CHAPTER XVI
Luther: The Reformation in
Germany
1517–24

I. TETZEL

ON March 15, 1517, Pope Leo X promulgated the most famous of all indulgences. It was a pity, yet just, that the Reformation should strike during a pontificate that gathered into Rome so many of the fruits, and so much of the spirit, of the Renaissance. Leo, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was now head of the Medici family, which had nourished the Renaissance in Florence; he was a scholar, a poet, and a gentleman, kindly and generous, in love with classical literature and delicate art. His morals were good in an immoral milieu; his nature inclined to a gaiety pleasant and legitimate, which set an example of happiness for a city that a century before had been destitute and desolate. All his faults were superficial except his superficiality. He made too little distinction between the good of his family and that of the Church, and wasted the funds of the papacy on questionable poets and wars. He was normally tolerant, enjoyed the satire directed against ecclesiastics in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, and practiced, with occasional lapses, the unwritten agreement by which the Renaissance Church accorded considerable freedom to philosophers, poets, and scholars who addressed themselves—usually in Latin—to the educated minority, but who left the irreplaceable faith of the masses undisturbed.

The son of a banker, Leo was accustomed to spending money readily, and chiefly on others. He inherited full papal coffers from Julius II, and emptied them before he died. Perhaps he did not care much for the massive basilica that Julius had planned and begun, but the old St. Peter’s was beyond repair, immense sums had been poured into the new one, and it would be a disgrace to the Church to let that majestic enterprise abort. Possibly with some reluctance he offered the indulgence of 1517 to all who would contribute to the cost of completing the great shrine. The rulers of England, Germany, France, and Spain protested that their countries were being drained of wealth, their national economies were being disturbed, by repeated campaigns for luring money to Rome. Where kings were powerful Leo was considerate: he agreed that Henry VIII should keep a fourth of the proceeds in England; he advanced a loan of 175,000 ducats to King Charles I (the later Emperor Charles V) against expected collections in Spain; and Francis I was to retain part of the sum raised in France. Germany received less favored treatment, having no strong monarchy to bargain with the Pope; however, the Emperor Maximilian was allotted a modest 3,000 florins from the receipts, and the Fuggers were to take from the collections the 20,000 florins that they had loaned to Albrecht of Brandenburg to pay the Pope for his confirmation as Archbishop of Mainz. Unfortunately that city had lost three archbishops in ten years (1504–14), and had twice paid heavy confirmation fees; to spare it from paying a third time Albrecht borrowed. Now Leo agreed that the young prelate should manage the distribution of the indulgence in Magdeburg and Halberstadt as well as in Mainz. An agent of the Fuggers accompanied each of Albrecht’s preachers, checked expenses and receipts, and kept one of the keys to the strongbox that held the funds.¹

Albrecht’s principal agent was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who had acquired skill and reputation as a money-raiser. Since 1500 his main occupation had been in disposing of indulgences. Usually, on these missions, he received the aid of the local clergy: when he entered a town a procession of priests, magistrates, and pious laity welcomed him with banners, candles, and song, and bore the bull of indulgence aloft on a velvet or golden cushion, while church bells pealed and organs played.² So propped, Tetzel offered, in an impressive formula, a plenary indulgence to those who would penitently confess their sins and contribute according to their means to the building of a new St. Peter’s:

This splendid bargain for a believer was in harmony with the official conception of indulgences for the living. Tetzel was again within the letter of his archiepiscopal instructions when he dispensed with preliminary confession if the contributor applied the indulgence to a soul in purgatory. Says a Catholic historian:

Myconius, a Franciscan friar perhaps hostile to the Dominicans, heard Tetzel perform, and reported, for this year 1517: “It is incredible what this ignorant monk said and preached. He gave sealed letters stating that even the sins which a man was intending to commit would be forgiven. The pope, he said, had more power than all the Apostles, all the angels and saints, more even than the Virgin Mary herself; for these were all subject to Christ, but the pope was equal to Christ.” This is probably an exaggeration, but that such a description could be given by an eyewitness suggests the antipathy that Tetzel aroused. A like hostility appears in the rumor mentioned skeptically by Luther,⁵ which quoted Tetzel as having said at Halle that even if, per impossibile, a man had violated the Mother of God the indulgence would wipe away his sin. Tetzel obtained certificates from civil and ecclesiastical authorities at Halle that they had never heard the story.⁶ He was an enthusiastic salesman, but not quite conscienceless.

He would have escaped history had he not approached too closely to the lands of Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony.* Frederick was a pious and provident ruler. He had no theoretical objection to indulgences; he had gathered 19,000 saintly relics into his Castle Church at Wittenberg,⁷ and had arranged to have an indulgence attached to their veneration; he had procured another indulgence for contributors to the building of a bridge at Torgau, and had engaged Tetzel to advertise the benefits of that pontifical indulgence.⁸ However, he had withheld from Pope Alexander VI (1501) the sum raised in Electoral Saxony by an indulgence for donations to a crusade against the Turks; he would release the money, he said, when the crusade materialized. It did not; Frederick the Wise kept the funds, and applied them to the University of Wittenberg.⁹ Now, moved by reluctance to let coin of Saxony emigrate, and perhaps by reports of Tetzel’s hyperboles, he forbade the preaching of the 1517 indulgence in his territory. But Tetzel came so close to the frontiers that people in Wittenberg crossed the border to obtain the indulgence. Several purchasers brought these “papal letters” to Martin Luther, professor of theology in the university, and asked him to attest their efficacy. He refused. The refusal came to Tetzel’s ears; he denounced Luther, and became immortal.

He had underestimated the pugnacity of the professor. Luther quickly composed in Latin ninety-five theses, which he entitled Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (Disputation for Clarification of the Power of Indulgences). He did not consider his propositions heretical, nor were they indubitably so. He was still a fervent Catholic who had no thought of upsetting the Church; his purpose was to refute the extravagant claims made for indulgences, and to correct the abuses that had developed in their distribution. He felt that the facile issuance and mercenary dissemination of indulgences had weakened the contrition that sin should arouse, had indeed made sin a trivial matter to be amicably adjusted over a bargain counter with a peddler of pardons. He did not yet deny the papal “power of the keys” to forgive sins; he conceded the authority of the pope to absolve the confessing penitent from the terrestrial penalties imposed by churchmen; but in Luther’s view the power of the pope to free souls from purgatory, or to lessen their term of punishment there, depended not on the power of the keys—which did not reach beyond the grave—but on the intercessory influence of papal prayers, which might or might not be heard. (Theses 20–22.) Moreover, Luther argued, all Christians shared automatically in the treasury of merits earned by Christ and the saints, even without the grant of such a share by a papal letter of indulgence. He exonerated the popes from responsibility for the excesses of the preachers, but slyly added: “This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due the pope from .... the shrewd questionings of the laity, to wit: ‘Why does not the pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems a .... number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church?’” (Theses 81–82.)

At noon on October 31, 1517, Luther affixed his theses to the main door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg. Annually, on November 1—All Saints’ Day—the relics collected by the Elector were displayed there, and a large crowd could be expected. The practice of publicly announcing theses, which the proponent offered to defend against all challengers, was an old custom in medieval universities, and the door that Luther used for his proclamation had been regularly employed as an academic bulletin board. To the theses he prefixed an amiable invitation:

To make sure that the theses would be widely understood, Luther had a German translation circulated among the people. With characteristic audacity he sent a copy of the theses to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Courteously, piously, unwittingly, the Reformation had begun.

II. THE GENESIS OF LUTHER

What circumstances of heredity and environment had molded an obscure monk, in a town of three thousand souls, into the David of the religious revolution?

His father Hans was a stern, rugged, irascible anticlerical; his mother was a timid, modest woman much given to prayer; both were frugal and industrious. Hans was a peasant at Möhra, then a miner at Mansfeld; but Martin was born at Eisleben on November 10, 1483. Six other children followed. Hans and Grethe believed in the rod as a magic wand for producing righteousness; once, says Martin, his father beat him so assiduously that for a long time they were open enemies; on another occasion, for stealing a nut, his mother thrashed him till the blood flowed; Martin later thought that “the severe and harsh life I led with them was the reason that I afterward took refuge in the cloister and became a monk.”¹⁰ The picture of deity which his parents transmitted to him reflected their own mood: a hard father and strict judge, exacting a joyless virtue, demanding constant propitiation, and finally damning most of mankind to everlasting hell. Both parents believed in witches, elves, angels, and demons of many kinds and specialties; and Martin carried most of these superstitions with him to the end. A religion of terror in a home of rigorous discipline shared in forming Luther’s youth and creed.

At school in Mansfeld there were more rods and much catechism; Martin was flogged fifteen times in one day for misdeclining a noun. At thirteen he was advanced to a secondary school kept by a religious brotherhood at Magdeburg. At fourteen he was transferred to the school of St. George at Eisenach, and had three relatively happy years lodging in the comfortable home of Frau Cotta. Luther never forgot her remark that there was nothing on earth more precious to a man than the love of a good woman. It was a boon that he took forty-two years to win. In this healthier atmosphere he developed the natural charm of youth—healthy, cheerful, sociable, frank. He sang well, and played the lute.

