Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  By the start of June 1521, his manuscripts had begun arriving, and he was able to borrow books on the periodic walks he took down to the Franciscan friary in Eisenach. As the days lengthened and the forest bloomed, Luther resumed work on the devotional writings that his trip to Worms had interrupted. For the Postils, he decided to switch from Latin to German so that he could reach a larger audience. Unable to preach himself, he wanted to provide homilies on the Gospels and Epistles that pastors could use in their own sermons.

  Continuing work on the Magnificat, Luther rhapsodized about Mary, holding her up as a poor, lowly thing who could serve as a model of Christian humbleness. In a startling aside about the Jews, Luther wrote that Christians should not “treat the Jews in so unkindly a spirit, for there are future Christians among them.” If “we led Christian lives, and led them with kindness to Christ, there would be the proper response.” After his earlier condemnations of the Jews, Luther was entering a period of moderation and forbearance toward them, brought on by his belief that, with the true gospel at last revealed, they would surely see the light and accept Christ as their savior.

  While engaged in these devotional works, Luther received frequent reminders of the hatred he was stirring. Nearly two years after the Leipzig disputation, the University of Paris (to cite one example) finally handed down its verdict, declaring 104 passages from Luther’s writings heretical. Luther, the faculty stated, deserved not just the ban but also imprisonment and an ordeal by fire. This judgment from Western Europe’s most prestigious university would mark the start of a determined campaign to extinguish Luther’s thought in France. Responding with a profane blast, Luther denounced the “Parisian street whore” who had been “bold enough to open her legs and uncover her nakedness before the whole world. . . . What schools! What faculties! What theologians! What bilge! What rubbish!”

  While at the Wartburg, Luther saw something by Erasmus that criticized him for his vehement language, and Luther expressed his scorn to Spalatin: “He thinks that everything should be discussed civilly and with a certain kindliness and courtesy.” Erasmus’s books had accomplished nothing precisely because they refrained “from chiding and biting and giving offense.” When popes and bishops are admonished in a civil manner, they think they are being flattered and so keep to their abusive ways, “as though they possessed a sort of right to be uncorrected and incorrigible.” Reflecting back on his performance at Worms, Luther regretted that he had yielded to the advice of Spalatin and others to hold his spirit in check. “They would hear another story if I stood before them again.”

  As he completed his manuscripts, Luther sent them off to Wittenberg to be printed. When the published editions returned, he took pleasure in the testimony they offered of his refusal to be silenced. With the arrival of July and the clamminess of summer, however, Luther’s industry flagged, owing in part to his worsening constipation. The constant force he placed on his bowels had opened a lesion in his anus, and the application of even the slightest pressure to the exposed membrane sent spasms of pain through his body. Some medications supplied by Spalatin brought a measure of relief, but the wound from the previous rupture kept reopening, causing renewed misery. “It is impossible that I endure this evil any longer,” he wrote to Melanchthon on July 13, 1521; “it is easier to endure ten big wounds than this small sign of a lesion.” If things did not improve, he would go to Erfurt “and not incognito” to consult a doctor or surgeon. (Luther’s presence in the Wartburg had by then become widely rumored.)

  In that same letter, Luther noted the emergence of a new source of disquiet. “I sit here like a fool and hardened in leisure, pray little, do not sigh for the church of God, yet burn in a big fire in my untamed body.” Rather than be ardent in spirit, he was “ardent in the flesh, in lust, laziness, leisure, and sleepiness.” For eight days he had not studied or written anything, in part because of the “temptations of the flesh,” and he asked his friends in Wittenberg to pray for him, “since in this seclusion I am drowning in sins.”

  As a young friar, Luther had witnessed with disgust the nocturnal pollutions of his fellow Augustinians. Now, immured in his own personal hermitage, deprived of companionship, suffering intense bouts of boredom, he seemed for the first time to experience the torments of lust. (Some scholars, however, read these passages as stylized expressions of self-abasement in a long monastic tradition.)

