It was not long, however, before Satan began to stir. The opening was provided, oddly enough, by Luther’s first promotion. His superiors—seeing his abilities—decided that he should become a priest, so that, in addition to tending to his own spiritual needs, he could help others address theirs. In preparation, Luther during the fall and winter of 1506 began receiving instruction in the three key priestly duties—preaching, hearing confession, and celebrating Mass.
The Mass—the central act of Christian worship—was the solemn ceremony through which homage was rendered to God for the great blessings he had provided. It involved an intricately choreographed series of hymns, invocations, readings from Scripture, lighting of candles, and ringing of bells, and to ensure that it was faithfully performed, a vast literature had arisen. Luther’s main guide was Exposition on the Canon of the Mass, by Gabriel Biel, a Tübingen professor who, by the time of his death, in 1495, was recognized as the leading theologian of his generation. The canon—the most sacred part of the Mass—was the long Eucharistic prayer through which the bread and wine were consecrated and transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. In four immense volumes, Biel classified, analyzed, and explained the ceremony’s every gesture, vestment, phrase, and procedure. He described how to wear the stole, alb, and maniple; how to fill the chalice and place the host on the paten; how to bow, stretch out the arms, hold the palms together, and kiss the cross. He was especially exhaustive on the spiritual, mental, and physical state in which the priest had to approach the ceremony. All impure thoughts had to be banished during the rite. (According to Biel, a priest could not celebrate Mass if he had had a nocturnal emission the night before. In Erfurt, Luther later observed, such emissions were so frequent that this stipulation had to be suspended on days when many Masses were to be performed.)
Luther considered Biel’s exposition the best of books on the subject. “When I read it, my heart bled,” he later recalled. Given its many stern warnings, however, it caused much anxiety as well. Omitting the stole or mispronouncing a single syllable was considered worse than committing one of the seven deadly sins. Some priests were so terrified by the words of consecration—Hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body”)—that they trembled all over on reciting them. The words had to be read without any alien thoughts, and anyone who stammered in pronouncing them was said to have committed a great crime.
On April 3, 1507, Luther, having duly completed his training, was ordained a priest. At the age of twenty-three, he was now authorized to stand as an intermediary between man and God and, by celebrating the Mass and administering the sacraments, to summon Christ before the kneeling congregation. His inaugural Mass was scheduled for May 2. In preparation, he had to confess and receive absolution, and with even greater diligence than usual he strove to uncover and root out any internal blemish that might prevent the Holy Spirit from working through him. To add to his worry, his father was scheduled to attend. In the nearly two years since Martin had entered the friary, he had had little contact with Hans, and he hoped that his father, on seeing his rapid progress, would be reconciled to him. Hans’s mining interests had flourished, and he made a grand entrance at the monastery, arriving on horseback with twenty or so associates and relatives and making a contribution to the cloister of twenty guldens.
Taking his place before the altar in the chapel, Martin nervously awaited the start of the ceremony. Initially, all went well. When, however, he reached the canon passage, “To Thee, the eternal, living, and true God,” Luther—suddenly overwhelmed by the gravity of the occasion and his proximity to the Almighty—was seized by panic. “With what tongue,” he thought to himself,
shall I address such Majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say, “I want this, I ask for that?” For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, the eternal and the true God.
Because he lacked genuine faith, Luther later observed, he almost died of anxiety and felt an urge to flee the altar.
The prior admonished Luther to remain, and he somehow managed to make it to the end. Afterward, he joined his father and his guests in the refectory. Seeking a word of reassurance, Luther asked why Hans had been so angry about his decision to become a friar. “Don’t you know the Fourth Commandment?” Hans said. “Honor your father and your mother? And here you have left me and your dear mother to look after ourselves in our old age.” “But father,” Luther replied, “I could do more good by prayers than if I had stayed in the world.” He then recalled the voice he had heard calling out to him in the thunderstorm. “God grant it was not an apparition of the Devil,” Hans snapped. Luther had long been nagged by the same suspicion, and his father’s comment (as he later wrote) “drove roots” into his heart, as if God were speaking through Hans’s mouth.
Luther’s struggle to win the approval of his father mirrored his exhausting efforts to please the Heavenly Father. The fit that seized him during his first Mass stirred up all his old anxieties about his unworthiness before the Lord. His was very much the God of the Old Testament—the wrathful and merciless judge who had obliterated Sodom and Gomorrah for the wickedness of their people and who at Sinai had ordered the slaughter of all who had worshipped the golden calf.
The recitation of the canonical hours added to his dread. While some of the Psalms offered solace and support, others rang with threats of divine violence and retribution. The references in Psalm 90 to God’s consuming anger and wrath so unsettled Luther that he could barely bring himself to say it. A recurrent image in the Psalms is “the pit,” into which all whom God has abandoned are cast, and Luther forever worried that he would be among them. He was especially troubled by the phrase iustitia Dei—the righteousness of God. Over and over it tolled in the Psalms, reminding him each time of God’s exacting standards.
