MARTIN LUTHLR Was painted in 1529 hy Lucas Cranach, one of the Reformation's leading artists. Since Cranach was both a skilled realist and a good friend of Luther's, his portraits are probably the most accurate extant.
In the 15th Century northern Europe was a vast and doubtful place. The shape and size of the earth were uncertain; the Western Hemisphere was a blank, and the continents of Africa and Asia were practically uncharted except for the recurrent warning, “Here be dragons." The ruler of the world was God, Creator of a man-centered universe. Nature was dark and mysterious. There were few dependable scientific laws; the arbitrary miracles of divine omnipotence obtained instead. The divine scheme of life was the redemption of sinful man to the heavenly kingdom that Adam and Eve had lost, and the material world was a trial ground.
Since the zenith of the Middle Ages two centuries before, Europe had fallen on hard times. England and France had warred for 100 years. English nobles had connived and fought at home over the crown. Peasants in France, England and Germany had risen against their masters demanding more freedom and better living conditions. Worst of all, trading ships home from the East had brought in diseased rats that had visited on Europe the Black Death, a disastrous pestilence that decimated the population of the Continent all the way from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. Plagues recurred again and again. Trade sagged; fields went fallow; men who did not succumb to the plague died from hunger. Enrollment at the universities dropped, and many of the social and intellectual advances the Middle Ages had achieved fell into desuetude.
Peoples tied to the soil and subject to the caprices of nature have ever been superstitious, prone to propitiate an unfathomable deity with charms and to exorcise malicious demons with curses, and so it was in the dusk of the late Middle Ages. The people of this era shrank before the mighty example of the God who had consigned His own Son to the appalling death on the cross; before the inscrutable will that had caused to be carried off hundreds of thousands of dead in an inexplicable pestilence; before an angry God who showed Himself in the rustling of dry leaves, in the howling of distant beasts in the deep forest at night, in the flight of birds across the moon.
Fear was everywhere. Hellfire rather than paradise was the incentive to righteous living. Human
Virtue was measured, and human training administered, by punishment. Ascetics flogged and fasted their way to heaven. Children were thrashed before they could reason. Servants and apprentices were whipped by their masters. Criminals were subjected to a whole catalogue of tortures. Murderers were boiled alive in oil cauldrons. Traitors were hanged by the neck, then drawn and quartered. Heretics were burned at the stake. Other offenders were strangled to the accompaniment of pious rejoicing.
Europe was still essentially agrarian, and rural life went on in tune with the cycle of the seasons. Grain was the staple food, and not until harvest time was there an abundance—and then only if fortune smiled and the yield was good. Even so, much of the produce had to be divided between storage to last until the next harvest, and seed to be sown for the next crop. Cattle and oxen, which in summer provided dairy products and labor, could not be kept alive on the scant supply of hay that remained in the winter, and people could not spare their own meager rations to feed the animals. Most of them therefore had to be slaughtered in the autumn for meat and hide; their flesh would be preserved by salting and smoking, and then rationed out during the long, lean winter ahead. The autumn slaughtering was a time of feasting and merrymaking before nature closed down and confined men to their cramped, shuttered dwellings, where they would mark the time until the new springtide, weaving cloth and making and mending their clothes and tools.
November 11 was the day of St. Martin, the patron of drinking and merriment, and his day was one for celebration not unlike the American giving or a thousand other festivals that from primitive times have marked the passing of autumn into winter.
On St. Martin's Eve in 1483, a second son was born to Hans and Margaret Luther in the mining town of Eisleben in Saxony. In honor of the saint who watched over the event they named the boy Martin.
If saints and medieval demons were watching over the child, this son of a Saxon peasant was himself to watch over a new era—indeed, he was to help to bring it into being.
The dark and haunted world into which Martin Luther was born was in fact on the point of turning. A new spirit was emerging out of the gloom of the late Middle Ages. Life was growing easier, and some people were beginning to rebel against the old superstitions and fears. Once this process had begun, it was inevitable that Europeans would one day start to re-examine the whole fabric of their spiritual beliefs. When that time came, a leader would be needed to crystallize the new thinking. Martin Luther was to be that man.