In 1501 his prospering father sent him to the university at Erfurt. The curriculum centered around theology and philosophy, which was still Scholastic; but Ockham’s nominalism had triumphed there, and presumably Luther noted Ockham’s doctrine that popes and councils could err. He found Scholasticism in any form so disagreeable that he complimented a friend on “not having to learn the dung that was offered” as philosophy.¹¹ There were some mild humanists at Erfurt; he was very slightly influenced by them; they did not care for him when they found him in earnest about the other world. He learned a little Greek and less Hebrew, but he read the major Latin classics. In 1505 he received the degree of master of arts. His proud father sent him, as a graduation present, an expensive edition of the Corpus iuris, and rejoiced when his son entered upon the study of law. Suddenly, after two months of such study, and to his father’s dismay, the youth of twenty-two decided to become a monk.

The decision expressed the contradiction in his character. Vigorous to the point of sensuality, visibly framed for a life of normal instincts, and yet infused by home and school with the conviction that man is by nature sinful, and that sin is an offense against an omnipotent and punishing God, he had never in thought or conduct reconciled his natural impulses with his acquired beliefs. Passing presumably through the usual erotic experiments and fantasies of adolescence, he could not take these as stages of development, but viewed them as the operations of a Satan dedicated to snaring souls into irrevocable damnation. The conception of God that had been given him contained hardly any element of tenderness; the consoling figure of Mary had little place in that theology of fear, and Jesus was not the loving son who could refuse nothing to His mother; He was the Jesus of the Last Judgment so often pictured in the churches, the Christ who had threatened sinners with everlasting fire. The recurrent thought of hell darkened a mind too intensely religious to forget it in the zest and current of life. One day, as he was returning from his father’s house to Erfurt (July 1505), he encountered a frightful storm. Lightning flashed about him, and struck a near-by tree. It seemed to Luther a warning from God that unless he gave his thoughts to salvation, death would surprise him unshriven and damned. Where could he live a life of saving devotion? Only where four walls would exclude, or ascetic discipline would overcome, the world, the flesh, and the devil: only in a monastery. He made a vow to St. Anne that if he survived that storm he would become a monk.

There were twenty cloisters in Erfurt. He chose one known for faithful observance of monastic rules—that of the Augustinian Eremites. He called his friends together, drank and sang with them for what he told them was the last time, and on the morrow he was received as a novice in a monastery cell. He performed the lowliest duties with a proud humility. He recited prayers in self-hypnotizing repetition, he froze in an unheated cubicle, he fasted and scourged himself, in the hope of exorcizing devils from his body. “I was a pious monk, and so strictly observed the rules of my order that... if ever a monk got into heaven by monkery, so should I also have gotten there .... If it had lasted longer I should have tortured myself to death with watching, praying, reading, and other work.”¹² On one occasion, when he had not been seen for several days, friends broke into his cell and found him lying senseless on the ground. They had brought a lute; one played it; he revived, and thanked them. In September 1506, he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; and in May 1507, he was ordained a priest.

His fellow friars gave him friendly counsel. One assured him that the Passion of Christ had atoned for the sinful nature of man, and had opened to redeemed man the gates of paradise. Luther’s reading of the German mystics, especially of Tauler, gave him hope of bridging the awful gap between a naturally sinful soul and a righteous, omnipotent God. Then a treatise by John Huss fell into his hands, and doctrinal doubts were added to his spiritual turmoil; he wondered why “a man who could write so Christianly and so powerfully had been burned.... I shut the book and turned away with a wounded heart.”¹³ Johann von Staupitz, provincial vicar of the Augustinian Eremites, took a fatherly interest in the troubled friar, and bade him replace asceticism with careful reading of the Bible and St. Augustine. The monks expressed their solicitude by giving him a Latin Bible—then a rare possession for an individual.

One day in 1508 or 1509 he was struck by a sentence in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1:17): “The just shall live by faith.” Slowly these words led him to the doctrine that man can be “justified”—i.e., made just and therefore saved from hell—not by good works, which could never suffice to atone for sins against an infinite deity, but only by complete faith in Christ and in his atonement for mankind. In Augustine Luther found another idea that perhaps renewed his terror—predestination—that God, even before the creation, had forever destined some souls to salvation, the rest to hell; and that the elect had been chosen by God’s free will to be saved by the divine sacrifice of Christ. From that consistent absurdity he fled back again to his basic hope of salvation by faith.

In 1508, by the recommendation of Staupitz, he was transferred to an Augustinian monastery at Wittenberg, and to the post of instructor in logic and physics, then professor of theology, in the university. Wittenberg was the northern capital—seldom the residence—of Frederick the Wise. A contemporary pronounced it “a poor, insignificant town, with little, old, ugly wooden houses.” Luther described the inhabitants as “beyond measure drunken, rude, and given to reveling”; they had the reputation of being the amplest drinkers in Saxony, which was rated the most drunken province of Germany. One mile to the east, said Luther, civilization ended and barbarism began. Here, for the most part, he remained to the close of his days.

He must have become by this time an exemplary monk, for in October 1510, he and a fellow friar were sent to Rome on some obscure mission for the Augustinian Eremites. His first reaction on sighting the city was one of pious awe; he prostrated himself, raised his hands, and cried: “Hail to thee, O holy Rome!” He went through all the devotions of a pilgrim, bowed reverently before saintly relics, climbed the Scala Santa on his knees, visited a score of churches, and earned so many indulgences that he almost wished his parents were dead, so that he might deliver them from purgatory. He explored the Roman Forum, but was apparently unmoved by the Renaissance art with which Raphael, Michelangelo, and a hundred others were beginning to adorn the capital. For many years after this trip he made no extant comment on the worldliness of the Roman clergy or the immorality then popular in the holy city. Ten years later, however, and still more in the sometimes imaginative reminiscences of his Table Talk in old age, he described the Rome of 1510 as “an abomination,” the popes as worse than pagan emperors, and the papal court as being “served at supper by twelve naked girls.”¹⁴ Very probably he had no entry to the higher ecclesiastical circles, and had no direct knowledge of their unquestionably easy morality.

After his return to Wittenberg (February 1511) he was rapidly advanced in the pedagogical scale, and was made provincial vicar-general of his order. He gave courses in the Bible, preached regularly in the parish church, and carried on the work of his office with industry and devotion. Says a distinguished Catholic scholar:

Slowly, during these years (1512–17), his religious ideas moved away from the official doctrines of the Church. He began to speak of “our theology,” in contrast with that which was taught at Erfurt. In 1515 he ascribed the corruption of the world to the clergy, who delivered to the people too many maxims and fables of human invention, and not the Scriptural world of God. In 1516 he discovered an anonymous German manuscript, whose mystic piety so supported his own view of the utter dependence of the soul, for salvation, on divine grace that he edited and published it as Theologia Germanica or Deutsche Theologie. He blamed the preachers of indulgences for taking advantage of the simplicity of the poor. In private correspondence he began to identify the Antichrist of John’s First Epistle with the pope.¹⁶ In July 1517, invited by Duke George of Albertine Saxony to preach in Dresden, he argued that the mere acceptance of the merits of Christ assured the believer’s salvation. The Duke complained that such stress on faith rather than virtue “would only make the people presumptuous and mutinous.”¹⁷ Three months later the reckless friar challenged the world to debate the ninety-five theses that he had posted on Wittenberg Church.

III. THE REVOLUTION TAKES FORM

Cranach’s woodcut of 1520 may reasonably suggest the Luther of 1517: a tonsured monk of middle stature, temporarily slender, with large eyes of serious intent, larger nose, and resolute chin, a face not pugnaciously but quietly announcing courage and character. Yet it was honest anger, rather than jejune audacity, that wrote the theses. The local bishop saw nothing heretical in them, but mildly advised Luther to write no more on the subject for a while. The author himself was at first dismayed by the furor he had aroused. In May 1518, he told Staupitz that his real ambition was to lead a life of quiet retirement. He deceived himself; he relished battle.

The theses became the talk of literate Germany. Thousands had waited for such a protest, and the pent-up anticlericalism of generations thrilled at having found a voice. The sale of indulgences declined. But many champions rose to meet the challenge. Tetzel himself, with some professional aid, replied in One Hundred and Six Anti-Theses (December 1517). He made no concessions or apologies, but “gave at times an uncompromising, even dogmatic, sanction to mere theological opinions that were hardly consonant with the most accurate scholarship,”¹⁸ When this publication reached Wittenberg a hawker offering it for sale was mobbed by university students, and his stock of 800 copies was burned in the market square—a proceeding of which Luther joyously disapproved. He answered Tetzel in “A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace,” concluding with a characteristic defiance: “If I am called a heretic by those whose purses will suffer from my truths, I care not much for their brawling; for only those say this whose dark understanding has never known the Bible.”¹⁹ Jakob van Hoogstraeten of Cologne thundered invectives against Luther, and suggested burning him at the stake. Johann Eck, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ingolstadt, issued a pamphlet, Obelisci (March 1518), which charged Luther with disseminating “Bohemian poison” (the heresies of Huss), and subverting all ecclesiastical order. In Rome Sylvester Prierias, papal censor of literature, published a Dialogue “maintaining the absolute supremacy of the pope in terms not altogether free from exaggeration, especially stretching his theory to an unwarrantable point in dealing with indulgences.”²⁰

Luther countered in a Latin brochure Resolutiones (April 1518), copies of which he sent to his local bishop and to the Pope—in both cases with assurances of orthodoxy and submission. The text spoke quite handsomely of Leo X:

To Leo directly he professed an unwonted humility:

However, as Leo’s advisers noted, the Resolutiones affirmed the superiority of an ecumenical council to the pope, spoke slightingly of relics and pilgrimages, denied the surplus merits of the saints, and rejected all additions made by the popes in the last three centuries to the theory and practice of indulgences. As these were a prime source of papal revenue, and Leo was at his wits’ end to finance his philanthropies, amusements, and wars, as well as the administration and building program of the Church, the harassed Pontiff, who had at first brushed the dispute aside as a passing fracas among monks, now took the matter in hand, and summoned Luther to Rome (July 7, 1518).

