Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  After about four weeks, it became clear that no action was going to be taken on the Augustinians’ petition—Rome was too absorbed in its own affairs to care much about an intramural dispute in far-off Germany—and so, at the end of January or the beginning of February 1511, he and his companion set off for home. “Like a fool, I carried onions to Rome and brought back garlic,” Luther would say, using a German expression for a fruitless transaction. But that was many years later. In contrast to Erasmus’s experience, Luther’s visit to Rome left no overt signs of disaffection. It did, however, lace his faith in the Church with some imperceptible cracks, which, when subjected to intense pressure, would perilously widen.

  After returning to Germany, Luther would never again leave it. As he settled back into his routine in Erfurt, however, he learned that his services were required elsewhere. The University of Wittenberg needed someone to teach theology, and the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt had been asked to supply a candidate. Johann von Staupitz, who in addition to his administrative duties for the Augustinian order was serving as the dean of theology at Wittenberg, felt that Luther would be ideal, and so in the summer of 1511 the young friar returned to the remote settlement on the Elbe.

  With a population of barely 2,000, Wittenberg seemed more a village than a town. In contrast to the rich grain fields and thick woods that surrounded Erfurt, Wittenberg was set on a stubby plain with soil so sandy that Luther would later remark that a villainous people must have once lived there and left a curse on the land. The main street, which extended barely three thousand feet from east to west, was lined by squat half-timbered cottages with walls of mud and roofs of hay and straw. Anchoring the street’s western end was the castle of Frederick III, the ruler of Electoral Saxony. A hulking Gothic fortress, it served as the prince’s residence on his occasional visits to the town. Adjoining it was the Schlosskirche, or Castle Church (also known as All Saints’), whose north door served as a sort of community bulletin board for the posting of notices and proclamations. A few hundred yards to the east, the street opened onto the marketplace, where local craftsmen and neighboring farmers displayed their goods. On the square’s northern edge was the town hall, and a short walk to the east was St. Mary’s, the town church, whose twin square stone towers stood stolid watch over Wittenberg and which would become known as the mother church of the Reformation.

  At the street’s eastern end was the Augustinian monastery. It was much smaller than the one in Erfurt, in both size and enrollment (with thirty to forty friars). Nearby was a chapel made of wood and featuring a rough-hewn pulpit. From the upper windows of the monastery, it was possible to see the Elbe winding its sluggish way through the Saxon flatlands.

  With trade at a modest volume, the local economy depended on such petty occupations as shoemaking, tailoring, butchering, and brewing. Of the town’s 356 taxpaying households, 172 had the right to brew beer, and to judge from Luther’s many complaints about public drunkenness, they seem to have set the social tone. There were three public baths and an apothecary, which sold not only drugs but also spices, wax, paint, and paper. There was also a Frauenhaus, or brothel, which only single men were allowed to patronize.

  On arriving in Wittenberg, Luther felt he was on the “very borderland of civilization.” Yet from this outpost he would help set in motion one of Europe’s great revolutions. In this respect, the Reformation would stand out. Most of the great intellectual and cultural breakthroughs of the age occurred in thriving cities. Aquinas drafted the Summa Theologica in Paris, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in Florence, Petrarch gave birth to humanism in Avignon. Luther, by contrast, would conceive his new theology in a rough-edged frontier town. But Wittenberg’s remoteness would actually prove an asset, for it had no intellectual establishment with vested interests or orthodoxies to defend. The university had been founded just nine years earlier, and on its faculty Thomists, Scotists, nominalists, and humanists all vied for supremacy.

  What’s more, the provincial air of Wittenberg was deceptive, for it was the capital of Electoral Saxony, and Frederick was determined to make it an intellectual and cultural showcase, both to boost his own prestige and to eclipse that of his cousin George, the ruler of neighboring Ducal Saxony. The division of Saxony went back to 1485, when the territory was split between two brothers. While Ducal Saxony got its most prominent city, Leipzig, Electoral Saxony got a vote to elect the Holy Roman Emperor (hence its name). There were only seven such votes, and Frederick’s control of one of them gave him much more political influence than the location and resources of his principality by themselves would have made possible.

