Luther: A Life by John M. Todd
Chapter 6: First Encounters, 1516
Staupitz had been right. Wittenberg was the making of Martin. It produced many different Luthers: the Religious Superior, the theology lecturer, the popular preacher, the spiritual guide, the University man, and Luther the man, universal friend and acquaintance and, soon now, author. In Wittenberg all his gifts gelled together into a mix which fitted what he was given to do. While his own inner life churned away,
sometimes to his own utter misery, it commonly enhanced, rather than otherwise, all his numerous activities. Sometimes his exaggerated self- denigration or his compensating impetuosity could be a disadvantage, but it often proved attractive. Then he had good judgment about men, in an almost instinctive way; and along with it went rapid action and an intense sincerity born of the inner struggles.
Luther the District Vicar had to write and depose a Prior, and tell the Community to elect a new one, in a letter addressed to the Fathers and the Prior jointly at Neustadt/Oral (25 September 1516). It was not an easy thing to do. But Luther had attained a good measure of savoir faire by watching others at it. The opening paragraph is one of
embarrassment. The community, he says, is not of one mind, or one heart or one soul, and this wretched way of living is partly the fault of the community and partly Luther’s own fault (in the sense of
negligence); the latter can hardly have been true since Luther had been District Vicar for such a short time. However, it was a prudent thing to say and undoubtedly Luther felt responsibility for the state of affairs. He expressed the sense of spiritual failure which was becoming his
diagnosis of the human condition: ‘We do not weep aloud to the Lord. . . nor pray that he make our way straight in his sight and lead us in his righteousness [a quotation from the Psalms]. He errs, he errs, who
presumes to guide himself by his own wisdom — not to speak of guiding others.’ He makes it clear that he is not just waving a big stick
— and then asks, ‘What now? Life without peace is dangerous because it is life without Christ, and it is death rather than life.’
He soon came to the point and put the matter clearly and finally: ‘I order you, Friar Michael Dressel, to resign from your office and surrender the seal. By the same authority I release you from the office of prior. . . I do not want you to complain that I have judged you without a hearing, or that I have not accepted your defence. . . You have done as much as you had grace to do . . .’ But ‘it is not enough that a man be good and pious by himself. Peace and harmony with those around him are also
necessary.’ He went on with explicit directions about the new election, begging the friars not to go in for an, apparently common, foolish approach to such matters by trying to elect a friar not in fact eligible.
The word ‘peace’ in the letter is a key word. It was becoming an obsessive theme in Martin’s mind. The words of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah were forever echoing there: ‘"Peace! Peace!" they say, but there is no peace’ — they occur in a long lyrical denunciatory
section of semitic poetry. The word for peace is Shalom, not just the absence of conflict, but the blessed harmony of those who lived by God’s Law, perhaps the peace of the coming age of the Messiah. Luther seldom does more than quote a word or two, but the Bible was his daily reading and he knew long sections by heart simply from frequent
reading. The highly significant context from which Luther took his thoughts about peace runs:
For thus says Yahweh Sabaoth
‘Be warned, Jerusalem
lest I should turn away from you, and reduce you to a desert,
a land without people’.
Yahweh Sabaoth says this:
‘Glean, glean, as a vine is gleaned, what is left of Israel;
like a grape-picker pass your hand again over the branches.
. . . .
Plainly the word of Yahweh is for them something contemptible,
they have no taste for it. But I am full of the wrath of Yahweh,
I am weary of holding it in.
Then pour it on the children in the streets, and where young men gather, too.
All shall be taken: husband and wife,
the graybeard and the man weighed down with years.
. . . .
For all, least no less than greatest, all are out for dishonest gain;
prophet no less than priest, all practise fraud.
They dress my people’s wound
without concern: "Peace! Peace!" they say, but there is no peace.
They should be ashamed of their abominable deeds.
But not they! They feel no shame, They have forgotten how to blush
And so as others fall, they too shall fall;
and they shall be thrown down when I come to deal with them
— says Yahweh.
