Authors: Andrew Pettegree
Tags: #Religion, #Christianity, #History, #Modern, #General, #Europe, #Western
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 (3 page)
An Indulgence Certificate from 1504
Silver Thaler of Frederick the Wise, 1522
Ein Freiheit des Sermons Päpstlichen Ablaß
An Early Luther Work Printed by Rhau-Grunenberg
Melchior Lotter Senior in Leipzig
Melchior Lotter Junior in Wittenberg
Published Editions of
Exsurge Domine
(map)
Passion of Christ and Antichrist
Justus Jonas Translating Luther
Martin and Katharina: The Marriage Portrait
Luther, Erasmus, and the Common Man
The Biter Bit (Manifestos of the Peasants’ War; map)
The Luther Family Making Music
Luther’s
Sermon on Keeping Children in School
Concerning War Against the Turks
Sermons Honoring the Dead Duke John of Saxony
That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew
A Prosperous City: The Wittenberg Rathaus
1.
A S
MALL
T
OWN
IN
G
ERMANY
IKE MANY OF HISTORY’S
most commanding personalities, Martin Luther was gregarious by nature. He was interested in people and loved to be in company. That was certainly a mercy, for in the second half of his life he was seldom alone. From the point in 1517 when he first registered on the consciousness of his fellow Germans, Luther was a controversial, divisive, charismatic, and inspiring figure; to some extent, he has remained so ever since. Those who came into his company seldom forgot the experience. Even in his early career the intense young monk attracted the interest of a number of influential figures who discerned in him a special talent. In later life, among his intimates, he inspired a passionate devotion. Thousands flocked to Wittenberg to hear him preach, or in the hope of attending his lectures. Those admitted to his circle of friends enjoyed the particular privilege of joining him at table, where Luther would relax and hold forth.
This was Luther’s especial domain. The day’s labors past, he would sit with his friends and talk. Fueled by his wife’s excellent beer, conversation would become general, discursive, and sometimes unbuttoned. Often one of the more eager of his dinner companions would make a
record of his master’s pronouncements; Luther, a university teacher for thirty years and used to being surrounded by note-takers, thought little of this.
Not all of what passed at table reads particularly well today. Luther was among friends and relaxed; he sometimes spoke to shock, and delighted in the outrageous. His jokes don’t always amuse us. But the
Table Talk
is also full of profound, though unstructured, theological observations and acute perceptions of contemporary society.
1
It is curious that, in this great mass of words, Luther said so little about his own movement, the Reformation. Between 1517, when Luther first attracted public attention, and his death thirty years later, Luther and his followers reshaped their world. Western Christianity was split in two, as it turned out, permanently. Families, cities, and nation-states were forced to choose sides: whether to remain with the old church, or to follow Luther into schism and new patterns of worship and belief. All this Luther accepted with remarkable calm. His actions had been dictated by God: the path he had taken was shaped by a higher power. In that respect the remarkable life he had led was not of his own making, but the consequence of patient obedience to God’s command.
So it is left to us, in our more secular age, to reflect on the magnitude of Luther’s achievement; but also, the sheer improbability of it all. Luther’s career was a monument to a towering talent, but it was also a pyramid of multiple improbabilities. There was nothing in the first thirty years of his life to suggest that here was an individual who would convulse a continent. It was extraordinary that a man who had built a steady and, for someone of his background, remarkably successful career within the church should suddenly repudiate both the institution and its spiritual leadership. It was even more extraordinary that he should survive to tell the tale.
When, at the height of the “Luther affair” in 1521, Martin journeyed across Germany to face the judgment of the German Empire at the Diet of Worms, he did so under guarantee of safe-conduct. Luther would be allowed to arrive and depart unharmed. But there were those among the
emperor’s entourage who urged him to repudiate this promise and have Luther arrested and executed.