  In the coming battle over Luther and his theology, Frederick would play a pivotal—and enigmatic—part. Until his death, in 1525, he would stand forthrightly behind the reformer, defending him in the face of great risk; had he not, Luther would probably not have survived. Yet the elector to the end remained a stalwart Catholic, devoted to medieval forms of piety. In 1493, at the age of thirty, he had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, during which he had acquired many relics, including a thumb of St. Anne’s that he found in Rhodes. By the time of Luther’s arrival in Wittenberg, Frederick’s collection had grown into one of the largest such holdings in Germany—a sprawling assortment of the fingers, limbs, heads, garments, and crosses of prophets, apostles, saints, and martyrs, which were housed in the Castle Church in Wittenberg and exhibited on certain holidays. Thanks to this cache, Wittenberg was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in all of Germany.

  While highly traditional on religious matters, however, Frederick was forward-looking on cultural ones. At his favorite castle, in Lochau, about thirty miles southeast of Wittenberg, he had had written on a wall of his bedroom: “You have inherited a Sparta, it is your task to beautify it.” Throughout his realm, Frederick was building churches and expanding castles, and to adorn them he was bringing to Saxony some of Europe’s most practiced woodcarvers, stonecutters, bronze casters, and chandelier makers. On a visit to Nuremberg in 1496, Frederick met Albrecht Dürer, who was then a largely unknown twenty-five-year-old; sensing his talent, Frederick became the first to commission paintings from him, and a Dürer altarpiece would grace the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

  In political affairs, Frederick was very canny. Of all the German princes, he stood out for his caution, honesty, and concern for the welfare of his people, hence his nickname: the Wise. Frederick was shy and would never marry, nor would he ever meet Luther face-to-face. Portraits show him to be a man of prodigious girth, with small eyes set in a fleshy face and a curly beard falling onto a coat with a fur collar. When it came to making decisions, Frederick was so deliberate as to madden some of his advisers. He was especially averse to sending troops into battle. Not once during his nearly forty-year reign did he become involved in a war, despite constant tensions with the more bellicose Duke George—over mines, highways, and, eventually, Luther. Tournaments, archery, and hunting provided all the soldierly outlets Frederick needed, and the resulting peace freed up resources for his various artistic and cultural projects. His main sources of revenue were the rich veins of silver in the Erzgebirge Mountains on Saxony’s border with Bohemia. Even their bounty, however, was not sufficient to underwrite his many ventures, and he made up the difference with taxes that created much hardship for his subjects.

  Of all his projects, none would occupy Frederick more than the University of Wittenberg, which he founded in 1502. By investing heavily in it, he hoped it would eventually surpass the much older and more celebrated university in Leipzig. When Luther arrived in Wittenberg, the school (like the town as a whole) was undergoing a construction boom, and his stay would take place against the backdrop of constant hammering, sawing, troweling, and the rumbling of wagons dropping off loads of stone and wood. In addition to improving the university’s physical plant, Frederick was keen on attracting top talent to it, and along with Luther there arrived two other friar-professors, bringing the total to nearly two dozen. Most of the several h
undred students came from within a hundred-mile radius, but thanks to Luther the university would become so famous that nearly a century later Shakespeare would make it Hamlet’s alma mater.

  To further enhance the university, the elector created a library on the second floor of his castle. It would eventually hold more than three thousand volumes, including not only Bible commentaries, Latin classics, patristic texts, grammars, and legal tomes but also the works of such acclaimed humanists as Ficino, Pico, Valla, and Erasmus, whom Frederick would come to admire greatly. Overseeing the library was George Spalatin, an energetic and conscientious priest who would serve as Frederick’s secretary, confessor, and chief liaison with Luther. A dedicated humanist, Spalatin regularly studied the catalogs of Europe’s top presses for new editions, and in 1512 he wrote to Aldus in Venice, requesting a complete set of his works. With its diverse holdings, Frederick’s library would provide a key resource to Luther as he pursued his theological studies.

