Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (102 page)

Erasmus did not end his life feeling that his career was a success. His pan-European humanist project seemed at its most convincing and his reputation at its highest peak in a brief period after 1517, that same year which saw the beginning of Martin Luther's rebellion. When Erasmus died on a visit to Basel in 1536, his chaste red marble monument was placed in the former cathedral, from where the prince-bishop had already fled and where Reformers had smashed sacred furniture and images of the saints, much to the elderly scholar's alarm and misery. For a decade and more before his death, Erasmus unhappily shifted his centre of operations (he never really looked for a home) round a circuit of western Europe, successively from Louvain to Basel to a house overlooking the cathedral in Freiburg im Breisgau. He had taken one principled stand against Luther, and thus had signalled that he would not abandon the old Church (see pp. 613-14), but he still desperately tried to avoid decisively taking sides in the storm which was now tearing apart the world of elegantly phrased letters, high-minded reform projects and charming Latin-speaking friends which he had patiently extended across the face of Europe. As a result, increasing numbers on either side of the new divide regarded him as a time-serving coward who lacked courage to take sides now that everyone was expected to do so. What had gone wrong? What had happened to the humanist project for changing the world through the power of a perfectly balanced Ciceronian sentence?

17

A House Divided (1517-1660)

A DOOR IN WITTENBERG

Two incidents stick in the popular consciousness from Martin Luther's career: first, that he nailed some theses to a door in Wittenberg, and second, that he came through a spiritual crisis to new faith while sitting on a latrine - his 'Tower Experience' or
Turmerlebnis
. The first incident probably did happen, and maybe on 31 October 1517, although the original door is not there to enlighten us, having been burned by French troops in 1760.
¹
Its replacement is a nineteenth-century confection, part of a lavish and romantic Gothic Revival reconstruction of the dynastic chapel of the Wettin family, beside their former palace. This 'Castle Church' now rather uncomfortably tries to kill three birds with one stone: to celebrate the medieval Holy Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformers whose work helped to tear the empire apart, and the nineteenth-century Hohenzollern dynasty who paid for the new work, and who were concurrently busy constructing a new German Empire (see pp. 837-8). Since the Hohenzollern were ancient and bitter rivals of the Wettin, the rebuilding had a certain piquancy. In an additional level of irony, a distinctly unreformed or under-reformed Hohenzollern prelate had triggered Luther's protest in the first place, as we will see.

The reconstructed door is a focus for Lutheran pilgrimage on Reformation Day, 31 October, the only day of the year on which the place now enterprisingly styling itself 'Lutherstadt Wittenberg' is crowded with visitors. Luther is about the one flourishing industry left in this small east German town in Saxony. By contrast, Luther's basement latrine in Wittenberg has not as yet developed much of a following after its recent rediscovery by archaeologists (the tower above it in his former monastery and family home having inexplicably been demolished by thoughtless Lutherans in 1840). Its continuing neglect is just as well, as its role in the Reformation story is myth, and based on a misunderstanding of the grammar in Luther's Latin reminiscence of his
Turmerlebnis
. We can still enjoy these and less dubious souvenirs of Wittenberg's glory years in the Reformation because the town was one of the few in Germany to be spared bombing in the Second World War. That exemption was a tribute to the worldwide impact of a monk-lecturer's spiritual turmoil in what in 1517 was one of Europe's newest universities.

The university owed its existence to the then head of the Wettin dynasty, Friedrich of Saxony, a strong-minded and creative ruler, by hereditary right one of seven electors, who chose a new Holy Roman Emperor when required (the imperial title had never become hereditary). That honour gave Friedrich a good deal of influence on the Habsburg dynasty, who since the early fifteenth century had normally provided one of their number as the next emperor, but who could never be certain that the electors would allow this to continue. Without the Elector Friedrich's support (puzzling in its consistency - he did not know Martin Luther well and never approved of his religious revolution), it is likely that Luther would have suffered the fate of Jan Hus a century before, burned by the authority of the Church. The Wettin were hugely wealthy from the profits of mining, particularly mining for silver, and one of the justifications for Friedrich's later nickname 'the Wise' was the constructive uses to which he had put his generous inheritance, especially the improvement of the little market town at the gates of his palace in Wittenberg. Some of his spending was what was expected of a medieval prince, like the beautiful music which he sponsored in the Castle Church, or the large collection of holy relics which he also assembled there, all lovingly listed for pious visitors in a printed catalogue. The foundation of the university was less conventional. The first in Germany to be founded without the blessing of the Church authorities, it brashly boasted against its older rivals that it could provide students with an up-to-date immersion in humanist learning.
²

