Luther: A Life by John M. Todd
Chapter 5: The Reverend Don, 1512-16
There was unrest in the air at Wittenberg. It had not led to anything like the open revolt at Erfurt; the new university, financially underwritten by the Elector, brought a definite increase in prosperity to almost everyone in the town. But the Wittenbergers shared in the same sense of unease to be found everywhere. The Myth by which they lived was only half understood, only a quarter truly known. Even those who could read had not read more than a small part of the full story as it was found in the New Testament. Martin Luther himself had only handled a Bible for the first time when he entered the Friary. The castle church at Wittenberg had sixty-four priests attached to it, to celebrate the daily Requiem Masses, intended to ensure the everlasting salvation of those who had died, funded by the dead or their relatives. They stood as a kind of
protective barrier between people and the power centres of society. Even in their own parish church, with sermons in German, for many people religion had the sense of the frightening ‘unknown’ of the old pagan myths. At Mass there was communion, but they only went to
communion a few times a year, some only at Easter; and then they took only the consecrated bread.
In the past fifty years as many as eighteen separate editions of German translations of the complete Bible had been circulating, neither
forbidden nor approved by Church authority, in some cases printed without a printer’s name for fear of ecclesiastical reprisals. They were expensive and were not seen often, outside of universities and the houses of priests and wealthy laymen. But excerpts were common enough, the Seven Penitential Psalms, or the story of Tobias, St John’s Gospel, the Book of Revelation. Travelling merchants often brought printed matter with them for sale, usually decorated with woodcuts.
Sometimes they were chronicles, histories of the world, poems,
romances, but the majority were religious, booklets about Saints, or on the Art of Dying, instructing one how not to despair when faced by the tally of a lifetime’s sinning; one should remember the repentant sinners in the Bible. Despair was the one unforgivable final sin which might damn a person.
In church the gospel passages gave hope and reassurance: ‘Come to me all you who are burdened and I will give you rest. . .My yoke is light’; ‘I was thirsty and you gave me drink. . .In so far as you did this to one of the least of these my brothers you did it to me . . . Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world.’ But to be sure of being in this
category, and not among those who heard ‘Depart from me, with your curse upon you . . .’, one had to be a well-paid-up member of the Elect;
and there were many ways of improving one’s position. Indulgences was one way, Requiem Masses another. And yet somehow these did not tie in quite harmoniously with the gospel at all points: ‘He who would save his life, must lose it’ — the glorious insouciance of the gospel:
‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you. . .’
Meanwhile, life went on, woven through with the threads of all the delights of life, the glory of love and its sexual expression, the celebration of food and drink, song and dance, sometimes to make a divine harmony of family life, blessed by a mutual charity, welcoming alike suffering and happiness on the journey to heaven. But too often the anomalies came to the fore. And the artists seemed to delight in them — terrible pictures of the devil stoking his fires with the bodies of the damned, tempted for all eternity and never satisfied by the things on which they had made themselves happy, and unhappy, in life; likewise the delineation of the crucifixion of the man-God, Jesus looking out from a realistic scene of terrible torture. The resurrection seemed to play a secondary part, or had only the function of indicating the terrors of the Last Judgement. But then again the sky would clear and they would be dancing in the streets on Easter Day, or on the feast of the Birthday of St John the Baptist, midsummer’s day. It was the usual complex human picture. But the feeling was of some instability, some underground disturbance. There was spare capacity in terms of time, energy, ability in many people’s lives. The printing presses were beginning to provide opportunities for using it.
Luther was no more than dimly and subjectively aware of these giant stirs. He had never known anything else but a society both stable and yet somehow dissatisfied, Information from afar about the old Emperor Maximilian, ‘the last of the knights’ as he was sometimes called; about the anti-clericalism which stretched right across Europe, and of the attempts in London by the young King Henry VIII to keep it under control; about the pseudo-Council of Pisa, called by King Louis XII of France, denounced by the warlike Pope Julius II, was of little
significance to him. Even the world of international biblical scholarship only began to impinge forcefully on his world about 1514. He had more than enough to cope with in Wittenberg. And the pressure kept building up through the years for himself to understand, to grasp more fully, to embrace more totally that which lay at the centre of all things, Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, who could be found again, multiform through His words, in the sacraments of the church, and deep in one’s own heart — and yet somehow just there was where He disappeared, chased away by the fear of damnation, the knowledge of one’s utter failure. Depression, indeed utter despair would set in, the terrible
Anfechtung, which brought him alone in his cell into absolute negation.
In the end, that which he would work out in his own inner citadel was to become the heart of his lectures and his sermons, and that which would bring students and populace flocking to hear him. >From his suddenly grateful and relaxed heart would pour forth a fierce stream of witness, advice, theology, powered by the sheer intellectual validity of the
witness, and finally by its religious authenticity and coherence. This was the achievement of the six years between 1512 and 1518. They were also the years of a general consolidation of his life of further promotion, and then of the beginning of fame.
