11 The mysteries of the Bible can only be nodded to here. The Gifts of the Jews and Desire of the Everlasting Hills examine its texts (and the unity of its two compilations) in some depth.
l2 Or other highly lucrative ecclesiastical benefice. It did not refer to an overburdened priest attempting to serve two or more poor parishes.
13 Simony was named for Simon Magus, a sorcerer who makes an appearance in Chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles, asking to buy from the apostles the power to bestow the Holy Spirit, in later centuries imagined to be a specific capability of a bishop.
14 The early Christians thought of all the members of the church together as a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5 and 9); private confession was invented in Ireland about the seventh century AD (see How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 176ff.); the word “sacrament” originally referred to a pagan Roman legal or military obligation. Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century referred to the faithful dead as passing through a purgatorial fire, but Purgatory as a place like Heaven or Hell would take centuries more to be fully imagined.
15 Friars, supposedly paupers, were enjoined by canon law to walk, never ride, but any bishop could dispense them from this rule for a supposedly greater good.
16 Albrecht’s collection included such items as some of the mud God had used to fashion Adam, branches of the Burning Bush from which God had spoken to Moses, the finger with which the apostle Thomas had traced the scar in the side of the risen Jesus, and, most precious of all, several vials of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk. Frederick’s collection included similar items.
17 Fex (or faex), the plural of which is feces (or faeces), can mean dregs or refuse, but here there is no doubt about Luther’s meaning. Whether writing in Latin or German, he seldom missed an opportunity for a little bathroom humor.
18 If a particular thesis came subsequently to be accepted by a majority of academics, it could end up as part of the curriculum, to be taught by lecturers and memorized by students. See this page.
19 These are the words of Jerome’s Latin translation. Literally, they should be translated as “Do penance.” The actual Greek of the New Testament—Metanoeite—means literally “Change your mind” (or, more loosely, “Change your heart, opinion, or attitude”). It is less prescriptive and surely has nothing to do with the sacrament of Penance. See Desire of the Everlasting Hills, pages 69ff.
20 Crassus was a legendary Roman profiteer of the first century BC who, like our vulture capitalists, made his fortune on the misfortunes of others.
IV
REFORMATION!
LUTHER STEPS FORWARD
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
The Merchant of Venice
1518–1521: FROM DISPUTE TO DIVIDE
Much of what happened next was fairly predictable. Though the Theses were the work of an exceedingly pious monk who had no thought, at this point, of preaching open rebellion against the papal establishment, the pope and his supporters—that is, the personnel and machinery of the entire Roman Catholic Church—reacted much like a unified, living body gathering its strength to expel an aggressive infection. The intellectual assault represented by the Theses was simply too explicit, too extensive, and too memorably articulated to be ignored. This pushed far beyond the in-jokes and allusive indirection of Erasmus’s satires. One didn’t just raise an ironic eyebrow and titter politely behind one’s hand. One was forced to take a stand, stare aut pro aut contra, to come out for or against.
It is tempting, as we look backward to a past that will soon be half a millennium gone, to caricature its principal players: Erasmus, the realistic, immensely learned critic, can so easily be turned into Erasmus the self-protective cynic; Luther, the scrupulously sensitive, wounded intellectual, can be neatly forced to play the fulminating, hysterical extremist, very nearly the psychotic. The latter is the picture that the famous psychologist Erik Erikson painted of his subject in Young Man Luther, invoking twentieth-century clinical clichés—Luther’s supposed fear and hatred of his father, his pathologically induced constipation—that have no convincing basis in the historical record. Luther obviously loved his father, a demanding man, no different from other responsible fathers of his time and place, all of whom—as well as mothers and teachers—thought it imperative to beat children into obedience and conformity. Luther did experience constipation, but most notably in the period in which he was forced into hiding and could not exercise. Luther’s supposed obsession with feces, as illustrated by his conversation, was no different from that of northern European contemporaries. The refined Thomas More’s talk and writing were hardly less full of what an analyst of our time might deem “excessive anality.”
Yes, Luther was a dramatically sensitive human being of a type we have all met. Despite his immersion in the forms and spirit of medieval monasticism—and specifically in the pessimistic severities of Augustinian spirituality—he never gave off the aura of a medieval saint, united mystically to the Godhead and awesomely in control of the passions of his lower nature. Rather, he confessed his personal flaws, publicly and often. And, despite the quirky, neurotic behavior of the novice Luther, the man wasn’t nuts, at least not most of the time.
What is perhaps most refreshing about him is the zinging, often self-deprecating, humor of his growing defiance—what we must retrospectively name his courage, his monumental courage, a demonstration that may be possible only to those who are genuinely humble. As he grew older, he would realistically evaluate his strengths and weaknesses and never overrate his talents. “I am the ripe shit,” he confided to dinner guests as he was reaching the old age of sixty and had scarcely two years left to live. “But then the world is a wide asshole, and soon we shall part.”
