Luther was disgusted by the treatment he received at the hands of Eck and the audience, who cheered Eck, feasted him, and followed him through the streets of Leipzig. Luther was aware that, aside from Eck’s extraordinary ability as a speaker, he had trouble articulating a clear argument of his own. And Luther suspected, rightly enough, that Eck did not even believe some of the things he appeared to support so roundly. We know from Eck’s correspondence that he had earlier entertained many of Erasmus’s and even Luther’s propositions. But he had turned himself into a public debater whose object was to vanquish his opponent by dramatic verbal pyrotechnics. The public debater was in devoted service to the secret politician, who had set himself the objective of winning the patronage of the pope and the papal establishment, whither he saw his good fortune lay. Luther’s less slick performance was actually motivated by Luther’s truthfulness, his profound wish to say only what he believed to be so. Duke George of Leipzig, one of Eck’s patrons, was astonished by the open candor exhibited by Luther and his fellow reformers, who tended to reject mere verbal cleverness in their attempt to get at the truth. “They do say what they really mean,” remarked Duke George in consternation at such unusual behavior.
For Luther, what had been waged at Leipzig was a pitched battle between Aristotle and Christ. For the schoolmen, the medieval and Renaissance philosophers who depended on the physics and the logic of Aristotle, the world made basic sense and everything in it had a purpose—a cause and an end. In Luther’s eyes, such teaching was pagan claptrap. The world made no sense at all, for it was nothing but a repetitive, everlasting cycle of birth and death to no obvious purpose whatever. Real meaning, meaning that we can care about, meaning for us comes only through the incarnation of Christ, the God-Man. His life, his hideous suffering, his horrifying death, his resurrection—these give us meaning as nothing else can come close to doing. In the Bible, and especially in the anguish of the Psalms (to which Luther was more attached than he was to the gospels, especially the three synoptic gospels),7 Christ speaks to us and we hear his voice, showing us that our experience is his experience and confirming for us the paradox that our seemingly meaningless lives, our secret sufferings—certainly empty of meaning if we remain at the humdrum level of Aristotelian insight—have glorious meaning if taken up into the mystery of Christ.
As 1519 nears its end, we find Luther already in possession of almost all of his signature positions:
The arguments over Christian history—or rather over the historical development of authentic Christian theology—will never be resolved on historical grounds alone. True doctrine must be grounded in the text of Scripture, which is its only sure foundation.
We have misunderstood what Scripture means when it speaks of justification. Only God is just; and he is just because he is merciful. Unlike us, God is supremely free; he could have been vindictive and merciless. But he chooses to forgive us our sins; it is he who justifies us. We cannot justify ourselves.
It is this force of forgiveness that rules the universe, not the blind physical laws of Aristotle. At the heart of the universe is the benignity of God.
In stumbling upon this last insight, the brooding, often morose Luther confided that “I felt myself absolutely reborn, as though I had entered into the open gates of paradise itself.”
There are, of course, many subsidiary developments beyond these three, but virtually all additional developments are built upon these central insights. Soon enough, for instance, Luther, provoked by the pope’s unyielding high-handedness, will begin to mock him as a diabolical temptation, the Whore of Babylon and/or the Antichrist prophesied in Revelation. On another front, he will elaborate on his theory that the local prince, whoever he may be, acts as the mouthpiece and enforcer of God’s will, following occasional Pauline affirmations that appear to point in the same direction. Luther, however, seems normally to find the prince more reliable than any church official. His teaching on predestination—that God has willed from all eternity that some shall be saved, others damned—will wobble back and forth over time. In later life, he will recommend not thinking about the difficult subject at all, if one can banish it from one’s mind. But all these positions seem to me to lack the centrality of the first three, especially given the mutability of the subsidiary positions—or at least their evolution—over time.
Even Luther’s seemingly strict adherence to the truth of the Bible has its limits. Though no infants are baptized in the course of the New Testament, Luther will continue to insist on infant baptism throughout his life, as well as on many other traditional beliefs unprovable from Scripture, such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In a letter of 1528 to two radical pastors, he will indeed demonstrate that he continues to stand up for almost the entirety of Roman Catholic tradition: “We confess that under the papacy much Christian good, indeed all Christian good, is, and so it has come to us. Namely, we confess with the papacy that there is a correct Holy Scripture, a correct baptism, a correct sacrament of the altar, a correct key to the forgiveness of sin, a correct teaching office, a correct catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the articles of faith [of the traditional creeds].” Quite a mouthful from the world’s first Protestant.
The best route to understanding Luther’s theological positions may lie in appreciating the man’s psychology. He was a natural conservative, someone who preferred black-and-white statements to unnecessarily clever and elusive formulations, someone more at home with the literal than the metaphorical, someone who respected tradition and wished only for necessary changes and adjustments.8 This corner of his psyche he may be said to share with a great many men and women throughout history.