Luther faced a critical decision. Even if the most genial of popes should treat him leniently, he might find himself politely silenced and buried in a Roman monastery, to be soon forgotten by those who now applauded him. He wrote to Georg Spalatin, chaplain to Elector Frederick, suggesting that German princes should protect their citizens from compulsory extradition to Italy. The Elector agreed. He had a high regard for Luther, who had made the University of Wittenberg prosper; and besides, Emperor Max, seeing in Luther a possible card to play in diplomatic contests with Rome, advised the Elector to “take good care of that monk.” ²²

At this very time the Emperor had summoned an Imperial Diet to meet at Augsburg to consider the Pope’s request that it should tax Germany to help finance a new crusade against the Turks. The clergy (Leo proposed) should pay a tenth, the laity a twelfth, of their income, and every fifty householders should furnish one man. The Diet refused; on the contrary, it firmly restated the grievances that were providing the background of Luther’s success. It pointed out to the papal legate that Germany had often taxed herself for crusades, only to see the funds used for other papal purposes; that the people would vigorously oppose any further remission of money to Italy; that the annates, confirmation fees, and costs of canonical litigation referred to Rome were already an intolerable burden; and that German benefices were given as plums to Italian priests. So bold a rejection of papal requests, said one delegate, had never been known in German history.²³ Noting the spirit of rebellion among the princes, Maximilian wrote to Rome advising caution in the treatment of Luther, but promising cooperation in suppressing heresy .

Leo was disposed or compelled to lenience; indeed, a Protestant historian has ascribed the triumph of the Reformation to the moderation of the Pope.²⁴ He put aside the order for Luther’s appearance in Rome; instead he bade him present himself at Augsburg before Cardinal Cajetan, and answer charges of indiscipline and heresy. He instructed his legate to offer Luther full pardon, and future dignities, if he would recant and submit; otherwise the secular authorities should be asked to send him to Rome.²⁵ About the same time Leo announced his intention of presenting to Frederick an honor that the pious Elector had long coveted—that “Golden Rose” which the popes bestowed upon secular rulers whom they wished to signalize with their highest favor. Probably Leo now offered to support Frederick as successor to the Imperial crown.²⁶

Armed with an Imperial safe-conduct, Luther met Cajetan at Augsburg (October 12–14, 1518). The Cardinal was a man of great theological learning and exemplary life, but he misread his function to be that of judge, not diplomat. As he saw the matter, it was primarily a question of ecclesiastical discipline and order: should a monk be allowed to criticize publicly his superiors—to whom he had vowed obedience—and to advocate views condemned by the Church? Refusing to discuss the right or wrong of Luther’s statements, he demanded a retraction and a pledge never again to disturb the peace of the Church. Each lost patience with the other. Luther returned impenitent to Wittenberg; Cajetan asked Frederick to send him to Rome; Frederick refused. Luther wrote a spirited account of the interviews, which was circulated throughout Germany. In forwarding it to his friend Wenzel Link, he added: “I send you my trifling work that you may see whether I am not right in supposing that, according to Paul, the real Antichrist holds sway over the Roman court. I think he is worse than any Turk.”²⁷ In a milder letter to Duke George he asked that “a common reformation should be undertaken of the spiritual and temporal estates” ²⁸—his first known use of the word that was to give his rebellion its historic name.

Leo continued his efforts for conciliation. By a bull of November 9,1518, he repudiated many of the extreme claims for indulgences; these forgave neither sins nor guilt, but only those earthly penalties that the Church—not secular rulers—had imposed; as to releasing souls from purgatory, the power of the pope was limited to his prayers, beseeching God to apply to a dead soul the surplus merits of Christ and the saints. On November 28 Luther issued an appeal from the judgment of the pope to that of a general council. In that same month Leo commissioned Karl von Miltitz, a young Saxon nobleman in minor orders in Rome, to take the Golden Rose to Frederick, and also to make a quiet effort to bring Luther, that “child of Satan,” back to obedience.²⁹

On reaching Germany, Miltitz was astonished to find half the country openly hostile to the Roman See. Among his own friends in Augsburg and Nuremberg three out of five were for Luther. In Saxony anti-papal feeling ran so strong that he divested himself of all indications that he was a papal commissioner. When he met Luther at Altenburg (January 3, 1519), he found him more open to reason than to fear. Probably at this stage Luther was sincerely anxious to preserve the unity of Western Christendom. He made generous concessions: to observe silence if his opponents would do likewise; to write a letter of submission to the Pope; to acknowledge publicly the propriety of prayers to the saints, the reality of purgatory, and the usefulness of indulgences in remitting canonical penances; and to recommend to the people a peaceful allegiance to the Church; meanwhile the details of the controversy were to be submitted for adjudication to some German bishop acceptable to both parties.³⁰ Well pleased, Miltitz went to Leipzig, summoned Tetzel, reproved him for excesses, accused him of mendacity and embezzlement, and dismissed him. Tetzel retired to his monastery, and died soon afterward (August 11,1519). On his deathbed he received a kindly letter from Luther, assuring him that the indulgence sale was only an occasion, not a cause, of the disturbance, “that the affair had not been begun on that account, but that the child had quite another father.” ³¹ On March 3 Luther wrote to the Pope a letter of complete submission. Leo replied in a friendly spirit (March 29), inviting him to come to Rome to make his confession, and offering him money for the journey.³² However, with consistent inconsistency, Luther had written to Spalatin on March 13: “I am at a loss to know whether the Pope is Antichrist or his apostle.”³³ Under the circumstances he thought it safer to stay in Wittenberg.

There the faculty, students, and citizens were predominantly friendly to his cause. He was especially happy to receive the support of a brilliant young humanist and theologian whom the Elector had appointed in 1518, at the age of twenty-one, to teach Greek at the university. Philipp Schwarzert (Black Earth) had had his name Hellenized as Melanchthon by his greatuncle Reuchlin. A man of small stature, frail physique, halting gait, homely features, lofty brow, and timid eyes, this intellectual of the Reformation became so loved in Wittenberg that five or six hundred students crowded his lecture room, and Luther himself, who described him as having “almost every virtue known to man,”³⁴ humbly sat among his pupils. “Melanchthon,” said Erasmus, “is a man of gentle nature; even his enemies speak well of him.”³⁵ Luther enjoyed combat; Melanchthon longed for peace and conciliation. Luther sometimes chided him as immoderately moderate; but Luther’s noblest and mildest side showed in his uninterrupted affection for one so opposed to him in temperament and policy.

Another Wittenberg professor shone with a fiercer light than Melanchthon’s. Andreas Bodenstein, known from his birthplace as Carlstadt, had joined the university staff at the age of twenty-four (1504); at thirty he received the chair of Thomistic philosophy and theology. On April 13, 1517, he anticipated Luther’s historic protest by publishing 152 theses against indulgences. At first opposed to Luther, he soon turned into an ardent supporter, “hotter in the matter than I,” said the great rebel.³⁷ When Eck’s Obelisci challenged Luther’s theses Carlstadt defended them in 406 propositions; one of these contained the first definite declaration, in the German Reformation, of the Bible’s paramount authority over the decretals and traditions of the Church. Eck replied with a challenge to a public debate; Carlstadt readily agreed, and Luther made the arrangements. Eck then published a prospectus listing thirteen theses which he offered to prove in the debate. One ran: “We deny that the Roman Church was not superior to other churches before the time of Sylvester; we have always recognized the possessor of Peter’s chair as his successor and as the vicar of Christ.” But it was not Carlstadt, it was Luther who, in the Resolutiones, had raised the point that in the first centuries of Christianity the Roman See had no more authority than several other bishops of the Church. Luther felt himself challenged, and claimed that Eck’s thesis freed him from his vow of silence. He determined to join Carlstadt in the theological tournament.

