Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  With The Babylonian Captivity, Luther was moving from reform to revolution. Audacious and at times apocalyptic, it offered a fierce assault on the stronghold of Catholic piety—the seven sacraments. These were the primary source of clerical authority and power, and Luther would now take a hammer to them. The Babylonian Captivity would serve in effect as the charter document of Protestantism, helping to define its theology, prescribe its rituals, describe the status of its clergy, and outline its positions on marriage and sex.

  The sacraments had always had a glaring vulnerability—their relatively recent vintage. They had not been fully defined until the mid-thirteenth century (by Peter Lombard) and their number had not been officially set at seven until 1439 (at the Council of Florence). Applying the principle that Scripture should be the sole authority, Luther would now test the sacraments against the text of the New Testament—and find most of them wanting.

  First up was the Mass, or the Lord’s Supper. This was the sacrament that had given Luther the most trouble during his early years as a priest. The intricate system of regulations, obligations, and admonitions prescribed by Gabriel Biel and other late Scholastics had brought on fits of terror. In his study of Scripture, however, Luther could find no textual basis for any of it, and he now denounced the way this most holy sacrament had been turned “into mere merchandise, a market, and a profit-making business,” on which priests and monks depended for their livelihood—a reference to Masses for the dead and the rich endowments provided for them.

  The main cause of these abuses, Luther maintained, was the specious doctrine that the Lord’s Supper was “a good work and a sacrifice”—a reenactment of Christ’s redemptive death at Calvary. Defined in this way, it had become a rite that a churchgoer could count as a meritorious work along with fasts, vigils, and pilgrimages to shorten his stay in purgatory. Rather than approach the Mass as passive onlookers, Christians should actively participate in it, seeing it not as a commemoration of Christ’s death but as a divine promise of forgiveness for sin to those who have faith in Christ. Luther favored retaining the Lord’s Supper as a sacrament, but only if it was performed with the same simplicity and lack of ceremonial pomp that marked Christ’s celebration of the Last Supper.

  This emphasis on simplicity in the Mass led Luther to continue the task of chipping away at the authority of the priesthood that he had begun in To the Christian Nobility. By investing the Mass with so much mystery and miraculous power, he wrote, the Church had greatly enlarged the role of priests as intermediaries between the Christian and God. The physical distance separating the priest at the altar from the laymen in the pews; the withholding of the cup from worshippers during Communion; the whispering of the words of consecration by the priest, “as if they were too sacred to be delivered to the common people”—all such practices were aimed at sealing the rite off from the unclean laity and making it the preserve of a specialized caste. When the priest raises the sign of the sacrament, he should pronounce, “in a loud and clear voice,” the words of consecration, and he should do so “in the language of the people,” so that faith “may be the more effectively awakened.”

  To further encourage lay participation, Luther endorsed offering the wine as well as the bread during Communion. The proscription against this had arisen out of a fear that the laity in their carelessness might spill some of the blood of the Lord. Despite the risk, Luther felt that the cup should be made available to all believers, since Jesus at the Last Supper was explicit about this, saying as he offered the cup to his disciples, “Drink of it, all of you.” Luther was here veering close to the Bohemian heresy, but what a year earlier had seemed so forbidding now seemed the only defensible course. “Rise up then, you popish flatterers, one and all!” he flared:

  Get busy and defend yourselves against the charges of impiety, tyranny, and lèse-majesté against the gospel, and of the crime of slandering your brethren. You decry as heretics those who refuse to contravene such plain and powerful words of Scripture in order to acknowledge the mere dreams of your brains!

  It was not the Bohemians or the Greeks who were heretics and schismatics, for they based their stand on the Gospels, but Rome, which vaunted its own figments against the clear Word of God.

  This idea, in turn, led Luther to arraign another key sacrament: priestly ordination. Since the New Testament contains not a single word about this practice, he wrote, it should be eliminated as an invention of the Church and the pope. By manipulating Scripture, the Church had sought “to set up a seed bed of implacable discord” between clergy and laity. The clergy not only exalt themselves above lay Christians but “regard them almost as dogs.” The sacrament of the Eucharist “does not belong to the priests, but to all men. The priests are not lords but servants in duty bound to administer both kinds to those who desire them, as often as they desire them.” “We are all equally priests,” Luther declared; “that is to say, we have the same power in respect to the Word and the sacraments.”

  Luther was here seeking to transform the priesthood from a divinely ordained elite to a ministry defined by service and duty. From these rudiments would arise the idea of the clergy as a trained and salaried class, taking its place alongside other professions that were emerging in early modern Europe.

  Luther similarly dismissed as unsupported by Scripture the sacramental status of confirmation, extreme unction (the ministering to the dying), and, most consequentially, marriage. Drawing on his work as a pastor and sometime marriage counselor, Luther offered a series of startling pronouncements about matrimony and sexuality. His starting point was Erasmus’s observation in his annotations that the term sacramentum as used by the Vulgate to describe the status of marriage was actually given in the Greek as mysterion, or “mystery.” Clearly, Luther wrote, there was no scriptural warrant whatsoever for regarding marriage as a sacrament. In declaring it one, the “Roman despots” were asserting oppressive control over what is a human institution, dissolving and compelling marriages as they pleased. The Church’s impediments to marriage (eighteen in all, according to Luther) were imposed for the sole end of “filthy lucre,” derived from the countless dispensations sought by those desperate to circumvent the Church’s “shameful laws.” “The Romanists of our day have through them become merchants. What is it they sell? Vulvas and penises.”

