Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  So would Erasmian-style complaints about clerical excesses and princely abuses. These began to appear in Luther’s notes on the twelfth chapter of Romans, where Paul moves from theological conjecture to practical instruction. Prompted by the Apostle’s admonitions, Luther started to work out the real-world implications of his new ideas. Throughout, there are echoes of Erasmus’s salvos against the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. In these pages, one can see Luther’s rebellion against the Church unfold in real time, along with evidence of the great impact that Erasmian ideas were having on him.

  At 12:8, for instance, where Paul urges people to give “with simplicity,” Luther lamented how in his day most people gave with the expectation of getting something in return. In the Gospels, he noted, Luke calls on those holding a feast to invite the poor, maimed, and blind. “If only this were observed, how many monstrous evils would the church then be spared today!” Luther was especially critical of the foundations and endowments that were supported by those wishing to have priests say Masses or sing hymns in their names. Such vainglory had turned the worship of God into a “market place.” Luther singled out the All Saints’ Foundation at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, whose main activity was saying Masses for the souls of the dead. Those giving to it were seeking less to honor God than to blow their own horn in the presence of others. Such practices, he predicted, would bring “great misery” to the Roman Church.

  Luther’s growing defiance was most apparent in his comments on Paul’s famous dictum at 13:1: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities.” Over the ages, this passage had been taken as a command to obey princes and accept the prevailing order, but it now triggered in Luther a fierce denunciation of “spiritual rulers.” Nothing more annoys these “extravagant spendthrifts” than efforts to curtail their privileges and properties. A cleric may be guilty of pride and wantonness, may be given to greed and ingratitude, but as long as he protects the Church’s rights and liberties, he is deemed a good Christian. “No wonder that laymen hate the clerics!”

  Aware of the sharpness of his tone, Luther was nonetheless unapologetic: “I must perform my duty as a teacher who holds this office by apostolic authority” to “speak up whenever I see that something is done that is not right, even in higher places.” And, as he proceeded, he became more and more outspoken. Spurred by Paul’s warning not to judge others by what they eat, Luther inveighed against clerical regulations. In contrast to the law of Moses, he declared, Christian law does not set aside special days for fasting nor single out certain types of food as acceptable. In an extraordinary outburst, he called for all fast days and holidays to be abolished, for the entire book of decretals (legal letters issued by the pope) to be purged, and for the pomp of prayer services to be sharply cut back. No priest (unless he wants to) should be required to go without a wife, have a tonsure, or wear a special habit. Rather, it should be left up to each individual to do as much or as little as his conscience and sense of responsibility to God allows.

  All of these statements carry distinct Erasmian overtones. Yet, even as Luther was echoing his criticisms of the Church, he was becoming aware of his and Erasmus’s theological differences. Reading Erasmus’s comments on Romans 5, for instance, Luther was concerned about his failure to state clearly that Paul was speaking of original sin. At the time, he was reading Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Writings, in which the bishop of Hippo attacked Pelagius for his belief in free will and in the perfectibility of humankind. If Erasmus were more familiar with these writings, Luther felt sure, he would show greater respect for this doctrine. Erasmus similarly seemed to misapprehend Paul’s position on the law. While rejecting ceremonies and statutes, Erasmus seemed to accept the binding nature of ethical codes like the Decalogue. As Luther read Paul, however, it seemed clear to him that the Apostle was rejecting adherence to the law in all its forms. In light of Erasmus’s tremendous prestige, Luther considered it his duty to alert him to these misreadings lest he lead others astray.

  Given his own anonymity, Luther felt that if he approached Erasmus directly, he would be brushed aside, so he instead decided to go through Spalatin, who, as an adviser to Elector Frederick, would be likely to get a fuller hearing. In his letter to Spalatin (dated October 19, 1516—about six weeks after the end of his lectures on Romans), Luther put his complaints about Erasmus far more bluntly than Spalatin would put them to Erasmus. Spalatin might call him rash “for bringing such famous men under the whip of Aristarch,” he wrote, but he was acting “out of concern for theology and the salvation of the brethren.” Aristarch was a critic in ancient Greece famous for his sharpness. Luther no doubt learned about him from Erasmus’s Adages—a borrowing that showed how indebted he was to the celebrated scholar, even while he rushed to set him right.