  It was around this time that Luther made one of his most controversial statements. “Be a sinner and sin boldly,” he exhorted Melanchthon. Luther’s enemies would pounce on this, charging him with encouraging license. But they omitted what followed, which was that we must “believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” However much we as fallible humans are fated to sin, he wrote, “no sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day.” Because humans are forever relapsing back into sin, Luther seemed to be saying, faith in Christ is the only way to overcome our weakness. His adversaries were not interested in such nuances, however.

  Adding to Luther’s summertime dejection, ironically, was the positive news coming out of Wittenberg. The university was thriving. Melanchthon was lecturing on Corinthians and Amsdorf on Hebrews, and Justus Jonas (unswayed by Erasmus’s appeal) had moved to Wittenberg and was about to begin his own lectures. “You are now well supplied and you manage without me,” Luther wrote to Melanchthon. “I do not see why you miss me so much or why my work should be necessary for you. You seem to be able to think for yourself since the affairs at Wittenberg progress more favorably in my absence than in my presence.” Since he was obviously not needed in Wittenberg, Luther testily observed, he would consider taking a position in either Erfurt or Cologne if one opened up.

  By the end of July, the arrival of some powerful new laxatives from Spalatin had helped relieve the pressure on his bowels, and Luther’s spirits lifted. In early August he felt well enough to go on a hunting expedition—his first ever. Luther did not enjoy the experience. At one point, he tried to save a rabbit by hiding it in the sleeve of his coat, but the dogs quickly discovered the terrified animal and, biting through the cloak, tore it to pieces. Luther could not resist allegorizing the incident: the dogs were like the pope and Satan, who in their rage destroyed even the souls that had been saved, despite Luther’s best efforts to protect them.

  Not long after that episode, a courier arrived with the printed copy of his commentary on confession. The sermon originally planned by Luther had swelled into a forty-leaf booklet. The title was On Confession: Whether the Pope Has the Power to Require It, and the answer, unsurprisingly, was no. Since 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council issued the canon Omnis utriusque sexus, annual confession had been mandatory for all Christians. Luther rejected this as a human invention. The papal command, he wrote, should be regarded no more highly than “the poop in front of you on the street.” Luther did endorse voluntary confession, since from his own experience he knew the consolation it could provide, but he urged abandonment of the sophistic practices that had arisen around it. According to Luther, a Christian who sincerely confesses to Christ in his room pleases God more than one who punctiliously confesses his sins to a priest. True repentance was a matter of the heart.

  That last statement reflected the continuing importance for Luther of the distinction between poenitentia and metanoia that Erasmus had pointed out in his annotations. And Luther’s rejection of the papal mandate on confession showed the influence of Erasmus’s notes on the subject, in which he argued that the practice of priestly confession has no foundation in Scripture but is of human origin.

  By midsummer 1521, Luther was dealing with a serious development in Wittenberg, heralded by the arrival of two sets of theses by Andreas von Karlstadt. He was emerging as an important figure in Wittenberg and had put forth his theses as a basis for moving the reform forward. One set, on the Lord’s Supper, argued for offering the wine as well as the bread during Communion. Luther himself had embraced this practice
in The Babylonian Captivity, and Karlstadt’s presentation in general seemed to him persuasive. In a striking modification, however, Karlstadt insisted that offering Communion in only one kind was a sin. Examining the relevant passages in the New Testament, Luther could not see how he had arrived at such a conclusion.

  The second set of theses, on clerical celibacy, was even more troubling. In them, Karlstadt proposed abolishing this requirement for not only priests but also monks. Of the former Luther fully approved, for Scripture seemed to offer no basis for it. To abolish celibacy for monks, however, would be far more drastic. Though convinced that this vow had inflicted great damage, he did not think it could simply be abandoned. Celibacy was so central to monasticism, in fact, that it was hard to see how the institution could survive without it.

