Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Agricola, Erasmus later wrote, “was one of the first to bring a breath of the New Learning from Italy” to the north. Agricola’s leading disciple, Alexander Hegius, became the director of St. Lebwin’s by 1483, and he immediately began reshaping its curriculum, phasing out the old textbooks and introducing instruction in Greek—something very uncommon in secondary schools at the time. Erasmus would get a taste of that language, but otherwise he was not able to take advantage of these changes, for he was nearing the end of his stay at the school. In his six or seven years there, he had completed courses in logic, physics, metaphysics, and morals and had become so familiar with Horace, Ovid, and Terence that he could recite large sections of their works by heart—a firm educational foundation, despite his later complaints about the school’s mediocrity. Most important, Erasmus had been exposed to two parallel but competing currents—the secular ideals of classical culture and the pious values of the Devotio Moderna—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to combine them.

  In 1483, Deventer was hit by the plague. The outbreak became so severe that magistrates fled the town, friends avoided one another, and some residents took to sleeping in haystacks in the surrounding countryside. Among the hundreds felled was Erasmus’s mother, Margaret. His father, Gerard, who had returned from Italy and was now living in Gouda, summoned Erasmus and his brother Pieter there, but he, too, soon died. Now in his late teens, Erasmus was suddenly without parents or prospects. His future lay in the hands of three guardians who had been appointed by his father. As he made his way back to Gouda (probably in the summer of 1484), Erasmus had one overriding wish—to continue his education.

  2

  Miner’s Son

  On the outskirts of the Saxon town of Eisleben in central Germany rise a series of mammoth slate-colored mounds. Standing along roadsides, behind apartment buildings, and next to shopping malls, they look otherworldly and vaguely sinister, as if they had once served as the altars of an ancient cult. In fact, they are refuse heaps, consisting of discarded rocks from the region’s mines, which once formed the backbone of the local economy. Between Eisleben and the Harz Mountains about forty miles to the north, there are hundreds of them. The taller mounds rise about four hundred feet and come to a point, giving the appearance of pyramids. The shorter ones are half as tall and flat on top. These date back to the late Middle Ages, and some were no doubt present during the time of Martin Luther. He was born in Eisleben, in 1483, and the heaps offer important clues about the world in which he was raised.

  Like many great historical figures, Luther was fond of citing his lowly origins. Both his father and his grandfather, he liked to say, had peasant backgrounds. This is misleading. While Luther’s distant forebears were indeed peasants, his father’s parents were not. Rather, they were independent farmers who lived in Möhra, a hamlet of about sixty families in Thuringia in central Germany. Their eldest son, Hans Luder (as the family name was originally spelled), married Margarete Lindemann, who came from a prosperous burgher family in nearby Eisenach. According to the strict inheritance rules of Thuringia, the Luder farm was to pass intact to the youngest son, Heinz. Hans—unhappy at the prospect of working for his younger brother—decided to strike out on his own. The area around Eisleben, about ninety miles to the northeast, was experiencing a mining boom. It had begun around 1470, when the demand for copper in Europe took off (stimulated by a growing market for copper and bronze pots for cooking). Mansfeld, the county in which Eisleben was located, was one of Europe’s top producers of both copper and silver, and Hans hoped to take advantage.

  Several months after he and Margarete arrived in Eisleben, their first child, Martin, was born, on November 10, 1483, in a house located a short walk from the town’s main square. Finding work in Eisleben proved harder than Hans had expected, and after a few months he moved his family to the town of Mansfeld, ten miles to the north. Set amid hills and woods, it had barely 2,000 residents, but among them were the powerful counts of Mansfeld, who controlled the region’s mines and whose imposing Gothic castle sat on a bluff overlooking the town. Hans quickly found work, while Margarete (like most women of that era) spent her time keeping house and tending to her children. (In all, the couple had eight children, only five of whom would survive into adulthood.)

