Katharina and Martin Luther

by Michelle DeRusha

  “Religion and superstition made up an important part of most aspects of Catholic daily life,” adds Reformation historian James Anderson. “Church and monastery bells continually reminded the inhabitants of towns and villages of the presence of God and the danger of committing sins.”3 Sin is the key word here. Sin, with its power to damn a person to hell for eternity, was a terrifying force during Luther’s time, and most people, Luther included, did everything within their means to avoid it and repent of it. Priests who listened to confessions often referred to detailed handbooks that catalogued sins of thought, word, and action (including acts against God and neighbor and the seven deadly sins); sins committed with the senses or various parts of the body—including sins of the head, neck, ears, eyes, nose, mouth, tongue, gullet, hands, stomach, genitals, heart, knees, and feet; as well as sins committed specifically against the seven sacraments; sins against the seven virtues; sins against the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; sins against the fruits of the Holy Spirit; and sins against the eight beatitudes of the Gospels.4 There was a potential sin connected to virtually every body part, every thought, and every action.

  Death, Death, Everywhere Death

  Driving the fear of sin was a pervasive fear of death, the presence of which was unavoidable as people witnessed wave after wave of the plague decimate their cities and towns. Originating in China, the Black Death reached Europe’s shores in 1348, and by the time the first wave of the pandemic played itself out three years later, it’s estimated that 25 million people—almost a third of Europe’s population—had fallen victim to the pestilence.5 The disease was gruesome, virulent, and frighteningly efficient. People who went to bed healthy were often discovered dead the next morning; entire families were killed in a matter of days. “In men and women alike,” wrote fourteenth-century Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, who witnessed and survived the Black Death, “at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.”6 Blood and pus seeped from swellings, followed by multiple, worsening symptoms—fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains—and finally, death. In short, death by plague was a horrific way to die and a horrific way to watch someone die.

  No one knew what caused the Black Death or how it was transmitted. Some suggested the disease took on the form of a spirit: “Instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick,” claimed one medieval doctor.7 Others were convinced it was God’s punishment for sins like greed, blasphemy, heresy, fornication, and worldliness, and thus sought to rid society of those they considered heretics and sinners. As a result, some people reasoned that if they punished themselves thoroughly enough, they might be spared God’s wrath. Upper-class men, for instance, joined processions of flagellants that traveled from town to town and engaged in public displays of penance and punishment, beating themselves and one another with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople watched. They repeated this display three times a day for a month, and then would move on to the next town and begin the process again.8

  Physicians, who had no idea the disease was both airborne and transmitted via fleas, relied on popular but crude techniques such as bloodletting and boil-lancing (practices that were dangerous as well as unsanitary) and superstitious rituals such as burning aromatic herbs and bathing in rosewater or vinegar, to no avail. “Dead bodies filled every corner,” wrote Boccaccio. “Most of them were treated in the same manner by the survivors, who were more concerned to get rid of their rotting bodies than moved by charity towards the dead. With the aid of porters, if they could get them, they carried the bodies out of the houses and laid them at the door; where every morning quantities of the dead might be seen. They then were laid on biers or, as these were often lacking, on tables.”9

  Three hundred years after its initial devastating outbreak, the Black Death was still a pervasive threat in Europe. Two of Luther’s brothers died of plague in 1505, around the time Luther entered the Augustinian monastery. Katharina and Luther lived through three outbreaks in Wittenberg—in 1527, 1535, and 1539—and Katharina cared for plague victims in their home after they were married. In Strasbourg alone, a city of about 25,000 inhabitants, 16,000 were killed by the plague in one year.10

  Even when citizens weren’t contending with outbreaks of the plague, death was a pervasive presence and threat. Life expectancy at birth during Luther’s time was, by our twenty-first-century standards, shockingly low—twenty-eight to thirty years old for men and a bit higher for women.11 The risk of death for childbearing women was extraordinarily high. In early modern England, for example, childbirth accounted for one-fifth of all deaths among women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, an occurrence so common it didn’t even warrant commentary at the time.12 Low life expectancy was due in large part to the extremely high infant mortality rate. In general, approximately one-quarter of all babies born alive during the early modern period in Europe died in infancy, and another quarter died before reaching puberty, a rate that held steady even into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 In Florence, Italy, at the height of the Renaissance, for instance, 61 percent of all infants were either stillborn or died within six months.14 Nearly one child in two in early modern Europe failed to live to the age of ten, and two live births were required to produce one fully matured adult.15 Luther’s own family did not escape these ruthless statistics. At least one of his brothers was stillborn, a death his mother attributed to a female neighbor, whom she was convinced was a witch,16 and Luther and Katharina lost two out of their six children. One daughter lived only a few months, and the other died as a young girl.