In his earlier letter to Michael Dressel, Luther had said to him, in a vein similar to that of his words quoted to Friar Spenlein: ‘God . . has placed his peace in the middle of no peace, that is in the middle of trial’ and the man who is disturbed by nothing is not a man who has real peace
(Shalom), he has only the ‘peace of the world.’ On the other hand, the man who has true peace is the man ‘whom all men and all things harass and who yet bears it quietly with joy’. Instead of saying ‘Peace, peace’, where there is no peace, he says rather ‘Cross, cross’ and there is no cross — for as soon as you say joyfully: ‘Blessed cross, there is no tree like you,’ the cross ceases to be a cross. ‘Seek peace and you will find it, but seek only to bear trials with joy as if they were holy relics.’ ‘Relics’
was another word Luther built up into a whole metaphorical usage of his own. Veneration of relics (especially of the ‘True Cross’ — supposedly pieces of the cross of Jesus’s
crucifixion found in Israel) became suspect to him and objects of criticism by him as mere substitutes for true religion; Luther began to speak of personal ‘crosses’ as things to be welcomed like veritably
‘true’ relics.
Another letter from Luther the District Vicar earlier the same year was to his old friend Lang, just after the latter’s appointment as Superior at Erfurt. Luther had been there on an official visitation and on his return to Wittenberg wrote to Lang about the Guest House. It was being used too much as a convenient hotel. Luther suggested that Lang might keep a tally of exactly how much was eaten and drunk there each day.
People were beginning to respond to Fr Luther’s insights. The friars, the students, the townspeople listened to his sermons and came to his
lectures. People began asking for copies of his lectures and addresses.
Printers and merchants were always on the look-out for authors who would provide them with a product they could market. They liked pious material best; they could market it not only to the numerous laity who could read, but also to the less snobbish members of the clerical and academic world. More scholarly material obviously was limited to university circles, but there were funds, public and private to make sure of an adequate sale. Luther was able to provide the printer-publishers with both kinds of material. In the winter and spring, 1516-17 he brought out his first publication in each sphere.
His beloved Psalms provided the material for his more popular book. It was a translation, in the vigorous and accurate German he was
beginning to enjoy writing, of the Seven Penitential Psalms, together with a commentary. It pleased him greatly. He sent a copy to his old mentor Staupitz but thought it best not to send copies off to his humanist friends, who would find this an old-fashioned kind of thing to publish. A German humanist, if he must produce something in his own language ought to look to native literary traditions. Spalatin complained that no copy had been sent to him, and Luther replied; ‘The fact is, I do not want you to have them. They have not been published for refined minds but for the roughest sort.’ Such thrice-chewed food was not for the humanist palate. And he had to write in similar vein to his friend Christoph Scheurl, once the Dean Of Law at Wittenberg and now a leading humanist at Nuremberg, to whom Staupitz had shown the book.
‘They were not put out for the Nurembergers, that is for highly sensitive and sharp-nosed souls, but for rough Saxons, the sort you know, the sort for whom Christian scholarship can never be chewed small enough.’
Martin had put something of himself into these Psalms as he did into everything he wrote. In his Preface, he spoke of reliance on the great Reuchlin in his attempt to render the Hebrew truthfully. He was thinking much about the world into which Jesus came. In his lectures on the
Letter to the Hebrews he called the Jews, ‘the very Sacrament, that is, the kind Father’s beloved children in Christ.’ Publishing this Jewish poetry, used by Christians as prayer now for nearly fifteen hundred years, gave him both great literary pleasure and the enormous
reassurance that the people to whom he preached in St Mary’s Church in Wittenberg wanted it. An English translation uses many ‘Saxon’ (rather than ‘Latin’) words and gives some idea of the flavour of Luther’s translation:
For my days pass away like smoke and my bones burn like a furnace
My heart is smitten like grass and withered;
I forget to eat my bread. . . For I eat ashes like bread,
and mingle my tears with my drink, because of thy indignation and anger;
for thou hast taken me up and thrown me away.
