Luther was also reading Julius Exclusus, with delight. The dialogue (he wrote to Spalatin) “is so merry, so learned, so ingenious (that is, so Erasmian), that it makes the reader laugh and joke at the vices and miseries of Christ’s church, for which rather every Christian ought to pray and weep.” Luther was so captivated that he thought of translating the work into German, but he dropped the idea when he realized that he could not do justice to the style. Luther signed his letter “Eleutherius,” Greek for “free”—a sign of both his growing ease in that language and his sense of spiritual emancipation.
Eleutherius’s letters in this period contain unmistakable Erasmian echoes. In a message to Spalatin at the end of 1517, for instance, he noted how few saints were honored for offering charity, patience, humility, faith, hope, and other spiritual goods. St. Lawrence was worshipped to ward off fire, Sebastian to prevent the plague, and Valentine to control epilepsy; otherwise, these men “would be little esteemed.” This passage seems to have been directly inspired by the Enchiridion and its stress on inner piety over formal worship. In his study of Scripture, meanwhile, Luther remained indebted to Erasmus’s annotations and the insight they offered on difficult passages.
Where Erasmus’s theological insights were concerned, however, Luther was dismissive. Whenever he addressed opponents of the New Learning, he wrote, “I always give Erasmus the highest praise and defend him as much as I can,” but “if I have to speak as a theologian rather than a philologian, there are many things in Erasmus which seem to me completely incongruous with a knowledge of Christ.” One cannot enter into the meaning of Scripture simply through study or innate intelligence, he added; one must instead rely on prayer and the infusion of the Spirit. Erasmus extolled Jerome, but, to understand Christ and grace, Augustine and Ambrose were superior guides.
Finally, in late January or early February 1518, Luther heard the first rumbles of discontent over the Ninety-Five Theses. They came at a Dominican conclave taking place in Frankfurt an der Oder, about a hundred miles to the east. The Dominicans were bitter rivals of the Augustinians, and their hostility had deepened as a result of Luther’s attack on indulgences. It had so eaten into the profits of Johann Tetzel that he had given up selling them. At the meeting, Tetzel defended a set of 106 “anti-theses” on indulgences that attacked Luther’s theses at several points. Rallying to Tetzel’s defense, Dominican preachers began denouncing Luther from the pulpit, calling him a heretic and predicting that within a month he would be burned at the stake. Tetzel’s anti-theses were printed up and carried by booksellers to cities and towns across Germany.
One of those peddlers turned up in Wittenberg. Appearing in the marketplace, he was confronted by a group of students, who, harassing and jostling him, demanded to know how he dared bring such wares into their town. Some bought up copies of the anti-theses; others seized them from his bag. Townspeople were invited to assemble in the marketplace at two o’clock in the afternoon, and at that hour hundreds of copies of the anti-theses were burned. Luther—sure he would be blamed for the act—disapproved.
The Dominicans’ campaign was encouraging others, and by mid-February the Ninety-Five Theses were being “overwhelmed with abuse,” as Luther put it. Indulgences were “nothing but a snare for souls,” but in exposing them as a fraud, he had entered a “dangerous labyrinth of disputation” in which “six hundred Minotaurs” were arrayed against him. “The false preachers of indulgences are thundering against me in wonderful style.”
Luther was especially disturbed by the tirade directed at him by Johann Eck—the same Ingolstadt professor who had reproved Erasmus for his New Testament annotations. Earlier, Eck and Luther had had an amicable exchange of letters, leading Luther to consider him a friend, but when Eck read the Ninety-Five Theses, he became so agitated that he immediately wrote down his objections. His manuscript—titled Obelisks, after the critical marks used to signify offensive passages in texts—denounced Luther for daring to question so sacred an institution as indulgences. Eck called him a heretic, presumptuous, insubordinate, unlearned, softheaded, a despiser of the pope, and most serious of all, a Bohemian—a term that linked Luther’s ideas to those of Jan Hus, whose challenge to indulgences and other Catholic institutions had brought him to the stake a century earlier. Just as Hus had doomed himself by promoting Bible readings unsanctioned by Rome, Eck wrote, so was Luther circulating his own teachings rather than those of the Church.