  Later, Luther, in his Table Talk—a thick compendium of comments taken down at the dinner table by students staying in the Black Cloister in Wittenberg—said that his parents kept him “under very strict supervision, even to the point of making me timid.” On one occasion, his mother, discovering that he had stolen a nut, beat him “until the blood flowed.” On another, his father “whipped me so severely that I ran away from him, and he was worried that he might not win me back again.” By such strict discipline, “they finally forced me into the monastery.”

  Such comments figure prominently in one of the most famous studies of Luther, Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther, published in 1958. Seeking the psychological sources of Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church, Erikson focused on what he described as the identity crisis Martin faced as a result of his strained relations with his “jealously ambitious” father. According to Erikson, Hans’s “excessive harshness” and his “angry, and often alcoholic, impulsiveness” bred constant fear in his son. The “suppressed rage” Martin felt toward his father and his desire to escape his father’s control eventually drove him to enter the monastery in defiance of Hans’s wishes. Over time, Martin transferred the anger he felt toward his father to the Catholic Church as a whole. As Erikson summarized it, “he rebelled: first against his father, to join the monastery; then against the Church, to found his own church.”

  Erikson’s analysis has not fared well with Luther scholars. Most, in fact, are curtly dismissive. They maintain that the known facts about Luther’s childhood and his relations with his parents are too slight to support such sweeping conclusions. Erikson himself acknowledged that he took liberties with the record, writing that “a clinician’s training permits, and in fact forces, him to recognize major trends even where the facts are not all available.” Special scorn has been reserved for his focus on Luther’s “anality.” Erikson—noting Luther’s frequent use of scatological language, his lifelong problems with constipation and urine retention, and the corporal punishment meted out by his parents, probably to the buttocks—wrote that Luther’s anal zone became the seat of both sensitive and defiant associations. Luther’s fear that his parents and teachers might subject him by dominating this zone and thus gain power over his will “may have provided some of the dynamite in that delayed time bomb of Martin’s rebellion,” which eventually exploded with such force.

  The line from Luther’s constipation to his rebellion against Rome seems tenuous. All that aside, Luther’s father does seem to have had a strong influence on his outlook. As Luther’s later letters attest, he cared a great deal about his father’s judgments of his choices in life, and he constantly chafed at Hans’s efforts to dictate them. It does not take a great leap to assume that the tense relations between them helped shape Martin’s temperament and contribute to his more general distrust of authority.

  In the end, though, it was the raw realities of the Mansfeld mining world that would leave the deepest mark. “In his youth,” Luther remarked in his Table Talk, “my father was a poor miner.” Whether Hans actually descended into the mines is not clear. What is clear is that he quickly worked his way up to become a Hüttenmeister—a supervisor of one of the smelters used to heat the ore to separate the copper from the sulfur and bitumen. Enterprising and hardworking, Hans eventually gained an interest in several smelters. He did well enough to be able to buy a two-story stone dwelling at the foot of Mansfeld’s central street, on which most of the town’s well-to-do lived. Men in his position, though, often went into debt, and while Hans’s fortunes steadily improved, they fluctuated along with the market and other variables. The stress and the need to scrimp in the Luther household were no doubt unrelenting.

 
The gashed landscape itself reflected the ferocity of the mining world. Shafts had to be dug deep into the earth, leading to tunnels that were dark, poorly ventilated, and barely wide enough for the men to enter single file. In a flash a mine could collapse, fill with water, or catch fire, killing all inside. Miners could be maimed and paralyzed by falling rocks and cracking beams; the poisonous dust clotted their windpipes and corroded their lungs. Avalanches were common, burying miners under tons of rock, and the years of constant strain and cramping left their bodies bent and spirits sapped. The mining fields themselves were an inferno of belching furnaces, smoldering faggots, smoking chimneys, polluted pools of water, wagons filled with charcoal, bellows pumping air into the tunnels, and piles of discarded axles, pump rods, cranks, crowbars, cauldrons, and shovels. Over all hung the smoke from the never-sleeping smelters.