The lecturer who arrived in 1511, nine years after Friedrich had founded the university, came from the sort of family who provided most of the Western Church's most effective clergy: not especially rich or endowed with long pedigrees, but hard-working and high-achieving. Martin Luther's father made his money in the mining industry, and with a miner for a father, Luther was prone in later years to emphasize his credentials as a man of the people. In fact his mother's family boasted more than one successful graduate. It was only natural for Hans Luther to direct his son towards graduate study to become a lawyer, but Martin struck out in his own direction into the religious life, after an incident which, if he had become a saint of the Catholic Church, would have been the perfect opening for hagiography in a traditional mould. Caught in a thunderstorm in 1505, the young man was so terrified that he vowed to St Anne, the mother of Mary, that he would enter monastic life if he survived. When the storm was over, he kept his vow to that apocryphal lady (a useful ally against any parental opposition, since she was the patron saint of his father's mining industry, as well as being maternal grandmother of God). Martin Luther moved only a little way down the road from his college in Erfurt to the house of the strict monastic Order of Augustinian Eremites; it was they who sent him to Wittenberg.

Perhaps it was his order's devotion to Augustine that directed Luther to his fresh perception of Augustine's views on salvation and grace, but he was hardly alone around the turn of the century in returning to Augustine's grand narrative of human helplessness remedied by divine mercy. Luther was not a conventional humanist.
³
There was little in his theology as it developed which suggested the optimism and sense of boundless possibility which characterized so much humanist learning. Yet as he worked out a theology of salvation which echoed Augustine's exposition of Paul, humanist techniques of scholarship constantly prompted him to challenge scholasticism. Increasingly openly, he despised the scholastic tradition both Thomist and nominalist: he loathed the presence of Aristotle in scholastic theological discussion, and he came to despise the nominalist idea of a salvation contract between God and humanity which Gabriel Biel had pioneered (see pp. 565-6). In 1513 he began lecturing on the Psalter, a natural choice for a monk who structured his daily life around the chanting of the psalms. To help his students, he had a batch of psalters printed with the text broadly spaced surrounded by wide blank margins, so that they could make their notes around the text as he spoke. Absent was all the medieval commentary, that ready-made lens through which students would have been expected to view the Bible, forcing them to look afresh at the text itself.
⁴

In 1515 Luther moved to lecturing on Paul's letter to the Romans, so central a text for Augustine's message about salvation. It is worth noting that this took place before Erasmus had published his edition of the New Testament, and so it owed nothing to that monument to humanist learning. Luther discovered good news there for himself: an 'evangelical' message, direct as he saw it in the
evangelium
. His own manuscript notes survive from these two lecture courses and in them themes appear which later coalesced behind his proclamation of justification by faith: his presentation of the psalms as a meditation on the message and significance of Jesus Christ, his affirmation that all righteousness comes from God, his pointers to the revelation in the words of scripture, a revelation dwarfing any truths provided by human reason. When Luther turned to Romans, at the heart of his presentation of the message of salvation was the doctrine of predestination: 'whoever hates sin is already outside sin and belongs to the elect'. How could we get to this state without help from outside ourselves? A terrifying image in his notes underlines the plight of human beings after the Fall in the Garden of Eden: so trapped in sin that both body and spirit are twisted up claustrophobically without any escape from their agony -
incurvatus in se
- 'turned in on themselves'.
⁵

