But he was not exactly eager to marry, in spite of the good advice he gave others about the advantageousness of marital life. He wrote, “Grow and multiply: that is a divine work which is not up to us to prevent or to permit, but it is as natural as I am a man and even more necessary than eating, drinking, sleeping, and being awake. It is implanted in our nature and kind as well as those parts of the body as are required for it. Man and woman shall be two souls and one body.”
So he had urged his friend Philipp Melanchthon to marry, not completely unselfishly, since he thus wanted the famous scholar to remain in Wittenberg. Moreover, a wife could better provide for the hardworking man than he could on his own.
Thus my honored teacher married Katharina Krapp, the daughter of Hans Krapp, a respected tailor in Wittenberg, and was initially not very happy, even spoke in a letter about a day of tribulation and of marriage as bondage sent from God. The modest comeliness of Katharina probably contributed less than Magister Philippus’s fear that she would discourage him from his work for the university and the Reformation. Later the marriage improved, and she had four children by him. Economically, things did not go as well for the Melanchthons as they did for my family, and I heard that Mother did not always praise the other Katharina—a situation that was probably mutual. It is also said that Frau Melanchthon was jealous of Mother. If there was reason to be so, it is no longer known.
As was noted, Father was not keen on getting married and did not suffer, as he said, under the monk’s vow of chastity. He said later, “With women, I had nothing to do other than a few times in the confession, and there I did not look at them. And other than the natural discharge at night, I was not troubled by sexual lust.”
Later he often spoke against the tyranny of celibacy and could quote the church fathers, and foremost Augustine (who still as an old man suffered from emissions), and Hieronymus: “When he felt his blood rushing he struck his breast with stones, but could not beat the maid from his heart.” Others such as Francis made snowballs, Benedict lay down in thorns, Bernard so castigated his body that it reeked abominably.
My mother related to me that after the uncertainties mentioned above, which included the fact that Father had previously had his eye on another escapee, Ave von Schönfeld, who in 1523 married the chemist’s assistant of Master Cranach, Dr. Basilius Axt (a beautifully drastic name more suitable for a surgeon, however), everything relating to the marriage went rather quickly. There is no doubt she adored the famous man, and as he asked the decisive question, she agreed without any reservation.
Father, by the way, did not lose sight of Ave: her husband, Dr. Axt, would not, without the influence of my father in AD 1525, have become town physician of Torgau and finally, in 1531, the personal physician of Duke Albrecht I of Brandenburg-Ansbach in Königsberg, whereby the family, one would assume, was well off. Twice before, Father had requested from the elector thirty guldens for Axt.
In addition to that, he interceded for her when it came to her parental inheritance, which her brother Ernst refused her because, as a former nun, she was not entitled to inherit. He wrote a letter to the Most Gracious Elector Johann Friedrich: “She, Ave, was one of the first nuns to escape from the cloister, an innocent woman misled to live a nun’s life. She is now an honest married woman, so that I think Ernst von Schönfeld is not worthy to be the brother of such a sister. To withhold her inheritance is a dishonor to the Gospel.” (And I, Paul, here should add that Father now and then exploited the Gospel for purposes that one can only understand after some lengthy reflection.)
My own research and memories as well as many sources suggest that there were two main reasons and one minor reason for my father’s final yet surprising decision to marry.
First, in view of the revolt of the peasants and the excesses mainly of the nobles, a tour through the regions of the rebellion strengthened in him the belief that the end of the world was near, at least his own death. And in spite of the legitimacy of their demands, the peasant mobs seemed to him to be more and more the helpers of the Devil, who wanted to destroy his new Gospel, and he wanted to set an example and outsmart the Devil. He wrote, “And to defy the Devil, I will take my Käthe as my lawful wife so that before I die I will be found in the state for which God has made me, and nothing of my previous popish life with its monkish and nunnish rubbish will any longer stain me.”