Eck had not intended to make his comments public, but Luther’s friend Wenceslas Link in Nuremberg had obtained a copy and sent it to him. Luther was shocked to see himself treated so severely by someone whom he had considered an ally. Eck’s book “is nothing less than the malice and envy of a maniac,” he wrote. Luther quickly prepared a counterattack. Titled Asterisks, after the marks used to highlight important passages in a text, it was six times as long as Obelisks and no less vituperative. Eck, he wrote, is an example of Scholastic sterility who stinks “of his goat Aristotle.” His statement that the free will rules in the soul like a king in his kingdom really means like the madam in her brothel, “for the will alone is always a whore and has all the qualities of a whore.” Asterisks offered an early taste of Luther’s talent for invective. But his ferocity was a response to Eck’s own vehemence. Rather than engage with the substantive issues raised by indulgences, Eck had immediately turned the matter into a test of ecclesiastical authority—a far graver concern.
Until now, the dispute over indulgences had been confined to the cloister and the university. Seeking a wider audience, Luther decided for the first time to set down his ideas in German. The Sermon on Indulgences and Grace was designed to give the laity a succinct summary of the urgent issues at stake. In it, Luther rejected indulgences even more sharply than he had in his theses. It was, he wrote, much better to give alms to those in need than to waste them on such empty contrivances as indulgences, and if he was called a heretic for saying so, he did not care, for only those who did not truly understand the Bible would use such a label.
Printed by Johann Rhau-Grunenberg in March 1518, the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace was a crudely produced pamphlet of twelve pages. Copies—packed in wooden kegs and transported by horseback and cart—went quickly, and other printers began bringing out their own editions. More than twenty would appear by the end of 1520; with an edition in those days averaging about a thousand copies, this was an extraordinary number for such a sober work. The Sermon on Indulgences and Grace was an example of a new product of the printing industry—the Flugschrift, or short pamphlet—and its success suggested the large market that existed for such works. In some ways, the publication of the sermon was as historically significant as the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, marking the moment when Luther discovered the power of writing in the vernacular.
As Luther’s views spread, so did the anger against him. “I know perfectly well that my name is in bad odor with many,” he wrote at the end of March 1518. Even many good men had found fault with him “for condemning rosaries, tonsures, chanting psalms and other prayers, in short, all ‘good works.’” His preference for the Bible over the Scholastic doctors had excited great hatred among the theologians, who “are almost insane with their zeal,” but “with God’s help I care nothing for their scarecrows.” If Scotus and Biel had the right to dissent from Aquinas, and if the Thomists had the right to contradict everybody else, why should he not be entitled to do the same?
Amid this growing rage, Luther received a summons from Johann von Staupitz, the head of his order, to appear at the next chapter meeting of the Augustinians, to be held in Heidelberg in late April 1518. Staupitz—wanting to give his protégé an opportunity to show off his skills as a theologian—instructed him to prepare a set of theses for disputation. To minimize controversy, though, he advised him to avoid the subject of indulgences and instead concentrate on his new ideas about faith and grace, works and free will. At long last, Luther was going to get a chance to discuss his views publicly—if, that is, h
e made it to Heidelberg safely. For the first time since posting his theses, he would be leaving the environs of Wittenberg. Heidelberg was in the Rhineland, about 250 miles away, and getting there would pose great danger.
“Everybody advises me not to go to Heidelberg,” Luther wrote to Johann Lang in Erfurt. “But I shall fulfill my vow of obedience and go thither on foot.” The elector had taken him under his protection and would not “suffer them to drag me to Rome.” Frederick provided a safe-conduct letter as well as introductions to officials in the territories through which Luther was to pass. (The elector also came through with the long-promised cowl.) As an added precaution, Luther traveled incognito, and a careful route with designated stops was mapped out to reduce the threat of abduction or attack.
Apprehensive and resigned, Luther—accompanied by a fellow friar named Leonhard Beier—left Wittenberg on foot on April 11, 1518. From the moment the two men crossed the bridge out of Wittenberg and into the springtime countryside, however, all went well. They traveled south to Leipzig, then passed through the wooded valleys and rolling hills of Thuringia to the village of Judenbach. There they were received by a Saxon councilor, who treated them to a fine dinner. Midway through the journey, Luther reported to Spalatin that he was “terribly fatigued” from walking but that no vehicles were available. Proceeding through groves of pines and firs and over the hill to Coburg, they turned west into the Mainz valley. Stopping in the episcopal seat of Würzburg, they were entertained in the Marienberg castle, a fortress that overlooked the town. Luther was cheered to find that the Augustinian delegation from Erfurt, including Johann Lang, was present, and for the remaining seventy miles to Heidelberg, he and Beier were able to travel in the delegation’s wagon.