Receptivity to challenge is not a virtue of official Catholicism, then or now. As we watch in mute horror the astounding unresponsiveness of the worldwide Catholic episcopate to the seemingly endless contemporary scandals of pedophile priests, we learn that the episcopal repertoire is generally confined to a sequence that begins in blank denial (What on earth are you talking about?), is followed by gestures of false reform (Here is our extensive program of self-correction),1 and ends in the huffy pulling of rank (How dare you!). How much more so was this the expectable pattern in sixteenth-century Europe, which had never experienced a successful challenge to its dominant hierarchy.
What saved Luther and his growing bands of supporters from the fate of the Lollards and the Hussites—that is, from being hunted down and burned at the stake—was the growing power of Europe’s secular princes, no longer simply civil servants to ecclesiastical princes. But such protectors would in due course take their own costly exactions. To flee from the arms of the Roman Church to the arms of the territorial nobility would prove to be something of a devil’s bargain.
To begin with, however, the German (or Germanic)2 nobility looked like a good bet to Luther and to many of the religious dissenters who would follow in his wake. The Alps defined a chasm that was at least as cultural as it was geological. When as a young monk Luther made his one trip beyond the Germanic lands—over the Alps into Italy in early 1511,3 in the very time when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling—he was scandalized by what he saw: men pissing shamelessly in public throughout the streets of Rome; priests hurrying through their masses without appropriate reverence and even telling the reverent Brother Martin to hurry up so they could make use of his assigned altar (no doubt to buzz through their endowed masses); bishops and cardinals openly patronizing prostitutes and keeping catamites; general irreverence and a sense that everything and everyone in society was for sale. For the rest of his life, there was no put-down Luther found more cutting than to dismiss a man as “an Italian.”
Even today the divide between the customs o
f northern and southern Europe remains vivid and can lead quickly and easily to either misunderstanding or just an ugly display of national prejudice. This continuing divide lies even at the heart of Europe’s current economic crisis. (Why should prudent Germans and Finns bail out improvident Greeks, Irish,4 Portuguese, Spaniards, and—especially—Italians?) In Luther’s day, as the universal language of Latin receded and was replaced by national tongues, by a gathering wave of books and broadsides printed in the vernacular, and by more consciously held national identities, the contrast between the solid northern burgher and the slippery southerner seemed evident. Nor was this an age in which tolerance for difference was lauded as a virtue.
In early 1518, Luther published his first work in German, Sermon on Grace and Indulgence, which restated arguments central to the Theses. Indulgences, wrote Luther, were for lazy Christians, who should not be buying them with their surplus funds but turning over whatever money they did not need to poor people. In August 1518, Luther published his Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses in Latin. Its purpose was to defend his theological orthodoxy against the accusations, mounting on all sides, that he was a heretic. He sent a copy to the pope, along with a respectful letter of introduction. From now on, Luther’s life would be one of heroic hard work—of almost ceaseless writing, in both defense and accusation, and of not a few public appearances in which he would attempt to explain himself to his audiences, some warmly sympathetic, others chillingly condemnatory.
Between 1518 and 1521, Luther made four public appearances in cities beyond Wittenberg—in a time when most people seldom ventured beyond the nearest market town—and published (in addition to the works cited above) eight seminal essays. Indeed, between the Theses of 1517 and his death in early 1546, Luther would write and subsequently publish, on average, a new work every two weeks. In the period of public appearances, and largely as a result of growing opposition, many of his opinions took a more radical turn, after which the course of his intellectual development seemed determined and the historical outcomes irreversible.
In April, Luther set out on foot southeast across Germany for the University of Heidelberg and was received everywhere along his route as a celebrity, greeted enthusiastically even by a local bishop. In his public disputation on Augustinian questions of grace and human nature, he impressed everyone. Martin Bucer, who was in the audience and would become one of his principal intellectual supporters, was fascinated: “[Luther’s] sweetness in answering is remarkable, his patience in listening is incomparable … his answers, so brief, so wise, and drawn from the Holy Scriptures, easily made all his hearers his admirers.” As Richard Marius, one of Luther’s more recent and judicious biographers, remarks: “We could wish that Luther had kept that tone throughout his life. He did not.”
In August, Luther ventured even farther south to the city of Augsburg, where the German Diet, or quasi-parliament, was convening in the presence of the old emperor Maximilian. Pushing sixty, the emperor was fixated on his own approaching death—he always traveled with his coffin—and much more focused on securing as his successor his eighteen-year-old grandson Charles, son of Philip the Handsome and Juana la Loca, than he was on theological questions. Maximilian would manage to secure Charles’s succession by bribing key electors with funds supplied liberally by (who else?) the Fuggers—to the tune of 850,000 gulden in all.
Also present was the papal legate, the Dominican Jacopo di Vio, who called himself Tommaso Cajetan—in tribute to Thomas Aquinas and his own Italian hometown of Gaeta. (In a world where surnames were just coming into vogue and there was no such thing as a defined legal name, many, especially among the intellectuals, took names they felt suited them better than the ones they were born with.) Cardinal Cajetan represented the interests of the pope, who was mainly concerned with preventing the accession of Charles—Francis, the French king, was his preferred candidate—and encouraging a crusade against the Turks. But there was also the bother of that annoying little Augustinian, who had to be put firmly in his place.