In June 1519, the two warriors rode off to Leipzig, accompanied by Melanchthon and six other professors, and escorted in country carts by 200 Wittenberg students armed and armored as if for battle; and in truth they were entering territory hostile to Luther. In the great tapestried hall of Pleissenburg Castle, packed with excited spectators, and under the presidency of the orthodox Duke George of Albertine Saxony, Eck and Carlstadt began the joust between the old and the new (June 27). Hardly anyone in Leipzig cared that on the morrow a new emperor was to be elected at Frank-furt-am-Main. After Carlstadt had for days suffered under Eck’s superior argumentative skill, Luther took the stand for Wittenberg. He was brilliant and powerful in debate, but recklessly candid. He denied emphatically the primacy of the bishop of Rome in the early days of Christianity, and reminded his mostly antipathetic audience that the widespread Greek Orthodox Church still rejected the supremacy of Rome. When Eck charged that Luther’s view echoed that of Huss, which the Council of Constance had condemned, Luther replied that even ecumenical councils could err, and that many doctrines of Huss were sound. When this debate ended (July 8), Eck had accomplished his real purpose—to have Luther commit himself to a definite heresy. The Reformation now advanced from a minor dispute about indulgences to a major challenge of papal authority over Christendom.

Eck passed on to Rome, presented to the Curia a report of the disputation, and recommended the excommunication of Luther. Leo was not so precipitate; he still hoped for some peaceable solution, and he was too distant from Germany to realize how far the revolt had gone. Prominent and respected citizens like Johan Holzschuher, Lazarus Spengler, and Willibald Pirkheimer spoke up for Luther; Dürer prayed for his success; the humanists were sending forth a cloud of pamphlets satirizing the papacy with all the exuberant vituperation characteristic of the age. Ulrich von Hutten, on reaching Augsburg in 1518, turned his rhymes against Leo’s call for crusading funds, and expressed the hope that the collectors would go home with empty bags. When news came of the Leipzig debate he hailed Luther as the liberator of Germany, and from that time his pen was a sword for the Reform. He enlisted among Franz von Sickingen’s knights—who were itching for revolution—and induced him to offer Luther all the support and protection that his armed band could provide. Luther replied in warm appreciation, but was not ready to use force in defense of his person.

In March 1520, Hutten published an old German manuscript written in the time of the Emperor Henry IV (r. 1056–1106), and supporting Henry in his struggle against Pope Gregory VII. He dedicated the book to the young Emperor Charles V, as a hint that Germany expected him to avenge Henry’s humiliation and defeat. To free Germany from Rome, said Hutten, was of greater urgency than to repel the Turks. “While our forefathers thought it unworthy of them to submit to the Romans when these were the most martial nation in the world, we not only submit to these effeminate slaves of lust and luxury, but suffer ourselves to be plundered to minister to their sensuality.”³⁸ In April 1520, Hutten issued the first of two series of Gespräche, verse dialogues that played a role second only to Luther’s works in voicing and stimulating the national desire for independence from Rome. He described Rome as a “gigantic bloodsucking worm,” and declared that “the Pope is a bandit chief, and his gang bears the name of the Church.... . Rome is a sea of impurity, a mire of filth, a bottomless sink of iniquity. Should we not flock from all quarters to compass the destruction of this common curse of humanity?”³⁹ Erasmus pleaded with Hutten to temper his style, and gave him a friendly warning that he was in danger of arrest. Hutten hid himself in one after another of Sickingen’s castles, but continued his campaign. To Elector Frederick he recommended the secular appropriation of all monastic wealth, and described the excellent uses to which Germany could put the money that was annually sent to Rome.⁴⁰

But the center of the war remained in little Wittenberg. In the spring of 1520 Luther published, with furious notes, an Epitome in which he quoted the most recent and still uncompromising claims made by orthodox theologians for the primacy and powers of the popes. Luther met extremes with extremes:

Later in the same year Carlstadt issued a “little book”-De canonicis scripturis libellus—exalting the Bible over popes, councils, and traditions, and the Gospels over the Epistles; if Luther had followed this last line, Protestantism might have been less Pauline, Augustinian, and predestinarisan. The libellus was ahead of its time in doubting the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and the full authenticity of the Gospels. But it was weak in its central argument: it decided the authenticity of Biblical books by the traditions of the early centuries, and then rejected tradition in favor of the books so certified.

Heartened by the support of Melanchthon and Carlstadt, Hutten and Sickingen, Luther wrote to Spalatin (June 11, 1520):

IV. BULLS AND BLASTS

On June 15,1520, Leo X issued a bull, Exsurge Domine, which condemned forty-one statements by Luther, ordered the public burning of the writings in which these had appeared, and exhorted Luther to abjure his errors and return to the fold. After sixty days of further refusal to come to Rome and make a public recantation, he was to be cut off from Christendom by excommunication, he was to be shunned as a heretic by all the faithful, all places where he stayed were to suspend religious services, and all secular authorities were to banish him from their dominions or deliver him to Rome.

Luther marked the end of his period of grace by publishing the first of three little books that constituted a program of religious revolution. Hitherto he had written in Latin for the intellectual classes; now he wrote in German—and as a German patriot—An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate. He included in his appeal the “noble youth” who, a year before, had been chosen emperor as Charles V, and whom “God has given us to be our head, thereby awakening great hopes of good in many hearts.”⁴³ Luther attacked the “three walls” that the papacy had built around itself: the distinction between the clergy and the laity, the right of the pope to decide the interpretation of Scripture, and his exclusive right to summon a general council of the Church. All these defensive assumptions, said Luther, must be overthrown.

First, there is no real difference between clergy and laity; every Christian is made a priest by baptism. Secular rulers, therefore, should exercise their powers “without let or hindrance, regardless whether it be pope, bishop or priest whom they affect .... All that the canon law has said to the contrary is sheer invention of Roman presumption.”⁴⁴ Second, since every Christian is a priest, he has the right to interpret the Scriptures according to his own light,⁴⁵ Third, Scripture should be our final authority for doctrine or practice, and Scripture offers no warrant for the exclusive right of the pope to call a council. If he seeks by excommunication or interdict to prevent a council, “we should despise his conduct as that of a madman, and, relying on God, hurl back the ban on him, and coerce him as best we can.”⁴⁶ A council should be called very soon; it should examine the “horrible” anomaly that the head of Christendom lives in more worldly splendor than any king; it should end the appropriation of German benefices by Italian clergymen; it should reduce to a hundredth the “swarm of vermin” holding ecclesiastical sinecures in Rome and living chiefly on money from Germany.

Why should the German Church pay this perpetual tribute to a foreign power? Let the German clergy throw off their subjection to Rome, and establish a national church under the leadership of the Archbishop of Mainz. Mendicant orders should be reduced, priests should be allowed to marry, no binding monastic vows should be taken before the age of thirty; interdicts, pilgrimages, Masses for the dead, and holydays (except Sundays) should be abolished. The German Church should be reconciled with the Hussites of Bohemia; Huss was burned in flagrant violation of the safe-conduct given him by the emperor; and in any case “we should vanquish heretics with books, not with burning.”⁴⁸ All canon law should be discarded; there should be only one law, for clergy and laity alike.

This headlong assault of one man against a power that pervaded all Western Europe became the sensation of Germany. Cautious men considered it intemperate and rash; many reckoned it among the most heroic deeds in German history. The first edition of the Open Letter was soon exhausted, and the presses of Wittenberg were kept busy with new printings. Germany, like England, was ripe for an appeal to nationalism; there was as yet no Germany on the map, but there were Germans, newly conscious of themselves as a people. As Huss had stressed his Bohemian patriotism, as Henry VIII would reject not Catholic doctrine but papal power over England, so Luther now planted his standard of revolt not in theological deserts, but in the rich soil of the German national spirit. Wherever Protestantism won, nationalism carried the flag.

In September 1520, Eck and Jerome Aleander promulgated the bull of excommunication in Germany. Luther fought back with a second manifesto, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October 6). Addressed to theologians and scholars, it reverted to Latin, but it was soon translated, and had almost as much influence on Christian doctrine as the Open Letter had on ecclesiastical and political history. As the Jews had suffered a long captivity in Babylonia, so the Church as established by Christ, and as described in the New Testament, had undergone over a thousand years of captivity under the papacy in Rome. During that period the religion of Christ had been corrupted in faith, morals, and ritual. Since Christ had given his Apostles wine as well as bread at the Last Supper, the Hussites were right: the Eucharist should be administered in both forms wherever the people so desired. The priest does not change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; no priest has such mystical potency; but to the fervent communicant Christ comes spiritually and substantially, not through any miraculous transformation by a priest, but by His own will and power; He is present in the Eucharist along with bread and wine, by consubstantiation, not by transubstantiation.⁵⁰ Luther rejected with horror the notion that in the Mass the priest offers up Christ to His Father as a sacrifice in atonement for man’s sins—though he found nothing horrible in the idea that God had allowed man to crucify God as a sacrifice to God in atonement for man’s sins.