My days are like an evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.
But thou O Lord art enthroned for ever;
Thy name endures to all generations.
Thou wilt arise and have pity on Zion;
it is the time to favour her.
(from Psalm 102)
This came out in the spring of 1517. Into it had gone something of Luther’s new theological assurance but also of a new spirituality which was to be seen in his other ‘first’ book, in the more scholarly sphere.
Although scholarly, it was also in German not Latin. In the autumn of 1516 he had come across the intellectual element in that seam of
medieval culture usually called ‘Rhineland mysticism’. He read Tauler (d. 1361), a member of the Order of Dominican Friars, and another book in the same tradition called A German Theology. From their teaching on the Cross, on Verlassenheit (abandonment of all things for God) and Gelassenheit (a word Indicating the result of abandonment of self to God, that is serenity or sometimes resignation, he hammered out part of his theology of the Cross and strengthened further his sense of inner commitment. In an excited letter to Spalatin (on this occasion he was considered highly suitable for a discussion of the text), dated 14 December 1516, Luther wrote: ‘If reading a pure and solid theology, which is available in German and is of a quality closest to that of the Fathers, might please you, then get yourself the sermons of Johann
Tauler, the Dominican . . . I have seen no theological work in Latin or German that is more sound and more in harmony with the gospel than this. . . Taste it and see how sweet the Lord is, [a quotation from the Psalms] after you have first tried and realised how bitter is whatever we are’. The enclosure was in fact the anonymous treatise A German
Theology, which Luther thought to be by Tauler and had just had printed in Wittenberg, and to which he had contributed an Introduction. It was his first printed text, offered for sale by a printer-publisher, to the
general public. These two German publications were significant coming from a man for whom Latin was the normal means of communication when it came to the written word.
In the University at Wittenberg by the autumn of 1516, Luther had become the unacknowledged leader of what amounted to a campaign to change syllabus. The students had been voting with their feet. Hardly any of them attended the lectures on Aristotle; they were to be found in the biggest numbers in the lecture hall of the Bible man. Dr Luther, however, was not as yet seen by his colleagues as any kind of unique phenomenon, but simply as part of the avant garde, one of the followers of Erasmus, Reuchlin and others who, throughout the European
universities, were demanding new syllabuses in line with the ‘new learning.’ Johann Lang, in a letter to Spalatin in March 1516 (shortly before he was appointed to Erfurt) referring to the large numbers of students who were dropping out of the courses on scholastic philosophy and theology, and explaining the rebirth of biblical studies (he used the Renaissance type word reviviscere) and the new Strong interest in antiquae scriptores, identified the phenomenon by pointing to the
international influence of Reuchlin and Erasmus, ‘men of great erudition and integrity’. That same month, Erasmus had published the epoch- making new version of the New Testament based on Greek manuscripts.
It was printed in Greek, but also in Latin, translated for the benefit of the majority who could not read Greek; many ecclesiastics considered it almost sacrilegious to read the Bible in any version except that of Jerome’s fifth-century Latin Vulgate.
On 7 September 1516, Luther gave the final lecture in his course on the Letter to the Romans. He had time now to devote to one of the most able of the students who had gathered around him, Bartholomaeus Bernhardi, a mature student, graduate of Erfurt, only four years younger than
Luther. He was about to proceed later in the month to the Degree of Sententiarius. For his thesis he had taken Fr Luther’s great central theme from Roman, on the uselessness of the powers and will of man without
grace. It was an exciting occasion for the young professor. He had been getting support for his idea, but by no means all the faculty had been won over and that included Archdeacon Karlstadt, DD, previously and now once again Dean of Theology. The latter was just back from an eighteen-month absence in Italy, collecting some humanist scalps, notably (notoriously easily won) Doctorates of Canon and Civil Law in Siena and some lovely Italian clothes. He allowed Fr Luther to preside at the Disputation, but made his disagreement with the thesis abundantly clear. Karlstadt had been the light of theology at Wittenberg from the earliest days and had had works published there as early as 1507 and 1508, marking out the University’s first claims to a reputation. He was shocked to find this young candidate for Sententiarius being encouraged to question the scholastic method. But, once convinced of something, Luther took little account of opposition however much it upset him, and his student was given full rein to present Luther’s ideas.
