Call God Direct

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
by Lyndal Roper
The Bodley Head, 2016, 577 pages, $60
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The Protestant Reformation turns 500 this year. According to the tenets of most churches in the Reformation tradition, there is no requisite mediator between God and Christians outside the Holy Trinity—and so the Virgin Mary cannot be the “mediatrix of all graces”. The New Testament of Jesus Christ requires no interpreter, is straightforward in its message and generally understandable by faithful Christians. We are justified by faith, not by good works, though good works follow naturally in the wake of faith. Not only can’t you buy your deceased loved one’s way out of Purgatory with money, prayers and good works, Purgatory itself is a medieval fabrication based on contentious interpretations of out-of-the-way passages in Scripture, promoted by a corrupted papal Church pretending that its traditions are as valuable as the Word of God itself. The priesthood of Christ includes all believers. There are only two sacraments, baptism and holy communion. Less formally, there is the recognition that lifelong celibacy in the sense of perfect and perpetual continence is a contra-naturam impossibility for any but the impotent.

Just in time for 2017 comes what has been hailed as the best English-language biography of Martin Luther, the product of ten years’ work in the relevant German archives by Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University. For anyone born into Lutheranism and still feeling the attachment, like this reviewer, it has deep resonance, and it is particularly honest to the subject and his flaws.

Johannes Tetzel, authorised seller of papal indulgences, was the immediate cause behind Luther’s nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517—nailing the papal Church, as it were. As Roper reminds us, Tetzel, hawking his wares in the vicinity of Luther’s Wittenberg, “went so far as to claim that his indulgences were so efficacious that even if a person had raped the Virgin Mary they would be assured complete remission from Purgatory”. Luther, an Augustinian monk loyal to Augustinian theology, believed on the contrary that salvation came through faith, by divine grace, that Christians could not earn points by viewing relics or purchasing indulgences. This, as Roper observes, was a direct assault on “the medieval Church’s claim to be able to grant forgiveness and facilitate salvation through the dispensation of the sacraments … By attacking the understanding of penance, Luther was implicitly striking at the heart of the papal Church, and its entire financial and social edifice.” That Church saw an existential threat in any successful challenge to its would-be-totalitarian “system”, a system that “structured the religious and social lives of most medieval Christians. At its centre was the Pope who was the steward of a treasury of ‘merits’—grace which could be disbursed to others. Attacking indulgences, therefore, would sooner or later lead to a questioning of papal power.”

This is familiar ground, more familiar than many of the biographical facts and anecdotes vividly set forth in this original work of scholarship. Previous Reformation studies written in the West after 1945 were distorted by a perceived difficulty (whether true or not) in accessing the most important archives, those located in the Lutheran homelands in the German Democratic Republic. They tended to focus instead on Reformation movements in south-west Germany, where sixteenth-century political and economic structures were quite different from what they were in Saxony. East German scholarship, on the other hand, concentrated, as one would have expected, on the more radical reformers such as Thomas Müntzer, and on the Peasants’ War. The social history of Wittenberg and early Lutheranism was largely ignored. Roper’s biography locates its subject in the social and cultural contexts that formed him, one of its great strengths.

The grandson of a peasant, Luther was born in 1483 at Eisleben and spent his childhood in the small mining town of Mansfeld, proceeding thence to school in Magdeburg. His father intended him for the law but, during a violent thunderstorm on a journey along the road to Erfurt, Luther swore a vow to St Anna, patron saint of miners, that if she saved him he would enter a monastery, subsequently fulfilling the promise in 1505 by joining the Augustinian order. The social worlds of these towns, and Wittenberg of course, are described in such detail that one can visualise the streetscapes, individual houses, shops and taverns. Numerous woodcut illustrations from the period assist the process.