  According to Luther, the only circumstances justifying the annulment of a contracted marriage were impotence, ignorance of a previously contracted marriage, and a vow of chastity. In one of his wildest flights, he argued that if a woman’s husband is impotent, she should be allowed to have intercourse with another man. Such an arrangement should be kept secret and the husband compelled to raise the offspring as his own. If he refused, the woman should be allowed to contract a marriage with another man and flee to a distant place.

  On one key issue, though, Luther held fast: divorce. He considered it so repellent that even bigamy seemed preferable. Following Christ’s position in the New Testament, Luther maintained that “unchastity” (adultery) was the only justifiable grounds for divorce. Apart from this one area, though, Luther was breaking decisively with the traditional Catholic attitude dating back to Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose that considered sex shameful and physical passion as something to be feared. Luther went so far as to warn parents against committing their children to the monastic life, since its vow of perpetual chastity was so difficult for so many to keep. Luther had come to see sexuality as a natural part of the human condition as created by God—an attitude that would profoundly affect Protestant thinking on the subject.

  As for baptism and penance, Luther held that Scripture justified retaining them as sacraments, but even here he denounced what he saw as the unnecessary burdens imposed by the Church. While the New Testament passages on baptism provided sanction for that rite, its true value had been obscured by the many extraneous requirements stipulated at the expense of faith. It was not these external rites but the quickening of the spirit associated with baptism that made
it sacred.

  Luther similarly rushed to “unmask the tyranny that is rampant” in the sacrament of penance and the rite of confession at its heart. While he acknowledged that the practice of private confession could not be proved from Scripture, he was convinced from his own experience of its value and so supported retaining it, but it had become a workshop “of greed and power.” The Romanists had required such stringent satisfactions as to “torture poor consciences to death”: one runs to Rome, another to Chartreuse; one scourges himself with rods, another mortifies his body with fasts and vigils. “For these monstrous things we are indebted to you, O Roman See, and to your murderous laws and ceremonies, with which you have corrupted all mankind.” As a result, the true value of penance—the experience of genuine contrition for one’s sins—had been seriously eroded.

  Luther was here drawing on Erasmus’s observation that the Vulgate’s use of poenitentia (“penance”) did not accurately capture the meaning of the underlying Greek term, metanoia (“to change one’s mind”). Erasmus’s philological insight thus became in Luther’s hands the basis for a dramatic recasting of this key sacrament. By the time Luther was finished wielding his hammer, he had reduced the seven sacraments to two-plus—the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and a greatly reduced version of penance.

  Luther was not simply redefining the sacraments, however; in The Babylonian Captivity, he was unleashing a frontal attack on the authority and hierarchy of the Church. “Neither pope nor bishop nor any other man has the right to impose a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his consent,” he proclaimed, reflecting his radical Paulism. He added: “I lift my voice simply on behalf of liberty and conscience, and I confidently cry: No law, whether of man or of angels, may rightfully be imposed upon Christians without their consent, for we are free of all laws.” Luther was thus arguing for a dramatic democratizing of the Church, with the power of the pope and prelates to rule over the laity sharply cut back.

  With The Babylonian Captivity, Luther was breaking irrevocably with Rome. He was also distancing himself from Church moderates who until then had supported his program to curb Roman excesses and reanimate the faith. With a single blow, he had rent the curtain in the temple. Could the temple survive?

  Even as The Babylonian Captivity was being prepared by the printers, Johann Eck was arriving in Germany. At first, all had gone smoothly for the Ingolstadt professor. On September 21, 1520, in the town of Meissen, seventy miles southeast of Wittenberg, he had arranged for the bull against Luther to be affixed to the doors of the cathedral. In the following days it was posted in Merseburg, sixty miles to the southwest, and in Brandenburg, forty miles to the northeast, giving the impression of a noose tightening around Wittenberg and Luther.

  Then, on September 29, Eck reached Leipzig. A little more than a year earlier, he had been proclaimed the victor here in his disputation with Luther, but the atmosphere had changed dramatically. In the streets students shouted ribald songs after him and posted lampoons around town. Eck felt so threatened that he fled into the Dominican monastery, but even there he was assailed by angry letters, and the university refused to publish the bull.

  Eck eventually managed to make it out of Leipzig, but since he dared not show his face in Wittenberg, he gave the bull to a Leipzig militiaman to take there; the militiaman handed it off to a resident of that town. Eck, meanwhile, headed for Erfurt. There, he was accosted by armed students who grabbed copies of the bull. Calling it a “bubble” (a play on the Latin word for “bull”), they tore it into bits and threw them into the river to see if they would float. In Torgau, the document was torn down and besmeared. Finally, on October 10, the bull reached Peter Burkhard, the Wittenberg rector, and then, on October 11, Luther himself.