  In his outbursts against the clergy, Luther was drawing on firsthand knowledge. In the spring of 1516, in his capacity as district vicar, he visited several monasteries under his supervision. At most of them, the conditions were deplorable. Guesthouses were being used as resort houses, gluttony was rampant, insubordination was on the rise. The situation was especially serious at his old cloister in Erfurt. After returning to Wittenberg, he wrote to its director, Johann Lang, to urge him to keep a daily log of the amount of beer, wine, bread, and meat consumed in the guesthouse, so that he would be able to see “whether the monastery is a monastery rather than a tavern or hotel.” He also recommended that Lang keep an account of “the comings and goings of mendicant friars and their hangers-on” so that he could tell “those restless and insatiable people” who are so proud of their good works “how profusely they imbibe.”

  At Lang’s request, Luther agreed to take in several malingering monks from Erfurt. But the situation did not improve, and Lang asked him to accept several more. Luther said he could not. “I have enough useless friars around here,” he wrote on October 26, 1516. The population at the Black Cloister was up to forty-one, and the supplies were barely sufficient for them. Luther complained about the growing demands on his time. “I nearly need two copyists or secretaries. All day long I do almost nothing else than write letters.” He was, he noted, a reader during mealtimes, a supervisor of novices, a lecturer on the Bible, a preacher at both the monastery and the town church, the overseer of eleven monasteries, the mediator of a dispute over the control of a parish church in nearby Torgau, and the caretaker of a fishpond from which the Wittenberg friary collected rent. On top of it all, he was preparing for the printers his lecture notes on the Psalms. Thus occupied, he hardly had time to say the hours or celebrate Mass. “Besides all this there are my own struggles with the flesh, the world, and the devil. See what a lazy man I am!”

  The day after he wrote to Lang, Luther was due to begin his next set of lectures, on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. He was worried that the class would be unable to meet, however, for Wittenberg had been hit by the plague. Every day, it claimed two or three people; among them was the son of a craftsman who lived across the street from the Augustinian cloister. Panicked, students were fleeing the city, and Johann von Staupitz, the Augustinian vicar-general, advised Luther to do the same. He refused. “My place is here, due to obedience,” he wrote to Lang. “It is not that I am not afraid of death (I am not the Apostle Paul but only a lecturer on the Apostle Paul!), but I hope the Lord will rescue me from my fears.” Those fears were setting off new bouts of the Anfechtungen. “My life daily approaches nearer hell,” he wrote to another friend, “for I become worse and more miserable all the time.”

  But Luther was about to face a more immediate challenge. With the approach of All Saints’ Day (November 1) 1516, Wittenberg (notwithstanding the plague) began to fill with pilgrims come to see Frederick’s relics collection, which was placed on display every year at that time. On the evening before, Luther was scheduled to give a sermon, and he would have to decide whether to say anything about the relics. There were more than nineteen thousand of them, including a twig from Moses’s burning bush, four hai
rs of the Virgin Mary, five particles of her milk, a piece of Jesus’s swaddling clothes, two pieces of hay from the manger, five pieces of the table from the Last Supper, and eight thorns from Jesus’s crown. A catalog prepared by Lucas Cranach of Frederick’s collection offered sketches of some of the ornate reliquaries in which these items were displayed—boxes adorned with garlands and fruits, horns bearing images of wild animals, goblets showing scenes from the crucifixion, cylinders held aloft by singing cherubim.