Whenever the
Turmerlebnis
occurred (in fact almost certainly after 1517), Luther remembered or reinterpreted this moment of agony resolved as a turning point forcing on him the realization that faith was central to salvation.
⁶
Predictably the trigger was a text from Romans, 1.17, itself sheltering a Tanakh quotation from Habbakuk 2.4: 'the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written "he who through faith is righteous shall live" '. In this sentence, the words 'righteousness/righteous' were in the Vulgate's Latin '
justitia/ justus
': hence the word justification.
⁷
In Latin that literally means making someone righteous, but in Luther's understanding - in a literally crucial difference - it rather meant declaring someone to be righteous. To use the technical language of theologians, God through his grace 'imputes' the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this 'imputation' would not be 'made' righteous at all. That is the essential contrast with the
via moderna
notion of a covenant in which a merciful God allows human merit 'to do that which is in oneself'. Since the word
justitia
is linked so closely with faith, as in Romans 1.17, we see how Luther constructed his evangelical notion of justification by faith from Paul's closely woven text. That was the core of his liberating good news, his Gospel.

Later Luther told this story of a theological revolution as autobiography, portraying his years in the Wittenberg Augustinian monastery as tortured and unprofitable. Partly this was hindsight, given all that happened afterwards, and partly it can be accounted for by his generous efforts in later years to cheer up a long-term house guest, Jerome Weller, who suffered repeated bouts of depression, and who needed to hear about someone else who had successfully endured similar troubles.
⁸
Luther also freely admitted that he had been a good and conscientious monk, one of the best products of the healthiest parts of the monastic system. Indeed, that was the trouble. After all his frequent anxious visits to the confessional to seek forgiveness for his (in worldly terms trivial) sins, he still felt a righteous God's fury against his sinfulness. Reminiscing later, he said that he had come to hate this God who had given laws in the Old Testament which could not be kept and which thus held humankind back from salvation. The opposition of Law and Gospel, an opposition set up by God himself, remained a fundamental theme of his theology.

Luther needed to reconstruct his own story in the light of later events because the drastic implications of his personal struggle only gradually became clear. They developed into the rediscovery of good news which has come to be called the Protestant Reformation, but which called itself, to begin with, an 'evangelical' movement. That remains the official self-description of the Lutheran Churches, in a use of this word which has separate connotations for English-speakers with their own historical references to an anglophone Christian history. What happened in the years after Luther's first lectures on Romans was a turnabout in the whole Western Christian scheme of salvation (soteriology) which had constructed that great theological success story, the doctrine of Purgatory, with all its attendant structures of intercessory prayer for the dead - chantries, gilds, hospitals - that comforting sense that through divine mercy we humans can busy ourselves doing something to alter and improve our prospects after death. In the end, for Luther and all who came to accept his new message, the problem was that it was not divine mercy upholding this system, but a lie told by clergymen. Yet to begin with, Luther did not see this; nor did he object to Purgatory. In fact he continued to accept Purgatory's existence until around 1530, when he finally realized that his soteriological revolution had abolished it (his change of mind demanded a certain amount of re-editing of some of his earlier writings).
⁹
Instead, he seized on a lesser problem within the system: the sale of indulgences.

Indulgences, the Western Church's grants remitting penitential punishments, could be seen as a practical demonstration that God loved sinners, and that God's love was channelled through the power of the Church. Yet many loyal church people and theologians had seen the commercialization of the system as vulgar and needing reform, whatever they thought of the principles behind it. Now Luther was provoked to confrontation with the Church hierarchy by a particularly reprehensible campaign, backed by Pope Leo X himself. It raised funds from the German faithful to finish rebuilding St Peter's Basilica in Rome, in a deal which also looked after the financial needs of the great Hohenzollern prelate Albrecht, Archbishop of Magdeburg. The preaching campaign for the indulgence was headed by an extrovert Dominican, Johann Tetzel, who was capable of urging his hearers, 'Won't you part with even a farthing to buy this letter? It won't bring you money but rather a divine and immortal soul, whole and secure in the Kingdom of Heaven.'
¹⁰
The squalid implications of this, an insult to the Apostle Paul's view of grace and salvation, led Luther to announce (probably with a notice on the Castle Church door) that he proposed a university disputation on ninety-five theses, taking a decidedly negative view of indulgences. He enclosed these theses in a letter of 31 October 1517 to that same Albrecht, who happened to be his own archbishop.