Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (10 page)

These teaching duties had to be balanced with his responsibilities to the Augustinian monastery, where he was now subprior, and to the local town church. Luther was already preaching regularly to his monastic brethren when in 1514 he was asked also to take on similar duties in the parish church.
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This was the beginning of a pastoral responsibility to the people of Wittenberg that would continue to his last years. What may have at first seemed like one commitment too many would come to play a critical role in shaping Luther’s vocation. The cerebral and to this point rather introspective scholar monk was required to wrestle with the problem of how his new spiritual insights could be made relevant to a diverse congregation of his fellow citizens—and how he could hold their attention. Luther gradually grew into this role. The parish church unlocked in him a talent for the homely simile that sweetened the forthright and powerful message of repentance. This preaching experience was also something on which he would draw when, in the years after 1517, he first tried his hand at writing in the vernacular.

The growing self-confidence and intellectual authority can be seen in the course of the two great series of academic lectures of 1513 to 1516. Luther began his lectures on the Psalms in 1513 with frank reflections on his own spiritual struggles. This allowed him to develop his important insight that the critical obstacle to understanding Scripture was man’s inner resistance to God’s will. By the time of the lectures on Romans Luther was ranging far more widely, offering sharp criticism of those princes of the church who abused their trust with an extravagant and godless lifestyle.
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In all this frantic activity Luther did not neglect the business of the university. The intense professor was by this time developing a following both in his order and in the academic community. In 1514 Georg Spalatin wrote to ask Luther’s opinion of the Reuchlin affair, the hot-button topic that divided modernizers and conservatives. Johann Reuchlin had been the one prominent scholar to object to the wholesale confiscation and
destruction of Jewish books, deemed by its advocates necessary to the Jews’ eventual conversion to Christianity. This had made Reuchlin himself the subject of a campaign of public denigration, but humanists, many of whom would later play a prominent role in Luther’s affairs, rallied to Reuchlin’s cause.
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In this case Luther sided decisively with the friends of innovation, as he did in 1515 when his friend Johann Lang made a bold attack on Occam, Duns Scotus, and the Scholastics.
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Thus were the fault lines drawn between the old learning, associated with Scholasticism and the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, and the new. In 1516 Luther was one of the first eager readers of the Greek New Testament of Desiderius Erasmus; for all his later reservations about Erasmus he immediately recognized this as a milestone of biblical scholarship. Not all of Luther’s Wittenberg colleagues were as comfortable with the direction of travel. The conflicting visions of scholarship came to a head when one of Luther’s pupils, Bartholomäus Bernardi von Feldkirchen, defended a set of dissertation theses that strongly affirmed the supremacy of Augustine over Thomism. The ripples of this controversy reached as far as Erfurt, and Luther was forced to take up his pen to mollify both his former Erfurt brethren and Wittenberg colleagues such as Andreas von Karlstadt, who viewed with alarm these increasingly radical curricular developments in the Wittenberg Theology Faculty. Yet after a trip to Leipzig to secure a scholarly edition of Augustine with which to refute Luther, Karlstadt declared himself converted to Luther’s point of view. Henceforth he would be Luther’s most fervent supporter. By May 1517 Luther could report triumphantly to his friend Lang that the tide had turned:

Our theology and St. Augustine are continuing to prosper and reign in our university through the hand of God. Aristotle is declining daily and is inclining toward a fall which will end him forever.
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By this point Luther had committed himself to a full frontal assault on Scholasticism, in the context of a fundamental renovation of the
university curriculum. For the next eighteen months this would be Luther’s first preoccupation, in his mind of much more fundamental importance than the secondary issue of indulgences, until events proved otherwise. Over the summer Luther penned the manifesto of this new reform movement: ninety-nine theses against Scholastic theology to be debated at the degree ceremony of one Franz Günther of Nordhausen on September 4, 1517. These theses bear all the hallmarks of the later, more famous theses on indulgences—forthright, probing, and provocative.
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For many years the first published version of these theses was thought to be lost, until in 1983 a copy was rather sensationally discovered interleaved among the pages of a quite different book in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.
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Survival rates for early printed broadsheets are notoriously low, and many of the examples that do survive have come down to us as mere fragments, many recovered from the bindings of other books, where they were used as printer’s waste. In cases like these, after the necessary sheets had been distributed, any surplus stock was sold by the printer to bookbinders, who used the wastepaper as packing between the pigskin used for the outer cover and the inner board of the binding. Most of the fragments unearthed during restoration work of this sort are relatively unremarkable;
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to find an unknown work of Luther was a discovery of a wholly different order, particularly a work so critical to the reconstruction of the operation of the Wittenberg press at the beginning of the Reformation. So we know from this discovery that the original publication of the theses against Scholastic theology was a single-sheet broadside, no doubt intended for exhibition on the church door and for distribution to those attending. It is printed in the no-nonsense typefaces of Johann Rhau-Grunenberg. To assist the reader, or those attending the disputation, Rhau-Grunenberg divided the theses into four groups of twenty-five. Although they appear to make up four full groups, one hundred in total, in the first group the numbering jumps from seventeen to nineteen, reducing the total to ninety-nine. This sort of error was also quite common, as we will see when we discuss the printed editions of the
theses on indulgences. But we now know categorically from this example that Rhau-Grunenberg was printing theses in broadsheet form, and was doing so for Luther only eight weeks before the theses on indulgences were published.
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This, as we will see, is a discovery of some importance for the debate that has raged on the posting of Luther’s more notorious theses on indulgences.

The irony is that when Luther penned the theses on Scholastic theology he probably regarded them as a far more daring and potentially controversial statement than the later theses on indulgences. Certainly Luther did everything in his power to bring these earlier theses to wider public attention. Copies were dispatched to Johann Lang and to the Erfurt Augustinians. On September 11, Luther dispatched a copy to Christoph Scheurl in Nuremberg.
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Despite these efforts, the hoped-for public debate never took off. None of Luther’s anticipated disputation partners took the bait. Despite, as he saw it, the importance of the subject, the theses sank without trace; as we have seen, none of those who read them thought them important enough to keep them among their other papers.

This was Luther’s first systematic attempt to spread his reputation beyond Wittenberg, and it had failed completely. Although he would remain fully committed to curriculum reform, Luther had received a harsh lesson in his capacity to command public attention, as a modestly published professor from a provincial university. There is little doubt that this discouraging experience would have had an impact, and probably shaped his expectations of the likely resonance when, eight weeks later, he proposed another set of theses, this time on the subject of indulgences. Nothing, certainly, could have prepared him for the storm they would unleash, or the impact they would have on his life, his religion, and his adopted city.

3.

I
NDULGENCE

HEN
L
UTHER TOOK AIM
against indulgences in his ninety-five theses, he was attacking a hugely important institution, a cornerstone of popular devotion and a mainstay of the church economy. That is well-known, and would certainly have been perfectly clear to Luther himself. What is less widely appreciated is that the attack on indulgences also threatened an extremely lucrative part of the printing industry. From the first days of printing, publishers had alternated large projects with jobbing tasks that took less time and assisted their cash flow. These included many commissions for ecclesiastical customers: tracts, brochures, ordinances, and indulgence certificates. Among the few surviving prints authentically attributed to Johannes Gutenberg are two certificates of indulgence, one in thirty lines and one in thirty-one.
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These would have been the certificates handed out to pious donors, confirming their donation and the terms and length of remission from purgatory attached to their pious act. Both these indulgences survive in surprisingly high numbers, and in several other editions.
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Another of Gutenberg’s early works was the so-called
Türkenkalender,
a pamphlet poem drumming up support for fund-raising for a crusade against the Turk.
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This was big business, both for the ecclesiastical institutions who benefited from the grant of an indulgence, and the printers who turned
out thousands of copies of the sermons, brochures, handbooks, and certificates that accompanied any indulgence campaign.

At the time that Luther first made his fateful protest against indulgences, such considerations would have been far from his mind. He was more focused on ensuring that his views received attention, dispatching copies to his friends and other interested parties, as he had with the theses against Scholastic theology. But it was the printing press that made Luther’s theses a public matter and would rapidly make of their author a controversial and notorious figure. In the process printers were richly compensated for any lost business through the suppression of demand for indulgences. Luther’s movement opened up a new era in the history of cheap print. It was a commercial as much as a theological revolution.

THE ECONOMY OF SALVATION

The Catholic practice of indulgence developed gradually during the Middle Ages, and from relatively modest beginnings.
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Indulgences derive from the priestly power to absolve a penitent sinner. By pronouncing forgiveness the priest restores the link with God threatened by sinful acts; only then could a Christian be assured of salvation. As part of the healing process the priest would prescribe for the confessing sinner a carefully weighed punishment, or penance. From the eleventh century onward the church occasionally allowed that a measured part of this penance could be rescinded in return for noteworthy pious acts. Some of the first indulgences, for instance, were offered to those prepared to join a Crusade. Others involved acts of charity, the giving of alms, donations to support the building of churches, or attendance at the consecration of a new church.

In this respect the granting of an indulgence was never a simple financial transaction. A confessant must first convince the priest that he is penitent, then confess his sins and accept the prescribed penance. Only the third part of this, the punishment, can be replaced by indulgence.
But there is no doubt that with indulgences the financial aspect loomed ever larger in the calculations of both the penitent and the church authorities.

The doctrine and practice of indulgence developed enormously throughout Europe in the two centuries before 1500. This had two main causes: a decisive intervention of the church hierarchy to bring order to the rapid proliferation of indulgences, and the emergence of purgatory as a distinctive element of church doctrine. Already by the time of the Lateran Council in 1215 concern at the disorderly growth of indulgences brought a stipulation that bishops and archbishops should limit remission to forty days. Only the pope could offer a full (plenary) remission for all sins. The value of this privilege was demonstrated when Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the year 1300 a special jubilee: pilgrims who journeyed to Rome in this year would receive forgiveness for all their sins. The success of the jubilee, and its impact on the local economy, led to the proclamation of further jubilees at rapidly decreasing intervals, first fifty, then twenty-five years.