  The boom-and-bust cycles of the industry, the large financial outlays it required, the rapid technological changes, the disputes over mine boundaries, the tense relations between owners and workers—all marked the Mansfeld mines as an outpost of early capitalism. This economic system, with all its disruptive and destabilizing effects, was just taking root in Europe, and Hans, rising from miner to smelter master, was an early participant. With his drive, industry, and readiness to take risks, he was an emblematic figure of the emerging new order—the entrepreneur—and to his son he would pass on his robust individualism.

  As much as Mansfeld’s mines anticipated Europe’s future, however, the town’s culture remained rooted in its folkloric past. A striking indication appears in De Re Metallica, a pioneering treatise on the mining industry by the Saxon scholar and humanist Georgius Agricola that was published in 1556. In an otherwise fastidiously factual account of the extracting, transporting, and refining of minerals, Agricola at one point observes that the mines are home to “pernicious pests” and “fierce murderous demons,” which, if detected, often cause the mines to be shut down, for if such fiends could not be expelled, “no one escapes from them.”

  As a boy, Martin had such beliefs drummed into him. Superstitions were of course common in that period, but their grip was tightened by the great risks and dangers that miners faced. Luther’s world abounded in demons, gnomes, evil spirits, and other malevolent agents. In central Germany, the stock of such sprites was enlarged by the presence of its dark, trackless forests, in which it was easy to get lost and fall prey to wolves, outlaws, or witches. In Mansfeld, Luther was taught that witches lurk on all sides and cast their spells on man, beast, and crops. His mother was tormented by a neighbor who she claimed was a witch, and when one of Martin’s brothers died, she blamed the neighbor. From his father he learned of earth spirits who disturbed workmen in the solitude of the tunnels. When crops failed, it was because demons had befouled the air. “We may not doubt that pestilences, fevers, and other grave diseases are the work of demons,” Luther would later remark in his Table Talk.

  He would also feel the seductive presence of the Devil. In later years, Satan would regularly materialize, shattering Luther’s calm with unsettling questions about his faith. It was in the acrid, smoldering world of the Mansfeld mines that the Prince of Darkness first cast his spell. Hell, meanwhile, was no metaphor for Luther but rather a place to which the souls of the damned went to suffer eternal punishment—to burn in an unquenchable fire, forever and ever. Devotional guides gave advice on the various steps that could be taken to avoid hell and its torments, which were tailored to fit the crime, or sin.

  Around the same time that Luther was growing up in Germany, Hieronymus Bosch in the Netherlands was painting his Last Judgment. Based on the book of Revelation, it shows an apocalyptic landscape in which the damned are subjected to all kinds of unspeakable acts by ghoulish beasts. A man with an arrow through his chest is tied to a pole and carried like a slain deer. Naked men are whipped while turning a mill wheel. Others are depicted being impaled, mutilated, hung from butcher hooks, and ridden like animals. Presiding over the carnage is Christ the Judge, who, seated resplendently on an arc, is flanked by Mary, the apostles, and trumpet-blowing angels.

  The image of the judging Christ struck fear in the young Luther. He would later recall the dread he felt as a child on seeing in church a painting of Christ seated on a rainbow, looking down in wrathful disapproval at the wayward world. In many church images, Christ wielded a sword—a symbol of his severity. The sight of a crucifix would terrify Luther with its air of menace and mercilessness. The suffering Christ, his arms splayed in agony on the cross, seemed to demand a much greater sacrifice than any human could bear. The piercing pain and sense of abandonment associated with the crucifixion were chillingly captured by Matthias Grünewald in his famous Isenheim Altarpiece, painted in Alsace in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Christ’s emaciated body is taut with the torment caused by the nails driven through his hands and feet; his flesh is covered with sores and punctured by thorns. Nearly every church in northern Europe had an image of the crucifixion featuring nails, thorns, spears, whips, and dripping blood, while tableaux of the saints showed them undergoing ghastly forms of martyrdom.

