Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  A nobleman named Heinrich von Einsiedel, feeling pangs of conscience at the corvées (forced labor) and other obligations being reimposed on the peasants, wrote to Luther to ask his opinion. He need not feel troubled, Luther replied. In fact, it would not be a good thing if the corvées were eliminated, for without such burdens, the common man would become overbearing. However harsh such treatment might seem, it actually pleased God. Melanchthon thought that even serfdom was too soft for the obstinate Germans and held that the lord’s right of punishment and the servant’s duty of obedience should be absolute.

  Writing to John Rühel and other Mansfeld officials, Luther acknowledged how radically his image had changed: “What an outcry of Harrow, my dear sirs, has been caused by my pamphlet against the peasants! All is now forgotten that God has done for the world through me. Now lords, parsons and peasants are all against me and threaten my death.”

  Until 1525, the reform movement had been national in scope and Luther its undisputed standard-bearer. The hopes of the German people had rested with him, and his every word and pronouncement had been eagerly followed and analyzed. Now he seemed the leader of a faction. Far from being the Joshua who would lead the people into the promised land, he seemed the Judas who had betrayed them. Luther was so loathed by ordinary Germans that it became dangerous for him to travel outside Wittenberg. Among peasants, he was reviled as Dr. Liar and a lapdog of the princes. According to Friedrich Engels, Luther extracted from the Bible “a veritable hymn to the authorities ordained by God—a feat hardly exceeded by any lackey of absolute monarchy.”

  As acidly as he mocked Luther, Engels extolled Müntzer, calling him a “magnificent figure” whose political program represented “a genius’ anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had just begun to develop among the plebeians.” Ironically, Engels, in attributing such importance to Müntzer, was following Luther’s own lead. He was not alone. From the time of the Enlightenment on, this rabid apostle of religious violence would become a symbol of revolutionary struggle. The German Democratic Republic would place an image of Müntzer on its five-mark note, and Mühlhausen would be renamed Thomas-Müntzer-Stadt.

  Over time, Luther would come to recognize his own contribution to the peasant calamity. “I, Martin Luther, slew all the peasants in the uprising,” he would say in his Table Talk, “for I ordered that they be put to death; all their blood is on my neck. But I refer it all to our Lord God, who commanded me to speak as I did.”

  The peasants themselves turned irrevocably away not only from Luther but from the Reformation as a whole. In their view, the new gospel, which had stirred them to action, had deserted them at the decisive moment. Some would become atheists in all but name. Others would glumly return to the Catholic fold. Quite a few heeded the radicals whom Luther had scorned and became Anabaptists. Everywhere cynicism toward organized religion took hold. Though social and economic protests would still periodically break out, the awakening of the lower classes stalled, and the masses in general became sullen and apathetic. Though the nobles could not afford to wipe out the tillers of the soil as a class, serfdom was strengthened, and it would persist in parts of Germany into the nineteenth century.

  Intellectual progress faltered as well. Priceless archival and manuscript collections were lost, and learning as a whole—already under assault from the radicals—became even more suspect. Censorship increased, support for scholarship receded, and the Renaissance love of books and ideas was replaced by a grim emphasis on piety, doctrine, and orthodoxy. Luther’s own frequency of publication would fall off after 1525, and the great flood of popular pamphlets that had eulogized the evangelical peasant would suddenly dry up.

  The populist preachers vanished. Every day, Erasmus observed, “priests are arrested, tortured, hanged, decapitated, or burnt at the stake.” In many regions, strict measures were taken to ensure that the Bible was taught according to traditional interpretations. In August 1525, the margraves Kasimir and George of Brandenburg issued an edict ordering all pastors to teach that Scripture makes clear that “Christian freedom does not consist in the removal of rents, interest, dues, tithes, taxes, services, or other similar external burdens” but “is only an inward and spiritual thing” and that “all subjects are obliged to obey their authorities” in all temporal affairs. In Austria, Archduke Ferdinand, in the course of suppressing the revolt, would seek to eradicate Lutheran influences and reinforce the power of the Catholic Church. Of seventy-one people accused of heresy who were brought before the Austrian court at Ensisheim, only one was acquitted; the rest were burned, drowned, or broken on the wheel. The current Catholic character of both Austria and Bavaria can be traced not only to the vigorous policies of the Counter-Reformation but also to the fierce suppression of the new gospel in the aftermath of the Peasants’ War.