The date of this Disputation, 25 September, is also the date of the letter deposing Prior Michael Dressel. It was the end of the following month that Luther wrote to Johann Lang about his need of two secretaries. The small friary was beginning to fill up with those who wanted to come and hear Luther. And he himself already had too much to do. He was
thinking about the texts of his two books in German to be published in the coming seven months. He was reading with a raging excitement Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, with its new text of the New
Testament, while preparing for his next lecture course on the Letter to the Galatians, due to start at the end of October; and he was preparing sermons to be preached in St Mary’s.
In this latter sphere he was more and more worried by the Indulgences which the parishioners were forever running after, a passion which reached its height each year on 1 November, All Saints Day, when they repaired to the Elector’s Museum to see and venerate the relics, the bones, the holy wood and the rest, and gain an Indulgence, paying for the privilege as they went in. On 31 October, Fr Martin preached in Wittenberg on the need for that true repentance, which does not try to evade punishment by buying an Indulgence, but on the contrary welcomes it. He followed this in subsequent weeks with a series of sermons warning against the abuse of prayer to the saints, and held up many practices to ridicule — ‘I am astonished that St Bartholomew is not pictured in yellow trousers and spurs’. All this brought a query from Spalatin as to whether Martin was not falling into the Hussite heresy.
Martin replied truthfully that he was preaching only against abuse, not
the practices themselves; he encouraged people to pray to the saints not just for material things, but for spiritual goods. Not much more than normal stock-in-trade of university intellectuals, this exchange,
however, did signal the first note of alarm from a friend at the direction of Luther’s thought.
It was a matter of doctrine which had roused the query, what might today be called ideology. Spalatin, at court, was more conscious than Luther of lines beyond which it was advisable not to stray: Spalatin had not worried about Luther’s denunciations of corruption in the Church, occurring in his university lectures for more than a year now, so common were these throughout Europe. Though the Office of the
Church was sublime, it was filled with corrupt officials, Luther had said.
Pope and prelates were arraigned for enriching themselves on the income from Indulgences, and seducing Christians from the true worship of God; they branded people as heretics merely for opposing the purely temporal rights of the Church. That had been in the lecture hall, not the parish church. Not long after Spalatin’s enquiry, however, Luther returned to the attack in sermons in the parish church. On 24 February, at St Mary’s, he said: ‘People learn to fear and run away from the penalty of sins, but not the sins themselves. . .Indulgences are rightly so called, for to indulge means to permit . . . Not through Indulgences, but through gentleness and lowliness, says he [Jesus], is rest for your souls found. Oh the dangers of our times! Oh, you snoring priests! Oh, darkness deeper than Egyptian! How secure we are in the midst of the worst of all our evils!’ Many people had attacked Indulgences, and although some had been labelled heretics, many had not. Luther was thought of only as a young man fighting for desirable reforms.
The Elector remained remarkably unmoved by the explosions from the pulpit in the parish church, even though they were implicitly an attack on his income and his great museum of relics. At the moment, in Luther’s sermons, it was only a matter of emphasis; the principle of Indulgences was not attacked, only its obtrusion, and the greater
importance given to it than to the life of faith through the Bible and the sacraments. But the sermons must have given the Elector some pause.
Two years previously, he had had difficulty in raising the cash for
rebuilding the bridge over the Elbe at Torgau; it was done by means of a local Indulgence allowing people to be dispensed from fasting during Lent — they called it the ‘Butter Tax’. He had had to beg the Bishop to tell his priests to emphasise the fact that the faithful must buy the
Indulgence if they wished to avail themselves of the privilege of not