The weavers were released the next day. With Müntzer gone, Nicholas Storch, the leader of St. Catherine’s weavers, stepped to the fore. Selecting twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples from among the congregation, he formed a sort of underground cell aimed at overthrowing the oligarchs who ruled the town and improving the lot of the workingman. Fearing an uprising, the town council summoned Storch and his colleagues Stübner and Drechsel to account for their activities. Due to appear on December 16, 1521, they, too, decided to flee, heading north to Wittenberg.
There, the breakdown in authority provided an opening for their radical Bible readings, and a sort of scriptural primitivism set in. Book learning was shunned as elitist, revelation was extolled over exegesis, and civil institutions were condemned as instruments of oppression. The local school was turned into a food pantry, and enrollment at the university plunged as worried parents withdrew their children.
Amid this ferment, senior Augustinian friars began arriving in Wittenberg from around Germany for their order’s general chapter meeting, scheduled to begin on January 6, 1522. With more and more monks leaving the cloister, the most urgent matter was the validity of monastic vows. With Luther’s opposition by now well known, the friars in a historic step agreed that all who wanted to leave the monastery should be free to do so. Those who wanted to remain had to give up mendicancy and saying private Masses and instead devote themselves to preaching, physical labor, and helping the poor and sick. Emboldened, Gabriel Zwilling on January 10, 1522, led a group of friars in destroying all but one of the side altars of the cloister church and making a bonfire of the paintings, statues, crucifixes, and other sacred items removed from them.
Caught up in the fervor, Karlstadt moved to solidify his control. The simplified Mass that he had performed on Christmas Day had proved very popular, and it was reenacted on New Year’s Day, on the following Sunday, and on Epiphany. At each Mass more than a thousand people—many times the usual number—took Communion. The practice of receiving the sacrament in both kinds spread to Eilenburg, Lochau, and other nearby communities. And Karlstadt was already preparing his next great leap. In his return to the sources, he was traveling beyond the New Testament to the Old. Reading in Genesis of how God had driven Adam from the Garden of Eden to till the ground by the sweat of his brow, he urged his students to leave the lecture hall and return to the land. Poor laborers, he said, prayed more sincerely than monks, and craftsmen were better able to understand the Bible than bishops.
In his sermons, Karlstadt spoke of biblical passages like Exodus 20:3—“You shall have no other gods before me.” While most reformers rejected the worship of saints and relics, Karlstadt argued that all material images, including works of art and even crucifixes, should be banned from houses of worship as useless. “God hates and despises images,” he declared, adding that “churches in which images are placed and honored might readily be considered brothels.” He similarly called for the elimination of all musical instruments, organ playing, and communal hymn singing. “Better one heart-felt prayer than a thousand cantatas of the Psalms,” he wrote. Karlstadt also stressed the need to help the poor and hungry and to put beggars to work.
Along with Melanchthon and Jonas, Karlstadt pressed the town council to officially adopt the main elements of the reform. Fearing further unrest, the council obliged. The Praiseworthy Order of the Princely Town of Wittenberg, issued in late January 1522, approved the Mass (based on Luther’s ideas) that Karlstadt had introduced, with Communion offered in both kinds and the words of consecration in German. It also called for the placement of all ecclesiastical revenues into a “common chest” that would be controlled by both laymen and clerics and which would be used to pay the clergy, maintain buildings, and meet the needs of the city’s sick and poor. Loans would be extended to indigent craftsmen and scholarships awarded to poor students. Begging was to be abolished and all those refusing to work were to be expelled. Prostitution was to be prohibited and all brothels were to be closed. Finally, a date was to be set on which all religious images would be removed from the churches.
The Praiseworthy Order and its provisions for a common chest would be among the most important measures of the early Reformation. Inspiring a wave of similar ordinances, it would over time help transform municipal governance in Germany, with the state taking responsibility for social services that had long been the preserve of the Church.
Even so, the pace of change remained too slow for some. The town council announced a date for the orderly removal of images, but groups of impatient citizens carried out a Bildersturm, or iconoclastic riot, taking down images in the Castle Church and other sanctuaries. They were stopped before they could get too far, but the outburst showed the powerful emotions being released. In the eighth century, the dispute over icons had helped precipitate the split between Eastern and Western Christianity; now, in remote Wittenberg, the issue was again flaring.
By this point, Frederick had had enough. Divisions in the town were widening, the clergy at the Castle Church feared being attacked, and the university had all but ceased to operate. The Wittenberg disturbances were giving all of Electoral Saxony a bad name. Frederick’s cousin Duke George in particular was incensed. Ever since the Leipzig disputation, he had warned of the chaos that would result if Luther was allowed to spread his Bohemian views. On February 10, 1522, George sent a fierce directive to all officials in his duchy, decrying the outrages Luther was provoking. The monks of his order had left their monasteries, laid off their habits, and let their tonsures grow. They wandered from place to place, preaching against the holy Mass and teaching the people to receive the sacrament in both kinds, even though those who had previously tried to introduce such practices had been deemed “contumacious heretics.” The duke ordered his officials to seize and imprison any renegade monk in worldly dress or any priest caught trying to seduce his subjects with Luther’s “forbidden and unchristian doctrine.” Rumors spread that George was preparing to send an armed force into Electoral Saxony to occupy it and annex it to his own lands.