In the winter of 1512, The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther, twenty-nine years old, Sub-Prior of the Friary at Wittenberg, Professor of Bible in the University, had to start preparation for his professorial lectures which would begin the following year. He had also to start preaching to his brethren. Something like a settled existence was at last beginning.
After a year at Wittenberg, instead of being moved elsewhere, as he had been, roughly at the end of each year for the last four years, Luther had been allowed to stay. The months passed swiftly. He was a success as sub-prior, and had begun lecturing in the University at 6a.m., twice a week on the Psalms. Early in 1515, his lecture course on The Psalms was at last drawing to a close, and another was scheduled to follow it.
And now came substantial promotion within his Order. He was
appointed Vicar Provincial, with responsibilities for the administrative
and spiritual oversight of eleven communities across Saxony and Thuringia, including his own mother house at Erfurt. He had to make regular visits of inspection, and intervene whenever there was trouble. It was a vote of confidence from his brethren, confidence both in his
practical judgement and in his high spiritual standards. It was a new burden of considerable substance.
The appointment had been made at a meeting of the Augustinians at Gotha which opened on 29 April 1515. Fr Luther preached at the
gathering and gave his brethren a forceful harangue about that prime sin of the cloister, backbiting and slander. In a stream of crapulous
analogies, breaking into German, he let the Fathers have it in no
uncertain terms, which they apparently approved. ‘The detractor, like a dog, digs up and eats a man’s rotting and wormy corpse . . . He lives in manure . . . sets about plastering anyone who is clean. . .indeed uses the stuff for food.’ The humanist Canon Mudt, who lived at Gotha, enquired from Johann Lang about the identity of this ‘sharp preacher’, and was delighted with the text Lang sent to him. Martin was thoroughly in his stride now as far as preaching went, because in the previous year he had begun to preach to the populace at the parish church of St Mary in Wittenberg, three or four minutes’ walk from the Cloister. At first he had been asked to stand in when the regular preacher was ill; he was so much liked that the City Council invited him to be the regular assistant.
In the parish church, as in the University lecture halls and the Friary study rooms, the ascetic face, the evident sincerity, the sometimes almost frightening intensity of his quiet though easily audible voice, his glinting eyes, and his ability to speak to the condition of those he was addressing, won people to him. In the church he spoke in German, and enjoyed the Saxon idiom, often quoting from an Aesop fable, or from some well-known saying; always there was the quality of speaking to people’s own needs, seeing into their deepest felt concerns. In an early sermon he put the high ideals before them from a text of the New Testament, quoting the words of Jesus: ‘Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.’ Luther commented: ‘It is possible that one may think to himself: Would it be sufficient if I wish the other person well in my heart, especially if I have been injured and offended by him?’ and he goes on with other excuses which people make to themselves for not going all the way in charity and answers them
forthrightly, telling them the gospel means what it says. On the matter of property, he said: ‘All the goods we have are from God and they are not given to us to retain and abuse, but rather to dispense.’ He drew a
picture from daily life: When a pig is slaughtered or taken hold of and other pigs see this, we see that the other pigs set up a clamour and grunting as if in compassion. Chickens and geese and all wild animals do the same thing . . .Only man, who after all is rational, does not spring to the aid of his suffering neighbour in time of need and has no pity on him.’
These sermons were a popularisation of Latin sermons he gave to the brethren in the cloister chapel and, more distantly, of the Latin lecture commentaries and expositions he gave in the University halls — though there too he would occasionally add some German phrase or word to give a particular emphasis or shade of meaning. Luther was bilingual, as many were. The use of German was no concession or mere trimming; it was a wish to use the more expressive and experienced vocabulary of the native language. He tended to turn to it when in need of vituperative words: pig-theologians or sow-theologians was a favourite description of conventional teachers who just repeated the same old lectures, snoring and grunting.
These years were a time of the deepening of friendships which remained for life. When he came back to Wittenberg Fr Martin already had a normal range of acquaintances and friends. But during these six years in Wittenberg he began to put down roots and to get specially close to colleagues and friends in the cloister and the town. Most notable was Georg Spalt an old student acquaintance from the Erfurt days. Spalatin, as he was always called had been ordained priest, an ordinary massing priest not a religious; he became University Librarian and Counsellor to the Elector in the year that Luther gained his doctorate. Originally he had been appointed to educate the Elector’s son, Prince John Frederick, and resided at court at Torgau, about twenty miles up the river. After the appointment as University Librarian, with a good budget from the
Elector, he was often at Wittenberg, working with the assistance from Manutius in Gotha who put him in touch with the great Aldus in Venice, to build up the library. He became Martin’s most frequent
correspondent, most reliable friend, and the crucial go-between with the Elector. Already by 1513, Spalatin was finding Luther the one really important man in the University and had begun to consult him about the University on Frederick’s behalf. In that year Spalatin wrote that Dr Martin was ‘an excellent man and scholar, whose judgement I value very highly’ and even said, the following year, that he would like to
‘become wholly his’. The confidence was reciprocated. Even when Spalatin was in Wittenberg at the castle, Luther could not always wait to
see him but would dispatch a messenger up the road with a letter. The earliest chance survival of a letter from Luther in his own handwriting was one to Spalatin in 1514, and the tone of the letter shows that Fr Martin was enjoying his life. It was about a matter of great interest and concern to all the intelligentsia in the Church in Germany during the previous year or two, the Reuchlin Affair.
