Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (103 page)

Luther's protest was quickly turned into an act of rebellion because powerful churchmen gave a heavy-handed response. He wanted to talk about grace; his opponents wanted to talk about authority. That chasm of purposes explains how an argument about a side alley of medieval soteriology escalated into the division of Europe. His own order was broadly sympathetic to his arguments, but throughout 1518 Luther's opponents relentlessly called him to be obedient to Rome, and the incendiary idea of conciliarism (see pp. 560-63) constantly hovered around their diatribes. A veteran Dominican papal theologian, Silvestro Mazzolini of Prierio (sometimes known as 'Prierias'), was commissioned to write against the ninety-five theses. He saw a familiar conciliarist enemy in Luther, and he discussed the infallibility of Church authority at such length that it made Luther much more inclined to wonder whether the Church might be fallible. Luther's meetings with Cardinal Cajetan, one of the most admirable and irreproachable of senior churchmen (see p. 583), became a fiasco for the same reason. Each confrontation made him seem more of a rebel, a reincarnation of the executed rebel Jan Hus.

Cajetan's meeting with Luther need not have ended as it did. Cajetan's immersion in the writings of Thomas Aquinas led him, like other Thomist Dominicans, to emphasize the role of predestination in salvation, an emphasis which Aquinas shared with both Augustine and the Augustinian monk of Wittenberg.
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Moreover, soon after Luther's first protest in 1517, Cajetan had decided to examine the question of indulgences for himself, and his conclusions (published later at great length) were typical of his brusquely independent thinking. While defending the existence of indulgences, he took a realistic view of their historical origins, and downplayed both the theology of merit and the proposition that the Church could control the measuring out of lengths of penance in Purgatory.
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Yet in 1518 this meeting of Dominican and Augustinian reformers degenerated into an angry confrontation, in which Cajetan demanded unquestioning obedience to the Pope from Luther, while Luther would not withdraw what he had said about grace. In the terms of B. B. Warfield's characterization of the Reformation as Augustine's doctrine of Grace triumphing over Augustine's doctrine of the Church (see p. 584), Cajetan prioritized Augustine on the Church over Augustine on grace. His Thomist successors in the Catholic Church continued to do so, in the Counter-Reformation (see Chapter 18), a version of Church reform which sought the destruction of the project for Christendom which Luther and his admirers now developed.

Finally in 1520 Luther found himself excommunicated, cut off by the Pope from the fellowship of the whole Church. He publicly burned the bull of excommunication in Wittenberg, cheered on by the students and townsfolk, to whom he had become a hero. Luther was beginning to see himself as chosen by God precisely for a heroic role: to deliver the Church from a satanic error. He had accepted his total sinfulness. This gave him a paradoxical sense of his own rightness, and if the Pope was telling him that he was wrong in proclaiming God's cause, that must mean that the Pope was God's enemy. What was worse, the Church had taken God's sacraments and turned them into part of an elaborate confidence trick on God's people. Luther proclaimed his message to all the victims of the cheat: not just to scholars in Latin but to all laypeople, powerful and humble, in German. Three great treatises in 1520, the
Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation
,
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church
and
The Freedom of a Christian
, stood out amid the increasing flood of Luther's polemic from the Wittenberg printing presses.

The first of these three drew on the ancient tensions between pope and emperor to proclaim that the pope was the enemy not just of the empire but of all Christendom. As imperialist spokesmen had long maintained (see p. 558), he was Antichrist, but furthermore, so was the whole apparatus of his Church. The
Babylonian Captivity
addressed itself in Latin to those inside that apparatus, seeking to convince clergy that the sacraments which they administered had been perverted from their biblical forms. Above all, God's Eucharist had been turned to a Mass which falsely claimed to be a repetition of Christ's sacrifice once offered on the Cross. Luther performed something of a balancing act when he spoke of the Mass: he kept a passionate sense of the presence of the Lord's body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine, but he scorned the scholastic and non-biblical explanation of this miraculous transformation which the Church had provided in the doctrine of transubstantiation. The third book explored the problem of its title: how could utterly fallen humanity, enslaved to sin, claim any liberty? Luther, never afraid of paradox, boldly gave an answer answerless: 'A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.'
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The paradox was solved by the utterly undeserved death of Christ, which gave back freedom to those whom God had chosen from amid an utterly undeserving humanity.