In 1483, when Martin was born, Europe was just awakening from the late-medieval torpor. The towns were beginning to stir again with commerce, and the mines were thrumming with industry. The printing press had been invented and paper manufactured, and literacy was ceasing to be the province of scholars. German universities were proliferating.
Across the Alps, in Italy, the Renaissance had already turned men's minds from the promise of deferred paradise to the pleasures of life on earth; beyond the Rhine, France and England had ceased their hostilities. Farther away, in Portugal, a wandering Genoese, Christopher Columbus, was trying to enlist the support of a skeptical court for a plan to reach the wealth of Asia by a westerly route across the ocean. In 1453 Constantinople—for over a thousand years a Christian stronghold in the East —had fallen to the Turks; one effect of this seeming catastrophe was that a wave of fleeing Greek scholars flooded southern Europe, seeking refuge in the Christian West and bringing with them a
Heritage of classical antiquity and a new intellectual outlook.
Europeans had encountered Greek learning during the 12th Century, but then it had come to them by translation from the Arabic. Now it was available in the original Greek, and scholars began to see the ancient writings in a new light. Before long they turned their attention to the font of Christianity—the New Testament—and when they did, they alighted on discrepancies between the original Greek texts and the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome, which had been the accepted version of the Bible since the Sixth Century A. D.
The revival of ancient learning, literature and art had brought about a new attitude toward human beings and their place in the world. Formerly human accomplishments had been seen as a reflection of divine will. Now they were seen as worthy of attention in their own right. This attitude was known as humanism. Humanism combined with
A STERN-FACED SCHOLAR iir///s his pupils in this woodcut made by artist Albrecht Durer for a religious tract, one of many that poured off early 16th Century printing presses. Teaching was often harsh and books were often crude, but both spread literacy.
The critical spirit of late-medieval Scholasticism— or the pursuit of truth by painstaking logic—to create a different conception of the relation of faith and reason, revelation and knowledge. Scholastic theology had been built on the belief that a knowledge of God was accessible by reason, and 13th Century men had trusted in the power of man's mind to understand the ways of God. Fifteenth Century men were not so sure.
The invention of the printing press was disseminating not only Christian thought, but secular and pagan thought as well, and it was reaching a population that was growing increasingly literate. Some of the wealthy at first scorned printing as vulgar—which sometimes it was—and feared a drop in the artistic quality and economic value of their manuscripts. But scholars had no such fears, and many of them joined with printers to produce magnificent copies of ancient classics. By 1500 Europe possessed an estimated nine million books, compared with fewer than 100,000 hand-wrought manuscripts some 50 years before. No other invention has so thoroughly—or so rapidly—revolutionized intellectual life and society. The more men read, the more they felt the stirrings of independence, the more was traffic in ideas accelerated—and, with it, criticism of society and of the Church.
Nowhere was criticism sharper or independence fiercer than in Martin Luther's birthplace, Germany, whose growing wealth was in commerce and industry, and whose vigor was in the confident burgher class.
The German throne—or that of the Holy Roman Empire, of which the German territories were still a part—was occupied during most of the second half of the 15th Century by the Habsburg Emperor Frederick III. He was a weak and indolent ruler whose reign saw little accomplished but the marriage of his son, the future Maximilian 1, to Mary of Burgundy, and the consequent acquisition
Of her holdings, which included the Netherlands, to the Habsburg lands.
The Holy Roman Empire was not a centralized state; it was a religious-political concept. It was Roman by heritage, Christian by faith and primarily German by language and location. In theory it was united in common interest, but in fact it was divided into more than 300 separate political units—secular and ecclesiastical principalities, and duchies, landgravates and free cities among them— and men were Saxons or Swabians or Nurembergers before they were Germans; they owed their allegiance to a prince or a city government rather than to the emperor. By Frederick's time the Holy Roman Emperor—a title dating back to the 10th Century—was only a figurehead; he had effective control of only a small part of his titular dominions, really only the estates of his family and their vassals. He had only a symbolic role and no real rule, because no German emperor had succeeded in cementing a centralized state as the French and English monarchies had done long since. Princes and towns restricted the Emperor's power; he could collect no taxes sufficient to his needs, and he could not maintain an army.