A few years later, in 1510, Luther made a pilgrimage to Rome and stayed a month. Deeply pious, he was shocked at the worldliness of the priests he met and their cynicism even about the Mass itself. They joked over supper, boasting how at the elevation they had quietly said to themselves, “Bread you are, and bread you will remain.” To Luther, who always retained his belief in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, this was deeply shocking. Ascending on his knees the Holy Staircase (brought to Rome from Jerusalem in the fourth century by Helena, mother of Constantine the Great), up which Christ had walked to judgment in Pilate’s praetorium, and saying an Our Father on each step, there came into his mind, as he later claimed during one of his many table talks, St Paul’s words in his Letter to the Romans, “The just shall live by faith alone.” It was a transformative moment, though it may in fact have come later.

Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses spread so fast that within two weeks of their appearance they were being devoured all over Germany. They were read by Erasmus in Rotterdam, who sent copies to Thomas More in England. Not only did countless thousands read them, they acted on them: Tetzel’s published reply was publicly burned on its arrival in Wittenberg, for instance, a prototype act for what became a customary procedure, and understandably so, since the public burning of a book, and even more so of a papal bull, was hugely emblematic—consigning them to hell. In Leipzig the papal bull excommunicating Luther was actually torn apart rather than burned, dung thrown at it, and a sign-board erected on the spot to celebrate the fact. The public debates and various conferences that failed to bring Luther to heel, the continuous prospect of martyrdom, the gradual development of his theological positions, the closer-and-closer alliance with his protectors Friedrich III, Elector of Saxony, Philip of Hesse and other secular powers of northern Germany, cemented during the Peasants’ War when Luther wisely sided with the authorities against threatening social dissolution—all these are recounted in detail.

One marker of the power of Luther’s words is that between 1518 and 1525 his publications in German exceeded the combined total of publications of the next seventeen most prolific authors. Luther by himself authored 20 per cent of all works published by German presses between 1500 and 1530, even though for the first half of that period he had not even begun to publish. Meanwhile anti-Lutheran Catholic works cluttered up the back corners of bookshops, unsaleable.

Partly as a result of his immense output and massive readership he was dominant in re-shaping the German language out of a sea of dialects. He did this not only by way of his translation into German of the New Testament, and then the Old Testament too, but via the immense popularity and style of his polemical works, which reflected the man: simple in expression, direct, unadorned by flowery rhetoric, close to the speech rhythms and earthy vocabulary of the common people.

By far the most liberating factor in Luther’s theology was the understanding that because of our fallen nature, all that we do, including our good works, our best motives, everything is tainted by sin, which is why asceticism has no point. Moreover, free will is a necessary illusion (as Augustine understood—and many of us who studied determinism in Philosophy I). We are justified by our faith and God’s generous grace alone, placed in His beautiful created world to love and enjoy it, not to renounce it, while endeavouring to the best of our limited ability to do His will.

The best political decision Luther ever made was to save the Reformation from the inevitable destruction it would have faced had he lent his support to Thomas Müntzer and the rebellious peasants, with whose grievances he nevertheless sympathised. No one with an eye to the future of a movement dependent on powerful protectors for its survival could ally himself with the kind of rhetoric that flowed from Müntzer’s pen. To Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, a supporter of Luther:

Couldn’t you find in your Lutheran pudding and your Wittenberg soup what Ezekiel has prophesied in his thirty-seventh chapter? You haven’t even been able to detect the flavour, because of that Martinian peasant filth of yours, of what the same prophet goes on to say in the thirty-ninth chapter, that God instructs all the birds of the heavens to consume the flesh of the princes; whilst the brute beasts are to drink the blood of the bigwigs.

—and to Ernst, Count of Mansfeld: “Brother Ernst, just tell us, you miserable, wretched sack of worms, who made you a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his dear blood?” Not that Luther couldn’t lambast his social betters, but he was smart enough to know the limits.

In response to this sort of stuff, in his tract Against the Robbing Murdering Thieving Hordes of Peasants (1525) Luther directed his own violent rhetoric against the chaos welling up from below:

Everyone who can, smite, slay. And stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.