  The war’s impact would extend much deeper than that, however. The emphasis on resistance and individual conscience that Luther had embraced in his early years receded. He would instead relentlessly stress the need for acquiescence and suffering. In his preaching, he would proclaim with monotonous regularity the importance of obedience to the government and submission to the state. With his stress on conformity, respect for authority, and acceptance of injustice, Luther would imprint German Lutheranism with the idea that Christians must at all times accommodate themselves to political and social conditions and that organized resistance to authority was not only futile but unjustified.

  In this landscape of retreat and ruin, Luther was determined to move ahead with his plans to marry Katharina von Bora. His friends were unanimously opposed to his choice, thinking her unsuitable, but Luther did not care, and the ceremony took place at the Black Cloister on June 13, 1525, with little fanfare and only five people present, including Lucas Cranach and his wife, who stood in for his parents; Bugenhagen officiated. After the ceremony, the forty-one-year-old Martin and the twenty-six-year-old Katharina went to the nuptial bed and lay down on it in front of Justus Jonas, who served as the customary witness (and who then left them). The next day the same circle gathered for a celebratory breakfast. In a letter to Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Luther admitted, “I neither love my wife nor burn for her, but esteem her.” He had married her, he explained, “to silence the mouths which are accustomed to bicker at me”; that is, which had spread rumors about his relations with Katharina. He also wanted to please his father, who had asked him to marry and leave descendants, and to set an example for the many who are “as yet afraid even in the present great light of the Gospel.”

  Luther’s decision to marry was thus as much a political as a personal act, putting the final seal on his break with the Catholic Church. His timing, however, caused an uproar. As a pamphlet by a student put it, “Everywhere the smoke still rises from the ravaged villages, thousands of peasants are led away in chains, the rivers are red with the blood that has been shed,” yet Luther had chosen that very moment to carry out this celebratory act.

  Even Melanchthon was taken aback. To his great annoyance, he was not invited to—nor even informed of—the wedding. Writing to his friend Joachim Camerarius three days after the ceremony, he observed, “You might be amazed that at this unfortunate time, when good and excellent men everywhere are in distress, he not only does not sympathize with them, but, as it seems, waxes wanton and diminishes his reputation, just when Germany has especial need of his judgment and authority.” Melanchthon hoped that Luther’s new situation might “sober him down, so that he will discard the low buffoonery which we have often censored.” Melanchthon denied the rumors racing across Germany that Luther and Katharina had had sexual relations prior to their marriage. (Well aware of the sensitivity of his letter, Melanchthon wrote it entirely in Greek, and its contents did not become generally known until the late nineteenth century.)

  The criticism of Luther’s decision to marry simply reinforced his belief that it was the right thing to do. To spite his enemies, he decided to hold a very public feast
, scheduled for June 27, 1525, and invitations were sent to many friends and relatives. Luther wrote to Leonhard Koppe, the man who had helped free Katharina and her fellow nuns, to ask him to bring not herring but a keg of “the best Torgau beer.” In a letter to John Rühel and other Mansfeld officials, Luther took note of the continuing violence in Thuringia: “The land is in such a state that I hardly dare ask you to undertake the journey; however, if you can do so, pray come, along with my dear father and mother.” His parents did come. After a special service at the town church, a banquet was held at the Black Cloister, followed by an Ehrentanz (a kind of square dance) at the Rathaus. The couple then set up house in the newly renovated friary.

  Remarkably, around the same time as their celebration, there appeared on their doorstep a most unexpected visitor: Karlstadt. Threatened, hunted, and terrified that he would suffer the same fate as Müntzer, Karlstadt on June 12 had written to Luther from Frankfurt, asking for his forgiveness and help in returning to Saxony. Karlstadt had then made his way to Wittenberg, and he now threw himself on Luther’s mercy. Having just gotten married, Luther was furious at the prospect of this heavenly prophet who had called him a “bloody sow” and a “mad sophist” living under his roof. But Karlstadt had nowhere else to go. As the price for giving him shelter, Luther demanded that he prepare and publish a full recantation of his doctrine of the Eucharist and that he promise never to write, preach, or teach again. Karlstadt felt (as he would later recall) that he would have been better off if he had been among the Turks, but he had little choice. The retraction did appear, and for the next two to three months he would live in secret in the Black Cloister, keeping the newlyweds company.