But there is another corner that seems to belong only to the period that begins in his time and continues into ours, for in Luther we sense—for the very first time in biographical history—what may best be called existential terror or what Marius labels Luther’s “devouring fear of death.” Luther, commenting on the Fifth Psalm, finds the life of the believer filled with “pain, temptation, doubt, and fear.” Even for the theologian, the Christian expert, “living, no, on the contrary, dying and being damned makes the theologian—not understanding, reading, or speculating!” The boy who pledged to devote his life out of fear has become a fear-beset adult.
It is not so very surprising that Luther was often misunderstood in his time. He might have been better appreciated in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or in the twentieth by Sartre or Camus or even perhaps in the twenty-first by an intensely existentialist black-metal band such as Wolves in the Throne Room, who might consider this text of Luther’s for their next concert: “We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance and not on the move. At the time of dying, however, this is hazardous and useless, for then death looms large of its own accord.” See the smoke and gloom, hear the screams and growls; for each of us, claims Luther solemnly, must confront the tragedy of mankind’s earthly destiny. Luther never loses completely the fear that he may be damned—though, often enough, his fear of Hell sounds more like the agnostic’s fear of slipping into nonexistence than like anything to be found in any tradition of Christian theology.
It strikes me as pleasingly ironic that the defiant language of Luther in his darkest moments can be so reminiscent of the so-called “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can.…
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.…
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
Hopkins wa
s a great Victorian poet, and his language is denser than Luther’s, which can be prolix. But the two often seem to be speaking about a similar experience, near despair despite a muscular faith. Hopkins was a retiring convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, homosexual in predisposition and probably bipolar, who spent much of his brief and sickly adult life as a Jesuit priest in an uncomfortable exile in Ireland. On the face of it, he would not seem to have much in common with the far more vigorous Luther, publicly and intellectually engaged with his time and with many of its principal players. (Indeed, in his greatest poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins dismisses Luther as “beast of the waste wood”—and we can imagine what Luther would have had to say about Hopkins.) But it may be that the “dark night of the soul” is a phenomenon more common to sensitive Christian believers (or perhaps to sensitive believers of any sort) than has been widely appreciated.
In any case, Satan, the Archdevil and ruler of Hell, looms ever larger in Luther’s imagination, his figure encountered everywhere. Luther disparaged the miracles that occurred at Catholic shrines as “works of Satan, permitted by God to tempt your faith.” He believed in the power of witches to do grievous harm, opening wounds in the bodies of their victims, causing storms and crop failures and killing livestock. He thought that Satan could appear as a human temptress and, through anal intercourse with a man, conceive a devil child. Though these vivid imaginings sound no more modern than the early Middle Ages, the admonitory figures of Luther’s nightmares combine with his profound fears of Hell and nonexistence to fashion a soon-to-be-middle-aged man of restless energy and ceaseless activity.
In the spring of 1520, Luther produced two tracts. The first, On the Papacy in Rome, Against the Famous Romanist at Leipzig, is a freewheeling attack on positions proposed by a Leipzig monk who had argued for absolute papal sovereignty over church and state. It is written in German, full of the sort of sarcasm and cutting humor that made it a “must-read” for Luther’s growing audience. The second, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, also in German to render it accessible to even the least literate German prince, is one of the most important statements of the gathering Reformation. In it Luther openly pits the legitimate power of the prince—or secular ruler—against what he claims to be the stolen power assumed by the clergy, especially by the pope and his bishops. For the necessary reformation to take place, the prince must assume his legitimate power over both secular and religious realms. The Address represents a giant step toward building the necessary theoretical underpinning for what will soon become the national churches of Protestant Europe.
That many princes (and other secular rulers) were at last growing powerful enough to defy ecclesiastical prescription and punishment9 surely made Luther’s argument appear more realistic than it might once have been, but a certain lack of realism is still discernible in his highly theoretical construct, which lacks any feeling of intimate acquaintance with persons of power or their accustomed ways of thinking and acting. Indeed, monk Luther knew no princes. Even his local magnate, the unusually avuncular Frederick the Wise, who had lent Luther his silent patronage, was a distant figure, known to Luther through correspondence with one of Frederick’s secretaries. The two never met. But black storm clouds were gathering over Luther’s head. He would soon need from the princes all the help he could get.