  Even the cultural imagery popular at the time would have influenced Luther’s views of life and death. Medieval Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings such as The Last Judgment, The Seven Deadly Sins, and the third panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych depict disturbing scenes of death, torture, demons, half-human–half-animal creatures, and menacing machines, all portrayed in ominous, brooding colors. In one scene, for instance, a monster with a catlike head and an ogre’s muscled body swallows a naked man whole. In another, the gaping maw of a giant, melting face seems to inhale dozens of writhing, naked bodies.

  Likewise, the series of fifteen woodcuts depicting the Apocalypse by Luther’s contemporary, Albrecht Durer, offers unsettling scenes from the book of Revelation, complete with menacing demons, skeletal horsemen, and the writhing dragon with seven heads. Even the Gothic architecture of the churches and cathedrals—spiked spires, flying buttresses, pointed arches, soaring vaulted ceilings, stone facades, and brooding gargoyles hunched high over city streets—provoked a mix of fear and awe. While the gargoyles often served a practical purpose—they were part of the rain spout and gutter system of the building (rainwater typically exited away from the building out of the gargoyles’ mouths)—their menacing demon, lion, and dragon faces also offered citizens a reminder and a warning: evil resided outside the church walls, salvation within.17 Themes of evil, death, and damnation so pervaded the artwork and popular imagery of the time, it would have been difficult to escape their influence.

  Fear of death prompted Luther to make his thunderstorm vow, and fear of sin and eternal damnation resulting from it prompted him to honor that vow. To make a vow to a saint was to make a promise to God, and to break such a vow was to commit a mortal sin, for “it was to admit that one did not truly believe in the God to whom the vow was made.”18 A person living in the late Middle Ages absolutely did not want to commit a mortal sin, the worst kind of sin imaginable, and risk plummeting to hell. Luther refused to pay an eternal price by breaking his vow to St. Anne and God. He entered the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt in July of 1505.

  A Model Monk

  Luther once remarked that
the devil is quiet during a novice’s first year in a monastery.19 The new monk was relatively content during his early months behind the cloister walls. Much like Katharina in the Nimbschen convent, Luther performed the Daily Office, which began around 2:00 a.m. and concluded with the chanting by the cantor of the “Salve Regina,” followed by the “Ave Maria” and the “Pater Noster” at the end of the day.20 He led a largely silent and austere life, occupying a single cell that consisted of a bed with a straw mattress and one wool blanket. The cell was unheated, so when it was extremely cold, Luther and his fellow monks were allowed to gather in the heated common room. He did not speak with the other monks, save a few basic hand gestures, and his gaze was always directed downward, his hands hidden deep in the roomy sleeves of his robe.

  Luther quickly took to the routines and rituals of monastic life, and as Richard Friedenthal points out, “Not a murmur of rebellion, or of the slightest disobedience, [has] ever been reported. The quiet and discipline did the intractable young man good.”21 From the start, Luther set out to become the model monk, and he did everything by the book. He even chose his monastic order based on his desire to pursue the most righteous and holy life possible. From the dozens of monasteries in Erfurt, Luther chose the Augustinian monastery, set on the bank of the Gera River and surrounded by a high, thick wall. Only a few steps from his lodgings were the less rigid Benedictine, Dominican, and Franciscan monasteries, as well as a number of other orders, but Luther chose the way of the Observant Augustinians. As James Kittelson acknowledges, “To be an Observant Augustinian was to engage in serious spiritual work.”22

  This portrait of Martin Luther as an Augustinian monk was painted by the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder after Luther died, circa 1546. [Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

  Even as a novice Luther fasted for days on end, drinking only the tiniest sips of water or beer and not allowing a crumb to pass his lips. He went above and beyond the Daily Office and prayed constantly. At night, he threw his wool blanket to the floor and exposed his flesh to the frigid air. When he was given his first Bible, he pored over the Latin text, memorizing the verses until he knew the book almost entirely by heart and was able to quote from it extensively with ease.

  Luther even made a pilgrimage to Rome. He traveled more than nine hundred miles on foot, through the Swiss Alps, the path lined with crosses marking the spots where travelers had met their deaths; over the Italian Apennines in a treacherous snowstorm; and finally, two months later, into the Holy City. At his first glimpse of the city, Luther threw himself to the ground, crying, “Hail, holy city of Rome!” During the month he spent there, he toured all the most famous sites and viewed the most famous relics, including the rope with which the disciple Judas hanged himself after he had betrayed Jesus and a “stone with a furrow as broad as a man’s fingers caused by Peter’s tears after he had denied Christ.”23 Luther even purchased indulgences as remittance for his past sins and climbed the holy stairway at the Lateran Palace on his knees, reciting a “Pater Noster” on every step, as was the custom. When he reached the top he received a plenary indulgence, which he prayed would release the soul of his grandfather from purgatory.24 “I believed everything,” Luther later said.25 Much later, however, in a sermon only months before his death, Luther said he stood at the top of the stairs and asked himself, “Who can know if it is so?”—suggesting that even then he had reservations about works-based faith.26

  “I was a good monk,” Luther said, “and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work.”27 Try as he might, though, Luther could not live up to his expectations of being the most perfect, most holy, most sinless monk. He badgered his confessor, sometimes confessing his sins for as long as six hours in a single day.28 Yet when he finally left the confessional, relieved to have been absolved of every last sin, the thought would strike him, “What a fine confession you just made,” and, recognizing with dismay the sin of pride, he would head back to the confessional once again.29 Luther didn’t believe the doctrine of confession was flawed (as he would come to believe later), but only that he had not yet been able to achieve the perfect confession. It was torture, and as time went on and the frustrating cycle continued, Luther’s fear of God’s wrath intensified, and he began to succumb to depression and despair.