  “At last that Roman bull brought by Eck has arrived,” Luther announced to Spalatin. Its demand that he recant without a hearing did not surprise him—this was how the Roman tyranny worked. What did shock him was the document’s slipshod quality—its chaotic piling up of articles; its haughty refusal to explain how his propositions erred; its failure to distinguish among those that were heretical, offensive, scandalous, and impious. With the bull’s arrival in Wittenberg, the sixty-day countdown to Luther’s excommunication began, but he was characteristically defiant. “I despise it and am now attacking it as impious and fraudulent, Eckian to the core.” He was referring to a tract that he was drafting in Latin in which he dismissed the bull as nothing but wasted paper and stated that it would be better to be killed a thousand times than to retract a single article of his own. Just as Rome’s ecclesiasts had excommunicated him for blasphemous heresy, he wrote, “so I excommunicate them according to the holy truth of God.”

  Luther did not have much time to dwell on the matter, however, for he was expected in the town of Lichtenberg, eighty miles to the south, for another meeting with Karl von Miltitz. Since their last encounter, in January 1519, the papal envoy had continued to ply his makeshift diplomacy, with little to show for it. Even at this late date, he remained convinced that the whole affair could be settled if Luther sent a personal appeal to the pope. Luther was dubious. In 1518, he had sent such a petition to Cardinal Cajetan. After his first meeting with Miltitz, he had written a conciliatory letter to Leo, which Miltitz had not even sent. In August 1520, at Frederick’s behest, Luther had drafted an appeal to Charles V, requesting both protection and a fair hearing. Now Miltitz was urging him to approach the pope yet again. With the issuing of Exsurge Domine, such a gesture seemed pointless, but Luther, prodded by Frederick, agreed to meet.

  The journey to Lichtenberg, undertaken in mid-October, posed great danger. Ulrich von Hutten had gone into hiding amid reports that the Romanists had hired a team to take him bound to Rome or even kill him. Luther was even more desirable prey. On the trip he was accompanied by Melanchthon, a fellow friar, a nobleman, and four horsemen. Miltitz arrived with four horsemen of his own. In their meeting, which took place in a local cloister, Luther agreed to write a respectful letter to Leo offering his side of the affair and making it clear that he had never intended to attack the pope personally. He told Miltitz that he had an essay on Christian freedom in the works and would frame the letter as a dedication to it.

  Back in Wittenberg, he immediately began work on the essay. The idea for it had arisen out of the continuing controversy over his position on works. Matthaeus Adrianus, the converted Jew who had been hired to fill the Hebrew chair, had turned violently against Luther over his teaching that good works avail nothing, and in sermons he was attacking him personally. Others shared Adrianus’s anger, and Luther now sought to explain himself.

  The Freedom of a Christian would be the third of his great 1520 tracts. In contrast to the bite of To the Christian Nobility and the rage of The Babylonian Captivity, Luther would now strike a serene, meditative tone. He sought to describe the deep personal transformation that faith can work in the Christian heart. His goal was to develop a foundation for good behavior free of the narrow calculus of self-interest that, he felt, tainted so much human activity.

  Luther opened with a pair of paradoxical propositions that would become famous:

  A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

  A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

  Though these statements might seem contradictory, Luther wrote, they actually complement each other. Taking up the first, he offered his most lyrical tribute yet to the emancipating power of faith. The one thing on which a Christian life depends is the Word of God, and that Word becomes effective only through faith. Since faith alone justifies, and faith can rule only in the inner man, it is clear that man cannot be saved through any external works like dress, food, prayer, or meditation. Every Christian must thus lay aside all confidence in works and concentrate on his faith. “Every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, by virtue of a spiritual power, he is lord of all things without exception, so that nothing can do him any harm.” For those w
ho lack faith, by contrast, all things turn out badly, for they wickedly seek to turn everything to their own glory rather than to God’s. Luther restated his idea that all Christians are priests and that to insist otherwise had produced a tyranny based on the “unbearable bondage” of human works and laws.

  Taking up his second proposition, Luther wrote that because faith accomplishes all, some maintain that good works are not necessary. “I answer: not so, you wicked men, not so.” Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works out of a spontaneous love for God. To illustrate the point, he took an image from Aristotle and turned it on its head. In the Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher argued that men become good or bad builders through building well or badly. The same was true of virtue, Aristotle wrote: we become just or unjust through our acts toward others. Luther rejected this. A good or bad house does not make a good or bad builder, but a good or bad builder makes a good or bad house. The work does not make the workman; the workman makes the work. So it is with the works of man. They are good if done by men of faith and wicked if done in unbelief, for faith alone justifies and saves the person.

  Finally, Luther discussed the obligations a faithful Christian has toward others. A Christian should serve others in such a way as to seek advantage not for himself but only for his neighbor. Paul commanded us to give to the needy; he urged the stronger member to serve the weaker. The truly Christian life is one in which faith becomes active through love—through works undertaken freely without hope of reward. A Christian should not distinguish between friend and enemy or anticipate thankfulness or unthankfulness but freely and willingly give of himself and all that he has. By that standard, few monasteries, altars, or other church institutions were truly Christian, for their sole end was profit.