One can already see here that Father’s decision to marry was a rational or a religious decision rather than one based on lust of the flesh, which later did not prevent the emergence of a lasting marital love. My brother Johannes told me that Father had said that marital love is like God’s love: “God does not love the sinner because he is beautiful; rather he becomes beautiful because God loves him.” So a man does not marry a woman because she is desirable; rather she is desirable because he has married her.
Father said later, “I would not exchange my Käthe for the kingdom of France or for Venice, because she was a gift from God for me, and I in turn was given to her by him.”
The second main reason is connected with my grandparents in Mansfeld, primarily my grandfather. As his son in 1505 went into the monastery and renounced a promising secular career by studying jurisprudence, he was intensely disappointed and even said that during the famous thunderstorm in Stotternheim, Martin had been deceived by a specter.
The marriage, Father felt, would after all be a step into the secular world, away from the monkish, a step toward reconciliation.
The additional reason was that my grandfather feared that the events of the times, mainly pestilence and war, could cause the extinction of the family, and my father’s marriage, with the hope of children, might prevent that.
It can be seen that on the whole my father had good reasons for marriage: in marriage, he believed, a person follows God’s creative will, and the original sin postulated by the church fathers and put on the same level with concupicentia, evil lust, through marriage is transformed into something good.
A maid, Father wrote, who swaddles a child and cooks him porridge, even if he is the child of a whore, fulfills God’s will much more than all the monks and nuns of the earth who, for all their self-proclaimed holiness, cannot refer to God.
I beg my Christian readers to consider that my mother as the person most affected by these internal and external struggles was nolens volens involved, and I only now come to the most dramatic of all the events.
What an outcry arose as my parents’ wedding took place! Not just cries from the old church that Luther was a lecher unable to control his urges and therefore needing to have a young, fresh virgin and even a noble little nun. (At the same time, it was said that our Frau Mother had worked in a public house or had been a disreputable dancer.)
And what was the opinion of my father’s friend, my venerated teacher, Melanchthon, and with him other supporters of the Reformation? In Greek, on the 16th of June, 1525, he wrote Joachim Camerarius, his friend, who stayed in Wittenberg at that time. I translate for the reader:
Unexpectedly, Luther has married the Bora woman without informing even one of his friends in advance of his intention. He invited to dinner in the evening only Pomeranus, as Bugenhagen is mostly called, the painter Lucas Cranach, and Dr. Apel. You might well wonder that in such serious times, when the true believers suffer everywhere, this man indulges and compromises his good reputation. It seems all the worse because right now Germany needs his mind and authority more than ever. This can only be explained in the following way: The man is very easy to seduce, and so the nuns, who stalked him everywhere, have ensnared him. Although he is a noble and worthy man, perhaps the frequent contacts with the nuns have weakened him and fanned the fire in him. So, I believe, he has been trapped and fallen into this changed way of life at a most inopportune time.
But then the Magister continued, and seemed to depart from the apparent jealousy:
Now what has happened has to be accepted in good nature and is not to be criticized. Because, as I see it, this way of
life—the marriage life—although low, is yet more sacred and pleasing to God than celibacy. Moreover, I hope that matrimony makes him more dignified and, through it, he will lose some of the buffoonery that we have often censured. Through many of the missteps of the saints of old, God has shown us that we should use His Word as the touchstone, and not go by the appearance and the personality of a man but rather by His Word alone. And it is also impious, vice versa, to condemn the teaching because of the missteps of the teacher.
It is a great pity that Magister Philippus, so knowledgeable a man, was unable to see what Father had done in the right light. All the more so as Father had not kept hidden that his marriage had proceeded not out of fleshly love or lust but to reaffirm what he had taught.