  Despite its small size, Wittenberg had a printer, Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, whose presses after 1512 would be located close by the Augustinian cloister, giving Luther ready access. Even more central to Wittenberg’s cultural life was the painter and businessman Lucas Cranach the Elder. Arriving in Wittenberg in 1505 at Frederick’s invitation, Cranach would remain for the next forty-five years; he would be elected burgomaster (mayor) three times. He would also come to own the town’s apothecary plus several imposing buildings, including one on the main square that housed his enormous and prolific workshop-residence. Embodying the entrepreneurial spirit of the new Europe, Cranach was to become an early and unwavering supporter of Luther, and his portraits of the reformer would help fix Luther’s image in history.

  For all these cultural sprouts, however, Wittenberg at the time of Luther’s arrival remained a coarse and grubby place, its streets full of dung and offal, scavenging pigs and foraging dogs. Christoph Scheurl, a Nuremberg native who taught in Wittenberg from 1507 to 1512 and who would become a good friend of Luther’s, described its citizens as drunken, crude, and quarrelsome, and he would frequently complain of feeling lonely and cut off from the world. Luther himself, however, had no such qualms. Once settled, he threw himself into his work as an instructor of theology, giving lectures on key Scholastic texts. He also continued to perform the Mass and, as best he could, to carry out his devotional rounds—going to confession, holding vigils, praying the hours.

  As before, however, the Anfechtungen, those debilitating spells of anxiety and dread, continued to occur. No matter how hard he tried, his every devotional act seemed tainted by selfishness. The more sinful he felt, the severer the austerities he imposed. Unlike Erasmus, who detested fast days, Luther welcomed them, convinced that the sharper his hunger, the more God would approve. In the depths of winter, when frigid gusts bore down from the great Eurasian plain, he welcomed the numbness that spread through his limbs. His confessions steadily lengthened, reaching two, three, even six hours in some cases. Once, upon leaving his confessor, he rushed back to disclose some sin he had momentarily forgotten. “God bids us hope in His mercy,” the exasperated priest declared—“Go in peace!”

  Yet no matter how emphatically the priest pronounced him absolved, Luther felt his pride and selfishness return. Deep down, he could see that his efforts to please God stemmed not from a genuine desire to do good but from a striving for the reward of eternal life. “My conscience,” he later recalled, “could never achieve certainty but was always in doubt and said: ‘You have not done this correctly. You were not contrite enough. You omitted this in your confession.’ Therefore the longer I tried to heal my uncertain, weak, and troubled conscience with human traditions, the more uncertain, weak, and troubled I continually made it.” The thought that God in his righteousness would consign humans to whatever fate he pleased, however seemingly unjust, caused him to feel utterly cast away.

  Amid these spiritual torments, Luther would to his good fortune find in Wittenberg someone able to understand what he was going through. Johann von Staupitz, the Augustinian prelate who had arranged for Luther’s transfer to Wittenberg, would become for him not only a spiritual adviser but also a paternal figure offering moral guidance. Years later, after the two had a painful falling-out, Luther would fully acknowledge his debt to Staupitz, observing that if he did not want to be “a damned ungrateful papal ass,” he had to recognize him “as primarily my father in this doctrine.”

  A plump, balding Saxon nobleman known for his brilliant sermons, Staupitz in his personal relations could be very reserved—a trait that Luther at times found exasperating—but his long experience in counseling monks had made him astute in diagnosing what ailed them. When Martin came to him bemoaning his trespasses, Staupitz tried to shake some sense into him. Murder, adultery, theft—these were real sins. The faults troubling Luther—stumbling over a liturgical passage, growing impatient with a fellow monk—were Humpelwerk and Puppensünden, weak excuses and play sins. “If Christ is to help you,” Staupitz said, “you must keep a list of real honest-to-goodness sins and not go hobbling around nursing toy ones, imagining you commit a sin every time you fart!” (This was Luther’s colorful phrasing of Staupitz’s statement, which was no doubt more demure.)