In Heidelberg, Luther was to his surprise received as a guest of honor. Home to Germany’s oldest university, the town was ruled by Count Palatine Wolfgang. He invited Luther, Lang, and Staupitz (who had arrived in the city) to a grand dinner and showed them the Heidelberg castle, which, rising on a spur above the city, offered a view across the Neckar River to the fertile plain of the Rhine. They also got to see the treasures of the castle church, which included a splinter of the True Cross. Luther stayed in the Augustinian convent, where on April 25, 1518, in the large hall, the chapter meeting began.
Luther had prepared twenty-eight theological and twelve philosophical theses, and he presided while Leonhard Beier defended them. In the audience were Augustinian officials and doctors from around Germany, along with some students and members of other orders eager to see the controversial friar. For the first time, they heard the bracing new theology that Luther had developed from his intensive readings of the Psalms and Romans. His theses stressed the weakness of man and the omnipotence of God, the inutility of works and the centrality of faith. The person who believes “that he can obtain grace by doing what is in him” simply increases his sin, according to one thesis. It is not through works and glory that God’s grace can be found but through suffering and the cross.
Physically, Luther made a strong impression. Overwork and undernourishment had left him with chiseled cheekbones that stood out in his large tonsured head, and his dark eyes radiated evangelical intensity. He quoted effortlessly from the Bible, engaged in easy repartee, and spoke with earnest conviction. Some found his views shocking. “If the peasants would hear this, they would certainly stone you to death,” a university doctor declared at one point. Most of those in attendance, however, were favorably impressed. The count palatine wrote to Frederick that Luther had performed so well that he had won “no small praise for your Grace’s university and was greatly lauded by many learned persons.”
Among those persons was Martin Bucer, a twenty-six-year-old Dominican from Alsace then studying in Heidelberg. “Although our chief men refuted him with all their might, their wiles were not able to make him move an inch from his propositions,” he wrote to Beatus Rhenanus in Basel. Luther’s “sweetness in answering is remarkable, his patience in listening is incomparable, in his explanations you would recognize the acumen of Paul, not of Scotus; his answers so brief, so wise, and drawn from the Holy Scriptures, easily made all his hearers his admirers.” On the day after the disputation, Bucer dined with Luther, and the meal was “rich with doctrine rather than with dainties.” Luther, he added, “agrees with Erasmus in all things, but with this difference in his favor, that what Erasmus only insinuates he teaches openly and freely.”
Bucer’s remark shows how natural it was for observers at this point to link the ideas of the two men. Luther, in his sharp condemnations of clerical excesses, his praise for internal piety over formal ceremony, and his preference for the Scriptures over the Sentences, did seem to echo Erasmus. Luther’s more radical notions about human depravity and helplessness were not immediately apparent. Bucer’s esteem for Luther was especially telling, for he represented a new generation of humanists who in the future would face choosing between schools led by the two men. For many young reformers, the friar’s spiritual magnetism would prove hard to resist.
Older traditionalists, however, were largely immune. Luther’s attack on Scholastic methods and ideas, including his disdain for the notion that man can cooperate with God in seeking salvation, seemed to senior Augustinians a repudiation of their entire system. The depth of their disapproval became apparent to Luther on his return to Wittenberg. A group of Nurembergers gave him a ride to Würzburg, where he transferred to the wagon of some brethren from Erfurt, with whom he continued to that city. For part of the journey his companion was Bartholomäus Arnoldi von Usingen, one of his old Erfurt professors. Luther tried hard to win him over to his new concepts but succeeded only in confounding him. In Erfurt, Luther met with another former professor, Jodokus Trutfetter, who, far from being persuaded, angrily reproached him for his defection.