His view of sex was down-to-earth. In contradistinction to some recent Catholic “theologians of the body” including Pope John Paul II, Luther (like John Milton in Paradise Lost) understood from experience that post-Fall sex is inevitably corrupted like everything else, animalistic, a “burning” (St Paul), inherently coarse and dirty-in-the-head, preferably to be contained but never really transformed by the institution of marriage. Pre-Fall sex was a pure thing, impossible to imagine in a fallen world and not re-attainable this side of Paradise. Luther compared sex with defecation because, as Roper puts it, “defecation was a source of pleasure, humour and play. No grandson of a peasant could see excrement as anything but positive because it was a source of fertility.” As in that example, Roper’s wit is subtle.

Although Luther’s views on the laws of consanguinity became more conservative later, in the early 1520s they were radical. He told the pastor Marquard Schuldorp of Magdeburg, who had married his niece, “Your marriage is perfectly valid, because what has not been forbidden by God is permitted.” The key text was Leviticus. Closer to the mainstream was his advice that “God has not forbidden but left it free for sisters’ children to marry each other.” In fact a marriage based in any degree of kinship not specifically forbidden by Scripture was acceptable.

To Luther, as to many today, sexual expression was deeply related to physical and mental well-being—he knew a woman, he said, who had died for lack of sexual intercourse. The contemporary humours theory with its emphasis on the necessary discharge of bodily fluids backed this up. He was generous in his attitude to unhappy and dysfunctional marriages. If one party to a marriage committed adultery, the innocent party, following dissolution of the marriage, should be allowed to re-marry. Sexual desire was irrepressible, and as for the spiritual sin of desiring the husband or wife of another (as opposed to actual adultery), “No one escapes being guilty of that.” Such honesty is impressive. Roper has high praise for Luther’s views on sexuality:

He had shed asceticism for a remarkably positive conception of human physicality, and a flexible, pastoral attitude towards the marital dilemmas of others. This vision would separate him not only from the old Church, but also from the rule-bound communitarian moralism of those influenced by the Swiss reformers and their heirs, the Calvinists.

Luther privately sanctioned Philip, Landgrave of Hesse’s bigamous marriage to the sixteen-year-old Margarethe von der Saale, subsequently denying his role. This is perhaps the biggest stain on his politico-religious record. With Martin Bucer acting as intermediary, Luther and his associate Philipp Melanchthon signed a memorial on December 10, 1539, agreeing that the landgrave could marry a second time, secretly, while remaining married to his wife (who consented to the arrangement), thereby allowing him to take Communion with a clear conscience. Unfortunately for Luther and Melanchthon, Philip invited several dignitaries to the “secret” wedding, and, as Luther should have known, it is uncommon for a secret to be kept by two people, rare when three know it, impossible when four or more are in on it. The resulting scandal hurt Luther’s reputation in the short term, but in Roper’s view “its deeper, and abiding, legacy was to ally the pastor’s authority to marital guidance, so that helping people find their way through conjugal turmoil became one of the chief duties of the clergy”.

With one conference after another failing to find a compromise acceptable to both sides (and the Catholic side tried: at the Diet of Regensburg in 1541, for example, there was an agreement on justification, though it was later rejected at Rome), Luther’s polemic lost all restraint. In his treatise Against the Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil (1545) he labelled Pope Paul III a sodomite (the Pope, notoriously, had numerous children, so Luther was implying he was bisexual) and a transvestite—“the holy virgin, Madame Pope, St Paula III”. The purpose was to smash the papal aura of holiness: Luther has Paul III, in contradistinction to Christ in the wilderness, say to Satan, “Come here, and if you had more worlds than this, I would accept them all, and not only worship you, but also lick your behind.” Luther-inspired woodcuts of the religious enemy by artists like Lucas Cranach the Elder are typically scatological. Images of demons abound, half-animal forms, hag-like witches. In one, the Pope shits out a stream of baby cardinals, who are then suckled by furies with snakes for hair; in another, a female demon defecates tonsured friars. The images of diarrhoea in so many of these illustrations signified the uncontrolled and uncontrollable corruption of the Roman Church. The Turk was not the Antichrist, the Pope was. Luther read the Koran in 1542, and thought it should be published, for Christians could not refute it unless they knew what was in it. Muslims were deluded, whereas the Catholic hierarchy knew the truth of God but had changed it into a lie.