  Associated with each relic was an indulgence. Indulgences remitted the penalties associated with sin and so reduced the time the sinner had to spend in purgatory. The Castle Church was one of many churches in Europe authorized by the pope to offer an indulgence once or twice a year to all believers present at a display of relics. To each relic was assigned a specific number of days or years by which the penitent’s time in purgatory was reduced. Added together, the relics in Frederick’s collection could bring about a reduction of precisely 1,902,202 years and 270 days in purgatory.

  Those obtaining indulgences were expected to make a financial contribution to the Church as a form of good work. By the early sixteenth century, indulgences had become a key source of income for the building of bridges, dikes, schools, and hospitals. Many of the great cathedrals of Europe were underwritten in part by the money raised through indulgences. In Saxony, the income from them was supporting the rebuilding of a bridge across the Elbe at Torgau. Indulgences also helped sustain the operations of the Castle Church and the University of Wittenberg. Luther’s own welfare was thus bound up with the revenue generated by these dispensations.

  But there was much about them that troubled him. Technically, indulgences did not actually take away or forgive sin; rather, they remitted (commuted) the temporal punishment due to sin after the guilt for it had been forgiven following a penitent’s show of contrition and the performance of acts of satisfaction. In reality, however, such fine points often got lost, and many purchasers acted as if they had been forgiven for their sins and so no longer had to worry about showing contrition or giving satisfaction. Indulgences also gave believers a sense of reassurance about their fate in the afterlife; a letter of indulgence thus came to be considered a sort of “get out of purgatory” note. That the transaction entailed a financial contribution raised further concerns, for this made it seem that the offender was being given time off not for good behavior but for bribing the judge.

  In studying Romans, Luther had come to see that man is by nature sinful and unable through any amount of good works to overcome such weakness. Indulgences, by reassuring people about their spiritual state in both this life and the next, ran the risk of making them neglect true penitence. And so, in his sermon on All Hallows’ Eve, Luther decided to speak out. With the rows of sacred items on display in the Castle Church and with crowds of worshippers eager to benefit from them, he issued a stern warning: No one who receives an indulgence can know if the remission of his sins is complete. Only those who engage in heartfelt contrition and confession can receive such remission, and even then no one can be sure he has adequately performed such acts. Indulgences are dangerous because they lull believers into a state of spiritual complacency. What’s more, if the pope did have the power to deliver souls from purgatory, as he claimed, he would be cruel not to release all of them, even without indulgences.

  This was dangerous territory. Luther was criticizing not only the pope but also, implicitly, Frederick. There were no repercussions, however. The sale of indulgences continued, and the elector took satisfaction in the young professor’s growing reputation, as shown by his promise to send Luther the cloth for a new cowl.

  But the question of indulgences would not go away. In early 1517, word reached Wittenberg of a new indulgence being offered in the region. It was being preached by a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel on behalf of the pope. It was a much-coveted plenary indulgence, offering the remission of all temporal punishment due to one’s sins over a lifetime and thus eliminating the need for any additional expiation in purgatory. The indulgence was not available in Wittenberg itself, for Frederick—wanting no competition for his own offerings—had barred Tetzel from his territory, but local residents were excitedly discussing the generous benefits being offered.

  A seller of indulgences since 1504, Tetzel had over time perfected the art of marketing them. Weeks before he was due to appear in a town, an advance team would come to spread the word. When Tetzel himself appeared, priests, magistrates, and other town notables would come out to greet him. Songs were chanted, flags were raised, candles were lit. As church bells rang, the bull declaring the indulgence was borne aloft on a velvet cushion and cloth of gold; inside the church, a red cross was erected and the pope’s banner attached to it. Then Tetzel, a large man with a booming voice and theatrical flair, launched into his appeal: How many mortal sins are committed in a day, a week, a year, a lifetime? They are infinite, and for them an infinite penalty in the fires of purgatory must be paid. By obtaining an indulgence, however, sinners could, for once in a lifetime, gain full remission of those penalties. Such remissions could be used to relieve not only the future torments of the living but also the current agonies of the dead.

  Tetzel expertly preyed on the guilt of his listeners:

  Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, “Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so. . . . You let us lie in flames so that we only slowly come to the promised glory.”