To these theological subtleties he added some ethical novelties. Marriage is not a sacrament, for Christ made no promise to infuse it with divine grace. “The marriages of the ancients were no less sacred than ours, nor are those of unbelievers less true.”⁵¹ Consequently there should be no prohibition of marriage between Christians and non-Christians. “Just as I may eat, drink, sleep, walk...and do business with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk, or a heretic, so also I may marry any of them. Do not give heed to the fool’s law which forbids this... A heathen is just as much a man or a woman created by God as St. Peter, St. Paul, or St. Lucy.”⁵² A woman married to an impotent husband should be allowed, if he consents, to have intercourse with another man in order to have a child, and should be permitted to pass the child off as her husband’s. If the husband refuses consent she may justly divorce him. Yet divorce is an endless tragedy; perhaps bigamy would be better.⁵³ Then, adding defiance to heresy, Luther concluded: “I hear a rumor of new bulls and papal maledictions sent out against me, in which I am urged to recant.... If that is true, I desire this book to be a portion of the recantation I shall make.”⁵⁴

Such a taunt should have deflected Miltitz from still dreaming of a reconciliation. Nevertheless he again sought out Luther (October 11, 1520), and persuaded him to send to Pope Leo a letter disclaiming any intent to attack him personally, and presenting temperately the case for reform. For his part Miltitz would try to secure a revocation of the bull. Luther, the thirty-seven-year-old “peasant, son of a peasant” (as he proudly called himself), wrote a letter not of apology but of almost paternal counsel to the forty-five-year-old heir of St. Peter and the Medici. He expressed his respect for the Pope as an individual, but condemned without compromise the corruption of the papacy in the past, and of the papal Curia in the present:

Along with this letter Luther sent to Leo the third of his manifestoes. He called it A Treatise on Christian Liberty (November 1520), and felt that “unless I am deceived, it is the whole of Christian living in a brief form.”⁵⁶ Here he expressed with uncongenial moderation his basic doctrine—that faith alone, not good works, makes the true Christian and saves him from hell. For it is faith in Christ that makes a man good; his good works follow from that faith. “The tree bears fruit, the fruit does not bear the tree.”⁵⁷ A man firm in his faith in the divinity and redeeming sacrifice of Christ enjoys not freedom of will, but the profoundest freedom of all: freedom from his own carnal nature, from all evil powers, from damnation, even from law; for the man whose virtue flows spontaneously from his faith needs no commands to righteousness.⁵⁸ Yet this free man must be servant to all men, for he will not be happy if he fails to do all in his power to save others as well as himself. He is united to God by faith, to his neighbor by love. Every believing Christian is a ministering priest.

While Luther was writing these historic treatises, Eck and Aleander were encountering the religious revolution at first hand. In Meissen, Merseburg, and Brandenburg they were successful in proclaiming the bull of excommunication; at Nuremberg they elicited apologies from Pirkheimer and Spengler; at Mainz Archbishop Albrecht, after flirting a while with the Reformation, excluded Hutten from his court and imprisoned the printers of Hutten’s books; at Ingolstadt Luther’s books were confiscated, and in Mainz, Louvain, and Cologne they were burned. But at Leipzig, Torgau, and Döbeln the posted bull was pelted with dirt and torn down; at Erfurt many professors and clergymen joined in a general refusal to recognize the bull, and students threw all available copies into the river; finally Eck fled from the scenes of his triumphs a year before.⁵⁹

Luther denounced the ban in a series of bitter pamphlets, in one of which he fully approved the doctrines of Huss. About August 31, 1520, as “a single flea daring to address the king of kings,” he appealed to the Emperor for protection; and on November 17 he published a formal appeal from the Pope to a free council of the Church. When he learned that the papal envoys were burning his books, he decided to reply in kind. He issued an invitation to the “pious and studious youths” of Wittenberg to assemble outside the Elster gate of the city on the morning of December 10. There, with his own hands, he cast the papal bull into a fire, along with some canonical decretals and volumes of Scholastic theology; in one act he symbolized his rejection of canon law, of Aquinas’s philosophy, and of any coercive authority of the Church. The students joyfully collected other books of the kind, and with them kept the fire burning till late afternoon.

On December 11 Luther proclaimed that no man could be saved unless he renounced the rule of the papacy.⁶⁰ The monk had excommunicated the pope.

V. THE DIET OF WORMS: 1521

A third actor now mounted the stage, and from this moment played through thirty years a major role in the conflict of theologies and states. In a dozen chapters he will impinge upon our narrative.

The future Emperor Charles V began with a royal but tarnished heredity. His paternal grandparents were the Emperor Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his maternal grandparents were Ferdinand and Isabella; his father was Philip the Handsome, King of Castile at twenty-six, dead at twenty-eight; his mother was Juana la Loca, who went insane when Charles was six, and survived till he was fifty-five. He was born in Ghent (February 24, 1500), was brought up in Brussels, and remained Flemish in speech and character till his final retirement in Spain; neither Spain nor Germany forgave him. But in time he learned to speak German, Spanish, Italian, and French, and could be silent in five languages. Adrian of Utrecht tried to teach him philosophy, with inconsiderable success. From this good bishop he received a strong infusion of religious orthodoxy, yet he probably imbibed, in middle age, a secret skepticism from his Flemish advisers and courtiers, among whom an Erasmian indifference to dogma was smilingly popular. Some priests complained of the freedom allowed to religious opinion in Charles’s entourage.⁶¹ He made a point of piety, but studied carefully the art of war. He read Comines, and learned almost in childhood the tricks of diplomacy and the unmorality of states.

On his father’s death (1506) he inherited Flanders, Holland, Franche-Comté, and a claim to Burgundy. At fifteen he assumed the government, and devoted himself to administration. At sixteen he became Charles I, King of Spain, Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, and Spanish America. At nineteen he aspired to be emperor. Francis I of France sought the same honor at the same time, and the Imperial Electors were pleased with his douceurs; but Charles spent 850,000 florins on the contest, and won (1519). To assemble this heavy Trinkgelt he borrowed 543,000 florins from the Fuggers;⁶² from that time Charles was for the Fuggers and the Fuggers were for Charles. When he dallied in repaying the loan, Jakob Fugger II sent him a sharp reminder:

Charles met part of his obligation by giving the Fuggers a lien on the port duties of Antwerp.⁶⁴ When the Fuggers were almost ruined by Turkish conquests in Hungary, he came to their rescue by turning over to them control of Spanish mines.⁶⁵ Henceforth the key to much political history would be Cherchez le banquier.

The youth who at nineteen found himself titular head of all Central and Western Europe except England, France, Portugal, and the Papal States was already marked by the feeble health that was to multiply his vicissitudes. Pale, short, homely, with aquiline nose and sharp, challenging chin, feeble in voice and grave of mien, he was kindly and affable by nature, but he soon learned that a ruler must maintain distance and bearing, that silence is half of diplomacy, and that an open sense of humor dims the aura of royalty. Aleander, meeting him in 1520, reported to Leo X: “This prince seems to me well endowed with .... prudence beyond his years, and to have much more at the back of his head than he carries on his face.”⁶⁶ He was not mentally keen, except in judging men—which is half the battle; he barely rose to the crises that confronted him—but that was much indeed. A conserving indolence of body and mind kept him inert until the situation demanded decision; then he met it with sudden resolution and resourceful pertinacity. Wisdom came to him not by nature but by trials.

On October 23, 1520, Charles V, no older than the century, went to Charlemagne’s Aachen to be crowned. Elector Frederick started out to attend the ceremony, but was stopped at Cologne by gout. There Aleander presented to him another plea for the arrest of Luther. Frederick called in Erasmus and asked his advice. Erasmus defended Luther, pointed out that there were crying abuses in the Church, and argued that efforts to remedy them should not be suppressed. When Frederick asked him what were Luther’s chief errors, he replied: “Two: he attacked the pope in his crown and the monks in their bellies.”⁶⁷ He questioned the authenticity of the papal bull; it seemed to him irreconcilable with the known gentleness of Leo X.⁶⁸ Frederick informed the nuncio that Luther had lodged an appeal, and that until its results were known, Luther should remain free.

The Emperor gave the same answer; he had promised the electors, as a condition of his election, that no German would be condemned without a fair trial in Germany. However, his position made orthodoxy imperative. He was more firmly established as King of Spain than as Emperor in a Germany that resented centralized government; and the clergy of Spain would not long bear with a monarch lenient to heretics. Besides, war loomed with France; it would be fought over Milan as the prize; there the support of the pope would be worth an army. The Holy Roman Empire was tied to the papacy in a hundred ways; the fall of one would profoundly injure the other; how could the Emperor rule his scattered and diverse realm without the aid of the Church in moral discipline and political administration? Even now his chief ministers were clergymen. And he needed ecclesiastical funds and influence to protect Hungary from the Turks.

It was with these varied problems in mind, rather than the question of a refractory monk, that Charles summoned an Imperial Diet to meet at Worms. But when the leading nobles and clergy, and representatives of the free cities, assembled there (January 27, 1521), Luther was the chief topic of conversation. The forces that through centuries had been preparing the Reformation came now to a head in one of the most dramatic scenes in European history. “The great body of the German nobles,” says a Catholic historian, “applauded and seconded Luther’s attempts.” ⁶⁹ Aleander himself reported:

The excitement was fanned by a whirlwind of antipapal pamphlets; a wagon, mourned Aleander, would not hold all these scurrilous tracts. From Sickingen’s castle of Ebernburg, a few miles from Worms, Hutten issued a frantic attack on the German clergy:

So strong was the sentiment for Luther that the Emperor’s confessor, the Franciscan monk Jean Glapion, privately approached Frederick’s chaplain, Georg Spalatin, in an attempt at conciliation. He professed considerable sympathy for Luther’s early writings, but the Babylonian Captivity had made him feel “as if he had been scourged and pummeled from head to foot.” He pointed out that no system of religious belief could be securely based upon Scripture, for “the Bible is like soft wax, which every man can twist and stretch according to his pleasure.” He admitted urgent need for ecclesiastical reform; indeed, he had warned his Imperial penitent that “God will punish him and all princes if they do not free the Church from such overweening abuses”; and he promised that Charles would accomplish the major reforms within five years. Even now, after those terrible Lutheran blasts, he thought peace possible if Luther would recant.⁷² Luther, apprised of this at Wittenberg, refused.