  Seeing Luther’s terror before the righteous God, Staupitz tried to expose him to a different image of the Almighty—that of a benevolent father who cares for his children and desires their love in return. He spoke of God’s compassionate readiness to confer his grace on man and of the sanctified path that the sacraments offered to attain it. Penance—poenitentia—required not just the performance of outward acts of confession and satisfaction but also a process of internal renewal and repentance; the change had to occur not just in one’s conduct but also in one’s heart. These words, Luther later wrote, quoting from the Psalms, “pierced me like the sharp arrow of the Mighty.”

  Seeing Luther’s distress, Staupitz came up with a plan to jostle him out of it. In September 1511, he asked Luther to meet him in a garden located just outside the cloister. They sat under a pear tree (of which Luther would become very fond). Because of his many administrative responsibilities, Staupitz said, he was no longer able to carry out his duties as a Bible lecturer. He wanted Luther to study for a doctorate in theology and, upon earning it, to take over the Bible chair at the university and lecture on the Scriptures, as well as preach in the monastery. Terrified at such a prospect, Luther poured forth fifteen objections. His chief excuse, he later explained, was that he did not have the stamina for such an undertaking and in any case did not expect to live long. Well, Staupitz dryly replied, “our God has a large empire and can use learned doctors in heaven.”

  In the end, the opportunity to read the Bible won Luther over. At long last, he would have a chance to get at the marrow of the bone. Along with his promotion, he was assigned an office in the towerlike upper story of the building that connected the monastery’s dormitory to its brewery. Small but heated, the office for the first time offered Luther a space in which he could work undisturbed (and unfrozen), and it was from this “poor little room” that he “stormed the papacy,” as he later put it.

  After completing the required courses, Luther, in a ceremony held in the Castle Church in October 1512, became a doctor of theology. He was presented with a copy of the Bible, a golden doctor’s ring, and a biretta—the signature beret of doctors—which he would proudly wear as a sign of his achievement. In addition to his obligations as a friar, Luther now had to tend to such academic duties as supervising doctoral candidates and presiding over disputations. He also began preaching at the town church, winning praise for his performance, and he was appointed subprior of the Wittenberg monastery, a position that gave him considerable influence over its operations.

  Above all, Luther would begin lecturing on the Bible—a task he would keep at for the rest of his life. In later years, after he became famous, his lectures would draw up to four hundred people. When he began, his audience rarely topped twenty. Yet none of
his lecture series would be more consequential than the first two. Delivered from 1513 to 1516, they would be Luther’s road to Damascus—his pathway to a new faith. Remarkably, his notes for both sets of lectures have survived, allowing us to peer into Luther’s mind as he developed the ideas that would set in motion the Reformation.

  The subject of the first series was the Psalms. This was a natural choice, given the central place these hymns had in Christian theology and liturgy. They were fixtures not only of the canonical hours but also of Masses, baptisms, and funerals—indeed, of Christian devotion in general. With fierce urgency they expressed the whole range of human emotions, from incapacitating fear and murderous hatred to serene contentment and exuberant thanksgiving to God. Some of the most memorable lines in the New Testament come from the Psalms. Christ’s famous cry on the cross as related in Matthew and Mark—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—is taken verbatim from the first line of Psalm 22.

  For Luther, the Psalms had special power. A “beloved book” that gives off “such a fine and precious fragrance,” he later called it. The Psalms, he added, depict fear and hope more vividly than any painter could and with greater eloquence than one could find even in Cicero. Luther, like Jesus, often felt forsaken by God and, in studying these verses, he hoped to find the way back to him. “The Psalter,” he observed, “is properly a garden of nuts, outwardly somewhat hard at first but having a sweet kernel within.”