Cajetan, whose intellectual contributions are still occasionally praised by right-wing Catholics, was in reality a nap-inducing theologian, more Aristotelian than Aristotle, more Thomistic than Thomas Aquinas; and at Augsburg, where the air was buzzing with intrigue, Cajetan was at any rate wearing his political, not his theological, hat. Luther always looked forward to a debate or at least a lively exchange of views. Cajetan the Italian diplomat simply expected submission. Only after the principal business of the Diet was concluded and Luther had been kept waiting for six days was he allowed to meet with the cardinal, who offered not a conversation but the opportunity for Luther to recant on his knees. After a few mannerly sentences, the meeting devolved into a shouting match, Luther insisting that the matter of whether the pope had the power to release souls from Purgatory be put before a council of the universal church, Cajetan screaming, “Gersonista!” which he thought an unanswerable rebuff. (Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris in the early fifteenth century and much admired for both his intellectual accomplishments and his genuinely spiritual orientation, was a principal architect of Conciliarism, the theory that only a general council, not the pope, can be said to hold ultimate earthly authority in the church. The theory presaged the eventual development of representative democracy in the Western world.)
At the University of Leipzig, much closer to Wittenberg, a great debate took place in the summer of 1519 between Luther and a wily, practiced public speaker who called himself Johann Eck. Born Johann Maier, he had renamed himself after his native city, today spelled “Egg.” (It is easy to make too much of these fashionable name changes: Luther himself had originally given his surname the more homely spelling of “Luder,” which can carry such meanings as carrion, cad, and slut.)5 Eck was a theologian who knew how to win the approval of a German audience with a dazzling display of rapier-sharp invective and an inexhaustible supply of logical objections employed with lightning-quick aggressiveness. The debate, which continued for a week and a half, was thrilling as a top-flight sports tournament to its many spectators. Though Luther was an articulate public speaker and could be cutting both in print and in conversation, he was probably not up to matching the dazzle displayed so effortlessly by his large-lunged opponent. He would ever after refer to Eck as that “glory-hungry little beast.”
Did the pope hold some sort of primacy in the church? That was the central question from which all else must flow. To Eck and to the Catholic tradition that he saw himself upholding, the answer was obvious: Jesus himself had established the papal primacy of Peter and his successors, as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel (16:18–19) and confirmed by “the fathers”—that is, the principal theologians—throughout church history. Of course, the answer is not really so obvious. The language Jesus uses is metaphorical, far from juridical, and open to a variety of interpretations. Just a few verses later (18:18), he is recorded as saying something virtually identical to a crowd of people identified only as “the disciples.” Many perfectly orthodox fathers, especially among the Greeks, as Luther pointed out, never acknowledged that Peter or his successors had primacy. The Greeks, interposed Eck, lost their empire to the Turks as God’s punishment for seceding from the Roman communion.
For the audience, made up largely of students and teachers from the University of Leipzig, Eck was the established champion; most were rooting for the home team, not for Luther. In any case Luther’s arguments were new to them and required more attention and intellectual discrimination than they were willing to extend. Leipzig was large and venerable; who was this upstart challenger from tiny, new Wittenberg?
By this point in Luther’s thinking, the bishop of Rome had no business claiming a distinctive role in the universal church. Such a role belonged only to a genuine consensus of all Christians—and such a consensus could be provided by a representative general council, though even this did not mean that a general council could not err. There was nothing in the Bible to confirm the inerrancy of a ge
neral council. Only the Bible itself was inerrant—and only when interpreted by a true Christian.
Gradually, each of Luther’s seemingly radical opinions was exposed to view, egged on as he was by Eck, who now accused his opponent of being no better than a Wycliffite or a Hussite, deserving to be burned at the stake. Hus, remarked Luther, had been treated badly by the Council of Constance and perhaps condemned unfairly. Indeed, though having yet to read Hus’s principal works, Luther, despite the gasps of the audience, said stoutly that he had come to the conclusion that Constance had erred—and this was one reason he could not claim inerrancy even for a general council. If only the fathers at Constance had treated Hus with the fraternal affection he deserved. “I believe that the Bohemians are men”—something the German audience, victimized in previous decades by the understandable wrath of the Hussites, was rather reluctant to acknowledge—“and that they may be attracted by gentle words but that they are only hardened by being called criminal and by the opprobrious name of heretics.”
The idea of treating people with whom one disagrees in a mild and gracious manner was so alien to the time that it received only whoops and hollers from the assembled listeners. Eck used a number of underhanded ploys to best Luther, perhaps the worst being his pious invocation of the greatest medieval saint, Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan friars. The miraculous stigmata that Francis had received in his body were, according to Eck, proof positive for all to see that God had blessed Francis’s perfect obedience to the pope. In all likelihood, this miracle never occurred.6 That it proves God’s approval of papal primacy is surely a large logical leap, but this sort of crowd-pleasing contortion worked its magic. Luther’s ungenerous reply, suggesting that it might be a better world if none of the fawning, slimy mendicant orders were to continue in existence, though not unlike the view that Boccaccio had put forward more than a century and a half before, brought few to his side.
Heretics and Heroes Page 19