The real powers of the Empire were the seven Electors—princes and archbishops who ruled important territories and who, according to Germanic custom, elected the Emperor. They acknowledged the Crown in elaborate feudal homage but frustrated the exercise of imperial authority.
Hans Luther was a subject of the Elector of Saxony, which was one of the larger principalities of the Holy Roman Empire and the site of the rich iron - and copper-laden woodlands of central Germany. Hans was a free peasant and an opinionated, hot-tempered man who according to one legend had killed a man in a petty quarrel. Whatever the truth of the legend, he had left his father's farm because as an older son he had no inheritance. (The opposite of the rule of primogeniture obtained in the region where he lived; the youngest son, not the eldest, was heir to his father's property.) He moved to Eisleben, where he worked as a copper miner. He moved again to Mansfeld, began to save his wages, borrowed some capital and leased a small smelting furnace. After a time he employed others to work for him, and eventually he acquired half a dozen mining shafts and two foundries. Less than a decade after Martin's birth he was elected a municipal councilor in Mansfeld.
The career of Hans Luther, a peasant who might have expected to remain on the soil, testifies to the social flux that prevailed in 15th Century Europe. The bonds of feudalism, which formerly had kept every man in the station to which he was born, had loosed their hold. Aristocrats were impoverished, peasants were uprooted, and a new class of men were seeking their livelihood in trade and manufacture instead of on the land. In earlier days trade had been purely an exchange of commodities; lending for interest counted as usury, and usury was forbidden. Peddlers, having no feudal roots and selling wares they had not produced, were scorned as vagrants.
Now the scions of that lowly calling had metamorphosed into proud merchants; they handled goods for profit and put money out to breed; they created new enterprises, more goods and greater profits—which among other things could buy liber-
THE REFORMERS PARENTS, the dour Hans and Margaret Luther, often had heated arguments with their strong-willed son over his choice of career. On a visit to Wittenberg in 1527 they sat for these portraits by Cranach.
Ties, privileges and social position. A shrewd and self-assertive man like Hans Luther could rise from peasant to entrepreneur—and such a man almost always nurses even greater ambitions for his offspring than for himself. Hans Luther envisioned the profession of law for his son Martin.
The principles of Imperial Roman law, which had been revived in Italy in the 12th Century and applied to the French monarchy in the 13th, were now seeping into the German principalities. The development of a code of law was helping to create a class of professional administrators who were neither lords nor clergymen, but secular executives who became ever more indispensable, reputable and comfortable. If commerce was the route to riches, the law was the path to the courts of the great.
At his father's bidding, Martin Luther embarked on legal studies, but he discontinued them after a few months and retreated to a monastery. His father was bitterly disappointed and angry, but he remonstrated to no avail.
Martin Luther was a complicated man. On the one hand he was lively, cheerful, fond of song and companionship, and on the other hand stubborn, brooding, fearful of the wrath of God, given to tormenting introspection and self-inflicted punishment, all in pursuit of spiritual grace. If the social flux determined his place in the world, the medieval ethos of the God of wrathful judgment had a hold on his character. Entering a religious order must have seemed to him the obvious way to acquire the peace of mind he so desperately sought.
Luther entered the Augustinian cloister at Erfurt in 1505, when he was not yet 22 years old. The chapter he joined was one of the most diligent of monastic groups. Monasteries had been founded with austere regimens designed to help their members to salvation, and medieval monks had done much to keep the culture of ancient Rome from disappearing under the barbarian onslaught, to train the youth of Christian Europe through long centuries otherwise dark and unenlightened, to fell forests and reclaim fields, to succor the poor and tend the sick. In Luther's time the monks were under attack for loose living and abuse of wealth and privileges. Some monasteries had lately been reformed, and it may be said that at Erfurt Luther experienced 16th Century monasticism at its most rigorous.
He undertook to fulfill his vocation with the diligence and zeal that marked everything he ever did. He practiced several forms of asceticism, fasting to excess and praying long hours into the night. He confessed his sins regularly and in detail, exhausting himself and confounding his confessors. "If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery," he later said, "1 would have made it. All my brothers in the monastery will testify that had 1 gone on with it I would have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other works." Still he did not attain the inner peace for which he yearned.