On March 3 Aleander presented to the Diet a proposal for the immediate condemnation of Luther. The Diet protested that the monk should not be condemned without a hearing. Charles thereupon invited Luther to come to Worms and testify concerning his teaching and his books. “You need fear no violence or molestation,” he wrote, “for you have our safe-conduct.”⁷³ Luther’s friends begged him not to go, and reminded him of the safe-conduct that the Emperor Sigismund had given Huss. Adrian of Utrecht, now Cardinal of Tortosa, soon to be pope, sent a plea to his former pupil, the Emperor, to ignore the safe-conduct, arrest Luther, and send him to Rome. On April 2 Luther left Wittenberg. At Erfurt a large crowd, including forty professors from the university, hailed him as a hero. When he approached Worms Spalatin rushed a warning to him not to enter, but rather to hurry back to Wittenberg. Luther answered: “Though there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I will go there.”⁷⁴ A band of knights rode out to meet him and escort him into the city (April 16). The streets filled at news of his arrival; 2,000 people gathered around his carriage; all the world came to see him, said Aleander, and even Charles was cast into the shade.

On April 17 Luther, in his monastic garb, appeared before the Diet: the Emperor, six electors, an awesome court of princes, nobles, prelates, and burghers, and Jerome Aleander armed with papal authority, formal documents, and forensic eloquence. On a table near Luther stood a collection of his books. Johann Eck—not he of the Leipzig debate but an official of the archbishop of Trier—asked him were these his compositions, and would he retract all heresies contained in them? For a moment, standing before the assembled dignity of the Empire and the delegated power and majesty of the Church, Luther’s courage failed him. He replied in a low and diffident voice that the books were his, but as to the second question he begged time to consider. Charles granted him a day. Back in his lodging he received a message from Hutten beseeching him to stand fast; and several members of the Diet came privately to encourage him. Many seemed to feel that his final answer would mark a turning point in history.

On April 18 he faced the Diet with fuller confidence. Now the chamber was so crowded that even the electors found it difficult to reach their seats, and most of those present stood. Eck asked him would he repudiate, in whole or in part, the works that he had written. He replied that those portions that dealt with ecclesiastical abuses were by common consent just. The Emperor interrupted him with an explosive “No!”—but Luther went on, and hit at Charles himself: “Should I recant at this point, I would open the door to more tyranny and impiety, and it will be all the worse should it appear that I had done so at the instance of the Holy Roman Empire.” As to the doctrinal passages in his books, he agreed to retract any that should be proved contrary to Scripture. To this Eck, in Latin, made an objection that well expressed the view of the Church:

Luther made his historic response in German:

Eck countered that no error could be proved in the doctrinal decrees of the councils; Luther answered that he was prepared to prove such errors, but the Emperor intervened peremptorily: “It is enough; since he has denied councils, we wish to hear no more.”⁷⁸ Luther returned to his lodging weary with the strife, but confident that he had borne good testimony in what Carlyle was to call “the greatest moment in the modern history of man.”⁷⁹ The Emperor was as shaken as the monk. Born to the purple, and already accustomed to authority, he thought it self-evident that the right of each individual to interpret Scripture, and to accept or reject civil or ecclesiastical decrees according to private judgment and conscience, would soon erode the very foundations of social order, for this seemed to him based on a moral code that in turn derived its strength from the supernatural sanctions of religious belief. On April 19 he called the leading princes to a conference in his own chambers, and presented to them a declaration of faith and intent, written in French, and apparently by himself:

Four electors agreed to this procedure; Frederick of Saxony and Ludwig of the Palatinate abstained. That night—April 19—anonymous persons posted upon the door of the town hall, and elsewhere in Worms, placards bearing the German symbol of social revolution, the peasant’s shoe. Some ecclesiastics were frightened, and privately solicited Luther to make his peace with the Church, but he stood by his statement to the Diet. On April 26 he began his return journey to Wittenberg. Leo X sent orders that the safeconduct should be respected.⁸¹ Nevertheless the Elector Frederick, fearful that Imperial police might attempt to arrest Luther after the expiration of the safe-conduct on May 6, arranged, with Luther’s reluctant consent, to have him ambushed en route homeward as if by highwaymen, and taken for concealment to the castle of Wartburg.

On May 6 the Emperor presented to the Diet—now thinned by many departures—the draft that Aleander had prepared of the “Edict of Worms.” It charged that Luther

Two days after the presentation of this edict Leo X transferred his political support from Francis I to Charles V. The rump Diet agreed to the edict, and on May 26 Charles promulgated it formally. Aleander praised God, and ordered that the books of Luther should be burned wherever found.

VI. THE RADICALS

The Wartburg was in itself a somber punishment. The ancient castle, perched on a mountaintop a mile from Eisenach, was hidden from the world as well as from the Emperor. For almost ten months (May 4, 1521, to February 29, 1522) Luther dwelt there in a gloomy chamber equipped with bed, table, stove, and a stump as a stool. A few soldiers guarded the fortress, a warden tended the grounds, two boys served Luther as pages. For convenience, and perhaps as a local disguise, he shed his monastic robe, donned knightly garb, and grew a beard; he was now Junker George. He went out hunting, but he did not relish killing rabbits when there were so many Antichrists still unslain. Idleness and insomnia, and too much food and beer, made him ill and stout. He fretted and cursed like a Junker. “I had rather burn on live coals,” he wrote, “than rot here.... I want to be in the fray.”⁸³ But Frederick’s minister advised him to stay in hiding for a year while Charles’s fervor cooled. Charles, however, made no effort to find or arrest him.

In Luther’s intellectual solitude doubts and hallucinations plagued him. Could it be, he wondered, that he was right and so many pundits wrong? Was it wise to break down the authority of the established creed? Did the principle of private judgment portend the rise of revolution and the death of law? If we may believe the story that he told in his anecdotage, he was disturbed, in the castle, by strange noises that he could explain only as the activity of demons. He professed to have seen Satan on several occasions; once, he vouched, the Devil pelted him with nuts;⁸⁴ once, says a famous legend, Luther flung an ink bottle at him, but missed his aim.⁸⁵ He solaced himself by writing vivid letters to his friends and his enemies, by composing theological treatises, and by translating the New Testament into German. Once he made a flying trip to Wittenberg to harness a revolution.

His defiance at Worms, and his survival, had given his followers a heady elation. At Erfurt students, artisans, and peasants attacked and demolished forty parish houses, destroyed libraries and rent rolls, and killed a humanist (June 1521). In the fall of that exciting year the Augustinian friars of Erfurt abandoned their monastery, preached the Lutheran creed, and denounced the Church as “mother of dogma, pride, avarice, luxury, faithlessness, and hypocrisy.”⁸⁶ At Wittenberg, while Melanchthon composed his Loci communes rerum theologicarum (1521)—the first systematic exposition of Protestant theology—his fellow professor Carlstadt, now archdeacon of the Castle Church, demanded that Mass should be said (if at all) in the vernacular, that the Eucharist should be given in wine and bread without preliminary confession or fasting, that religious images should be removed from churches, and that the clergy—monks as well as secular priests—should marry and procreate. Carlstadt set a pace by marrying, at forty, a girl of fifteen (January 19,1522).

Luther approved of this marriage, but “Good Heavens!” he wrote, “will our Wittenbergers give wives to monks?”⁸⁷ Nevertheless he found something attractive in the idea, for he sent to Spalatin (November 21, 1521) a treatise On Monastic Vows, defending their repudiation. Spalatin delayed its publication, for it was unconventionally frank. It accepted the sexual instinct as natural and irrepressible, and declared that monastic vows were lures of Satan, multiplying sins. Four years would elapse before Luther himself would marry; his belated appreciation of woman apparently played no part in inaugurating the Reformation.

The revolution proceeded. On September 22, 1521, Melanchthon administered communion in both kinds; here the Utraquists of Bohemia won a delayed victory. On October 2 3 the Mass ceased to be said in Luther’s monastery. On November 12 thirteen of the monks walked out of the cloister and headed for marriage; soon a similar exodus would empty half the monasteries of Germany. On December 3 some students and townsfolk, armed with knives, entered the parish church of Wittenberg, drove the priests from the altars, and stoned some worshipers who were praying before a statue of the Virgin. On December 4 forty students demolished the altars of the Franciscan monastery in Wittenberg. On that same day Luther, still disguised as a Junker, clandestinely visited the city, approved the marriage of the monks, but warned clergy and laity against violence. “Constraint,” he said, “is not all ruled out, but it must be exercised by the constituted authorities.”⁸⁸ On the morrow he returned to the Wartburg.