This confirms completely the word of King Antigonos, who when asked why he brought a sacrifice to God, said; to protect him from his friends, because from his enemies he could protect himself. Also an example is the statement of the lawyer and legal adviser, Hieronymus Schurff, who had accompanied Father on an earlier difficult journey to Worms: “If a monk marries, so will all the world and also the Devil laugh, and his purpose of improving the Church will fail.” My father believed rather that the Devil would cry at his marriage. King Henry VIII of England—of all persons, I might add here—is believed to have sent to my father and the Reformation a devastating broadside in which he insinuated that Father had undertaken the whole Reformation only to satisfy his own lust. This was, of course, before this king broke with the popish church in order to divorce his wife, Katherine of Aragon, and to marry Anne Boleyn. Previously, for his writing of AD 1521, Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum (Defense of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther), he had been honored by the pope with the title Defensor Fidei, Defender of the Faith. It is pleasing to note that my father had capably responded with his open letter, Martinus Lutherus contra Henricum Regem Angliae.
My mother’s decision to marry Martin Luther under these circumstances—which could not have remained hidden from her—must have required a great deal of courage.
The couple was consecrated by Bugenhagen, preacher at the town and parish Church of St. Mary’s, and then in the presence of the guests was conducted fully clothed to the bridal bed, which had been prepared for them. This is an old custom intended to prove through the successful uniting of the flesh before witnesses, the virginity of the bride. Although only symbolic, this process and what followed in the solitude of the bedchamber must have caused great embarrassment for these two human beings, chaste and untrained in things of the flesh. Father would have suffered even more under these circumstances than Mother, who in the cloister had opportunities, notwithstanding the imminent penalties, to have become acquainted through her sister nuns, above all Ave von Schönfeld, with the desires of love of another person, be they man or woman. Also, there were confessors in the cloisters who knew how to seductively approach their penitents and to give pleasure to themselves and their wards. This was of course done in the name of Christ and grounded in the cloister’s pledge of obedience. So one can assume that Mother in the bridal bed would with experienced hands have made the process easier for my father.
What my mother must have gone through moves me even today to great pity and hurt. It was the general belief that marriage between a monk and a nun would bring forth the Antichrist. Though Erasmus ridiculed this belief when he said, “Then the world must be full of Antichrists,” it can still be imagined what fears and burdens my mother must have endured, which only found relief for both parents when the midwife handed them a healthy baby boy, not with a twisted foot or a withered left hand. That was my eldest brother, Johannes, born on the 7th of June, AD 1526.
To protect her motherhood from the Antichrist, in whom all Christians are taught to believe, required the most solid faith of my mother and much encouragement from my father in view of the overwhelming rage of all enemies but also of many friends of the Reformation.
My mother heard people whisper that Father was the son of the Devil, who under the guise of a traveling gem trader had gained entrance into the house of a Wittenberg burgher and seduced the daughter. The bishop who spread this rumor from the pulpit did not care that our father was born not in Wittenberg but in Eisleben.
So Mother had to fight the additional fear that she might be married to the son of the Devil. As my mother told me, not without me first taking a pledge that her oldest son would never discover it, she had before the birth as well as afterward often dreamed of the Antichrist, who in many guises met her as the enemy of the Lamb, as Judas Iscariot, as the servant of Belial, as the second Beast of the Abyss with the sign 666, and even—and this was the worst dream—in the guise of a sweet boy, like the Christ Child in the crib, who smiled angelically at her. She revealed to me that she often fearfully checked on Johannes during his childhood and adolescence but saw nothing unusual. For the rest of us children she had no such fear.
The celebration of my parents’ wedding on the 13th of June, 1525, proceeded more or less in a hurry, which caused Magister Philippus to complain audibly. The wedding was attended by friends from Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach, Justus Jonas, Johann Apel, and Johannes Bugenhagen. Fourteen days later, again on auspicious Tuesday, the so-called feast took place, to which friends and relatives were invited, most importantly among them his parents from Mansfeld, who all attended church and the feast afterward. Magister Philippus, despite his initial reservations, let himself be persuaded to attend.