Reuchlin, the great Hebrew scholar (Luther had studied his Grammar for some years) had recently led a campaign against the burning of valuable Hebrew manuscripts and against a regular anti-semitic programme of the Dominican friars at Cologne, in the name of what they saw to be doctrinal orthodoxy. The affair was destined to produce a famous book in 1515, the Book of Obscure Man, a satire representing the Cologne theologians as dry as dust academics, ‘scholastics’, busied about the most ludicrous subjects and discussing their own foolish and decadent lives. In 1514 the matter was still in its early stages. Luther’s letter conveys the atmosphere, half chatty, half serious in this matter of deep concern to University men. It is addressed: ‘To the most learned and highly esteemed priest in Christ, Georg Spalatin, my dearest friend.
Greetings . . .’ The usual ‘Jesus’ does not appear at the head of the letter
— Luther sometimes omitted it in these relatively casual personal missives. Luther indulges in some classical punning about the asininity of a Cologne priest, Ortwin who had written a poem against Reuchlin:
‘In corresponding with you, I could laugh at many details if it were not that one should rather weep over than laugh at such great depravity.’ But he found comfort in the fact that the case had gone to Rome, where justice was sure to be done. ‘Since Rome has the most learned people among the cardinals, Reuchlin’s case will at least be considered more favourably than those jealous people of Cologne — those beginners in grammar! — would ever allow.’ Fr Luther was still the provincial cleric with little idea of the human factors that could dominate procedures of the most elevated, as well as of the most humble bodies.
Two years later there was a rushed note sent up the street to the library by hand in great haste:
To my friend George Spalatin, servant of God. Jesus.
Greetings. I seek a service, dearest Spalatin. . . Please loan me a copy of St Jerome’s letters for an hour, or at least (indeed I would like this even better) copy for me as quickly as you can what the saint has written about St Bartholomew the Apostle in the little book On Famous
People. I need it before noon, as I shall then be preaching to the people . . . Farewell, excellent Brother. From our Little monastery. Friar Martin Luther Augustinian.
That was August 1516 . Three weeks later a similar missive was sent, A travelling book merchant had enquired through Spalatin whether he could have something to sell from Luther’s pen: ‘To the most learned George Spalatin, a priest of Christ, whom I venerate in the Lord. Jesus.
Greetings. When I finally returned yesterday late in the day I found your letter, best Spalatin. Please answer Martin Mercator in my behalf that he cannot expect to have my lecture notes on The Psalms.’ Luther explains that the Liberal Arts Faculty wanted the lectures to be printed by ‘our printer’, the University Press, and that in any case Luther will have to supervise it. This was a reference to printer Johan Grunenberg who had been in Wittenberg for some years now. ‘This would please me too — if they must be published at all — primarily because they would then be printed in a rough type face. I am not impressed with publications printed in elegant type by famous printers. Usually they are trifles, worthy only of the eraser. Farewell. Written in haste from the
monastery, at noon, the day after the Nativity, 1516. Friar Martin Luder, Augustinian.’
The ‘Nativity’ was the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 8 September. For a few years Fr Martin used the form ‘Luder’
occasionally, perhaps some kind of identity sign for him, tying him into his Saxon roots. The reference to his preference for the local printer seems to be in the same vein. He was continuing to emphasise that he was no humanist, no mere follower of bonae litterae. While valuing highly the scholarship of humanists, he detested the snobbish aesthetic posturing of some of them. However, within a year or two he would be complaining about the inefficiency, the sheer inaccuracy of Grunenberg, and resorting to various more modern printers.
The note of haste in the last two letters is something which began with Luther’s appointment as District Vicar and virtually never again
disappeared. From then on, he always had more to do than he could manage. The following month he wrote to his old friend Fr Johann Lang, who had recently been elected Prior of the Friary at Erfurt. The letter is long but extracts suggest, together with those from the two letters to Spalatin, something of the atmosphere of Luther’s life as Vicar and Professor of Bible. He was writing to his old friend of the Erfurt days, with whom he had formed the pro-Staupitz minority in 1511. Now