Shortly thereafter he sent to Spalatin, for publication, an Earnest Exhortation for All Christians, Warning Them against Insurrection and Rebellion. He feared that if the religious revolution went too fast, or became a social revolution, it would alienate the nobility and destroy itself. But its opening pages were themselves criticized as an incitation to violence:

Nevertheless, he went on, it is inadvisable for private individuals to use force; vengeance is God’s.

Revolution, more or less peaceful, continued. On Christmas Day 1521, Carlstadt celebrated Mass in German, in civilian dress, and invited all to receive communion by taking the bread in their hands and drinking from the chalice. About this time Gabriel Zwilling, a leader of the Augustinian Congregation, invited his hearers to burn religious pictures and demolish altars wherever found. On December 27 oil was poured upon the fire by “prophets” arriving from Zwickau. That town was one of the most industrial in Germany, having a large population of weavers under a municipal government of merchant employers. A socialist movement among the workers was encouraged by echoes and memories of the suppressed Taborite experiment that had agitated near-by Bohemia. Thomas Münzer, pastor of the weavers’ church of St. Catherine, became the mouthpiece of their aspirations, and at the same time an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation. Realizing that Luther’s exaltation of the Bible as the sole rule of faith opened the question who should interpret the text, Münzer and two associates—Nicholas Storch the weaver and Marcus Stübner the scholar—announced that they were singularly qualified as interpreters, for they felt themselves directly inspired by the Holy Ghost. This divine spirit, they declared, bade them defer baptism till maturity; for the sacrament could have effect only through faith, which was not to be expected of babies. The world, they predicted, was soon to suffer a general devastation, in which all ungodly men—including especially all orthodox priests—would perish; thereafter the communistic Kingdom of God would begin on earth.⁹¹ In 1521 an insurrection of the weavers was put down, and the three “Zwickau Apostles” were banished. Münzer went to Prague, was expelled, and took a pastorate in Allstedt in Saxony. Storch and Stübner went to Wittenberg, and in the absence of Luther they made a favorable impression on Melanchthon and Carlstadt.

On January 6, 1522, the Augustinian Congregation at Wittenberg completely disbanded. On January 22 Carlstadt’s adherents were strong enough in the municipal council to carry a decree ordering all images to be removed from Wittenberg churches, and prohibiting Mass except in Carlstadt’s simplified form. Carlstadt included the crucifix among forbidden images, and, like the early Christians, banned music from religious services. “The lascivious notes of the organ,” he said, “awaken thoughts of the world. When we should be meditating on the sufferings of Christ we are reminded of Pyramus and Thisbe.... . Relegate organs, trumpets, and flutes to the theater.”⁹² When the agents of the council proved dilatory in removing images, Carlstadt led his followers into the churches; pictures and crucifixes were torn from the walls, and resisting priests were pelted with stones.⁹³ Accepting the view of the Zwickau Prophets—that God speaks directly to men as well as through the Scriptures, and speaks rather to the simple in mind and heart than to the learned in languages and books—Carlstadt, himself erudite, proclaimed that schools and studies were deterrents to piety, and that real Christians would shun all letters and learning, and would become illiterate peasants or artisans. One of his followers, George Mohr, dismissed the school that he taught, and exhorted the parents to keep their children innocent of letters. Several students left the university and went home to learn a handicraft, saying that there was no further need for study.

Hearing of all this, Luther feared that his conservative critics would soon be justified in their frequent predictions that his repudiation of ecclesiastical authority would loosen all bonds of social discipline. Defying the Emperor’s ban, and waiving all protection by the Elector should Charles seek to arrest him, Luther left his castle, resumed his monastic robe and tonsure, and hurried back to Wittenberg. On March 9, 1522, he began a series of eight sermons that sternly called the university, the churches, and the citizens to order. He now rejected all appeals to force; had he not freed millions of men from ecclesiastical oppression without lifting more than a pen? “Follow me,” he said. “I was the first whom God entrusted with this matter; I was the one to whom He first revealed how His Word should be preached to you. Therefore you have done wrong in starting such a piece of work without .... having first consulted me.... .⁹⁴ Give me time.... Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women; shall we then prohibit wine and abolish women? The sun, the moon, the stars, have been worshiped; shall we then pluck them out of the sky? “⁹⁵ Those who wished to keep pictures, statuary, crucifixes, music, or the Mass should not be interfered with; he himself approved of religious images.⁹⁶ He arranged that in one Wittenberg church the Mass should be performed according to the traditional rite; in another, communion was administered in bread alone at the high altar, but in bread and wine at a side altar. The form, said Luther, made little difference; what counted was the spirit in which the Eucharist was received.

He was at his best and most Christian in those eight sermons in eight days. He risked all on being able to win Wittenberg back to moderation, and he succeeded. The Zwickau Prophets sought to convert him to their views, and offered, as proof of their divine inspiration, to read his thoughts. He accepted the challenge; they answered that he was feeling a secret sympathy for their ideas; he attributed their clairvoyance to the Devil, and ordered them to leave Wittenberg. Carlstadt, dismissed from his posts by a reconstructed town council, took a pastorate in Orlamünde, from whose pulpit he denounced Luther as a “gluttonous ecclesiastic .... the new Wittenberg pope.”⁹⁷ Anticipating the Quakers, Carlstadt abandoned all clerical garb, donned a plain gray coat, dispensed with titles, asked to be called “Brother Andreas,” refused payment for his ministry, earned his living at the plow, renounced all use of drugs, preferred prayer to medicine, advocated polygamy as Biblical, and adopted a merely symbolical view of the Eucharist. At the Elector’s request Luther went to Orlamünde to preach against him, but was pelted out of the town with stones and mud.⁹⁸ When the Peasants’ Revolt collapsed, Carlstadt, fearing arrest as an instigator, sought and received refuge with Luther. After much wandering, the tired radical found port as a professor in Basel, and there, in 1541, he achieved a peaceful scholastic death.

VII. THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH

Luther resumed the uneven tenor of his ways as priest to his congregation and professor in the university. The Elector paid him 200 guilders ($5,000?) a year, to which each student added a slight honorarium for attending his lectures. Luther and another monk, now both in layman’s garb, lived in the Augustinian monastery with a student servant. “My bed was not made up for a whole year, and became foul with sweat. But I worked all day, and was so tired at night that I fell into bed without knowing that anything was amiss.”⁹⁹ Hard work made his appetite forgivable. “I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German, thank God, Amen.”¹⁰⁰ He preached often, but with humane brevity, and in simple, vigorous language that held his rough auditors in hand. His only recreations were chess and the flute; but he seems to have enjoyed more the hours that he spent in attacking “papists’.” He was the most powerful and uninhibited controversialist in history. Nearly all his writings were warfare, salted with humor and peppered with vituperation. He let his opponents elaborate superior Latin to be read by a few scholars; he too wrote Latin when he wished to address all Christendom; but most of his diatribes were composed in German, or: were at once translated into German, for his was a nationalist revolution. No other German author has equaled him in clarity or force of style, in directness and pungency of phrase, in happy—sometimes hilarious—similes, in a vocabulary rooted in the speech of the people, and congenial to the national mind.

Printing fell in with his purposes as a seemingly providential innovation, which he used with inexhaustible skill; he was the first to make it an engine of propaganda and war. There were no newspapers yet, nor magazines; battles were fought with books, pamphlets, and private letters intended for publication. Under the stimulus of Luther’s revolt the number of books printed in Germany rose from 150 in 1518 to 990 in 1524. Four fifths of these favored the Reformation. Books defending orthodoxy were hard to sell, while Luther’s were the most widely purchased of the age. They were sold not only in bookstores but by peddlers and traveling students; 1,400 copies were bought at one Frankfurt fair; even in Paris, in 1520, they outsold everything else. As early as 1519 they were exported to France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England. “Luther’s books are everywhere and in every language,” wrote Erasmus in 1521; “no one would believe how widely he has moved men.”¹⁰¹ The literary fertility of the Reformers transferred the preponderance of publications from southern to northern Europe, where it has remained ever since. Printing was the Reformation; Gutenberg made Luther possible.,

Luther’s supreme achievement as a writer was his translation of the Bible into German. Eighteen such translations had already been made, but they were based on Jerome’s Vulgate, were crowded with errors, and were awkwardly phrased. The difficulties of translating from the original were appalling; there were as yet no dictionaries from Hebrew or Greek into German; every page of text evoked a hundred problems of interpretation; and the German language itself was still crude and but half formed. For the New Testament Luther used the Greek text that Erasmus had edited with a Latin version in 1516. This part of the task was completed in 1521, and published in 1522. After twelve more years of labor, amid constant theological strife, but aided by Melanchthon and several Jewish scholars, Luther published the Old Testament in German. Despite their imperfect scholarship, these translations were epochal events. They inaugurated German literature, and established Neuhochdeutsch—the New High German of Upper Saxony—as the literary language of Germany. Yet the translations were deliberately unliterary, couched in the speech of the populace. In his usual vivid way Luther explained his method: “We must not, as asses do, ask the Latin letters how we should speak German, but we must ask the mothers in their houses, the children in the streets, the common people in the market place... we must be guided by them in translating; then they will understand us, and will know that we are speaking German to them.”¹⁰² Hence his translation had the same effect and prestige in Germany as the King James version in England a century later: it had endless and beneficent influence on the national speech, and is still the greatest prose work in the national literature. In Wittenberg, and during Luther’s lifetime, 100,000 copies of his New Testament were printed; a dozen unauthorized editions appeared elsewhere; and despite edicts forbidding its circulation in Brandenburg, Bavaria, and Austria, it became and remained the best-selling book in Germany. The translations of the Bible shared, as both effect and contributory cause, in that displacement of Latin by vernacular languages and literatures which accompanied the nationalist movement, and which corresponded to the defeat of the universal Church in lands that had not received and transformed the Latin tongue.