  The violence in these depictions was not far removed from everyday life. Clubbings, slashings, stabbings, assaults, and rapes were routine occurrences in the late Middle Ages. Alcohol-fueled brawls frequently broke out in taverns, and since everyone carried a knife, they often turned fatal. The law itself was pitiless, and penalties were often brutal. Capital punishment was decreed for a score of offenses, ranging from murder and witchcraft to robbery, forgery, and heresy. Wealthy burghers generally got off with a simple beheading. The less fortunate were usually hanged, while heretics and husband-killers were burned. A Salzburg municipal ordinance stipulated that “a forger shall be burned or boiled to death. A perjurer shall have his tongue torn out by the neck. A servant who sleeps with his master’s wife, daughter or sister shall be beheaded or hanged.” Traitors faced being hanged, drawn, and quartered. This entailed hanging them to the point of losing consciousness, then reviving them, then disemboweling them, then finally beheading them and chopping the body into quarters. Those condemned to be broken on the wheel were tied to a wagon wheel, then beaten with a club or cudgel until nearly every bone in their body was broken. Executions were public entertainments, with families showing up with food and drink to heighten their enjoyment.

  Going hand in hand with this savagery was a general obsession with death. A key reason, no doubt, was the Black Death—a three-year crucible of terror during which parents abandoned their children, streets filled with corpses, and towns became morgues. Outbreaks of the plague continued to cause panic and spur flight. An estimated half all Europeans died, usually from disease, before reaching the age of thirty. Because death could occur at any moment, one had to be careful not to die in a state of unrepentant sin and so be consigned to eternal damnation. To convey the full horror of death, preachers and painters emphasized the putrefying corpse—stinking and hideous, with clenched hands, rigid feet, frozen mouth, and bowels swarming with worms. A favorite theme was the Dance of Death, which showed gleeful skeletons cavorting with startled men and women of all classes, grasping them with their bony hands to be dragged off to their fate.

  In the Mansfeld mining community, with its acute sense of vulnerability and danger, the embrace of saints, relics, and other religious totems was especially strong. The miners had their own patron saint—Anne, the mother of Mary. Though she is mentioned nowhere in the Bible and remained obscure during Christianity’s first millennium, a cult began to form around her in the thirteenth century, especially in central Germany; in Mansfeld, she was second only to Christ in importance. At the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Eisleben, where Luther was baptized, an altarpiece honors St. Anne, and the predella at the bottom shows three shepherds carrying miners’ lamps. At a critical moment in his life, Luther would appeal to Anne’s intercessionary powers.

  The mines of Mansfeld may help explain another of Luther’s conspicuous traits—his
scatology. His relish for obscenity and toilet language would prove embarrassing to not just contemporary supporters but also generations of Protestants. In his tracts and Table Talk, references to the Word of God and love of Christ appear alongside mentions of farting and belching, asses and excrement. “I have shit in the pants, and you can hang them around your neck and wipe your mouth with it,” he said at the table one day. (In many Table Talk editions, such comments are either cleaned up or excised.) Mansfelders, operating in a harsh and unforgiving environment, were known for their crude, blunt language. Luther moreover lived at a time when people were much less squeamish about their bodily functions than they are today—when people defecated on roadsides and emptied chamber pots into the street. The fastidious Erasmus was a rare exception. A son of the emerging middle class, he had modern ideas about hygiene, and throughout his life he would wage a lonely battle against the muck and grime of his age.

  In so many ways, the worlds in which Luther and Erasmus grew up set them on divergent courses. Deventer was surrounded by cleared land worked by independent farmers and linked by water to the outside world; Mansfeld was located deep inside densely wooded Germany, on the far edges of Christendom. It was a land with few books, few itinerant humanists, few warming rays from Italy. The only glow came from the charcoal-fired smelters used to separate metals from their ore. Whereas Erasmus would constantly move from country to country and consider himself a citizen of none, Luther would remain rooted in Germany, shaped by its culture and folkways, its coarse language and earthy humor. Whereas Erasmus would decisively turn his back on the Middle Ages as he developed a reform program for Europe, Luther would retain much of the medieval as he blazed his own distinctive path into the modern world.