What would the powers of this world make of Luther's call to liberty? Now that that Church authorities had responded, it was for the civil commonwealth to pronounce, in the person of its most exalted representative, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V, elected in summer 1519 to the huge relief of the Habsburg family, was then not out of his teens, but he ruled the largest empire that the Christian West had ever known. A serious-minded young man whose sense of destiny as Christendom's leader was not diminished by his advisers (see pp. 593-4), he was anxious not to jeopardize the unity of the dominion entrusted to him, but also anxious to do what God wanted. Eventually setting aside papal protests, he heeded Friedrich the Wise and gave Luther a formal hearing within the boundaries of the empire at the first available meeting of the Diet, the regular imperial assembly, at Worms in April 1521. Luther arrived after a triumphal tour across Germany. Facing the Emperor, he acknowledged a long list of books as his own. Ordered to say yes or no to the question 'Will you then recant?' he asked for a day's grace to answer. Would he return to being the best monk in Germany, or go forward into an unformed future, guided only by what he had found in the Bible?

Luther's answer next day was no single word, but a careful and dignified speech. His books were of various sorts, some of which were indeed 'polemic against the papacy' which reflected 'the experience and the complaint of all men': 'if then, I revoke these books, all I shall achieve is to add strength to tyranny, and open not the windows but the doors to this monstrous godlessness, for a wider and freer range than it has ever dared before'. He spelled out to the Emperor that without a conviction from 'scripture or plain reason (for I believe neither in Pope nor councils alone)', he could recant nothing. It was such a momentous culmination that not long after his death, Georg Rorer, the first editor of his collected works, felt compelled to construct two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: 'Here I stand; I can do no other'.
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This can stand for the motto of all Protestants: ultimately, perhaps, of all modern Western civilization.

To his great credit, Charles ignored the Emperor Sigismund's treachery to Hus in 1415 (see pp. 571-2) and honoured Luther's safe conduct from the Diet. Still Luther was in peril, and the best solution was for him to vanish; the Elector Friedrich duly arranged that. Luther occupied those months in the Wartburg, a Wettin stronghold on the wooded massif high above Eisenach, familiar to him from his childhood, by beginning a translation of the Bible into German. It would present his own spin on the text, to make sure that his liberating message got across, but it was an astonishing achievement at a time of great personal stress and amid a welter of polemical writing.
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Although time only allowed the completion of the New Testament, and the complete Old Testament followed later, his text has shaped the German language. Luther was a connoisseur of the vernacular, like his English contemporary Thomas Cranmer, whose speech has haunted formal English to the present day (see pp. 630-32), but Luther had a different gift. Cranmer's meticulously calculated liturgical prose presented a public, ceremonial face of the Reformation in restrained dignity, even sobriety, whereas Luther's talent was for seizing the emotion with sudden, urgent phrases. His hymns, first published in Wittenberg and Strassburg in 1524, reveal his genius perhaps even more than his Bible, because they transcend the notorious and already then well-established tendency of German to pile syllable on syllable in conglomerations of compound notions.

Singers of Luther's hymns can revel in strong words of one or two syllables, like his famous '
Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, Ein gute Wehr und Waffen
'. Almost certainly Luther also wrote its tune, which has become the universal anthem of Lutheranism. The words still provide a glimpse of how his genius seized on the fears of ordinary folk in a world full of evils and terrors, and helped his congregations roar away these terrors in song. Americans will probably know it in English translation as 'A mighty fortress is our God', but British hymn-singers will be more familiar with the vastly superior translation made by the Victorian historical writer Thomas Carlyle, who had a feel for craggy men of action like Luther, and captured far better the breezy directness of his German:

A safe stronghold our God is still,
A trusty shield and weapon;
He'll help us clear from all the ill
That hath us now o'ertaken.
The ancient prince of hell
Hath risen with purpose fell;
Strong mail of craft and power
He weareth in this hour;
On earth is not his fellow.