If his superiors found his excesses exasperating, they were not blind to his intelligence; and eventually they sent him to study and lecture at the new University of Wittenberg.
Earlier in the 15th Century, Wittenberg had been only a shabby town. But one effect of the lack of unity among the German territories was the stimulation of competition. The Elector Frederick the Wise chose Wittenberg as the seat of his domains.
Which he wished to make the cultural center of Germany. He refurbished the town with public buildings, a castle and a new church. He amassed over the period of his lifetime a collection of more than 17,000 relics—among them some straw that was purported to be from Christ's manger, a vial of Mary's milk, and 204 fragments of the children slaughtered by Herod at the birth of Christ. He put them on display in the Castle Church, where simply for the viewing of them the faithful could gain indulgences—a medieval invention that meant a bestowal of grace intended to commute the punishment said by the Church to be due for the commission of sins. Indulgences were then, and would later be in a different way, the focus of much of Luther's thought.
Frederick's collection of relics was more than a source of pride and a promise of heavenly credit; it was a source of revenue for his church and for the principality. Pilgrims came from near and far to share in their blessings, and then as now, the tourist trade was lucrative.
Nevertheless, Frederick was not solely mercenary, nor solely simple and devout; he was ambitious for the cultural growth of his electorate, too, and to this end he founded the University of Wittenberg.
The university was only six years old when Luther arrived in the winter of 1508. It was small—it had no more than 300 students—but like many institutions that are new and small, it was agres-sive and open to novelty.
Luther taught moral philosophy and Christian theology at Wittenberg. By all signs he seemed marked for a brilliant university career; superiors and students alike thought well of him, and his mental powers ripened. But still he fretted about his soul, and still he could not come to terms with his God. His superiors were sympathetic and tried to help, but they were also worn down by his persistent anguish. His confessor told him: "God is not angry with you; it is you who are angry with God."
After two years of study and lecturing, Luther was sent to accompany a senior friar to Rome on a diplomatic mission for the Augustinian order. The Augustinians were required to travel by twos. Luther was young and inexperienced, but he had already shown himself a zealous and articulate spokesman. Probably this was the reason he was chosen, despite his lack of seniority, to accompany the man in charge of the mission. Many years later he was to say he would not have missed the trip, "for then I might have been afraid of being unjust to the Pope."
The two friars left Wittenberg about the middle of November 1510, around the time of Martin's 27th birthday. The roads were already dissolving in winter mud, and in the mornings they were encrusted with ice. Progress was slow and tedious. It might also be dangerous, for vagabonds menaced the roads and outlaws lurked in the great forests that covered so much of the countryside. Many impoverished knights had turned highwaymen, and so had unemployed soldiers, who chafed for adventure as well as livelihood. Princes and city leagues endeavored to keep order along the public roads, and some succeeded, but bandits and brigands still threatened in places.
Travel required more courage and stamina than money, at least for clergymen. The religious houses along the way opened their doors to fellow monks and provided them with free hospitality, and so did many a humble homestead. But if the traveler was overtaken by nightfall or storm, prayer was his only protection against wolves and bears and the demons that were known to infest the out-of-doors after dark.
The south German cities through which Martin and his companion passed were bustling with trade, banking and manufacturing, and Luther's thoughts
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, established in 962 in an attempt to build a Christian unity in Europe, had by the beginning of the Reformation fallen into the political patterns shown here—an unholy muddle of more than 300 Church - and family-controlled units and free cities, often at odds with each other and obedient to the emperor when convenient.
On his journey as he recalled them later in life are an interesting revelation of the times, as they are of the man himself.
His observations were more practical than esthetic, but he was not blind to the sights. In Nuremberg he was fascinated by an invention that was appearing in towns all over Europe: a clock that struck the hours. In Ulm he was awed by the vastness of the cathedral—after the one in Cologne, it is the largest Gothic church in Germany, and except for its tower, which was added to in later years, it looks today much as it did when Luther saw it. In Switzerland he noted the ruggedness of the Alpine country. The Swiss people seemed to him hardy and sociable, but the shortage of arable land in the Alps caused him concern. It would not cross the mind of the 16th Century traveler, with his limited historical information and perspective, that the barren rocky cliffs he shook his head over secured the singular political independence that the Swiss Confederation had achieved—an independence that was to be a most significant factor in the forthcoming religious upheaval.