My father was very cheerful concerning the feast and wrote to Leonard Koppe, who had assisted in freeing the nuns, “Bring a barrel of the best Torgau beer. I will pay the delivery charge and everything else honestly. I would have sent a cart but didn’t know if it would be appropriate, as the beer must be well rested and cold so that it tastes good. If it does not meet these demands, you will be punished so that you shall drink it all alone.”
The gifts were plentiful: the good town of Wittenberg gave twenty guldens and a barrel of Einbeck beer; the gracious elector Johann, later called Johann the Steadfast, successor to Frederick the Wise, gave one hundred guldens. And now comes the reason why I recollect all this: I want to show my mother in all her daily cleverness wherein one should consider and remember that she had not long before escaped the closed world of the cloister: Cardinal Albrecht, elector, archbishop of Magdeburg and Mainz, archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire for Germany (Archicancellarius per Germaniam), and thus the most powerful man after the emperor, a great enemy of Father’s, the protector of the seller of indulgences, Johann Tetzel, sent twenty guldens for the wedding, which my father angrily rejected because it was obviously a ploy by the cardinal to show how easily Luther could be taken in by money. So the cardinal’s servant, who had to deliver the money, was sent away by Father. But below at the front door, as the emissary attempted to escape from my father’s wrath, stood my mother and seized the guldens. She was naturally smart enough not to tell Father about it at the time but rather quietly include the money in the household purse.
Reader, I must insert here what made Father later, at the end of the 1530s, particularly angry with the cardinal. But I suspect that the reasons of justice and mercy, which my father gave for his attacks against the man, were not decisive. His concern was his new Gospel, whose sworn enemy the cardinal was. Father simply used the cardinal’s apparent infringement in the case that I am about to relate as a palatable reason to rail against him with the crudest words without giving the legal side of the case appropriate recognition.
In January AD 1539 appeared his writ “Against the Bishop of Magdeburg, Albrecht Cardinal,” an elaboration of comments already put forth in a sermon, then transcribed and printed, which in a most ruthless manner laid open the bishop’s failures.
Cardinal Albrecht had in Halle a trusted servitor, money manager, and builder, Hans Schenitz, also called Hans von Schönitz, with whom he conducted all sorts of unholy financial business. Now the estates in the archbishopric complained of Albrecht’
s ever-increasing demands for money, which sums they did not want to give before all the approved expenditures had been accounted for. This, Schönitz was anxious to avoid because of the accounting demanded from him, but the archbishop assured him of his protection. Now Albrecht needed money and also a scapegoat, so he sacrificed his servitor and imprisoned him in the castle of Giebichenstein in AD 1534. Schönitz was interrogated under torture and finally confessed, with signature and seal, to having committed theft from the archbishopric. (Shortly before his death, however, he recanted.) For this, according to Saxon law, the death penalty applied if the stolen sums reached a certain amount. He was sentenced, hastily carted to the Galgenberg Gallows Hill, hoisted up, and for two years left hanging there till the wind broke him free. His goods were confiscated to the benefit of Albrecht.
I will not deny that Albrecht later consented to a certain compensation for the Schönitz family—not, however, because he regretted his evil deed but rather because he feared my father and his accusative writings.
Renowned jurists, including Hieronymus Schurff from Wittenberg, confirmed the legality of the archbishop’s proceedings and even the death sentence, although this does not absolve him from blame. But the archbishop was not the accused; rather, he was the accuser and the victim of the theft, the latter, however, not without his involvement.
It was said in Halle that Albrecht expressed satisfaction at the gallows death of Schönitz and even sent a servant to convince himself of the successful hanging. They say in Halle that even after hanging and drying in the wind, Schönitz’s body bled anew when Albrecht’s servants stepped beneath the gallows. Also, at various times mandrakes started to grow under the hanged, and if people tried to pull them out they shrieked horribly as if lamenting the victim’s death.
Shadows of My Father Page 4