Frederick the Wise appears in virtually all historical accounts a paradoxical, even an imperspicuous figure. He died as he lived, a Catholic, never immoderate yet pious and traditional in his devotions. But he was immovably on the side of fairness and rationality and against all violence and cruelty. He even disapproved of execution as a form of punishment: “An easy thing to take a life,” he mused, “but one cannot restore it.” In the course of his long reign, there were no wars within his territories, nor did he ever declare war against another land. He was in these ways most uncharacteristic of his time. He trusted, moreover, in his own deep responsibility to protect those whose lives were lived within his realm, those formally “under his protection.” And he was, if the category of a slightly later age may be applied to his, a German patriot. More than any other figure of his time, he was Luther’s good luck.
Frederick not only refused to distribute Exurge Domine; he actively lobbied for a public hearing for Luther, to be held not in Rome—whence, he was certain, Luther would never return—but in Germany, where fairness might be possible. He had cast his electoral vote for the new emperor, the now-twenty-year-old Fleming Charles, and against the pope’s French candidate. He was owed some consideration.
The next Diet would be held in the spring of 1521 at Worms, south of Frankfurt, where the gangling young Charles V, who, thanks to the long tradition of royal inbreeding, had a projecting lower jaw that made him resemble a somewhat awkward gorilla, would preside, appearing for the first time to his German subjects. Though Frederick tried valiantly to rally Charles to Luther’s side, Charles, an outsider with no especially German sympathies and already making his own private political calculations, knew how important unity of faith would be to his success as ruler of his vast and diverse territories, no portion of which loomed larger than the German-speaking lands.
Luther, though sick with anxiety, decided—in the manner of Paul submitting to Caesar—to respond positively to Charles’s mandate to appear at Worms. “If Caesar calls me, God calls me,” he wrote to Frederick, professing his belief in the God-given role of princes rather than priests. “If violence is used, as well it may be, I commend my cause to God.” And though Charles had promised his imperial safe conduct, the fate of Hus in similar circumstances was never far from Luther’s consciousness.
On the morn of April 16, after a two-week journey, a trembling Luther, accompanied by a few friends, made his humble entrance into Worms in a borrowed two-wheeled Saxon cart. All along the way, save as he passed through Leipzig, he had been met by large crowds of well-wishers, nowhere more lavishly than at Frankfurt, home of German literacy, already the host to the great annual book fair that continues to this day. At Worms, the infamous monk, now—as was widely known—excommunicated by the pope, was jostled by two thousand supporters, all of whom wished to welcome him and help to escort him to his lodging. Those who did not swarm in the street took up their clamorous positions on the roofs of houses. Luther could hardly have hoped for a heartier welcome.
In the afternoon of the next day, Luther found himself before the emperor and his family, the assembled princes of Germany, the papal nuncios, and assorted courtiers, clerks, and clerics. In the alcove of a window was piled an enormous number of books. Johann von der Ecken, chief official under the archbishop of Trier (and no relation to the Eck at Leipzig), pointed to the pile of books and asked Luther to acknowledge his authorship of them all. We know that, because Luther was almost inhumanly productive, this great pile would have appeared to many less industrious souls as an impossible achievement—short of diabolical assistance. Even Luther seems to have hesitated before claiming them all, so the titles were read aloud, making a long and increasingly incredible list, after which Luther acknowledged authorship.
“Will you then recant?” asked Ecken immediately. Luther, who had vainly hoped to be allowed to argue his case before the court, asked for time to consider his response on account of the momentousness of what he had written about, namely the Word of God. After long moments of silence, the young emperor agreed to a day’s consideration, ruffling Ecken’s feathers.
Late the next afternoon as the sun was already beginning to sink beneath the horizon, a much larger audience, hoping no doubt for an explosive encounter, filed into a much larger room, which became so crowded that only the emperor himself was provided a chair. The body heat in the room was such that Luther in his woolen monk’s habit was sweating profusely. He could not, he told the emperor, simply renounce all his works outright because they were of such differing kinds. Some were so simple and pious that no one could object to them. To renounce such books would be to renounce Christian doctrine, as accepted universally. A second class of books involved denunciations of the immoral lives of so many Romanists—“all this sink of Roman sodomy,” as he had termed it elsewhere—and their tyranny over the great and good German people. His audience, by and large, was almost as receptive to this second demur as it was to his first.
In a third class of books he had replied to attacks against him and, he confessed, had not always been mild in his answers. For “we must weigh carefully how wonderful and how awful our Lord is in his secret counsels. We must be sure that those things we do to banish strife … do not rather lead to a flood of unbearable evil.” Our desire for peace can so easily undo us just as it undid “pharaoh, the king of Babylon, the kings of Israel.” So too could even “the government of this young, noble prince Charles—on whom next to God we hope for so much—become sick unto death.” Of course, these princes, these “exalted men,” need “neither my teaching nor my warning,” but “I must not shun the duty I owe my Germany. And so I commit myself to your majesty and to your lordships. I humbly beg you not to condemn me without reason because of the passions of my enemies.” Then, to signal that he had nothing further to add, he pronounced his resounding “I have spoken.”