Seeking to prevent such actions, the electoral court on February 13, 1522, issued an order annulling the January ordinance. The university and the clergy were to introduce no further changes, and images were to be left in place until further notice. Private Masses were to be retained, and the traditional celebration of the Eucharist was to be reinstated. Frederick’s agent in Wittenberg sent a stern message to Melanchthon, directing him to silence Zwilling, and another to Karlstadt, urging him to stop preaching or at least moderate his public pronouncements.
Zwilling had in fact already left Wittenberg for Eilenburg, some thirty miles to the south, where he preached with such ardor that stones were thrown through the windows of the local parsonage. Karlstadt promised not to preach again (a vow that would prove temporary). But the disorder continued. Some priests said the words of consecration in Latin, others in German. Some communicants took the wafer in hand, others had it placed on the tongue. Half the population seemed eager for even more radical change, while the other half clung ever more tightly to the old ways. Overall, a doctrinaire and intolerant spirit reigned.
Only one person seemed capable of ending it. Bringing Luther back to Wittenberg would pose its own problems, since he remained under the imperial and papal bans, but the town council saw no other way, and so on February 20, 1522, without consulting Frederick, it sent Luther an urgent message requesting his speedy return to Wittenberg.
When the message arrived, Luther felt it had come from God. From what he had heard, the Wittenbergers seemed to have taken leave of their senses. He was especially annoyed to learn that Karlstadt had been preaching at the town church in his pulpit. Indifferent to the prospect of arrest or attack, Luther on February 22, 1522, sent Frederick a brief note, declaring, “God willing, I shall soon be there.”
When he learned of this, the elector rushed a letter to John Oswald, his official in Eisenach, directing him to order Luther to remain at the Wartburg. If the
pope and emperor proceeded against the reformer and he was forced to answer for it, Frederick wrote, it would cause him “the greatest embarrassment.” With a new diet about to open in Nuremberg, Luther should remain in hiding until its direction became clear. On receiving the letter, Oswald immediately went to the Wartburg to deliver it, but Luther would not be moved. After ten months of being cooped up with bats and birds, he longed to see his friends in Wittenberg (and to consult Melanchthon on his New Testament translation, which he had completed). And so, on March 1, 1522, he mounted his horse and left the Wartburg for good.
On March 3, Luther stopped for the night at the Black Bear Inn in Jena. The hostel’s public room was warmed by a large German stove and lit by candles, and Luther, sitting at a table with a book and glass of beer, fell into conversation with two students from Switzerland, who were soaked after riding through a rainstorm. With his knightly attire and a hand resting on the hilt of his sword, Luther was not recognized. One of the students, John Kessler, would later write an account of the encounter, which, though no doubt embellished, offers a remarkable glimpse of the reformer at this pivotal moment in his career. The students said they were headed to Wittenberg and asked their tablemate if Luther was there. “I have authentic information that he is not at Wittenberg, but that he will soon return there,” he replied.
“If God grant us life we will not rest until we see and hear that man,” Kessler said. “For it is on account of him that we are going there. We have heard that he wishes to overturn the priesthood and the Mass, and as our parents have brought us up to be priests, we want to hear what he can tell us and on what authority he acts.” Informed that they had been studying in Basel, Luther asked if Erasmus was still there. He was, the students said, but what he did there he kept secret. “What do they think of Luther in Switzerland?” Luther asked. Opinion was divided, Kessler said. Some could not praise him enough for having revealed the truth, while others, especially the clergy, condemned him as “an intolerable heretic.”
The other student, whose name was Spengler, picked up Luther’s book. To his shock, it was a Hebrew Psalter—not the usual fare for a knight. When Spengler said he would give much to learn Hebrew, Luther said, “You must work hard to learn it. I also am learning it, and practice some every day.”
Two merchants then entered, and after they removed their cloaks, one put a book on the table. Luther asked what he was reading. “Doctor Luther’s sermons, just out,” he said; “have you not seen them?” No, Luther said, but he soon would. He then asked the two men to join him at the table and offered to treat them to supper. A friendly conversation ensued. “Luther must be either an angel from heaven or a devil from hell,” one of the merchants said, adding that he would give ten guldens “to have the chance to confess to him; I believe he could give me good counsel for my conscience.” After the merchants went out to feed their horses, Luther asked the host to bring him some wine, which he said he preferred to beer. Bidding the students good night, he told them that when they got to Wittenberg, they should remember him to Jerome Schurff.
“Whom shall we remember, sir?” Kessler asked.
“Say only that he that will soon come sends his greetings,” Luther said.
