To his dismay, Luther was also sought out as a marriage counselor. Husbands and wives approached him with complaints about impotence and neglect, infidelity and infertility; young men and women hoping to marry sought his help in navigating the intricacies of canon law. As best he could, the celibate Luther grappled with the many impediments that Rome had placed in the way of marriage. In 1519, he had published a sermon in which he had called physical desire a “wicked lust of the flesh” in need of strict control, but, faced with the messy realities of human desire, he began to rethink such reflexive censure.
That questioning, in turn, was part of a broader transformation taking place in Luther’s mind. To this point, the many ideas that had welled up in him since the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses—about indulgences and works, confession and salvation, the papacy and the priesthood—had remained inchoate. They would now begin to cohere. After all the reading and preaching he had done, and after the many exhausting controversies in which he had participated, Luther in the early months of 1520 would have a series of intellectual and theological breakthroughs, culminating in a series of works that together would convulse Europe, rouse the German people, and shake the Roman Church.
The initial trigger for this transformation was the publication of a treatise on the Eucharist that Luther prepared in late 1519. In it, he advocated giving the laity not only the bread but also the cup during Communion. No less than the grain in the bread, he wrote, the grapes in the wine symbolized union with Christ, and to withhold the cup from communicants was to deny them this instrument of divine fellowship.
To Duke George, this position smacked of the Bohemian heresy, and he angrily protested to both his cousin Frederick and the bishop of Meissen, whose diocese bordered Bohemia. Priests in that town began spreading word that it would not be a sin if Luther were murdered, and the bishop ordered the posting of a note prohibiting the circulation of the text. Luther dashed off a fierce reply. Spalatin—worried that the controversy would harm relations between Frederick and George—instructed Luther not to publish his response, but by the time his message arrived, it was already in print.
Spalatin was furious, at both Luther’s disobedience and his provocative language. Luther was unapologetic. While acknowledging that he had shown more vehemence than was perhaps prudent, he cited Scripture in his defense. “Was [Christ] scurrilous when he called the Jews a perverse and adulterous generation, offspring of vipers, hypocrites, and children of the devil?” Paul spoke of dogs, vain babblers, and seducers, and in Acts 13 he raged against a false prophet so fiercely as to seem deranged. Those who know the truth “cannot be patient against the obstinate and unconquered enemies of the truth.” No one should think that the cause of the gospel “can be advanced without tumult, offense, and sedition. You will not make a pen from a sword, nor peace of war. The Word of God is a sword, it is war and ruin and offense and perdition and poison.”
Luther was here invoking Matthew 10:34, where Jesus declares, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace but a sword, for I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” This is one of several such militant passages in the New Testament, which provide a bellicose counterpoint to its irenic statements about turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemy. In the New Testament, there appear two very different Christs—one the prince of peace, the other the bearer of the sword. Whereas Erasmus embraced the former, Luther in this period began identifying with the latter.
He also began to speak of himself as a divine messenger. “God so carries me on that I cannot fear their rash and untaught hatred,” he wrote of his adversaries. God “acts through me, since I am certain that none of these things have been sought by me, but that they were drawn from me, one and all, by a fury not my own.” From this point on, the language of war, the sword, and divine mission would permeate Luther’s work. His conviction that he acted on God’s behalf would help him stand firm in the face of the greatest peril. It would also make him fiercely opposed to compromise, no matter how grave the consequences.
Luther’s new resoluteness is captured in a 1520 woodcut by Lucas Cranach—the first of his many portraits of the reformer (and one that would become an icon of the new movement). It shows a tonsured monk with a large, powerful head, cheekbones protruding from a gaunt face, lips pursed in determination, eyes enraptured. In contrast to images of Erasmus, which show a man ever aware of life’s ironies, Cranach’s Luther radiates the fearlessness and steadfastness of one called to preach God’s Word.
As a result of Luther’s support for the chalice, rumors began to spread that he had Bohemian origins. They became so insistent that in mid-January 1520 he felt compelled to send Spalatin a formal denial, corroborated by details about his birth and youth. Prodded by the controversy, Luther finally decided to read Jan Hus. At the Leipzig disputation, he had been approached by a member of the Hussite church in Bohemia, and when he had expressed interest in Hus’s work, the man promised to send him a sample. A copy of De Ecclesia arrived in October 1519, but Luther’s workload had kept him from reading it. When he finally got around to it, he was startled by what he found. Hus’s insistence that the Church was headed not by the pope but by Christ and that God’s Word ruled over the palsied doctrines of man prefigured Luther’s own views. And Paul and Augustine seemed to foreshadow Hus. “In short we are all Hussites and did not know it,” he wrote to Spalatin in mid-February 1520. That such a teacher of evangelical truth had been condemned and burned was shocking, yet no one was allowed to say so. After having so insistently denied any association with Hus at Leipzig, Luther now fully endorsed him, despite the somber realization that in doing so he could meet a similar end.
