The Freedom of a Christian showed how consistent Luther’s core ideas about faith and works had remained since his lectures on the Psalms and Romans, but in this essay they had ripened into a resonant vision of piety made active in the world through faith. The image of the good builder constructing a good house would become well known.
As with many analogies, however, holes could be poked in it. While it no doubt takes a good builder to make a good house, a builder becomes good in part through the experience of building houses; in the end, he is judged not by his knowledge of architecture but by the quality of the houses he builds.
This image offered a measure of Luther’s distance from not only Aristotle but also the Christian humanists. At many points, The Freedom of a Christian echoes the Enchiridion. Both are concerned with the inner person. Both hold that ceremonies, rites, and other external acts do not constitute true piety; one’s internal spirituality is what matters. For Erasmus, however, faith is only one measure of a Christian’s life; one’s conduct—the quality of the house one builds—is no less vital. Luther’s theology was also far more exclusivist than Erasmus’s. In the latter’s view, virtuous Gentiles like Socrates and Cicero outdid many Christians in exemplifying Christian values. To Luther, however, such figures, lacking faith in Christ, could not be truly moral actors; only faithful Christians could. For all their surface similarities, the Enchiridion and The Freedom of a Christian capture the sharply divergent worldviews of these two devotedly Christian thinkers.
Reflective, sincere, and concise, The Freedom of a Christian is perhaps Luther’s most accessible work. That he wrote it while facing possible martyrdom makes its temperate tone all the more remarkable. In his own day, however, it would not succeed in putting the controversy over good works to rest. Readers would pay far more heed to the first than to the second of his opening propositions; works—for both him and them—would always remain secondary to faith. Even so, Luther’s idea of the Christian inspired by his faith to apply the gospel in all realms of life would prove a world changing concept.
If in The Freedom of a Christian Luther was at his most earnest, in his letter to Leo X he was at his most mocking. Forced to entreat the pope yet again, he sought to hide his exasperation under a cloak of deference. The result was a rhetorical tour de force—a disdainful put-down masquerading as a reverential tribute.
“Living among the monsters of this age with whom I am now for the third year waging war, I am compelled occasionally to look up to you, Leo, most blessed father, and to think of you,” Luther began, immediately placing himself on a first-name basis with the pontiff. He was now writing because it had come to his attention that he stood accused of great indiscretion in his writings, “in which, it is said, I have not spared even your person.” While to his knowledge he had spoken only good and honorable words about the pope whenever he had thought of him, he was sorry if he had ever done otherwise, for Leo’s reputation and the fame of his blameless life were far too well known “to be assailed by anyone, no matter how great he is.”
To be sure, he had “sharply attacked ungodly doctrines” and snapped at his opponents, and of this he did not repent, for he was following in the tradition of Christ, who in his zeal called his opponents a brood of vipers, and of Paul, who branded his adversaries as dogs and deceivers. What is the good of salt if it does not bite? While never thinking ill of Leo personally, he “truly despised” his see and the Roman Curia, which, as no one could deny, was “more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was” and which, as far as he could tell, was “characterized by a completely depraved, hopeless, and notorious godlessness.” The Roman Church, once the holiest of all, “has become the most licentious den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the kingdom of sin, death, and hell.” In this den sat Leo, a “lamb in the midst of wolves,” a “Daniel in the midst of lions.”
Moved by his affection for him, Luther continued, “I have always been sorry, most excellent Leo, that you were made pope in these times, for you are worthy of being pope in better days.” The Curia deserved to have not devout men like him but “Satan himself as pope, for he now actually rules in that Babylon more than you do.” It was in the hope of saving Leo from his prison that he had made such a strong and stinging attack on it. And, while he was willing to remain silent if his opponents did the same, recant he never would.
In closing, Luther acknowledged that he was perhaps being presumptuous in seeking to instruct so exalted a personage, but, seeing His Blessedness facing dangers on all sides, he felt that he was in need of even the slightest help from the least of his brothers. As a token of his goodwill, he was sending along a little treatise (The Freedom of a Christian). Though small in size, “it contains the whole of Christian life in a brief form, provided you grasp its meaning. I am a poor man and have no other gift to offer, and you do not need to be enriched by any but a spiritual gift.”