Even confession was becoming a burden. In examining his own conduct, each friar had to determine whether and how often he had violated the many codes of Christian behavior, including but not limited to the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, the twelve articles of faith, the seven corporal works of mercy, the six sins against the Holy Spirit, the four cardinal virtues, and the three theological virtues. The penitent was expected to recall not only each sin but also the circumstances in which it had occurred. He was to reveal with whom and where the sins were committed; when they were committed (if on a Sunday or religious holiday, their gravity increased); why they were committed (if done out of depravity, they were more serious than if done in ignorance or fear); and in what manner they were committed (a willfully committed sin was worse than one spurred by an uncontrollable burst of anger).
For Luther, with his sensitive conscience, the constant self-interrogation proved deeply unsettling. The more he sought to root out his transgressions, the more he became preoccupied with them. Upon leaving confession, he would immediately recall how he had stumbled over a passage in the Psalter or left his cell without his scapular, and he would rush back to confess it. He became notorious in the monastery for the length and frequency of his confessions. Though he constantly confessed, he later recalled, “I could not find peace, but I was constantly crucified by thoughts such as these: ‘You have committed this or that sin; you are guilty of envy, impatience, etc. Therefore it is useless for you to enter this holy order, and all your good works are to no avail.’”
In his cell at night, Luther was kept awake by the uninvited murmurings of his heart. That brother is a fool, this one is a gossip, that other keeps everyone up with his snoring. For all his pious deeds, Luther inwardly feared that he remained the same old Martin—short-tempered, resentful, obstinate, proud. And God, he felt sure, would judge him severely for it. When Luther told one of his confessors that, even after being absolved, he continued to feel God’s wrath, the priest admonished him
: “You are a fool! God is not angry with you, but you are angry with God.”
With the specter of divine fury thus looming, the Anfechtungen returned. Without warning these spells would strike, plunging Luther into a chasm of doubt and desolation. During them, Christ seemed to him a merciless tyrant, willing to save only a select few who by their good deeds and saintly behavior had shown they merited salvation; the rest faced an eternity of suffering and torment, and Luther felt sure he would be among them. These bouts, though abbreviated in length, “were so great and so much like hell that no tongue could adequately express them, no pen could describe them, and one who had not himself experienced them could not believe them.” If they had “lasted for half an hour, even for one tenth of an hour,” the person undergoing them “would have perished completely and all his bones would have been reduced to ashes. At such a time God seems terribly angry, and with him the whole creation. At such a time, there is no flight, no comfort, within or without, but all things accuse.”
Even in his blackest moments, however, Luther was able to perform at a high level, and after being ordained a priest, he began (probably in the summer of 1507) to study for a doctor’s degree in theology. The Augustinian cloister was known for the quality of its instruction, and several of its friars taught at the University of Erfurt. As in Paris, however, the study of theology did not for the most part mean reading the Bible, for it was considered “the cause of all sedition,” as one of his teachers explained.
Instead, Luther spent most of his time with Scotus, Ockham, and Biel. The main text was the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and Luther sat through lectures on subjects like the unity of the Godhead, the salvific force of the sacraments, and the formation of corporeal entities. In the process, he received further instruction in late Scholastic notions of sin and salvation—in how man, by doing all that is within him, can receive an infusion of divine grace and in that state perform meritorious acts that are pleasing to God, leading to the reward of eternal life. No matter how hard he tried, however, he felt sure that he was falling short.
In the fall of 1508, he was suddenly jolted from this draining routine. A fledgling university in the small Saxon town of Wittenberg on the Elbe River in eastern Germany needed a lecturer in philosophy, and the Augustinian monastery there was asked to provide one. Luther was chosen, and he promptly set off on the nearly hundred-mile journey. Arriving, he found a remote outpost that was far more provincial and rough-hewn than anything he had yet encountered. During this initial visit to Wittenberg, Luther would remain for a year. (After his return, in 1511, he would become a permanent resident.) To his dismay, he was required to lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—a cruel distraction from the scriptural texts he so yearned to study. “I am well, thank God,” he complained to a friend, “except that my studies are very severe, especially philosophy,” which he would gladly change for theology—the theology that “searches out the meat of the nut, the kernel of the grain, the marrow of the bones.”
The kernel of the grain was the Bible itself. In March 1509, Luther received his first theological degree—that of baccalaureus biblicus, bachelor of the Bible—but, paradoxically, as his letter suggests, he had little time to read it. In the autumn of 1509, he successfully took the exam to become a sententiarius (bachelor of the Sentences), which qualified him to lecture on Lombard’s sprawling text. Later that fall, Luther was recalled to Erfurt and began delivering his lectures there. A copy of the volume he used has survived, and his marginal comments, jotted down amid the thicket of theses, objections, and corollaries, attest to his dutiful acceptance of reigning Catholic interpretations of grace and salvation, the Trinity and the resurrection.
In his notes, however, there appeared a name that would signal the first faint stirring of revolt: Augustine. On almost every page, Luther cited the bishop of Hippo. On the surface, this would seem unremarkable. Augustine was one of the four Doctors of the Western Church—the one, moreover, most venerated by medieval theologians. Luther’s own order proudly bore his name, and whenever Luther prayed at chapel, the saint’s image gazed down at him from the stained glass window above the altar. But, as with so many other Fathers, Augustine’s teachings were known mainly through passages that had been wrested from their context and obscured through centuries of glossing and syllogizing.