Luther got a similar surprise from reading Lorenzo Valla. With the publication of Ulrich von Hutten’s German edition of Valla’s debunking of the Donation of Constantine, this work was for the first time circulating widely in Germany, and Luther was incensed to find that the pope’s claims to his temporal possessions rested on a fraudulent document. “I have at hand . . . Lorenzo Valla’s proof (edited by Hutten) that the Donation of Constantine is a forgery,” he wrote to Spalatin in February 1520. “Good Heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at Rome! You wonder at the judgment of God, that such unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but prevailed for so many centuries and were incorporated into the Canon Law . . . as articles of faith.” Whereas prior to the Leipzig debate Luther had wondered whether the pope was the Antichrist, he now felt sure about it.
While he was reading Hus and Valla, there arrived in Wittenberg a much less welcome text: the Cologne-Louvain condemnation of his writings. Two of Europe’s leading universities had joined forces to denounce him. On examining the document, Luther could see at once that it was the work of the same “doctrinal asses” who had persecuted Reuchlin. In a blistering counterattack, he marveled at the mediocrity of their effort. Swollen with self-regard, these sophists had not even bothered to substantiate their charges against him; in their puffed-up view, simply asserting that he had erred was enough. Until these divine doctors could disprove his statements by Scripture, Luther wrote in one of many richly abusive passages, he would pay no more attention to them than to the rantings of a drunken man.
To show the eminent company he was in, Luther offered a roll call of scholars who had been condemned by universities, only later to be praised by them: Pico della Mirandola, Valla, Reuchlin, Lefèvre, and Erasmus. Attacked by the obscurantists of Cologne and Louvain, Luther was aligning himself with the pantheon of freethinkers who had helped spread the New Learning. (He could not, however, resist taking a swipe at Erasmus and what he saw as his equivocation, calling him a “he-goat with his horns caught in a thornbush.”)
While fending off the doctrinal asses of Cologne and Louvain, Luther faced a problem of a far more stubborn nature. Many readers who we
re otherwise drawn to his ideas balked at his insistence that good works are futile. Were Christians not to perform such works? Would not Luther’s position encourage license and immorality? Hearing much confusion over the matter, Spalatin reminded Luther of an earlier pledge to prepare a sermon on it, and in March 1520 he began to do so. The Treatise on Good Works showed that Luther had not softened the teachings he had taken from Paul. “Apart from faith all works are dead, no matter how wonderful they look or what splendid names they have,” he flatly declared. A heathen, a Jew, a Turk, and a sinner might all do good works, but only a Christian enlightened and strengthened by grace could firmly trust that he pleased God. Just as a husband and wife who love one another need not constantly provide proof, so those with faith in Christ did not have to perform virtuous acts to win God’s favor.
Luther spent two months on this treatise, filling it with a great jumble of opinions and ideas. There should be fewer saints’ days, for they encourage idleness and gluttony. Pregnant women should not fast if in so doing they would endanger the child they were carrying. Unchastity was a serious and rabid vice, from which a man must flee to prayer. Nothing came from Rome except the shameless selling of spiritual wares—indulgences, parishes, bishoprics, and benefices. On and on Luther went, producing a tract so dense and prolix that, despite brisk sales, it failed to settle the question at hand—the place of good works.
With the approach of the summer of 1520, however, Luther’s thinking was jolted into clarity by a dramatic moment in German history: the coming of a new emperor. On June 28, 1519, in the gloom of the Frankfurt cathedral, the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire, after a shameless display of influence peddling and deal making, had finally arrived at their decision: Charles (the fifth of that name). In the end, the wealth of the Fuggers had proved decisive. Rallying their syndicate, they had laid out on Charles’s behalf an astonishing 543,000 florins in bribes, indemnities, and pensions—nearly double the amount that Francis I, his chief rival, was able to muster.
The messiness of the means, however, could not dampen the excitement at the result. Few European sovereigns had such royal bloodlines as Charles. His grandfather on his father’s side was the emperor Maximilian I, the head of the house of Hapsburg. His grandparents on his mother’s side were Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. At the death of his father, Philip the Handsome, in 1506, Charles had become the duke of Burgundy. In 1515, at the age of fifteen, he had become the ruler of the Netherlands. In 1516, on the death of Ferdinand, he had become king of Aragon and Castile as well as of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. With the death of Maximilian in 1519, he inherited the Hapsburgs’ Austrian territories, which included parts of Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia. Now Charles was about to add the jumble of German states, principalities, and episcopates to his empire. At the time of his election, he was in Spain, presiding over a week of celebrations with processions and masquerades. He at once began preparing to head north to claim his crown.
Not yet twenty, Charles seemed young, noble, and idealistic. His very name evoked Charlemagne, his Carolingian predecessor. The coronation was to take place in Aachen, where Charlemagne had been crowned and which had served as his capital. “Sire,” his chancellor Mercurino Gattinara wrote to him shortly after his election, “God has been very merciful to you: he has raised you above all the Kings and princes of Christendom to a power such as no sovereign has enjoyed since your ancestor Charles the Great. He has set you on the way towards a world monarchy, towards the uniting of Christendom under a single shepherd.” World monarchy seemed a stretch, but from the Rhine to the Oder there spread the hope that the German people at last had a ruler who could unite their fractious lands.
Because of resistance to his rule in Spain, Charles was not able to leave until May 1520. He was expected to spend the summer in the Low Countries before traveling to Aachen for the coronation in late October. In anticipation, both pro-German and anti-Roman sentiment surged. The mood was captured by the ever-incendiary Hutten in his Roman Trinity: “Three things are sold in Rome: Christ, the priest, and women. Three things are hateful to Rome: a general council, the reformation of the church, and the opening of German eyes. Three ills I pray for Rome: pestilence, famine, and war. This is my trinity.”
Luther was swept up in the jubilation. His own personal conflict with the papacy was now merging with the more general opposition to Roman rule. With his growing mastery of political theater, he set out to seize the moment. “I have the intention of publishing a broadside to Charles and the whole German nobility against the tyranny and wickedness of the Roman court,” he informed Spalatin in early June 1520. Over the next six months, Luther would produce three extraordinary texts—three thunderclaps. He had no army, no party, no movement, just a pen and the printing press, but with them he would mount a headlong assault on a world order that had been in place for centuries. Luther’s Reformatory tracts, as they are known, would shock the German people into a new awareness and permanently alter the contours of political debate in Europe.
Working at his usual frenetic pace, Luther in a mere two weeks produced the first of these works, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate. “The time for silence is past, and the time to speak has come,” he declared, paraphrasing Ecclesiastes. He was appealing to the ruling classes to reform Christendom because the clergy themselves had become indifferent. With a prophet’s wrath, Luther accused the Romanists of cleverly building three walls behind which they practiced their “knavery and wickedness.” What was now needed was a trumpet that, as at Jericho, could bring those walls tumbling down.
The first wall was the Romanists’ assertion that popes, bishops, priests, monks, and nuns make up a special religious class superior to secular society. In fact, “all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office.” As Paul said (in 1 Corinthians),
we are all one body, yet every member has its own work by which it serves the others. This is because we all have one baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all Christians alike; for baptism, gospel, and faith alone make us spiritual and a Christian people.
Luther continued: “Because we are all priests of equal standing, no one must push himself forward and take it upon himself, without our consent and election, to do that for which we all have equal authority.” Priests, bishops, and popes all have their own particular work to do, as do cobblers, smiths, and peasants, “yet they are all alike consecrated priests and bishops.” It was “intolerable” that canon law attached such importance to the freedom and property of the clergy, “as though the laity were not also as spiritual and as good Christians as they, or did not also belong to the church.”
In both concept and language, these passages echoed Erasmus’s Paraclesis, with its idea that even the most humble layman can be more pious than a theologian. In adapting this proposition, though, Luther characteristically gave it a sharper, more populist edge, rejecting the entire idea of a hierarchical Christian society led by a specialized caste. Luther was here articulating a world-altering concept that would become central to his gospel: the priesthood of all believers (a phrase that he himself, however, did not use).
The second wall behind which the Romanists acted was their insistence that they alone had the authority to interpret Scripture. “Since these Romanists think the Holy Spirit never leaves them, no matter how ignorant and wicked they are, they become bold and decree only what they want.” Their claim “that only the pope may interpret Scripture is an outrageous fancied fable.” The keys were given not to Peter alone “but to the whole community.” Since we are all priests and all have one faith and gospel, “why should we not also have the power to test and judge what is right or wrong in matters of faith?” Since God spoke through Balaam’s ass against a prophet, “why should he not be able to speak through a righteous man against the pope?”
The final wall was the Romanists’ insistence that no one but the p
ope can summon a council. There was no scriptural basis for such a contention, Luther wrote. When the pope himself offends Christendom, the temporal authorities are in the best position to convene such a gathering. If a fire breaks out in a city, would it not be unnatural for everyone to stand by and let it burn on because no one has the authority of the mayor? Would it not instead be the duty of every citizen to arouse and summon the rest? Clearly, a fire had broken out in Christendom, and faithful Christians had to join together to extinguish it. “Let us awake, dear Germans, and fear God more than man, lest we suffer the same fate of all the poor souls who are so lamentably lost through the shameless, devilish rule of the Romanists.”
After offering this sweeping indictment of Roman oppression, Luther provided a detailed catalog of the Church’s abusive practices. Drawing on his own trip to Rome ten years earlier; on his readings of official Church documents; on the list of grievances submitted at recent diets; and on an interview with an attorney from Hamburg who had recently passed through Wittenberg on his way back from Rome, where he had had business with the Curia, Luther wrote with the drive and tenacity of an investigative journalist to expose Rome’s inner workings. First, there was the “worldly and ostentatious style” in which the vicar of Christ lived, which no king or emperor could match. While the pontiff wore a triple crown, even the mightiest monarch wore but one. Italy had become “almost a wilderness,” its bishoprics despoiled, its cities decayed, its people ruined, the revenues of its churches siphoned away by Rome. “And why? Because the cardinals must have the income! No Turk could have devastated Italy and suppressed the worship of God so effectively!”
Fatal Discord Page 47