  The Agony of Doubt

  Fear of God’s wrath was not a new experience for Luther. As a young boy he spent Mass paralyzed with fear as he gazed at the stained-glass window in his village church, the image depicting a stern Jesus gripping the sword of justice. He saw God as an angry, looming, threatening presence, always watching, always knowing, poised to punish the slightest transgression. Standing in front of the crucifix, Luther trembled, dizzy and faint with fear; the thought of the Eucharist filled him with nausea. There were times Luther felt that he hated God. He knew that “hating God was the ultimate blasphemy . . . he was hopelessly damned,” yet he couldn’t help himself.30 Luther was terrified of his God.

  The hours, weeks, and months Luther spent in his cell only exacerbated these inclinations toward despair. With so much time on his hands to brood over his sins and confess and re-confess, he spiraled into an obsessive cycle that led him deeper and deeper into depression. “When I saw Christ,” he stated dramatically many years later, “it seemed to me as if I were seeing the devil.”31 Even as late as 1515, he stated in his lectures on the book of Romans that “he felt often that he must despair of God, and that whenever he thought of the test that lay before him at the end of life his heart trembled and shook. How could God be merciful to him?”32

  Luther’s spiritual director was remarkably patient with him, despite being forced to listen to hour after hour of confession and angst from the new monk. At one point he tried to explain the nature of God’s love, declaring to Luther, “God is not angry with you; you are angry with Him.”33 Luther would often come away from these confessions and conversations with a sense of peace, but the consolation never lasted long. Although he believed in repentance and absolution in general, Luther couldn’t bring himself to believe it was intended specifically for him.

  “Despair—the horrifying thought that God’s mercy is not for me or that I have fallen too far for it to help me—was the one unforgiveable sin,” says Kittelson. “It was the sin against the Holy Spirit, and no one who died with it in their heart could escape the fires of hell.”34 People who lived in medieval and early modern Europe were terrified of dying with the feeling of despair in their hearts, so much so that depictions of angels and devils wrestling for the soul of a dying person were extremely popular images at the time, as was the prevalence of deathbed confessions and declarations. Loved ones often prodded a dying person to commend aloud their souls to God so that the declaration could be heard by those surrounding the deathbed and by God above. In fact, in Luther’s time it was considered a grave sign of God’s judgment and subsequent damnation to hell if a person died in his sleep or if he was suffering too greatly to utter any convicting last words.35 That’s why when Luther himself lay on his deathbed, his close friend Justus Jonas and the local preacher asked him, “Reverend father, are you ready to die trusting in your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine which you have taught in his name?” They were able to report to his detractors that Luther had replied with a clearly audible yes, thereby ensuring his entrance into eternal life.36

  Luther’s struggles with depression and despair during his monastic years weren’t uncommon, although it seems he suffered more than most monks. These were the occupational hazards of the monastic calling, specifically: accidie or acedia (sloth and torpor of the spirit) and scruple (a feeling of doubt or hesitance).37 Monks all across Europe had slang terms for the kind of spiritual and mental wrestling that went on behind the cloiste
r walls. They called the feeling of regret or frustration with spiritual shortcomings as being in cloaca, literally, “in the toilet” or “in the dumps.”38 Luther called his attacks of doubt and despair Anfechtung, an interesting word choice that can mean “temptation” or “doubt,” but also “challenging,” “contesting,” or “disputing,” implying that Luther felt, at times, like he was arguing with God or even that God was intentionally inhibiting his faith.39

  Luther found himself at an impasse. He knew that for his sins to be forgiven, they needed to be confessed, and in order for them to be properly confessed, every last one needed not only to be accounted for but truly repented of. The body and the heart had to be expunged of every impurity. The problem for Luther was that true repentance and absolution seemed attainable for only a few minutes or, at most, a few hours at a time. Even when he could stop his body from sinning, he struggled to keep his mind and heart pure.

  Ultimately it was his mentor and confessor, Johann von Staupitz, who finally put an end to Luther’s torment. “If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz,” Luther said himself, “I should have sunk in hell.”40 Aware that the traditional monastic life was doing the young monk more harm than good, von Staupitz ordered Luther out of the monastery in 1512—after seven years behind the cloister walls—and back into the world to teach at the nearby University of Wittenberg. Luther would still be a monk—in fact, upon arriving in Wittenberg, he moved into the Augustinian monastery known as the Black Cloister—but he would no longer live a contemplative, cloistered life.