian monastery known as the Black Cloister, named after the black robes worn by the Augustinian monks.
This 1536 drawing from the travel album of the Count Palatine Otto Heinrich would have been similar to the view Luther saw when he arrived in Wittenberg. [Public domain]
When Luther moved in as a twenty-eight-year-old monk, the Black Cloister consisted of several large stone buildings: a monastery comprised of more than forty rooms (most were small monks’ cells), stables and sheds for livestock, a brewing house, and an infirmary. In the middle of the complex was a courtyard bordered by a half-finished cloister church, the construction of which had been abandoned shortly after the foundation was laid in 1502.3 There was also a tiny old church, barely thirty feet long and twenty feet wide and in such disrepair it was shored up with beams on all sides. Inside was a narrow, damaged choir loft barely large enough to hold twenty worshipers, and a “pulpit,” which was actually a primitive chair constructed out of a few rough boards. Luther once remarked that the worship area “looked like the stall where Jesus had been born, above all in its ‘lowliness.’”4 Little did Luther know at the time, he would call this sprawling collection of dilapidated stone buildings home for the rest of his life.
A short distance from the Black Cloister was Wittenberg’s claim to fame: its university. Founded by Elector5 Frederick the Wise in an attempt to rival the prestigious University of Leipzig, which was located forty-four miles south in the territory ruled by his cousin (and rival) Duke George of Saxony, the new university struggled to gain recognition. In an effort to improve the school’s reputation and the caliber of the academic staff, Frederick invited the Augustinians and Franciscans to supply three new professors. Luther arrived as a new hire in 1512, unaware that his time as a professor in the little town of Wittenberg, a mere “heap of sand,” would be among the most pivotal periods not only in his own life but in the history of Western civilization.
As an Augustinian monk, Luther lived in the Black Cloister in Wittenberg, which is now the museum Lutherhaus. [By Marcus Singer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]
Luther’s Road to Damascus
By 1512 Luther had earned his doctorate along with the official title “Doctor of Biblia,” translated as “teacher of the Bible.”6 In addition to his teaching duties, Luther was also required to publish on theological matters. His mentor, von Staupitz, also made him the official preacher to the Augustinian monks in Wittenberg, a task that required him to preach up to several times a week. Beginning with the Psalms and continuing with Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, Luther dug into Scripture, and it was these years of study, exegesis, writing, teaching, and preaching that formed the foundation of his theology—a theology that not only informed the Ninety-five Theses and his belief in salvation through grace alone, but also saved Luther from his own spiritual despair. As Roland Bainton notes, “These studies proved to be for Luther the Damascus road.”7
You might wonder how Luther’s Ninety-five Theses is relevant to a discussion of his marriage to Katharina. After all, his primary concern in that famous treatise is the practice of selling indulgences, and more specifically, the power and authority of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church as a whole. Yet without the Ninety-five Theses, without that initial radical act of rebellion, Luther’s theology of marriage, his own marriage to Katharina von Bora, and the entire movement of marriage reform during the Protestant Reformation likely would not have happened at all. Writing and then nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the doors of Castle Church in Wittenberg was the single act that set everything else in motion.
It all began with Luther’s objection to the church’s practice of selling indulgences. According to the 1471 Catechism of the Catholic Church, an indulgence was a remission of temporal punishment for sins that have been confessed to a priest and forgiven by God.8 In other words, an indulgence didn’t take the place of confession or absolution—the sinner was still required to confess his sins and be absolved of them by a priest—but it did take the place of penance: the prayers, fasting, pilgrimages, and other works a person offered to God as payment for his sins. Furthermore, an indulgence could be offered as remittance for temporal punishment only. Thus an indulgence could reduce time spent in purgatory. Hell, on the other hand, was not temporal but eternal and therefore subject only to the will of God.