He had succeeded in making the speech he was to have been forbidden to make. Ecken, furious, shouted that he had failed to answer the question put to him and was, rather, calling into question “the most sacred orthodox faith” and waiting “in vain, Martin, for a disputation over things that you are obligated to believe with certain and professing faith.” In at least the public stance of men such as Ecken, all theological questions had already been answered. It was time simply to recant “without horns or teeth,” ordered the offended Romanist.
“Since then your majesty and your lordships,” replied Brother Martin, “desire a simple reply, I will answer ‘without horns or teeth.’ Unless I am convinced by Scripture and by plain reason (I do not believe in the authority of either popes or councils by themselves, for it is plain that they have often erred and contradicted each other) in those Scriptures that I have presented, for my conscience is captive to the Word of God, I cannot and I will not retract anything, for it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen.”
A slightly later printed version of Luther’s remarks adds the sentence “Here I stand; I can do no other” before “God help me,” but the accounts of what Luther said that were taken down as he spoke do not include this sentence. Is this, then, just another mythological addition to the story, like the nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses to Wittenberg’s church door? I don’t think quite. Surely scribes, hired by the opposing side, can’t always be trusted, especially to record every rhetorical flourish. And Luther himself never disowned the additional sentence, which is certainly consistent with the spirit he displayed in his reply.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” snapped King Lear at his one loving daughter, as if he had just been reading Aristotle. In logic, as in evolution and in all forms of development, nothing can come of nothing; rather, everything has a precedent: something that went before, something from which the phenomenon under study springs and takes its being. The one exception would seem to be the cosmos itself, which appears, whether in ancient theologies or in modern science, to emerge ex nihilo, from nothing. But everything else known to us has a
cause, a trigger, a parent, a thing from which it sprang.
In this series of books, The Hinges of History, we are looking especially at dramas of origination. We are attempting repeatedly to answer the questions: How did x or y get started? How did this or that valued aspect of our contemporary lives come to be? How far back into the past can we legitimately push its origins? In the previous volume, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, we found the earliest evidence for feminism, science, and the plastic arts as we know them in the high Middle Ages—in the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the early fourteenth centuries.
When did ego—the personal “I,” the self as we now understand it—come to be? Where do we find its earliest expression? Well, there is certainly ego in the Renaissance artists and, further back, in the self-promotion of a salesman such as Columbus. But nowhere in our earlier history does the force of ego ring so fully and defiantly as in the scene at Worms, where Brother Martin—this “pile of shit,” as he so often called himself—dared to say “No” to the assembled forces of early modern Europe, to the entire panoply of church and state, and to cite his own little conscience (surely a negligible phenomenon to the majority of his listeners) as the reason for his absolute, unnuanced, unhedged rebellion. For this reason, though we can certainly name many of his immediate predecessors (and have done so earlier in this book), we must pause before the figure of Martin Luther and acknowledge both his astonishing contemporaneity and our, perhaps somewhat uncomfortable, brotherhood with him.
Thus, it is this scene that is memorialized in the epigraphs at the outset of this book. Appropriately, I believe, Martin Luther’s statement about his conscience is followed by the statement of the self-named Martin Luther King Sr. (named “Michael” by his parents), whose admiration for the original bearer of his name was lifelong. For Dr. King senior, the essence of the first Martin Luther was the man’s courage; and once he saw “the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right” exhibited by the Roman Catholic presidential candidate he had no intention of voting for,11 King switched his vote (from Nixon to Kennedy) and his lifelong political allegiance (from Republican to Democratic). King’s son, Martin Luther King Jr., would in his brief life prove the most courageous and transformative figure of my generation of Americans, likely even of my generation of human beings.
In the end, the cultural forces that brought about such transformation need not be belittled by evidence that a heightened sense of ego may have led also to a heightened egotism. Egotism, that is, a false or disproportionate value placed on personal, subjective experience and on individual identity, has certainly accompanied the deepening of subjectivity and cheapened it throughout our contemporary world. The current inflation of ego in the self-presentation of so many public figures does not, however, erase the startling moral value of what Luther did, nor can it erase what subsequent men and women of courage have achieved in every hour since then, or what they continue to achieve in our time.
1 Evidence of false reform is abundant. Most recently, Seán O’Malley, the current cardinal archbishop of Boston, brought in to amend the mistakes of his predecessor Bernard Law, Cardinal Coverup himself, issued a partial list of clergy accused of sexual abuse, this nearly ten years after the Boston scandal broke. All of the 132 names on the published list were previously known to the public, though O’Malley managed to declare that he was publishing the list “after serious and thoughtful consideration and prayer.” What the cardinal failed to mention was that, in addition to consulting God, he had spent considerable time in conversation with his attorneys.
2 The principal tribes of northern Europe—the Franks, the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Swiss, the Dutch, the Flemish, the English—were of Germanic, rather than of Celtic or Greco-Roman, origin.
3 Luther said he made his Roman visit in 1510, though the best evidence suggests that it was made, by our reckoning, in January 1511, which was then part of 1510, since the new year did not commence till March 25, the feast of the Annunciation (and, therefore, of the supposed conception of Jesus).
4 As an extremely British Brit once explained to me, “Ireland is a Mediterranean island lost in the Atlantic.”
5 Nor should one assume that this fashion for name-changing was confined to the period under study. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, Adolf Hitler’s father would change the family surname from Schicklgruber to Hitler. The changes seem always to tend in the direction of greater dignity. It is a bit difficult, after all, to imagine “Heil, Schicklgruber!” catching on, even among the most devoted fascists.
6 This is the position of Donald Spoto, Francis’s most recent and reliable biographer.
7 Though Luther loved the Psalms, which he took (as did most of the previous Christian tradition) to be the voice of Jesus, he was less attracted to the three synoptic gospels, surely a confused position for one who thought of himself as “evangelical.” But as pointed out above, not all of Jesus’s sayings in those gospels can be neatly squared with Luther’s (or Paul’s) “justification by faith.” Luther did, however, hold the Fourth Gospel, John’s—the least ancient, least historical, and most layered with the theology of the developing church—in high regard.
8 My local Lutheran church, whose pastor is a respected figure, well known for both her social activism and her openness to alternative sexual lifestyles, is adorned with a large sign of welcome claiming, “We are completely open—in every way!” Luther might have found such a slogan enraging or hilarious, but his comment would not have been printable in any church bulletin.
9 Not many years later, the English reformer and translator William Tyndale would remark that though the Venetians had been placed under papal interdict again and again, they discovered that “they shat as well as they ever did.”
10 In fairly late Catholic tradition seven sacraments are designated: baptism, Eucharist, penance (or confession), confirmation in the faith, priestly orders, matrimony, and extreme unction (or final anointing before death).
11 Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested during a peaceful sit-in and incarcerated by the flagrantly racist state of Georgia. There was understandable anxiety that he might never be seen alive again. Senator Kennedy, beginning his run for the U.S. presidency, intervened publicly on King’s behalf, thus casting a spotlight on Georgia and forcing its minions to release their prisoner. At the time, it was a most unlikely move for a prominent white politician to make, especially toward the anti-Catholic South, at least some of whose votes Kennedy would need to win the national election.
INTERMISSION
IL BUONO, IL BRUTTO, IL CATTIVO
(The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)
A PORTFOLIO OF EGOS
As we, the children of the West, look back across our history, we can only be dismayed by the violent clashes that occurred in the period we are now considering. There is a scholarly theory (as well as a popular variant of it) that monotheism itself is responsible for the violence, because the worship of one God—by Jews from ancient times, by Christians from the time of Constantine forward when they gained political power, and by Muslims almost from their inception—necessarily encourages intolerance of other beliefs.
For Jews, we have only to consult the Bible itself, especially references to the supposed conquest of Canaan: “When the lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hast cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou: And when the lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” The Book of Deuteronomy goes on to connect all the smiting to the worship of this one God, who finds polytheism in any form both unforgivable and intolerable: “But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their [sacred] groves, and burn their graven images with f
ire.” Nor are these the Hebrew God’s most antihuman instructions, which elsewhere include the slaughter of even the children and the animals of the polytheists.
For Christians, words like “Crusade” and “Inquisition” should induce sufficient historical nightmares; and, if not, slightly longer phrases, such as “the burning of witches” and “the exile and extermination of Jews,” should do the trick. For Muslims, the word “jihad” currently needs no further explanation (even if, in its core meaning, it does not refer to violence).
But it is not as if polytheistic religions can be characterized simply as peace-loving, still less as pacifist. In truth, plenty of human blood has been spilled in the name of virtually every religion and sect on earth; and whether or not more has been spilled on a per capita basis by monotheists than by others is not a matter that can be easily resolved. The question of whether this recurring violence relates more to theological belief or to political gamesmanship or to the ancient human suspicion of the Other complicates analysis still further.
So, having at least given voice to these questions, I leave them to others to settle. I would prefer to tackle the movements and trends that I can trace with some clarity.
One undeniable trend that we see in the history we have surveyed thus far is the new sense of the self that begins to emerge after the catastrophe of the Black Death and that continues to bud—and then to flower in ever more riotous blossoms in the course of the Renaissance.
Christopher Columbus is an extraordinary avatar of the New Man, projecting a new vision of the globe and of himself on the Europe of his time. It is a vision that will have traceable (and sometimes improbable) consequences for centuries to come. And these consequences will be not only far-reaching but profound and permanent, far more profound and permanent than if Columbus had somehow set off major earthquakes or tsunamis or even induced continental shifts. The lives of the inhabitants of the newly discovered islands and continents will be forever changed by his discoveries, as will be the lives of Europeans and finally of all humanity. And as if this were not enough, it may be argued that Columbus himself becomes the first identifiable model of a new mode of conducting one’s life and of negotiating society. No longer traversing medieval byways, no longer dependent merely on the structures and rules of a highly stratified society, he invents himself and his project—something we, for better or worse, are all still doing.
Heretics and Heroes Page 21