  Moreover, the Bible was anything but clear on the matter, and Karlstadt’s interpretations of the key passages in Paul seemed sloppy. Given the many souls that had been destroyed by this vow, Luther would have liked nothing more than to do away with it, but he worried that “a great crowd of celibates” would decide to marry on the basis of unreliable readings of Scripture and then afterward feel “continued anguish of conscience” over what they had done. “Aren’t we running for an uncertain goal?” he wrote to Melanchthon. “Aren’t we beating the air? Why don’t we slow down in our race?” To Spalatin a few days later, Luther was even sharper: “Good Lord, will our people at Wittenberg give wives even to the monks? They will not push a wife on me!” Since the Wittenbergers were being closely watched by the outside world, any misstep would be immediately seized upon by their adversaries. “Therefore we need to use the greater care that our word may be without reproach.”

  Around this same time, Luther became concerned about the preaching situation in Wittenberg. In his view, there was only one person truly qualified to take his place: Melanchthon. Because the young professor was neither ordained nor tonsured, he could not be given a pulpit, but there was nothing to stop him from preaching in a lecture hall or another such space. Because Melanchthon had repeatedly made clear his own reluctance to preach, Luther enlisted Spalatin, urging him to work with the city council and the congregation at the town church to draft him. “Since he is rich in the Word above others, you can see that it is our duty to call him,” Luther wrote. He took satisfaction in the strides being made in the modest Hippo on the Elbe: “I am glad that Wittenberg is flourishing, and especially that it is flourishing when I am away, that the wicked may see it and be grieved. . . . May Christ perfect that which He has begun!”

  In Wittenberg, the Reformation was indeed moving ahead without Luther. In the wake of his bold performance at Worms, a new era seemed to have arrived. Students walked around town with Bibles under their arms, hailing one another as “brothers at one in Christ.” The arrival of Justus Jonas from Erfurt seemed to confirm Wittenberg’s status as a center of innovation and renewal, and as he settled in, he wrote to a friend of the “unbelievable wealth of spiritual interests” in the little town.

  Along with the exhilaration, however, came apprehension. Wittenberg was a small, defenseless town bordered by enemies. Duke George to the south and Elector Joachim of Brandenburg to the north were both fiercely opposed to Luther and ready to use force against his movement if the opportunity arose. The Edict of Worms had categorically banned any activity in support of Luther or his ideas, and the threat of action by imperial or ecclesiastical agents loomed. And at this moment of supreme danger, the man who had set the whole process in motion was marooned in a distant fortress, leaving a vacuum in leadership.

  The most obvious candidate to fill it was Melanchthon, Luther’s top disciple, but as always he preferred lecturing on the classics to contending over doctrine. Instead, Karlstadt stepped forward. As he had shown in Leipzig, he could be plodding and erratic in debate, but he was also strong-willed and single-minded. Far more impatient than Luther, he took the Bible far more literally, and he was eager to see its precepts applied at once in the earthly realm.

  During the spring of 1521, Karlstadt had been away from Wittenberg. King Christian II of Denmark, an admirer of both Luther and Erasmus, was eager to introduce evangelical reforms in his kingdom, and with Luther himself unavailable, he had turned to Karlstadt. Traveling to Copenhagen, Karlstadt had helped draft a program to curb the power of bishops and encourage priests to marry. But a fierce backlash caused the king to reconsider, and after six largely fruitless weeks, Karlstadt returned to Wittenberg. Though not authorized to take Luther’s place at the town church, he began preaching there, using its pulpit to promote his vision of a purified Christianity stripped of the obscure doctrines of Rome.

  Clerical celibacy was one such doctrine. This issue pushed its way to the fore because of events on the ground. Three priests in and around Saxony—taking to heart Luther’s assault on celibacy in To the Christian Nobility—had decided to marry. To the Church, priestly marriage was a grave offense punishable by removal from office and imprisonment, and two of the priests were immediately jailed. The third, Bartholomew Bernhardi, was a former student of Luther’s and a rector at the University of Wittenberg who was now serving as provost in the town of Kemberg. Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz demanded that he appear before a diocesan court and urged Frederick to hand him over. But Melanchthon wrote a defense of Bernhardi’s position and Karlstadt and others campaigned on his behalf, and he was not surrendered. The other priests, however, languished in prison, and one would ultimately die miserably in a Dresden dungeon.

  With the dam thus breaking, Karlstadt prepared a set of theses on clerical celibacy, proposing the abolition of this requirement for both priests and monks. On June 21, 1521, a disputation on them was held, but, amid the prevailing uncertainty, no decision was taken.

  There was even more hesitancy over the Mass. Unlike celibacy, this institution touched the lives of every churchgoing Christian. The sanctity and awe in which the sacrament had for centuries been held meant that even modest changes could lead to serious resistance. Giving the cup to the laity remained closely associated with the Hussites and Bohemian radicalism. The clergy at the Castle Church, meanwhile, were devoted to the traditional Mass, including the private Masses said on behalf of souls in purgatory. Some twenty-five priests were assigned to these private Masses, which were underwritten by lucrative endowments, and the income was used to support not only the Castle Church but also the university and some of its students. Eliminating them would thus have important financial repercussions.

  But Luther had denounced such Masses as an abomination, and over the summer he had declared his intention never to say another one again. Furthermore, the Mass as traditionally celebrated reinforced the privileged status of the priesthood. If all Christians were priests, as the new gospel insisted, then the Mass had to be radically altered. In the theses he drafted on the subject, Karlstadt sought to prepare the ground for such a change. On July 19, a second disputation was held, but again, no conclusions were reached.

  At the Black Cloister, however, a radical new force was emerging. Gabriel Zwilling, a small one-eyed friar who was among the first Augustinians in Wittenberg to embrace Luther’s doctrines, was drawing large crowds to its chapel with fiery sermons. Zwilling denounced his fellow monks as lazy and sinful and condemned private Masses as idolatrous acts designed to fatten the purses of the priests who said them. He also rejected the prescribed times for sleeping, rising, eating, drinking, and speaking, which so defined daily life at the cloister. A student from Silesia who attended the sermons wrote home that God had raised up in Wittenberg “a second prophet” who preached the gospel with such sincerity and candor that he seemed a “second Martin.”

  Among Zwilling’s most devoted followers was Melanchthon. The highly impressionable scholar would not miss one of his sermons, and under Zwilling’s influence it was he, rather than Karlstadt, who decided to press ahead. During these months, Melanchthon met regularly with a group of students in his home, and on Michaelmas, September 29, 1521, he w
ent with them to the town church. During the service, a layman rather than a priest officiated, and the host, rather than being held aloft and then placed on the tongue of each communicant, as was customary, was handed to each in turn, who then put the wafer on his or her tongue—an act long considered a deadly sin. In addition, the wine was offered to all present, and the words of consecration, rather than being read quietly by a priest and inaudibly to the congregation, were proclaimed for all to hear.

  However modest, this impromptu service represented a pivotal moment in the history of the Western Church. A Mass had been held without a priest, the words of consecration had been pronounced audibly, and Communion had been offered in both kinds. By thus worshipping, those in attendance were announcing a break not only with centuries of sacred tradition but also with Rome’s authority to define the liturgy.

  With this barrier now breached, the first acts of popular resistance occurred. On October 5, a group of mendicants from St. Anthony’s cloister in Lichtenberg arrived in Wittenberg. They belonged to a society of ecclesiastical beggars whose members traveled from city to city and who in normal times were grudgingly tolerated by the local population. This time, however, several students (who had to compete with the friars for contributions) angrily accosted them, hurling insults while pelting them with stones and clumps of dirt.

  Meanwhile, the Augustinian friars stopped saying the canonical hours. They also celebrated Mass as a communal meal in which both the bread and the wine were passed from friar to friar. When the prior, Conrad Helt, forbade this, the Masses on October 13 were discontinued altogether. In place of the rite, Zwilling preached for two hours, attacking the legitimacy of monastic life and calling on all friars to abandon the cloister. After dinner, he spoke for another hour on the abuse of the Mass. All who heard him in the packed chapel “were astonished,” as one of those present put it.