In some of his early writing Luther criticised Germans for attacking the Jews, but he became increasingly and even violently anti-Semitic as the years went by—or perhaps one should say anti-Judaic, for race per se was generally excluded from his rants. He was not exceptional in his attitudes, of course. Far into the nineteenth century, for example, the Jews of Rome were locked into their papacy-established and papacy-controlled ghetto each night (apparently the last of the locked ghettos of old Europe), and for the most part prevented from living outside of it until 1870, when their freedom finally came with the city’s conquest by Victor Emmanuel II and its incorporation into a united Italy.

Luther’s mature views, however, verged on the extreme even for the sixteenth century, so speculation on likely causes is in order. At some point he met a learned Jewish convert to Christianity who urged him to read the anti-Gentile and anti-Christian passages in the Talmud. Luther was shocked to see the Virgin Mary described as the whore of a Roman soldier named Pantera or Panthera. Their offspring, Jesus—“Yeshu ben Pantera” as he was insultingly labelled—was thus a bastard. Together with the equally shocking passages on how Jews should regard and treat Gentiles, this triggered a seismic reaction in Luther. However, he may have known that the source of the Pantera story was not Jewish but classical: the second-century Greek philosopher Celsus, whose anti-Christian work The True Word is lost but quoted in Origen’s Contra Celsum.

Whatever the causes, however visceral, Luther’s growing anti-Semitism was exacerbated when he found that the Jews of Germany were still uninterested in becoming Christians after all his work in reforming the religion. This seems to have been his major gripe. When the Jewish leader Josel of Rosheim asked him in 1537 to persuade the Elector to permit free movement of Jews throughout Saxony, Luther wrote to Rosheim explaining that his advocacy of good treatment of Jews had been to the end that they find their way to the Messiah, not “that they should be strengthened and made worse in their error through my favour and advancement”. He added, “Read how you treated your King David and all pious kings, yes, the holy prophets and people, and don’t treat us heathens as dogs.” As he came to see that nothing could convert this stubborn people to the truth, his rhetoric turned violent and bloody: the secular authorities should burn all synagogues and associated schools and bury the ruins for good measure, “so that not a stone or piece of slag of it should be seen for all eternity”. Burn their Talmud and prayer books, he urged, ban their teachers, force them to undertake physical labour, outlaw usury and confiscate its accumulated capital for distribution among Jewish converts to Christianity. Of course he could not know into what lakes of fire this hot stream of thought would later feed.

Luther’s movement fragmented after his death, his carefully developed networks subsequently lacking that strong central authority his leadership provided. Lutheranism, however, survived, because the various factions had far more in common than what divided them. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 saw the Emperor formally accept that there were two denominations in the Holy Roman Empire, that each ruler of his particular territory could determine the official religion there, and that individual freedom of worship would to an extent be guaranteed even within that formula. Rome, however, never gave up on its dream of suppressing “heresy” across the Continent, and of course in England too; shamefully, it even refused to endorse the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that put an end to the Thirty Years’ War, still regarded as the most devastating conflict Germany ever had to endure, absurdly describing that treaty as “null, void … iniquitous … damnable, reprobate … empty of meaning and effect for all time”.

Luther’s legacy, Lyndal Roper reminds us, includes not only the German Bible and enduring contributions to Christian theology, on the basis of which countless millions could feel secure in a direct, unmediated relationship with God, but also his beautiful hymns, the musical elements of the Lutheran liturgy, and the inspiration flowing thence into much of the music of J.S. Bach, himself a devout Lutheran, and other German composers. The movement’s political conservatism, as with the political conservatism of Anglicanism, ensured the development of the Reformation under the protection of powerful princes, without whom the venture would surely have been lost, as it was in France.