2
Such had been the fate of another heretic, Jan Hus, a century before, and it was the fate that many of Luther’s friends expected for him. Luther himself did not expect to leave Worms alive. That he had reached this climactic moment at all he owed to the stolid support of his own local ruler, Frederick the Wise, a devout Catholic who never left the old faith. He also, incidentally, owned one of Europe’s finest collections of relics, the sacred remains that lay at the heart of the theology of indulgence that Luther denounced with such vehemence. Curiously he had never met his turbulent professor; it may have been at the Diet of Worms that he cast eyes on Luther for the first time. Many contemporaries found Frederick’s protection of him unfathomable. Certainly without it Luther’s career as a reformer would have been stifled very quickly.
Luther owed his notoriety during these years to another of the Reformation’s extraordinary improbabilities: that a monk who into his thirtieth year had published nothing, and who shared the conventional education of other churchmen, should somehow reinvent himself as a writer and polemicist of astonishing power. More than that, in an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition, it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity. Luther in effect invented a new form of theological writing: short, clear, and direct, speaking not only to his professional peers but to the wider Christian people. This revelation of style, purpose, and form was at the heart of the Reformation, as it will be at the heart of this book.
And Luther achieved all this from a thoroughly incongruous place, a small, inconsequential market town on Europe’s eastern periphery, a place that to this point had scarcely figured in the annals of European history: Wittenberg. This was in many ways the greatest of all the improbabilities of the Reformation, for which Renaissance Europe had no precedent. Europe in the sixteenth century was a society of rising nation-states, full of intellectual vitality. Its cities, with their churches, universities, and the new printed books, were one of the greatest adornments of
this culture. But little of this cultural and economic Renaissance had reached the sandy, underpopulated plains of northeastern Germany. When Martin Luther first made his way to Wittenberg in 1508, he was not impressed, a sentiment shared by most of the small number of people who recorded their recollections of this tiny border settlement.
Yet this is how it turned out. From the time that Luther settled permanently in Wittenberg in 1511, his fate and that of his new home would be permanently intertwined. Wittenberg would become Luthertown (Lutherstadt), a title it formally adopted in the twentieth century. Wittenberg was the heart of the Reformation, and it shared and mirrored Luther’s own transformation.
ON THE WHITE MOUNTAIN
When Luther first walked through the gates of Wittenberg, he would have found a modest settlement of some two thousand souls.
3
The great cities of Germany were up to thirty times this size; even in the locality, Wittenberg was dwarfed by Leipzig, the local trading hub, and Erfurt, the lively university city where Luther had spent his formative years. Wittenberg had first emerged as a settled place in the twelfth century, after a brutal struggle to eradicate the local Slavic population. To the settlers from the flatlands of Flanders called to repopulate the region, the gentle hills close to the Elbe seemed formidable enough. So they called their new home White Mountain, the Wittenberg, after the white sand of the hill and on the banks of the river, sufficiently shallow at this point for a ford. Over the next two hundred years this became a walled city, strong enough to defy a Hussite army during the Bohemian Revolt. But it never quite threw off the feeling of a frontier settlement, standing sentinel against the alien hordes. Significantly the largest cities in this part of Germany, Erfurt and Leipzig, were to the south and west, angled toward the cultured southern heart of the German Empire.
W
ITTENBERG
Seen from the south, and the far bank of the river Elbe, we can pick out the castle complex to the left, the parish church in the center, and the Augustinian cloister on the far right.
It was from Erfurt that Luther had been dispatched to join the
Augustinian cloister at Wittenberg, and he never quite forgot these daunting first impressions. He had found Wittenberg, he reflected some years later, on the edge of civilization, “
in termino civilitatis
.” Had it been only a little farther east it would have been “
in mediam barbariam,
” in the middle of the barbarians.
4
Other visitors were equally unflattering. According to one traveler who experienced Wittenberg at about the time of Luther’s arrival, it was a poor, unattractive town, with old, small, ugly wooden houses, more like a village than a town.
5
Not surprisingly, when Luther’s views had stirred notoriety, these were sentiments his enemies were eager to echo. According to Johannes Cochlaeus, an early and dogged critic, Wittenberg was: