Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  In the process, however, something critical got lost: the individual. In Luther’s theology, the central focus was on the Christian standing alone before God, provisioned with nothing but his faith. Even with Luther’s growing stress on order and obedience, his respect for the individual conscience was not extinguished. With Calvin, it largely was. The idea of justification by faith, so central to Luther, was less important to Calvin and his followers; for them, it was the community of believers working to establish God’s kingdom that was key. In addition to being more activist than Lutheranism, then, the Reformed tradition (as Calvinism came to be known) was more collectivist. And more controlling. The Consistory—the elite body at the core of Calvinist governance—provided a means by which the clergy and their lay abettors could organize and direct the population. It was in effect a new priesthood, taking the place of the Catholic clergy and in some ways exceeding it in power and authority.

  Luther’s friendly feelings toward Calvin would evaporate in 1541, when he saw a pamphlet by him on the Eucharist. Calvin strongly criticized Luther’s view that Christ’s flesh and blood are physically present in the bread and the wine, calling it a “diabolical reverie.” He also rejected the sacramentarian view that these elements are mere symbols. Taking a middle course, Calvin held that the elements are instruments of God’s grace, which unite the believer to Christ. Seeing this, Luther wanted nothing more to do with him. As a result, any chance of a reconciliation between the Lutheran movement based in Germany and the Reformed movement based in Switzerland vanished, and the bitter competition between them in the decades to come would weaken the Reformation as a whole, allowing the Catholic Church to stage a vigorous comeback.

  Given a choice, most reformers would probably have preferred spending a night drinking beer with the lenient Luther than discussing the Psalms with the unbending Calvin. They might have also chosen to live in permissive Wittenberg rather than regimented Geneva. Reflecting his own unruly temperament, Luther had little interest in imposing the type of repressive regime that Calvin would establish in Geneva.

  His intolerance instead took a different form: a virulent hatred for members of different faiths. In the past, of course, Luther had expressed rage at many adversaries, from popes and peasants to Erasmus and the sacramentarians. Now, however, his fury would be directed at three groups whom he considered enemies of Christ, with grave consequences that would persist for centuries.

  One was the Muslims. Back in 1529, as the Turks prepared to attack Vienna and all of Europe braced in terror, Luther had come out with a blistering polemic, On War Against the Turk. The Turk, he wrote, was “the servant of the devil, who not only devastates land and people with the sword” but “also lays waste the Christian faith and our dear Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet Luther’s animosity toward the Turks was tempered by his awareness that the threat they posed had been critical to the survival of the Reformation. Had Charles V not been preoccupied with defeating them, he would have been free to level his guns at the Protestants. Luther moreover viewed Turkish aggression as a form of divine punishment for Christians’ sins and held that the best way to resist it was with “repentance, tears, and prayer.” In his tract, Luther was much tougher on the pope than on the Turks, decrying his constant calls for a crusade against the Ottomans and his unending demands for German money to pay for it. The pope’s decretals are, like the Koran, “a new law” that “he enforces with the ban just as the Turk enforces his Koran with the sword.”

  At that point, Luther actually had little familiarity with the Koran. Though the book had been translated into Latin in the twelfth century, no edition had appeared in print. In 1542, however, the Zurich theologian Theodore Bibliander produced a Latin version that met scholarly standards, and the Basel printer Johannes Oporin agreed to bring it out. When the Basel city council learned of this, it barred publication and ordered Oporin’s arrest. Hearing of the council’s decision, Luther sent it a message urging it to lift the ban. It did, and Luther agreed to contribute a preface explaining why he supported publication.

  It was not to promote interfaith understanding. Though in the past he had sought to refute “the pernicious beliefs of Muhammed,” he wrote, he knew that doing so more effectively would require close study of Muhammed’s writings, and so he wanted the complete text of the Koran made available. Just as the “madness” of the Jews was more easily observed once “their hidden secrets” were exposed, so would pious persons more readily grasp “the insanity and wiles” of the Islamists once the book of Muhammed became widely known. “We must fight on all fronts against the ranks of the devil,” Luther wrote. The learned must “read the writings of the enemy in order to refute them more keenly, to cut them to pieces and to overturn them,” so that “they might be able to bring some to safety” or at least “fortify our people with more sturdy arguments.”

  In Luther’s preface, the Jews came in for nearly as much abuse as the Muslims—further evidence of the dramatic shift taking place in his attitudes toward that people. In 1523, in That Jesus Was Born a Jew, he had called for the Jews to be treated cordially, according to the law of Christian love. That position reflected his belief that, with the true gospel having at last been revealed, the Jews would finally convert. As the years passed and no such change occurred, however, Luther’s wrath grew.

  In August 1536, Elector John Frederick issued a mandate prohibiting Jews from staying in Electoral Saxony, engaging in business there, or even passing through. The following year, Josel of Rosheim in Alsace, who served as a spokesman for German Jewry, asked Luther (through Wolfgang Capito) to intercede with John Frederick to rescind the mandate. Luther refused. “You should reflect,” he wrote to Josel, “on whether God will release you from the present misery, which by now has lasted more than 1,500 years. This will not happen, unless you accept with us Gentiles your cousin and Lord, the dear crucified Christ.” Dismissing Luther’s objections, the elector granted Josel’s request and modified the decree to allow Jews to travel through Electoral Saxony. Other lords, too, seemed to be softening toward them. Incensed, Luther set out to dissuade them. He wanted to convince the princes (as he put it in his Table Talk in 1542) “to chase all the Jews out of their land.” If he were a lord, he would “take them by the throat. . . . They’re wretched people.”

  Luther’s brief to the princes, appearing in 1543, was titled On the Jews and Their Lies. In it, he returned to the savage rhetoric of his first lectures on the Psalms. The Jews, he wrote, were “boastful, arrogant rascals,” “real liars and bloodhounds,” the “vilest whores and rogues under the sun,” who, steeped in greed, “steal and murder where they can” and “teach their children to do likewise.” A Jew “is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts.” Luther credulously repeated the popular libels of the day, writing that the Jews “have been accused of poisoning water and wells, of kidnapping children, of piercing them through with an awl, of hacking them in pieces, and in that way secretly cooling their wrath with the blood of Christians, for all of which they have often been condemned to death by fire.” In light of all this, “we are even at fault in not slaying them. Rather, we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying, and defaming; we protect and shield their synagogues, houses, life, and property.”

  To give the Jews their due, Luther proposed a seven-point program. First, the princes should “set fire to their synagogues or schools” and “bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.” This was to be done “in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians.” Second, the houses of the Jews should similarly “be razed and destroyed, and they should be forced to lodge under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies.” Their prayer books and Talmudic writings should be taken from them and their rabbis forbidden to teach “on pain of loss of life and limb,” for th
ese “villains” infuse the people with their “poison, cursing, and blaspheming.” All safe-conducts on highways should be abolished for the Jews, “for they have no business in the countryside. . . . Let them stay at home.” In addition, they should be prohibited from practicing usury, and all their cash, silver, and gold should be taken and placed in safekeeping. Finally, young Jews and Jewesses should be given flails, axes, spades, or spindles and forced to “earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam.” If these measures did not succeed in subjugating the Jews, “we must drive them out like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all their other vices and thus merit God’s wrath and be damned with them.”

  The frenzied language and persecutory proposals of On the Jews and Their Lies strongly echoed the literature produced three decades earlier by Johannes Pfefferkorn, Jacob van Hoogstraten, and other anti-Jewish polemicists during the battle over Hebrew books. Clearly, Luther was drawing on that literature in preparing his own indictment. And he would work hard to get his program adopted. On May 6, 1543, Electoral Saxony issued a stern new mandate that barred the Jews from settling in or passing through the territory and that ordered the seizure of their property. The mandate referred specifically to On the Jews and Their Lies, and the elector hosted Luther on the day it was issued. The tract also helped convince Margrave Hans of Brandenburg-Küstrin to banish the Jews, and when Prince George expelled the Jews from Anhalt in June 1543, Luther thanked him. When, by contrast, counts Philip and Hans George of Mansfeld showed favor toward the Jews, Luther became so enraged that he said he wanted to kill a blaspheming Jew.

  In his hatred of the Jews, Luther was very much a product of medieval Christianity. As Erasmus had put it, “If it is Christian to detest the Jews, on this count we are all good Christians, and to spare.” Yet, in its fury and violence, On the Jews and Their Lies stood out. “Never before,” Josel of Rosheim wrote of the treatise, “has a Gelehrter, a scholar, advocated such tyrannical and outrageous treatment of our poor people.” And it was just one of several virulently anti-Jewish works Luther produced in this period. His savage Judaeophobia would inject a toxic strain into German Protestant culture, with calamitous results.

  As hard as it is to imagine a tract any viler than On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther came close with Against the Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil. He wrote it in 1545 after Pope Paul III, the successor to Clement VII (who had died in 1534), announced his intention of convening a council to address the pressing issues facing the Catholic Church. Luther was one of many who had long called for such a council, and now it was finally going to happen, in Trent, Italy. From the pope’s statements, however, Luther had concluded that the council’s main business would be not rectifying Catholic abuses but reversing Protestant gains—and destroying him personally.

  No one, he declared in his tract, would attend the council but “the miserable devil” and his “whoring children”—the pope, the cardinals, “and the rest of his devilish scum in Rome.” The pope was “a true werewolf,” a “farting ass,” “a brothel-keeper over all brothel-keepers and all vermin,” with “long donkey ears and accursed liar’s mouth!” Claiming the power of the keys, “the most hellish father” felt entitled to create whatever binding laws he liked, such as, “Whoever does not kiss my feet” and “lick my behind” is “guilty of a deadly sin and deep hell.” The papal court was made up of “Sodomists” and “hermaphrodites” who deserved being “struck down by lightning and thunder, burned by hellish fire,” and attacked by the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, leprosy, and carbuncles. “We should take” the pope, the cardinals, and the rest of the blasphemous “riffraff” in Rome and “tear out their tongues from the back, and nail them on the gallows.”

  Even more unhinged than the text of Against the Roman Papacy were its illustrations, which were designed by Luther and executed by Cranach. One showed the pope riding a sow while holding in his hand a pile of dung at which the animal eagerly sniffs. In another, the pope and cardinals hang from a crossbeam, their hands bound and heads in nooses. In the most notorious, a she-devil gives birth to the pope and cardinals through her anus. In the great flood of antipapal literature during the Reformation, the pope had never been so vilified. Against the Roman Papacy would add to the rancor that for decades had been mounting between Protestants and Catholics and that would continue to rage for centuries.

  Luther’s own congregants would feel his scourge. With no vice police as in Geneva, Wittenberg was prone to the usual misdemeanors, and Luther regularly denounced its residents for their stinginess, selfishness, and moral delinquency. On June 14, 1545, his exasperation boiled over. Since the people seemed incapable of change, he declared, it would be better for all if he gave up. On July 25, he left on an extended visit to Zeitz, thirty miles south of Leipzig, to settle a dispute between some pastors. From there he wrote to Katharina that his heart had grown cold. Tired of Wittenberg, he did not wish to return, and he raised the possibility of deeding the Black Cloister back to the elector. Luther referred to a type of lewd dance that had become popular in Wittenberg, in which a man spun his partner around, causing her skirt to flare open. In 1540 the University of Wittenberg had prohibited the dance, and Luther had frequently preached against it, but to his dismay it had persisted. “Away from this Sodom!” he wrote. He would rather “eat the bread of a beggar” than torture his old age “with the filth at Wittenberg, which destroys my hard and faithful work.”

  Luther’s statement caused an uproar in Wittenberg. Melanchthon and others at once traveled to Torgau to inform the electoral court of the gravity of the situation. The elector John Frederick sent his personal physician to find Luther and deliver a letter to him. The news of Luther’s departure from Wittenberg, he wrote, would only bring joy to his Catholic enemies. Had the elector been notified of his dissatisfaction, he could have taken steps to address it. After receiving the letter, Luther on August 16 traveled to Torgau to meet with the elector. The next day he returned to Wittenberg, and soon afterward he resumed preaching. At the end of 1545, the elector issued an ordinance against extravagant weddings, suggestive dances, and shouting in the streets. Luther doubted that these measures would be properly enforced, and he once again threatened to leave if no improvement occurred.

  For all of Luther’s disgruntlement, Wittenberg was now flourishing. When he had settled there nearly thirty-five years earlier, the town was a run-down huddle of weather-beaten shacks, rutted streets, and roaming pigs. Now the market square was bordered by stately stone mansions, including Lucas Cranach’s huge workshop-home complex. Enrollment at the university, which had fallen to around two hundred during the 1520s, now exceeded five hundred. Every year, more than one hundred pastors were ordained and sent out into the field to spread the gospel of justification by faith alone, and Wittenberg now had its own Latin school. Its main economic motor was the printing industry. Wittenberg was now Germany’s top publishing center, and Luther’s German Bible was a perennial bestseller. During his lifetime, ninety-one printings of the whole or parts of it would come off Wittenberg’s presses (with another 253 partial or complete editions printed elsewhere).

  In 1545, those presses issued a collection of Luther’s writings in Latin. In the preface he prepared for it, he reflected back over the early milestones of his career, including his attack on indulgences, his colloquy with Cajetan, the Leipzig disputation, the Miltitz interlude, and the actions of Albrecht of Mainz. Luther placed the entire blame for the upheaval on the archbishop, who, he maintained, “wanted to suppress my doctrine and have his money, acquired by the indulgences, saved.” Luther also described his discovery of the new gospel and the exultation it had brought: “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” With this account, Luther left to the world a stirring narrative of personal rebirth and transformation that would serve as a template for Christians for generations to come.

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bsp; The Black Cloister itself was now famous, with Katharina the celebrated wife, cook, brewer, and household manager and Luther the giant of history holding forth at the dinner table before teachers, ministers, students, and visiting dignitaries. The one jarring note was the racket produced by the new bastions being built around the city—part of an effort by John Frederick to turn Wittenberg into a “mighty fortress” in the face of the growing threat from Charles V. As the sound of picks and shovels drew near, Luther had a sense of foreboding about the fate of the humble Hippo on the Elbe.

  In early 1546, the counts of Mansfeld asked Luther for help in arbitrating a bitter dispute that had broken out among them about their inheritance. Luther was reluctant to go. His health had continued to decline, and his sixty-two-year-old frame had grown abnormally heavy. “I’m like a ripe stool, and the world’s like a giant anus, and so we’re about to let go of each other,” he remarked. But the dispute touched on his family’s interest in the smelting business, whose operations the counts had taken over, and so he agreed to intervene. On January 23, 1546, Luther, accompanied by his sons, Hans, Martin, and Paul, set off for Eisleben, where he planned to stay. As his clumsy carriage rumbled along the dreadful Thuringian roads, the shaking no doubt caused him great pain.