To the Erfurters, his ideas were “twice-deadly cabbage,” Luther wrote to Spalatin after arriving back in Wittenberg, on May 15, 1518, lifting a phrase from Erasmus’s Adages. But he was greatly encouraged by the enthusiasm of the young. Just as Christ, rejected by the Jews, went over to the Gentiles, so he hoped that his “true theology,” dismissed “by those opinionated old men, would pass over to the younger generation.” Expressing his overall satisfaction with his trip, Luther observed that he “had gone out on foot” but “returned in a wagon.” Even the food and drink had agreed with him, so that “some think I look stronger and fatter now.”
At the meeting in Heidelberg, Staupitz had arranged for Luther to be relieved of his position as district vicar. His aim was to lighten Luther’s workload, but the move represented the first formal loosening of Luther’s ties to the Church. Freed from his administrative duties, Luther had more time to devote to preaching, lecturing, and writing, and he used it to further explore his new ideas. On the Sunday following his return, he was scheduled to preach at the town church, and as his subject he chose excommunication, or the ban. At the time, rumors were afoot that Luther himself might be excommunicated, causing great anxiety in the town, but rather than sidestep the issue, he decided to confront it head-on.
Like indulgences, the Church’s use of excommunication had produced growing resentment. Once a solemn punishment reserved for heretics and reprobates, it was now being routinely used to enforce the collection of payments and dues, not only from senior clerics unable to meet the levies on their offices but also from ordinary Christians falling behind in their tithes. Further, the original punishment of excluding the banned individual from the community of believers by denying him the sacraments had been extended to include a prohibition on all commercial dealings with the offender. Not only the felonious individual but also all of his relatives were subject to the ban. Crowds of excommunicants, forced from their homes, were reduced to begging. Those who died while excommunicated had to be interred without the rites of the Church and so were exposed to an eternity of torment. By the early sixteenth century, the Church was punishing not only individuals but whole communities it judged to have i
nterfered with its prerogatives. Town councils that tried to impose limits on the commercial activities of monasteries, for instance, frequently found themselves subject to an interdict, with all Church rites and observances prohibited within the town.
In his sermon, Luther inveighed against these practices. The ban, he declared, could affect only the external aspects of the relationship between a Christian and the Church, such as participation in the sacraments. It could not affect his inner relationship with God, which depended on faith, hope, and charity and which no human agent—not even the pope—could disturb. Unfortunately, the authority over such instruments was too often placed in the hands of the Pilates and Herods of the world, who used them to extract sums from the defenseless while the “big Johns” went untouched despite being fornicators, slanderers, and usurers. An unjust ban should be endured but its importance shattered, just as one could pop a pig’s bladder filled with peas that rattled (a popular children’s toy).
Just days after his return from Heidelberg, Luther was again defying the Church. As it happened, the Dominicans had spies in the town church (a practice that would become commonplace), and from their notes they produced a set of theses on the ban that was even more provocative than Luther’s actual statements. Published and circulated under his name, this counterfeit document caused such a stir that Luther felt compelled to reconstruct and publish his sermon. Appearing in August 1518 under the title Sermon on the Virtue of Excommunication, it would go through a dozen printings in less than two years.
As this episode shows, the criticism of Luther, far from making him reconsider his views, was hardening them. “The more they threaten,” he declared, “the bolder I am.” This was certainly apparent in his Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, which he completed at the end of May 1518 after months of labor. At seventy thousand words, the tract was baggy, rambling, convoluted, and laced with scriptural quotes—features that would become common in Luther’s longer theological works. But the Explanations was a critical text of his formative years, showing how his ideas about the supreme power of faith and grace were pushing him into conflict with the Church. Luther treated Leo X with respect, calling him “a very good pope” whose “integrity and learning are a delight to all upright persons,” but, he noted, he did not much care what pleased or displeased Leo, for “he is a human being just like the rest of us.” There were many popes who had not only erred but also committed terrible deeds. A good example was Julius II and the “horrible murders” for which he was responsible. Rome was a “veritable Babylon,” an “infernal abyss” of simony, lust, pageantry, murder, and other abominations. The “extortion” to which poor people were subjected through indulgences to help build the new St. Peter’s had to cease. Luther expressed his hope that the trials confronting the Church would lead to a “future reformation”—one of his earliest uses of the term that would become so associated with his name.
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