Even with winter approaching, and with the passes and desolate tracks of mountain land to be negotiated, the traffic across the Alps was lively. For pilgrims, envoys, adventurers, artists and men of learning, all roads still led to Rome.
When he came in sight of the city Luther prostrated himself and uttered a half-prayer, "Hail Holy Rome!" Here was the capital of Christendom, the home of the Vicar of Christ, the sacred place that had known Saints Peter and Paul and uncounted martyrs of early Christianity. Luther had come some 800 miles on foot, and he was overcome with wonder.
Here, as in Germany and Switzerland, his observations were more practical than esthetic, but now they were mixed with the prayers of the awe-struck pilgrim. He took no notice of the treasures that would enthrall Goethe centuries later, but he was much struck by the size of the Italian figs and grapes; and when he saw olive trees bearing abundant fruit in the rocky ground he recalled the words of the 81st Psalm, "With honey out of the rock would I satisfy thee." The morals and the irreverence of the Italians caused him distress, but he was nevertheless able to like their kindness, their vivacity and—oddly enough—their tailors. Inherently charitable, he admired their hospitals, where patients were given white nightgowns and laundered sheets, and served their food on clean plates; and as a latent evangelist who would have much to say about the education of the young, he approved their foundling homes, where orphaned children were well fed, neatly uniformed and taught lessons.
The city as a whole in Luther's time was essentially medieval, with crooked and narrow streets, churches set in squares, walled fortifications and towers everywhere; but the ruins of the ancient past and the upsurging of the Renaissance were visible as well.
In the old quarter, the early Christian basilicas of San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Croce and Santa Maria Maggiore stood among vineyards and fields. Cows grazed in the old Roman Forum, and goats gamboled on the Capitoline Hill. And everywhere there was rubble. Ruined Roman arches were interspersed with little medieval houses, some of them in open fields, others clustered together on crowded streets. Luther took no delectation in the ruins as did the humanists; he was insensitive to the grandeur of pagan antiquity.
Out of the rubble the Renaissance was rising. The new St. Peter's was under construction; the four great pillars were already standing in anticipation of the dome. Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Raphael was at work on the Stanza della Signatura frescoes.
But Luther was not there to see Renaissance art; he was there on business for the monastery and as a pilgrim. There were monuments to saints and martyrs, dozens of churches and several shrines, for the visiting of which he might obtain a store of indulgences. When he was not engaged with the Roman Curia, he set out to see the sights, and like any modern tourist, he carried a guidebook with him. In his time making the pilgrim's rounds was an exhausting undertaking, as it was the fashion then to visit all the seven major churches of Rome in one day. The pilgrim fasted, that he might receive the Eucharist at the end of the circuit. The streets were largely in disrepair—many were not even paved—and it rained almost every day of the month that Luther was there.
Except for all the sacred shrines and churches, Christian Rome gave him misgivings, as it did many another pilgrim from the north. He was offended by the ostentatiousness of the cardinals' palaces and scandalized by the stories he heard of the popes, which were told by the Romans with irreverent amusement. Pope Alexander VI was said to have had bastard children; the current Pope, Julius II—called the papa terribile by his contemporaries—had more concern for the affairs of state than he did for those of the spirit. He manipulated treaties and men with abandon. He led his armies personally, astride a great war horse, hurling threats of excommunication at his enemies as he charged.
Julius II was the Renaissance Pope par excellence —one of a long line of frankly political, frankly Italian-oriented popes who disported themselves like secular princes. He patronized the arts, oversaw building construction and coined money. He is remembered to history as the sponsor of St. Peter's Basilica, the Michelangelo statue of Moses, and other works of art, but his chief concern was to regain for the Church the papal lands and power that had been lost before his pontificate. At this he
Monlc ill 1510. Still a devout Catholic, he received Communion here but was disturbed by the casual cynicism of the Holy City.
Was successful. He inherited the Church properties in a state of dissolution; he subdued the factions that were fighting for them, and bequeathed to the pope who succeeded him a consolidated territory of considerable size. In January 1511, when Luther was there, Julius was away, laying siege to the fortress of Mirandola in northern Italy.