Indulgences first became popular during the Crusades, when Pope Urban II, who needed an army to fight against the Turks, remitted all penance for soldiers who participated in the war.9 The practice of selling and purchasing indulgences became extremely popular later in the Middle Ages and early modern period when pilgrims were offered indulgences for paying the fee to view collections of relics at shrine sites in Rome and elsewhere. Luther himself purchased indulgences on numerous occasions, most notably in Rome, when he bought an indulgence to decrease his grandfather’s time in purgatory. The sale of indulgences was used by the Church to raise revenues and line the pockets of the clergy and political leaders, from the pope down to the local parish priests and from the Holy Roman Emperor to the electors, as well as to fund wars and the construction of churches, monasteries, hospitals, and even civic projects. Elector Frederick the Wise, fo
r instance, used the profits from the sale of indulgences to finance the reconstruction of a bridge across the Elbe.10
The pope decreed churches across the Holy Roman Empire the privilege of dispensing indulgences, and Castle Church in Wittenberg was allowed an unusual concession: on one day each year—the first of November, known as All Saints’ Day—penitents who visited Frederick the Wise’s display of relics and paid the required admission fee would receive a highly unusual indulgence from the pope granting full remission of all sins, either for themselves or for a loved one who had died.11 Frederick the Wise owned a massive collection of relics, more than 17,433 pieces, including nine thorns from Jesus’s crown; thirty-five splinters from the cross; one wisp of straw from the manger; a bit of cloth from Christ’s swaddling; one hair from Jesus’s beard; one of his crucifixion nails; one piece of bread left over from the Last Supper; a few drops of the Virgin Mary’s milk; four hairs from her head; four pieces of fabric from her girdle; one twig from the burning bush of Moses; and one tooth of St. Jerome.12 These, among many others, were the treasures available to view on All Saints’ Day—for a price—and citizens of Wittenberg and beyond stood in line for hours to do exactly that. Those who paid the appropriate fee and viewed the relics on the designated day received an indulgence from the pope for the reduction of purgatory up to 1,902,202 years and 270 days.13
A Hammer, a Nail, a Revolution
As Luther immersed himself in Scripture, he became increasingly uncomfortable with and angered by the idea of indulgences. The final straw for him came in 1517, when a Dominican friar by the name of Johann Tetzel began to hawk indulgences guaranteed by Pope Leo X to remit all sins and restore penitents to the state of purity and innocence they enjoyed at baptism. In addition, those who purchased Tetzel’s indulgences, the proceeds from which would be used to complete construction of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, were granted remission from purgatory, either for themselves or for a deceased loved one. No indulgence could offer a get-out-of-hell-free card, but Tetzel’s deal proposed the next best thing.
Frederick the Wise actually didn’t allow Tetzel to sell the indulgences in his part of Saxony—not because he was theologically opposed to the practice, but because he feared Tetzel’s sales would decrease his own earnings from visitors to his relic collection. But the peddler traveled close enough to Wittenberg that Luther got wind of his wild claims. “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings the soul from purgatory springs,” Tetzel shouted from the town square, where he displayed a cross bearing the papal arms and the pope’s bull of indulgence presented on a gold-embroidered velvet cushion.14 Among other claims, the friar reportedly stated, “Even if you have deflowered the Virgin Mary, an indulgence will free you from the punishment in purgatory!”15
Tetzel’s bold promises infuriated Luther, who believed that the practice of buying and selling indulgences smacked of a works-based rather than a grace-based faith. He could not abide by a practice he considered not only corrupt but downright blasphemous. He had had enough.
On October 31, 1517, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, the day Frederick the Wise would offer his own annual indulgence sale, Luther sent a letter to Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg, who had been using his own sale of indulgences to pay off the debt he’d incurred in obtaining the archbishopric.16 In the letter Luther asked the archbishop to cease his sale of indulgences. He also included a list of ninety-five statements, written in Latin, which he titled “On the Power of Indulgences.” This was a bold move. Luther was a no-name monk, Albrecht of Brandenburg a noble of the church; bishops could have monks thrown into prison for lesser transgressions. Treading cautiously at first, Luther’s letter to Albrecht “heaped flattery on the archbishop’s head and humility on his own.”17
However, once Luther finished the opening formalities, he let loose; his list of ninety-five statements seared with a barely concealed rage. Not only did the treatise attack the sale of indulgences to support the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome—“Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”18—Luther also questioned the notion of papal sovereignty again and again, declaring that God and God alone, not the pope nor anyone else, had the power to pardon man from sin:
6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God’s remission. . . .
26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not possess), but by way of intercession. . . .
33. Men must be on their guard against those who say that the pope’s pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to Him. . . .