  38

  Fatal Dissension

  In the years before his marriage, Luther had led a spartan and solitary life. Working himself to exhaustion, he would fall into bed “oblivious of everything,” as he later put it. For a full year before his wedding day, his bed had not been made, and the straw was rotting from his sweat. Now he suddenly found his life joined to that of another. In the first year of marriage, he observed in his Table Talk, a man “has strange thoughts.” When sitting at the table, he thinks, “Before I was alone; now there are two.” When waking up in bed, “he sees a pair of pigtails lying beside him which he hadn’t seen there before.”

  At first, Katharina’s loquacity annoyed him. Having spent so much of her life in enforced silence, she now seemed determined to make up for it. Sitting next to Luther at her spinning wheel while he was engrossed in study, she would suddenly interject questions and observations. “Doctor, is the grandmaster [of Prussia] the margrave’s brother?” she once asked. Luther informed her with exasperation that the grand master was the margrave. “I must be patient with the pope,” he observed, “I must be patient with the Schwärmer, I must be patient with the Junkers, I must be patient with my family, I must be patient with Katharina von Bora. . . . My whole life is nothing but patience.”

  But the advantages of wedlock quickly asserted themselves. Despite her lack of experience in domestic affairs, Katharina proved an astute household manager. The Black Cloister, with its large rectory, drafty corridors, and cramped cells, seemed an unpromising home—because of Frederick’s stinginess, it had never been finished—but John, his successor, would prove far more generous. At one point, he essentially deeded over the structure to the Luthers. He also provided one hundred guldens as a wedding gift and doubled Luther’s salary to two hundred guldens. To Luther’s surprise, the couple also received twenty guldens from Luther’s old adversary, Albrecht of Mainz. Clearly, the archbishop was hoping to stay on Luther’s good side in case he decided to go over to the Reformation. Luther saw the money as tainted and wanted to return it, but Katharina, seeing the many uses to which it could be put, insisted on keeping it. It was their first serious marital quarrel, and Katharina prevailed. Measurements were taken for a new mattress and sent to Gabriel Zwilling, the former fire-breathing friar, who was now a considerably more sedate pastor in Torgau and who would help the Luthers with their household needs.

  Katharina quickly took stock of the many improvements that needed doing, including refurbishing the second-floor room that would become their main living space. Just west of the cloister stood the Brauhaus, or brewery, and Katharina, assuming control, prepared the family beer from the barley sent annually by the elector. She also took over the barnyard, with its pigs, cows, hens, and ducks, as well as an orchard outside town that produced apples, pears, grapes, and nuts. “It is a good thing that God came to my aid and gave me a wife,” Luther later observed. “She takes care of domestic matters, so that I don’t have to be responsible for [them].”

  That was fortunate, for in such matters he proved inept. At one point Luther acquired a lathe with the idea of doing some carpentry, but he never got the hang of it. He was no more skilled at bookkeeping. One thing Katharina felt comfortable entrusting to him was the garden, and Luther quickly discovered its pleasures. He wrote to Wenceslas Link in Nuremberg to ask for seeds and tools for boring and turning. Soon, lettuces, cabbages, peas, beans, and cucumbers were sprouting, and Luther expressed wonder at the “immense amount of space” taken up by the melons and gourds.

  Luther’s tending to his garden suggests his newly reduced horizons. In the autumn of 1525, he received an invitation to Spalatin’s wedding. After Frederick’s death, Spalatin had resigned his post at the electoral court and taken a position as a pastor in Altenburg, seventy-five miles away. Luther wrote back to say that he would not be able to attend, because Katharina feared for his safety. A few weeks later, he sent Spalatin a racy message about his new wife, who was also named Katharina: “When you have your Katharina in bed, sweetly embracing and kissing her, think: Lo, this being, the best little creation of God, has been given me by Christ.” On the same night that Spalatin received the letter, Luther continued, “I will love my wife in memory of you with the same act.”

  In short, the former friar was learning the joys of sex. As he would later remark, people sin more when they are alone; man is meant to be part of a couple. Having railed in print against the Church’s embrace of celibacy and virginity, Luther was now putting his own personal stamp on his rebellion. In doing so, he was making concrete the revolution in sexual attitudes that Erasmus had helped set in motion with his praise of matrimony and questions about the sacramental status of marriage.

  But the thought of the unfrocked monk and runaway nun having physical relations set off a flood of salacious rumors and sneers. “Death to Whoring!” was Duke George’s succinct greeting to the new couple. One disaffected student would later write a raunchy satire, titled Monachopornomachia—“The Battle Between the Monks and the Whores.” An early exercise in pornography, it alleged wild liaisons between the pious men of Wittenberg and the nymphs brought by Katharina from the convent.

  Even Erasmus fed the mill, writing to a colleague in October 1525 that “a few days after the singing of the wedding hymn the new bride gave birth to a child!” Erasmus also surmised that Luther’s marriage was the reason that he had failed to respond to The Freedom of the Will. “Luther is now becoming more moderate,” he wrote in September. “There is nothing so wild that it cannot be tamed by a wife.”

  He was wrong on both counts. Katharina did not show the first signs of pregnancy until three months after the wedding, and it was not until June 7, 1526—nearly a year after their union—that she gave birth to a son, whom they named Hans, after Luther’s father.

  Nor was marriage mellowing Luther. As he settled into his new domestic life, he simply could not bear the thought of responding to Erasmus’s vainglorious text. Physically exhausted and emotionally drained, he longed for a break from the punishing routine of writing and lecturing, preaching and contending. But there was growing talk about his failure to respond. De Libero Arbitrio had appeared in twelve editions in 1524 and was the subject of vigorous debate among German scholars. Seven Strasbourg theologians, led by Wolfgang Capito, sent Luther a lett
er describing the confusion Erasmus’s work was causing in the Netherlands and Cologne. “What is he up to?” they wondered.

  Does he not everywhere brush aside the authority of Scripture and prefer the calm of the Antichrist to the revolutionary character of the kingdom of Christ? . . . We therefore implore you for Christ’s sake: Don’t let yourself be appeased by flesh and blood! Give priority to what you once wrote Erasmus—for the sake of Christ one must be able to hate one’s parents. . . . You know how much the Lord has sought to lay on you, how many thousands hang on to your lips.

  Joachim Camerarius, whose visit to Erasmus in the spring of 1524 had left him with a reservoir of esteem for the Dutchman but who remained devoted to Luther and Melanchthon, was deeply troubled by The Freedom of the Will. Could Erasmus be correct? On a visit to Wittenberg in August 1525, he pressed Katharina to convince her husband of the importance of replying, and at her prodding Luther gave in. “I am altogether taken up with my reply to Erasmus,” he wrote to Nicholas Hausmann on September 27. Having broken so spectacularly with the peasants, he now prepared for a decisive reckoning with the humanists.

  Given the fury that Luther had provoked with his tracts against both the peasants and the sacramentarians, and given the civil tone of Erasmus’s own book, he could have been expected to moderate his language. But Luther remained temperamentally incapable of such restraint, and the loathing and resentment he felt for Erasmus ensured a fierce response.

  Still, more than personal pique was involved. With the challenge from Erasmus, Luther felt that his entire gospel was at stake. The Bondage of the Will (De Servo Arbitrio), as he gravely titled his response, would be one of his last important theological tracts; of all his books, he would later say, only it, together with his catechisms, was worth preserving. The central tenet of Luther’s theology—that the sinner is justified by faith and grace alone, without the works of the law—rested on the idea that humans are incapable of finding salvation through their own acts. If an individual could choose to perform deeds that merited God’s favor, Luther’s whole system would collapse. What for Erasmus was a lively clash of ideas was for Luther a matter of life and death, and he brought to the task an intensity to match.