The native Romans were as profane as the Pope, and their blase nonchalance was dismaying. They were unmoved by the sacred meaning of their holy city; they poked fun at the solemn piety of the northern Europeans; they joked about the rites of the Church.
If piety did not count for much in Rome, money counted for everything. Prostitutes, charlatans and beggars roamed the streets. Once when Luther was saying Mass he was poked in the ribs by a hurrying Italian priest who muttered to him, "Passa, passa— Get on, get on." Southern languor and Latin manners did not prevent the Italian priest from saying seven Masses in the time it took Luther to say one; every Mass yielded a payment of money.
In all, Rome was part tourist attraction, part supranational enclave in the midst of Italy, and only part holy city. Luther was disappointed, but not yet disenchanted; he still believed in the authority of the Church, and the sins of Rome struck him fully only in retrospect, after the Reformation had exploded in Europe. Individuals might be corrupt, but he did not dream of imputing evil to the Church itself. For the moment he was satisfied. He had come as a pilgrim and had added to his store of grace, and the excursion gave some respite to his troubled soul. At the end of a month, their business done, he and his fellow friar turned north for Germany and the regimen of the monastery.
The monks at Wittenberg generally spent their few leisure hours in the garden beside the monastery. One day a few months after Luther's return his vicar general, John von Staupitz, called Luther to him where he sat under a pear tree in the garden and spoke to him about his future. "Herr Magister," he said, "you must become a doctor and a preacher; then you will have something to do." Luther countered with 15 reasons why he should not. He did not want the degree; it would mean a lifetime commitment to teaching and preaching, and Luther preferred—or so he seems to have thought at the time —to seek his salvation through the isolated prayer and meditation of monastic life. Staupitz reproached him for his reluctance, but Luther replied, "Herr Staupitz, you will bring me to my death. 1 will never endure it for three months."
"Don't you know that Our Lord God has many great matters to attend to?" Staupitz asked. "For these He needs clever people to advise Him. If you should die, you will be received into His council in heaven, for He, too, has need of some doctors."
The vicar general jested, but he clearly was in earnest. Luther therefore entered the University of Wittenberg once more, this time to prepare for the doctorate and to lecture on the Bible.
He still had no thought of causing the upheaval that would shake the Church and the Christian world; but even from the beginning his teaching was out of the ordinary. One of the older professors at the University exclaimed: "This monk will confuse all the doctors. He will start a new religion and reform the whole Roman Church, for he bases his theology on the writings of the Prophets and the Apostles. He stands on the words of Christ, which no philosophy or sophistry can upset or oppose, be it that of the Scotists, the Albertists [or] the Thomists."
A year later, in the Elector Frederick's Castle Church in Wittenberg, the degree was conferred upon him. He was licensed to "defend the evangelical truth according to his strength." He swore obedience to the dean and masters of the theological faculty and took an oath "not to teach vain and foreign doctrines which are condemned by the Church and hurt pious ears." The presiding professor, Bodenstein von Carlstadt, placed a woolen beret on Luther's head and a silver doctor's ring on his finger. Luther then engaged in the customary disputation. When it was over his fellow students carried him on their shoulders through the streets of Wittenberg, and the church bells tolled in celebration with them.
The year was 1512. A great deal had happened in the 29 years since Luther's birth. Columbus had found support for his scheme in Spain and had discovered the New World, and all nations were now vying with one another in foreign trade and conquest. The material world was becoming more and more definite and spiritual ideals more confused, as the printing press spread information and humanist studies inspired ideas of doctrinal difference. The contemporary era was coming to seem in peril, and early Christianity seemed in the distance a paradise of simplicity and truth from which modern man had strayed. The nations were becoming ever more conscious of their nationalities, and the faithful were smarting over the shortcomings of society and of the Church.
Something of Luther's uneasiness was everywhere. As he began at Wittenberg to prepare his lectures on the Bible in a quiet tower study—a sanctuary where he would find his calling and work for the rest of his life—the world was priming for an explosion. The ideas he was to formulate, conceived in the most fervent piety, would touch it off.
LUSTY VILLAGERS of a Flemish town while away a free afternoon outside a tavern, drinking, squabbling and courting to the squalling of a bagpipe.
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