There is no indication that Leo ever read Luther’s letter. Many others did, however. The Open Letter to Leo X was immediately printed in Wittenberg and Augsburg. It, along with Luther’s three 1520 tracts, set off tremors across Europe, and printers were forced to work overtime to meet the demand. “No one’s books are bought more eagerly,” Henricus Glareanus, a school instructor in Paris and a friend of Erasmus’s, wrote to Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich. At the most recent fair in Frankfurt, he noted, one bookseller sold 1,400 copies of Luther’s works. The Babylonian Captivity caused such commotion that in some places the authorities were already seeking to ban it.
Luther was unmoved. “I care nothing if my work The Babylonian Captivity is prohibited,” he wrote in late October 1520. “What does it matter if all my books are prohibited? I will write nothing against those who use force against us. It is enough for me to have taught the truth against those stupid babblers, and to have defended it against the learned who alone are able to hurt.” And “what if they kill me? I am not worthy to suffer aught in so blessed a cause.” As for the papal bull, it had in no way frightened him; he intended “to preach, lecture, and write in spite of it.”
And preach, lecture, and write he did. In this period, Luther stepped up his already prodigious work pace. On November 4, 1520—not long after completing The Freedom of a Christian—he finished Against the Execrable Bull, his attack, in Latin, on Leo’s decree. Later in the month he produced a separate, substantially reworked version in German, Against the Bull of the Antichrist. In addition, he began preparing a long exposition on the Magnificat—the humble hymn of the Virgin Mary sung at vespers—as well as a series of postils—homilies on the New Testament—for use by preachers during Advent.
All the while, Luther was delivering daily sermons, giving lectures on the Psalms, and tending to his ever-expanding correspondence. He was helped out by his decision to abandon the canonical hours. He had so regularly fallen behind in saying them, and had so damaged his health in his effort to catch up, that he had finally given them up altogether—another way station on his flight from monasticism. He did, however, continue to wear the Augustinian habit and live in the Black Cloister.
With the approach of December 10, 1520, and the end of the sixty-day grace period stipulated in the bull, Luther had to decide how to respond. With his flair for the dramatic, he settled on an act that would rank among the boldest of his career. On the morning of December 10, Melanchthon posted a notice at the town church calling on all “pious and zealous youth” to assemble at nine o’clock at the chapel of the Holy Cross, which lay just outside the town’s eastern walls. At a spot near the Elbe where cattle were butchered, about one hundred students, bundled against the cold, gathered together with Luther, Melanchthon, and other faculty members. Some wood was arranged in a pile and lit by a master of arts. To the flames were fed volumes containing the canon law, the papal decretals, and the Extravagantes; a manual for father confessors; and works by Johann Eck and other adversaries of Luther.
As the books were consumed, Luther, trembling and praying, stepped forward
and, barely noticed by anyone, added a printed copy of the bull to the flames. Invoking Psalm 21, he said softly, “Because thou hast brought down the truth of God, he also brings thee down unto this fire today, Amen.” The students lingered by the flames, singing the Te Deum Laudamus and other hymns.
Back in his study, Luther wrote a note to Spalatin informing him of his act. In some ways, burning the canon law and the decretals was even more daring than destroying the bull, for they provided the legal foundation for all ecclesiastical power.
The students, however, treated the event as a lark. In town, they commandeered a farm wagon, in the front of which rode four boys in formal dress who, representing the vanquished “Synagogue” (a symbol of ceremony-addled Rome), chanted dirgelike fragments in Hebrew. Behind them, a flag-bearer brandished a four-foot-long version of the bull, waving it like a plundered standard. As the wagon made its way through the streets, it was heralded by the discordant blasts of a trumpet. As bewildered townspeople looked on, the wagon gradually filled with the tracts of papists, sophists, and enemies of the new gospel. From houses and sheds, shingles were taken to serve as kindling, and the students, returning to the site of the earlier pyre, read mockingly from the bull, sang more dirges, and fed the newly collected books to the flames.
Hearing of this buffoonery, Luther became furious, and at his next day’s lecture on the Psalms, he admonished the students about the serious business that lay ahead. Burning the decretals was child’s play compared with what was now required—burning the papacy itself, together with its false teachings and cruel policies. Those who failed to oppose with their full hearts the ridiculous rule of the pope would not be saved. It would be far better to live in a desert than to continue suffering in this kingdom of the Antichrist.
“Everything is tending towards a tremendous revolution, of which the outcome is uncertain,” Wolfgang Capito wrote to Luther from Mainz in December 1520. Capito had moved there from Basel to take a position with Archbishop Albrecht. From friends, he had heard of the many threats being directed at Luther. While the people stood unanimously behind him, Capito went on, his enemies were protected “by strong bulwarks, castles and moats” and had access to money, arms, and manpower. Expressing concern over the uncompromising course Luther had chosen, Capito, quoting from Paul, called on him to “consider our weakness, that we need milk rather than strong meat,” and not to test the devotion of the people “by asking too much of them.”
Luther brushed aside such counsels. Seething at the hatred he felt on all sides, he dashed off a pamphlet explaining (as its title put it) Why the Books of the Pope and His Disciples Were Burned by Doctor Martin Luther. Mimicking the form of the bull, Luther listed thirty errors that he had found in canon law, the most important of which was the teaching that no one could judge the pope, whereas the pope could judge everyone else. Through this article, Luther argued, all misfortune had entered the world. Not once had the pope sought to refute him through Scripture or reason. “If they are allowed to burn my articles, in which there is more gospel and more of the true substance of Holy Scripture” than “in all the pope’s books, then I am justified much more in burning their unchristian law books in which there is nothing good.”
As the news of Luther’s burning of the bull spread around Christendom, it was greeted with wonder and disbelief. When word reached Rome, the Curia at once began preparing a new bull to formally excommunicate him. Issued on January 3, 1521, Decet Romanum Pontificem (“It Pleases the Roman Pontiff”) was immediately sent north by messenger to Jerome Aleander, who was now in Worms.
There, final preparations were being made for the new Imperial Diet, scheduled to begin on January 6, 1521. It would be the first diet presided over by the new emperor. With German nationalist fervor rising, with rage at Rome surging, with Luther’s books stirring excitement and indignation from the Rhine to the Oder, with all looking to the young Charles to lead the cause of reform, the diet was shaping up as the most historic gathering in Western Europe since the Council of Constance of 1414. Just as Jan Hus’s fate had been decided at that assembly, so would Martin Luther’s be determined at Worms.
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Will He Come?
The Reichstag, as the Imperial Diet was called, was the main deliberative body of the Holy Roman Empire. Worms hosted it more than one hundred times between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, earning it the title “Mother of Diets.” The town would prove unequal to this one, however. In the weeks prior to its start, the roads into Worms were clogged with the retinues of arriving princes, bishops, and knights. William, duke of Bavaria, came with five hundred horses, and Philip, margrave of Baden, brought six hundred. Just ferrying them across the wintry Rhine (Worms sat on its western bank) required military-like prowess. With so much at stake, the diet attracted Spanish noblemen, Italian diplomats, French and English envoys, and officials from Savoy, Venice, Denmark, Poland, and Hungary, all ready to carry word of its proceedings to the far corners of Europe.
Worms had a population of 7,000, but the influx from the diet would nearly double it. Food was expensive, firewood was scarce, and lodgings were overcrowded. In the inns, knights slept five or six to a room, and a dozen grooms were forced to make do with a single bundle of straw. The emperor himself, staying in the bishop’s palace that adjoined the cathedral, had to share a room with Chièvres, his aging counselor, who in any case wanted to keep watch over him.
The crush, in turn, fed the unrest in town. For the past two decades, Worms and its environs had simmered with discontent. In the countryside, peasants had periodically risen up against their feudal overlords, demanding relief from oppressive levies, while town residents constantly feuded with the bishop. As an imperial free city, Worms answered directly to the emperor rather than the Church, yet the clergy retained many privileges, and the citizenry had had to endure many an interdict. Looming over the town was the Dom, or cathedral, a great sandstone monument that, with four Romanesque towers, two domes, and a choir at each end, projected a sense of ecclesiastical might. Anticlerical sentiment ran deep.
So did support for Luther. Like other Rhenish towns, Worms had been flooded with his books, and everyone who had read them, or had heard them read, felt that something momentous was afoot. A popular broadsheet carried an image of Luther’s powerful, gaunt head (taken from an engraving by Cranach), sometimes with a dove above, sometimes with a halo. “The people buy these pictures, kiss them, and carry them even in the palace,” Jerome Aleander wrote in one of his dispatches to Rome.
Arriving in Worms at the end of November 1520, the papal nuncio was struck by the insurrectionary air in its streets. Former students whom he encountered fled as if from an outlaw, while ordinary citizens accosted him to praise Luther. To his surprise, many priests and monks from orders other than Luther’s own seemed ready to defend him to the death. Even more disturbing to Aleander were the widespread rumors that Ulrich von Hutten and his cohort were plotting to murder him. Hutten had taken up residence in the Ebernburg, the fortress of the knight-adventurer Franz von Sickingen, which was located a day’s journey to the north and controlled the Rhine valley. “Do you think you can intimidate us by burning books?” Hutten declared. “The question will not be settled by the pen but by the sword.” “I feel less safe in this city than on the Campagna,” Aleander noted, referring to the bandit-infested region outside Rome.
Knowing how crowded Worms would be, the nuncio had reserved rooms well in advance, but when he went to claim them, he was turned away. He fared no better elsewhere. Despite his willingness to pay more than anyone else, Aleander had to settle for a grim garret in a poor man’s house. “I suffer unaccustomed hardship,” he lamented. “On the icy bank of the Rhine, I, who have been accustomed to a comfortable heated room from September to May, lack a fire.”
Despite the chilly climate, the diet offered Aleander an opportunity to mobilize the German ruling class against the wayward sheep who was leading the flock astray. The key to silencing Luther clearl
y lay with the emperor. Aleander had been greatly heartened by the imperial edict that Charles had issued against Luther in September 1520, ordering the burning of his books. “The Emperor is a man of the best disposition, such as has hardly appeared for a thousand years,” Aleander reported to Rome; “were it not for him, our business would be very much complicated by private passions.”
Aleander was thus aghast to find that, two days before his arrival in Worms, the emperor had sent a friendly letter to Frederick the Wise (who was in Saxony for the Christmas season). Playfully addressing the elector as “dear uncle,” Charles noted his desire to “put down this movement” from which so much disorder was feared, and to that end he asked the elector to bring Luther with him to the diet to be examined by a learned panel. Until then, Charles added, he hoped that Frederick would direct Luther not to write anything against the pope or the Roman See.
How, Aleander wondered, could Charles have made such a concession? The pope alone was authorized to judge matters of heresy, and since he had already spoken, any hearing granted to Luther would be an intolerable affront to his office. It was the principle of papal supremacy that above all else had to be preserved; there thus could be no examination or debate.
Charles’s commitment to that principle was incontestable. But, as he prepared for the diet, Luther was only one of his many preoccupations. Since his departure from Spain, the Comunero uprising had quickly spread, with the rebels seizing control of Valladolid, Toledo, and other key cities. To the east, Sultan Selim’s son and successor, Suleiman I the Magnificent, was threatening to march on Belgrade. If he succeeded in capturing it, Hungary could soon follow. More immediately, Charles was intent on traveling to Rome to be crowned emperor by the pope—an act that would confer formal recognition on his imperial claims. But getting his large court there would require a huge outlay. It would also require passing through northern Italy and confronting the French, who controlled Milan. Charles thus needed to form an army, which meant hiring German Landsknechts and Swiss mercenaries.
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