34. For these “graces of pardon” concern only the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, and these are appointed by man.19
These were serious statements, each written in Luther’s signature no-nonsense style. There was no room for nuance or misinterpretation; even today, read five hundred years later, one can clearly see how Luther’s document would have offended and enraged authorities. As Bainton points out, Luther’s Theses differed from ordinary propositions for debate because they were “forged in anger,” and therefore were “crisp, bold [and] unqualified.”20
Luther’s anger was fueled by his intimate understanding of a particular verse in the Bible, one he had obsessively reflected on day and night until he was finally brought to his knees in a moment of revelation. The verse was Romans 1:17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” Luther admitted that ever since he was a child, he had hated the phrase “righteousness of God,” because he had always assumed it referred to God’s anger. For Luther, the word righteousness was associated with God’s punishment.21 After much contemplation, prayer, and study, however, Luther finally came to understand that this “righteousness” was not something God did against sinners as punishment but something God gave to sinners as a gift. Moreover, as Luther came to understand it, God’s righteousness was not a gift earned or deserved, but given freely to the undeserving out of God’s great mercy and compassion and made possible only by Christ’s death on the cross. The key, Luther finally realized, was that God’s love and grace were not merited, but freely given and freely received through faith alone.
This understanding of God’s righteousness turned Luther’s entire theology on its head, transforming his understanding of God from one full of anger and wrath, eager to punish the sinner’s many transgressions, to an all-loving, all-merciful God. “I felt myself absolutely reborn,” Luther wrote after his revelation, “as though I had entered into the open gates of paradise itself.”22 His understanding of grace-based faith versus works-based faith was more than a personal revelation; it informed his entire rebellion against the church. After all, if human beings couldn’t possibly earn salvation by their good works, if human beings had no righteousness of their own and were entirely dependent on Christ for their salvation and hope, where, then, did that leave good works like pilgrimages and fasting? Where did that leave the notion of purgatory? Where did that leave the monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity? Where did that leave the pope, with his sales of indulgences, and the priests, doling out penance in the confessionals? Luther came to believe that the church to which he had dedicated his life was built on sand, and each abuse, each indulgence, added an unsustainable weight to the structure. In his eyes, Romans 1:17 obliterated the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church.
Interestingly, Reformation scholars today still debate whether or not Luther actually posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of Castle Church. Martin Brecht notes that the posting of the Theses on the church doors was first mentioned well after Luther’s death by his friend and fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon, who wasn’t even living in Wittenberg in 1517, the time of the alleged posting.23 In his thousand
s of Table Talk entries Luther never told the story of posting the Theses, nor did he mention it in any of his own writings that detail the beginnings of the reform movement. Brecht guesses that Luther probably did post the Theses, as nailing a notice on the church door was standard protocol for academics who wished to engage in a public debate, but the truth is, no one knows for sure if Luther stood before the doors of Castle Church with a hammer in his hand.
Regardless of whether the document was posted on the church doors or not, word got out. While no one showed up to the public academic disputation, when the document was printed and distributed not long after the alleged posting, the reaction was immediate and dramatic. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses was a sensation, and news of it spread like wildfire, prompting printers to work feverishly to keep copies in circulation. Translated from Latin into German, printed and reprinted and carried from village to village across Germany and beyond, the Ninety-five Theses made Luther famous within a month. He had attacked the notion of papal sovereignty and, along with it, the pope and the Roman Catholic Church itself. In doing so, Luther had set a revolution in motion. There was no turning back now.
The Great Debate
Armed with scriptural authority and the support of much of the public, Luther began to question other aspects of papal and Church authority. He took issue, for instance, with the doctrine of papal primacy, which held that the pope was not only sovereign but infallible, an authority born out of Christ’s proclamation that Peter was the rock upon which the Church would be built and passed down the line to each pope in succession.
Theologian Johann Eck, whom Luther referred to as “that little glory-hungry beast,” was the first of many to accuse Luther of heresy.24 In June of 1519, Luther traveled to Leipzig to debate the notion of papal primacy with Eck before a raucous audience of university students, professors, clergy, and theologians. The monk was in his element. He wore his doctor’s silver ring and a black cowl over a white habit. Reporters described him as brilliant and genial, cool, almost casual in his demeanor, and above all, confident. One of his critics, the theologian Hieronymus Emser, called him “haughty, bold and presumptuous.”25 Luther clutched a bouquet of flowers at the podium (both men and women in the Middle Ages often carried a small nosegay of flowers and fragrant herbs as a defense against the rank smells of everyday life), and would pause from time to time in his argument to inhale their heady fragrance.26 One wonders if burying his nose in the bouquet was Luther’s not-so-subtle way of implying that Eck’s arguments stunk.
Katharina and Martin Luther Page 7