On March 5, 1522, Luther was in Borna, south of Leipzig, and there he took a moment to write to Frederick and explain why he had decided to defy his wishes and return to Wittenberg. “I have received the gospel not from men, but from heaven only, through our Lord Jesus Christ,” he wrote. He did not intend to ask for the elector’s protection. “Indeed I think I shall protect your Eternal Grace more than you are able to protect me,” since “he who believes the most can protect the most, and since I have the impression that your Eternal Grace is still quite weak in faith, I can by no means regard your Eternal Grace as the man to protect and save me.” Luther excused Frederick from all responsibility should he be captured or put to death, and he asked the elector to put up no resistance if the emperor moved to seize or execute him. It did not occur to Luther to thank Frederick for all he had done to protect him over the previous ten months.
As Luther entered the hostile territory of Duke George, a party of horsemen joined him, and they stayed with him the rest of the way. On March 6, Luther was back in Wittenberg. Elijah had returned.
This time, he decided to stay at the Black Cloister. Before he could settle in, however, the lawyer Jerome Schurff arrived with an urgent message from Frederick asking Luther to fully release him from responsibility if anything should happen to him. Readily obliging, Luther drafted a statement affirming that he had returned without the elector’s permission. During his absence, he wrote, Satan had fallen upon his flock in Wittenberg and done things that could not be stopped through his writing but which had to be dealt with in person. He feared that there would be a “real rebellion” in the German territories and that those attempting “to put out the light by force” were only embittering people’s hearts and thereby “stimulating them to revolt.” With the gospel thus in need, all human commands and concerns had to be laid aside. Christ, the lord of souls, “has sent me and for this he has raised me up. I cannot abandon them.”
After Schurff left, Luther received many visitors, who told him of all that had occurred in the three months since his last visit. The local school had closed, the university was near collapse, the cloister was half empty, images and statues had been defaced and shattered, mob violence had broken out. Luther’s joy at being back in Wittenberg was overridden by the urgency of the situation and the need to address it.
March 9 was Invocavit Sunday (the first Sunday of Lent), and Luther announced that he would preach at the town church. Word quickly spread. The great champion of evangelical freedom, just returned from his hideout, was going to deliver his first public words since his courageous stand at Worms. Merchants and priests, professors and students, housewives and farmers, excitedly prepared to hear what Europe’s most famous citizen had to say.
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The Pope of Wittenberg
Aside from the weight he had put on at the Wartburg, Luther looked very much like the friar his congregants remembered from a year earlier. He had shaved off his beard, had his hair cut to restore his tonsure, and exchanged his knightly attire for his black Augustinian habit, which, despite its usual frayed state, conveyed the Lenten gravity of the occasion. Looking down from the pulpit at the careworn Christians in their woolen coats and muddy boots, Luther knew how critical this moment was. He needed to find the right words to banish the atmosphere of carnival and excess that had engulfed the town and recall his parishioners to the meaning of true piety.
“The summons of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another,” he declared with the solemnity of a judge handing down a sentence. To be ready for death, everyone must know and be provisioned with the primary things that concern a Christian. God sent his only begotten Son so that all might believe in him and be freed from sin. Yet faith by itself was not enough; there must also be love. “And here, dear friends, have you not grievously failed? I see no signs of love among you.”
What was most needed, Luther said, was patience. People should not insist that everyone immediately adopt the correct way; Christians should instead consider the needs of their brothers, for not all were equally strong in their faith. Just as a mother feeds her child first milk, then eggs, and then soft food, so should people of faith bear with their brothers until their faith, too, grows strong.
Only after offering these general reflections did Luther address the situation at hand. Had he been present in Wittenberg, he said, “I would not have gone as far as you have.” The cause was good but the haste too great. All those who had had a part in abolishing the Mass had erred. The Mass did eventually have to go, but it had been attacked in too aggressive a manner, without regard for those who found such a sudden change unsettling. Showing a trace of pique, Luther said that he could have been consulted about these matters but had not received the slightest communication. Now that he was back,
though, he wanted everyone to show love for one another. Otherwise, “our work will not endure.”
Luther’s performance had a powerful effect. A student who was present reported that, despite the somberness of Luther’s words, his voice was “sweet and sonorous.” He came across as “kind, gentle and cheerful,” and “whatever he does, teaches, and says is most pious.” Everyone who hears him once “desires to hear him again and again, such tenacious hooks does he fix in the minds of his auditors.”
Those who wanted to hear him again in fact got the chance, for on each of the next seven days Luther returned to the pulpit. Though attendance no doubt fell off as the workweek began, people from outlying communities, hearing of the reformer’s presence, showed up at the church. The Invocavit sermons, as they came to be known, would be Luther’s most famous feat of preaching. His message was straightforward: change had to come, but only gradually and calmly. The hearts of the people had to be won over with words and kindness; resorting to force and command would produce “a mere mockery.” As in his Sincere Admonition a few months earlier, Luther cited his own restraint: “Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany; indeed, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe.” But that would have been “mere fool’s play.” He had opposed indulgences and papists, but never with force. “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word.” While he drank Wittenberg beer with his friends Melanchthon and Amsdorf, he folksily observed, “the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.”
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