Johann Eck was in Rome, where he was helping the chancery compose Exsurge Domine, the historic papal bull that would demand Luther’s recantation under pain of excommunication. The term “bull” derives from the Latin word bulla or seal, suggesting that what is sealed comes from the hand of the pope himself. The document begins with a quotation from Psalm 74: “Arise, Lord, and judge the case before you.” It goes on to excoriate Luther, his teachings, and his followers in no uncertain terms, enumerating forty-one separate errors that must be summarily rejected. Employing the customary papal “We,” it bemoans the pope’s supposedly heroic efforts to pull the errant monk back from the brink: “Regarding Martin, dear God, what have We failed to do, what have We avoided, what paternal love did We not exercise, to call him back from his errors?” Henceforth, no one under any circumstances may “read, speak, preach, praise, consider, publish, or defend” any of Luther’s writings. Rather, these are all to be burned publicly by everyone who does not wish to be burned himself or, in a nice nod to gender inclusiveness, herself. (Indeed, the thirty-third of Luther’s forty-one heresies is that he doesn’t believe that God wants heretics burned at the stake.) The bull raises its skirts before Luther’s “abusive language”—which “vile poison,” we are told, is “the custom of heretics”—and condescends as from a great height to “the German people” for whom “our predecessors and We Ourselves have always had a particular fondness.” The bull has Eck’s characteristic smugness and sense of superiority stamped all over it.
Erasmus was more than a little worried. He had been writing to Luther, originally in admiration, more recently in words of caution. Once it came to his ears that there was a saying making the rounds that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched,” Erasmus’s anxiety was much stoked up. Please, advised Erasmus, write and speak with greater restraint—and whatever you do, leave me out of it. “Otherwise, you will make suspect those who might serve you better, were they not compromised.” Why not write something pious and devotional, thus helping to calm things down?
As in most periods of history around the planet, a proclamation or a new law cannot become effective till it is universally proclaimed or distributed. In September, Eck arrived in Germany, attempting to promulgate the bull. But he had to stay out of Frederick the Wise’s Saxony, where he knew he would be unwelcome, and not a few other princes refused their cooperation. Even the University of Leipzig, sounding muted notes of German nationalism, refused to be drawn into the distribution. As Eck went on his way, he kept adding the names of additional “heretics” to the bull, wherever he discovered new opponents or was sent additional denunciations by the papal chancery. Luther replied briefly that the bull was the work not of the pope but of Eck himself, who understood Scripture “as well as an ass knows how to play the lyre.”
In the first week of October, Luther published in Latin his most incendiary tract, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The original Babylonian “captivity” referred to the exile of Judeans in the great Mesopotamian city of Babylon after the conquest of Jerusalem in the early sixth century BC, as recorded in the Second Book of Kings. By the time Revelation, the final book of the Bible, was written at the close of the first century AD, Babylon had become the fabled capital of all evil and a code word for pagan Rome and its power. In the medieval period during which the Francophile popes resided not in Rome but in Avignon, people spoke of “the Babylonian captivity of the papacy.” Now, Luther awarded the prize for the epicenter of all evil to the papacy itself, seen as keeping the church in infernal bondage to all forms of perversity and sinfulness.
In the Babylonica, Luther came out of the closet, so to speak, casting aside all Erasmian caution and explicitly reciting his objections to papal teaching exactly as he saw (and felt) them. The pope is anti-Christ, his authority illegitimate and his sacramental system a fraud. “Neither pope nor bishop nor any man has the right to impose one syllable of law on the Christian man except the Christian give it his consent.” Marriage, though no sacrament, is an ancient human institution, which the church should not attempt to regulate with its infinite series of legalisms and the jockeying required by the church’s marriage courts. “Today’s Romanists have become salesmen. And what do they sell? Penises and vaginas.” There are, at most, three sacraments, not seven,10 ordained by Scripture: baptism, Eucharist, and confession (though this third would be gradually downgraded by Luther to such an extent that it would become at last almost invisible). The Eucharist (or mass) requires no specially ordained priest, only the community of believers, to make it happen. Christ is really present in this sacr
ament, even though the papal teaching of transubstantiation is nonsense, since it is based not on Scripture but on Aristotle, who is also nonsense. Because the Christian always remains simul justus et peccator (both justified and a sinner), the only sin we need take with ultimate seriousness is unbelief.
Erasmus read the tract in early 1521 and was horrified. What good could Luther possibly expect to come from such patent intemperance? Most upsetting of all, rumors were circulating that Erasmus was the secret author of the Babylonica. From this time onward, the tentative alliance between Erasmus and Luther was broken.
Once Luther had got these aggressive arguments off his chest he seems himself to have realized that he had gone too far in provocation. His next piece of writing, almost certainly his finest, was The Freedom of a Christian, which he finished in November 1520 and which makes many of the same arguments as the Babylonica, if in more considered prose and more elevated style. But there was no denying that Luther now stood foursquare against the institution of the papacy and a long line of papally sponsored theological development.
In early December, many German towns, encouraged by Eck and other Romanists, burned the works of Luther in ominous public ceremonies overseen by the shadowy figures of local executioners. On December 10, the people of Wittenberg made their own bonfire, throwing books of canon law and anti-Luther tracts into the flames. Luther, standing amid the revelers, contributed Wittenberg’s own copy of Exsurge Domine. Henceforth, as Erasmus had feared, the battle was joined. There could be no going back.
Heretics and Heroes Page 20