  Tetzel would then approach the indulgence chest and write out a certificate for some departed relative, and as the coins clinked in the box, he would proclaim, “Now I am sure of his salvation; now I need pray for him no longer.” (Or, as the more popular version had it, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”)

  In Wittenberg, Luther was hearing from his parishioners all sorts of wild statements attributed to Tetzel—that he had saved more souls through his indulgences than St. Peter had with his sermons; that his indulgences remitted the penalties for not only past sins but future ones as well; that even if someone had slept with the Virgin Mary, the pope had the power to grant him forgiveness, as long as a contribution was made. Appalled by these reports, Luther decided to preach against them. His sermon, delivered on February 24, 1517, offered one of the first statements of his “theology of the cross,” as it came to be called. All those who seek peace of conscience through their own actions, he declared, accomplish nothing other than to increase the restlessness of their souls. It was this zeal to perform meritorious works as a means of winning divine grace that had fed the hunger for indulgences. Indulgences caused people to fear and flee the penalty associated with sin but not to dread sin itself. Only through gentleness and lowliness could the soul find true repose, and only through punishment and suffering could those qualities be attained. Christ did not say, “Do this or that,” but rather, “Come to me, get away from yourselves, and carry your cross after me.” Alarmed at the crisis he saw gathering, Luther closed with a dramatic cry:

  Oh, the dangers of our time! Oh, you snoring priests! Oh, darkness deeper than Egyptian! How secure we are in the midst of all our evils!

  Luther’s plea had little effect. The Wittenbergers, terrified at the prospect of dying suddenly in a state of unexpiated sin, wanted not trials and suffering but relief and reassurance. In March and April 1517, Tetzel appeared in the towns of Jüterbog and Zerbst in Brandenburg, which were just beyond the border of Electoral Saxony and barely twenty miles from Wittenberg, and townsmen were hurrying there to sample his wares. When hearing confession, Luther was startled to find many of his parishioners refusing to promise to refrain from adultery, usury, and other vices. When he withheld absolution on the grounds that they were not showing true contrition, they produced their indulgence letters, which, they said, offered all the absolution they needed. When Luther refused to ho
nor them, they hurried back to Tetzel to complain. Furious, the Dominican announced that he had orders to burn as a heretic anyone who dared interfere with the indulgence trade, which had been authorized by the pope himself.

  The indulgence being preached by Tetzel had a particular feature that would prove especially controversial. The coins clinking in the collection boxes were earmarked for a specific end: St. Peter’s in Rome. As stated in the papal bull authorizing the indulgence, the proceeds from it were to underwrite the construction of the new basilica. In his preaching, Tetzel stressed that those purchasing the indulgence would benefit not just their own souls and the souls of the deceased but all Christendom by helping to raise a glorious new sanctuary in the Holy See. In addition to the usual spiritual questions associated with indulgences, then, this one introduced the volatile element of the relations between Germany and Rome and of the large sums being siphoned off from the one to the other.

  In Rome, the construction of the new St. Peter’s was progressing, but fitfully. The death of Julius II, in February 1513, had removed the prime mover behind the project. His successor, Leo X, lacked not only his sense of commitment to it but also his fire and resolve. That was by design. The cardinals, tired of the irascibility and severity of the warrior-pope, wanted someone more agreeable and temperate. And so it happened that the man chosen to head the Church during what would prove to be its greatest crisis was a pudgy, pampered epicurean. The son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Giovanni (his given name) had the taste and cultivation of his father without the dash and drive. Almost from the cradle he had been groomed for the papacy. His education was entrusted to such giants of the Florentine Renaissance as Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino. He was made a priest at the age of seven, an abbot at eleven, and a cardinal at thirteen. When elected pope, Leo was, at thirty-seven, one of the youngest pontiffs ever. His goal was to make Rome not only Europe’s holiest city but also its most urbane, and under him the Roman Renaissance would reach its apex—and begin its decline.