And were this world all devils o'er,
And watching to devour us,
We lay it not to heart so sore;
Not they can overpower us.
And let the prince of ill
Look grim as e'er he will,
He harms us not a whit;
For why? - his doom is writ;
A word shall quickly slay him.

Inevitably in the storm now spreading throughout the continent, Erasmus was urged to confront Luther, and he needed to do so in order to refute the charge that his own delicate sarcasm at the Church's expense had spawned this monstrous rebel. Erasmus chose his question carefully. The choice reflected his own distaste for the Augustinian theology which meant so much to Luther: has humanity retained free will to respond to God's offer of grace? He set out his attack in September 1524:
A Diatribe on Free Will
. Fully aware that he must play by Augustinian rules, Erasmus emphasized that the initiative in grace was with God. After that, however, he sought to avoid a dogmatic single formula on grace; for him this was Luther's chief fault. His attack was as much on Luther's way of doing theology as on the resulting theology: Luther was exposing controversial questions to public excitement when there was no need to do so. Erasmus preferred to seek consensus, put forward an opinion which seemed most probable - that process is actually the technical meaning of the word
diatribe
. Erasmus was a humanist pleading for people to be reasonable - and also saying bluntly that unreasonable people should not be brought into technical discussions of theology. Moreover, he believed that human beings could indeed be reasonable, because when Adam and Eve fell in the Garden of Eden, their God-given capacity to reason had not been fully corrupted, only damaged.

Luther by contrast was a prophet proclaiming an inescapable message to all fallen humanity. In his response, uncompromisingly entitled
On the Slavery of the Will
(
De servo arbitrio
, published in December 1525), Luther set out a pitiless message that human beings could expect nothing but condemnation, and had nothing to offer God to merit salvation:

If we believe that Christ redeemed men by his blood, we are forced to confess that all of man was lost; otherwise, we make Christ either wholly superfluous, or else the redeemer of the least valuable part of man only; which is blasphemy, and sacrilege.
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This parting blow in his book was the very heart of the Reformation's reassertion of Augustine, proclaiming that the humanist project of reasonable reform was redundant. It was not surprising that Erasmus went on fighting, in two bulky and bitter volumes published in 1526 and 1527, in which he showed how Luther had forced him back to reaffirm his loyalty to the imperfect structures of the old Church: 'Therefore I will put up with this Church until I see a better one; and it will have to put up with me, until I become better.'
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Wearily he was confronting not only Luther, but also his own humanist sympathizers like Luther's brilliant young university colleague Philipp Melanchthon, who had likewise determined to favour Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church.
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THE FARMERS' WAR AND ZWINGLI

What degree of change was Luther proclaiming, and what needed changing? Many ordinary people, especially those defending their livelihoods against new exactions by their lords and by governments, saw Luther's defiance of authority as a sign that all authority was collapsing in God's final judgement on human sin. The Last Days had arrived, and everyone had a duty to hurry along God's plan, which included overthrowing God's enemies in high places. In 1525 large areas of central Europe were convulsed by revolts against princes and Church leaders: the
Bauernkrieg
, often misleadingly translated into English as the 'Peasants' War', but better rendered the 'Farmers' War' to get a sense of the sort of prosperous people - not so different from Luther's family - who in their righteous anger and excitement led the crowds. The revolts were brutally crushed - and Luther, terrified by the disorder, applauded the rulers' brutality. Another text from Paul lit up for him: Romans 13.1, 'Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from God'. This has been described as the most important text of the Reformation. Many humanist scholars now drew back from the Reformation in fright; others committed themselves to an ordered, modulated programme of change. For many of the cowed, resentful rebels, the Reformers' message of liberation now seemed as big a sham and betrayal as the pope's old offer of salvation. Luther and his supporters would have to find some other means for pursuing their revolution than their first idealistic appeal to the good sense of all God's people.