In 1506, however, the Basel printer Johannes Amerbach, after almost two decades of editorial labor, had published the final volume of the first scholarly printed edition of Augustine’s collected works, and across Europe theologians, friars, and scholars were excitedly reading it. Of all the Fathers being revived in this period, none would have a more galvanizing effect on Christian thinking than Augustine. The Augustinian renaissance would in fact provide a major spur for the Reformation. (Almost alone among early-sixteenth-century thinkers, Erasmus would withhold his approval.)
Few would be more affected than Luther. Reading Augustine, he found a theology sharply at odds with the one in which he had been trained. Remarkably, a volume of Augustine’s writings annotated by Luther in 1509 and 1510 was found in the late nineteenth century in a library in Zwickau, Germany, and his notes on it show the stimulating effect that reading the bishop had on him. Just as Erasmus had embraced Jerome as his guide back to the days of the early Church, so would Luther travel there with Augustine. Until then, Luther later recalled, he had been given only Scotus to read, but after discovering Augustine, he not only read but “devoured” him. The experience would represent the first step on the road to the Ninety-Five Theses.
Among the works by Augustine that Luther read in this period was the Confessions. Opening it, he found a text unlike any other he had to that point encountered. In contrast to the convoluted treatises and arid handbooks of the medieval classroom, the Confessions was intensely personal. Written at the end of the fourth century, when Augustine was in his early forties, it is generally considered the first memoir, with many spicy details served up along with discussions of evil, grace, and salvation. And there was much in it with which Luther could identify.
Like Luther, Augustine (who was born in 354) grew up in a small inland town—Thagaste, which was located on a dry plateau about sixty miles from the Mediterranean coast in what is now Algeria. Where Mansfeld was an insignificant speck in the Holy Roman Empire, Thagaste was a remote outpost in the Roman province of Numidia. Also like Luther, Augustine had an overbearing parent—in this case his mother, Monica. A pious Christian, she would press her son from his earliest years to embrace Christ. She and Augustine’s father, Patricius, a pagan, were members of the Latin-speaking middle class and (like Luther’s parents) had just enough resources to send their bright son to a Latin school. Here Augustine would receive the training in Latin grammar and literature he needed to move beyond the provinces and onto the public stage. As he recounts in the Confessions, he read the comedies of Terence, memorized sections of the Aeneid, and learned to lament the death of Dido. (Augustine also developed a lifelong distaste for Greek—a key factor in Erasmus’s low estimation of him.)
At the age of sixteen, Augustine was seized by an impulse that for years would torment him: lust. It plunged him into “the whirlpool of sin.” One day at the public baths, the “signs of active virility” came to life in him, causing his father to rejoice at this indication that he would one day have grandchildren. (In the vast archive of patristic literature, this is perhaps the only overt reference to an erection.)
Carnal desire, in turn, was but one aspect of a broader psychological attribute that would come to dominate his theology: the will, in all its unruliness. Augustine lied to his tutor, stole from his parents’ larder, and joined a gang. One day, he pilfered some pears from a neighbor’s tree. The pears were sickly in appearance and sour, and Augustine quickly threw them away, tasting “nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed.” Reflecting on this act many years later, he remained troubled by its senselessness and what it said about his nature: “For the sake of a laugh, a little
sport, I was glad to do harm and anxious to damage another. Can anyone unravel this twisted tangle of knots?”
In 371, Augustine went to Carthage to continue his studies. The second city in the Western Empire, Carthage (located in what is now Tunisia) had a well-regarded university, streets lined with bookstores, and a spectacular harbor ringed with colonnades. It was also a “hissing cauldron of lust,” as Augustine put it. During the several years he spent there, he took a mistress and had a son with her. He was also seized by a new passion—ambition. Augustine wanted to become a great speaker solely for the fame it would bring him; rising to the top of his class in rhetoric, he became “swollen with conceit.”
In the course of his studies, though, he came upon a work that would give him his first push onto a new course: Cicero’s Hortensius. This tract (only fragments of which have survived) urges the study of philosophy, and as Augustine read it, his heart “began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth.” Setting out on a quest for knowledge, he turned first to the Bible, in accordance with the wishes of his mother. (Monica herself would ultimately be canonized and lend her name to a southern California city whose freewheeling ways would no doubt have horrified her.)
As he read the Old Testament, however, Augustine was put off by its coarse language, immoral tales, and many contradictions. Moreover, it did not satisfactorily address a question that had come to preoccupy him: the source of evil. He found a more convincing explanation in the teachings of the Manicheans. This underground sect subscribed to a rationalist but esoteric cosmology: that the universe is home to two great forces—those of Good, represented by light, and those of Evil, represented by darkness—and that the captive particles of the Good are always trying to escape those of the Evil. As abstruse as this philosophy was, Augustine found it persuasive, and he became an ardent follower.
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