Laboring so long on the Bible, and inheriting the medieval view of its divine authorship, Luther fondly made it the all-sufficient source and norm of his religious faith. Though he accepted some traditions not based on Scripture—like infant baptism and the Sunday Sabbath—he rejected the right of the Church to add to Christianity elements resting not on the Bible but on her own customs and authority, like purgatory, indulgences, and the worship of Mary and the saints. Valla’s revelation of the “Donation of Constantine” (the supposed bequest of Western Europe to the popes) as a hoary hoax of history had shaken the faith of thousands of Christians in the reliability of Church traditions and the compulsive validity of Church decrees; and in 1537 Luther himself translated Valla’s treatise into German. Tradition was human and fallible, but the Bible was accepted by nearly all Europe as the infallible word of God.

Reason, too, seemed a weak instrument when compared with faith in a divine revelation. “We poor, wretched people... presumptuously seek to understand the incomprehensible majesty of the incomprehensible light of God’s wonders.... We look with blind eyes, like a mole, on the glory of God.”¹⁰³ You cannot, said Luther, accept both the Bible and reason; one or the other must go.

Luther condemned the Scholastic philosophers for making so many concessions to reason, for trying to prove Christian dogmas rationally, for trying to harmonize Christianity with the philosophy of that “cursed, conceited, wily heathen” Aristotle.¹⁰⁷

Nevertheless Luther took two steps in the direction of reason: he made the sermon, not ceremony, the center of religious ritual; and in the early days of his rebellion he proclaimed the right of every individual to interpret the Scriptures for himself. He drew up his own canon of authenticity for the books of the Bible: how far did they agree with the teaching of Christ? “Whatever does not preach Christ is not Apostolic, even though it be written by St. Peter or St. Paul.... . Whatever does preach Christ would be Apostolic even if it proceeded from Judas, Pilate, or Herod.”¹⁰⁸ He rejected the Epistle of James, and called it an “epistle of straw,” because he could not reconcile it with Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith; he questioned the Epistle to the Hebrews because it seemed to deny the validity of repentance after baptism (thereby upholding the Anabaptists); and at first he rated the Apocalypse as an unintelligible farrago of promises and threats “neither Apostolic nor Prophetic.”¹⁰⁹ “The Third Book of Esdras I throw into the Elbe.”¹¹⁰ Though based on whorish reason, most of his judgments on the canon of Scripture were accepted by later Biblical critics as intelligent and sound. “The discourses of the Prophets,” he said, “were none of them regularly committed to writing at the time; their disciples and hearers collected them subsequently.... . Solomon’s Proverbs were not the work of Solomon.” But Catholic opponents contended that his tests of authenticity and inspiration were subjective and arbitrary, and they predicted that after his example other critics would reject, according to their own tastes and views, other Scriptural books, until nothing would be left of the Bible as a basis for religious faith.

With the exceptions indicated, Luther defended the Bible as absolutely and literally true. He admitted that if the story of Jonah and the whale were not in Scripture he would laugh at it as a fable; so too with the tales of Eden and the serpent, of Joshua and the sun; but, he argued, once we accept the divine authorship of the Bible we must take these stories along with the rest as in every sense factual. He rejected as a form of atheism the attempts of Erasmus and others to harmonize Scripture and reason by allegorical interpretations.¹¹¹ Having himself won mental peace not through philosophy but through faith in Christ as presented in the Gospels, he clung to the Bible as the last refuge of the soul. As against the humanists and their worship of the pagan classics, he offered the Bible as no mere product of man’s intellect but as a divine gift and consolation. “It teaches us to see, feel, grasp, and comprehend faith, hope, and charity far otherwise than mere human reason can; and when evil oppresses us it teaches how these virtues throw light upon the darkness, and how, after this poor, miserable existence of ours on earth, there is another and eternal life.”¹¹² Asked on what basis he rested the divine inspiration of the Bible, he answered, simply, on its own teaching: none but God-inspired men could have formed so profound and solacing a faith.

VIII. LUTHER’S THEOLOGY

Though his theology was founded with trusting literalness on the Scriptures, his interpretation unconsciously retained late medieval traditions. His nationalism made him a modern, his theology belonged to the Age of Faith, His rebellion was far more against Catholic organization and ritual than against Catholic doctrine; most of this remained with him to the end. Even in his rebellion he followed Wyclif and Huss rather than any new scheme: like theirs his revolt lay in rejecting the papacy, the councils, the hierarchy, and any other guide to faith than the Bible; like them he called the pope Antichrist; and like them he found protection in the state. The line from Wyclif to Huss to Luther is the main thread of religious development from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Theologically the line was anchored on Augustine’s notions of predestination and grace, which in turn were rooted in the Epistles of Paul, who had never known Christ. Nearly all the pagan elements in Christianity fell away as Protestantism took form; the Judaic contribution triumphed over the Greek; the Prophets won against the Aristotle of the Scholastics and the Plato of the humanists; Paul—in the line of the Prophets rather than that of the Apostles—transformed Jesus into an atonement for Adam; the Old Testament overshadowed the New; Yahweh darkened the face of Christ.

Luther’s conception of God was Judaic. He could speak with eloquence of the divine mercy and grace, but more basic in him was the old picture of God as the avenger, and therefore of Christ as the final judge. He believed, without recorded protest, that God had drowned nearly all mankind in a flood, had set fire to Sodom, and had destroyed lands, peoples, and empires with a breath of His wrath and a wave of His hand. Luther reckoned that “few are saved, infinitely many are damned.”¹¹³ The mitigating myth of Mary as intercessor dropped out of the story, and left the Last Judgment in all its stark terror for naturally sinful men. Meanwhile God had appointed wild beasts, vermin, and wicked women to punish men for their sins. Occasionally Luther reminded himself that we know nothing about God except that a cosmic intelligence exists. When one troublesome young theologian asked him where God had been before the world was created, he answered, in his blunt Johnsonian way: “He was building hell for such presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you.”¹¹⁴

He took heaven and hell for granted, and believed in an early end of the world.¹¹⁵ He described a heaven of many delights, including pet dogs “with golden hair shining like precious stones”—a genial concession to his children, who had expressed concern over the damnation of their pets.¹¹⁶ He spoke as confidently as Aquinas about angels as bodiless and beneficent spirits. Sometimes he represented man as an endless bone of contention between good and bad angels, to whose differing dispositions and efforts were to be ascribed all the circumstances of man’s fate—a Zoroastrian intrusion into his theology. He accepted fully the medieval conception of devils wandering about the earth, bringing temptation, sin, and misfortune to men, and easing man’s way into hell. “Many devils are in woods, in waters, in wilderness, and in dark, pooly places, ready to hurt .... people; some are also in the thick black clouds.”¹¹⁷ Some of this may have been conscious pedagogical invention of helpful supernatural terrors; but Luther spoke so familiarly of devils that he seems to have believed all he said of them. “I know Satan very well,” he said, and detailed their conversations with each other.¹¹⁸ Sometimes he charmed the Devil by playing the flute;¹¹⁹ sometimes he frightened the poor Devil away by calling him filthy names.¹²⁰ He became so accustomed to ascribing to the Devil the eerie sounds of walls contracting in the cold of the night that when he was awakened by such noises, and could confidently conclude that they were made by Satan rambling about, he could resume his sleep in peace.¹²¹ He attributed to diabolical agency various unpleasant phenomena —hail, thunder, war, plague—and to divine action all beneficent events;¹²² he could hardly conceive of what we call natural law. All the Teutonic folklore about the poltergeist, or noise-making spirit, was apparently credited by Luther at its face value. Snakes and monkeys were favorite incarnations of the Devil.¹²³ The old notion that devils could lie with women and beget children seemed plausible to him; in one such case he recommended that the resultant child should be drowned.¹²⁴ He accepted magic and witchcraft as realities, and thought it a simple Christian duty to burn witches at the stake.¹²⁵ Most of these ideas were shared by his contemporaries, Catholic or Protestant. The belief in the power and ubiquity of devils attained in the sixteenth century an intensity not recorded in any other age; and this preoccupation with Satan bedeviled much of Protestant theology.

Luther’s philosophy was further darkened by the conviction that man is by nature wicked and prone to sin.* As punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve the divine image was torn from the human heart, leaving only natural inclinations. “No one is by nature Christian or pious .... the world and the masses are and always will be unchristian.... . The wicked always outnumber the good.”¹²⁶ Even in the good man evil actions outnumber the good, for he cannot escape from his nature; as Paul said, “There is none righteous, no, not one.” “We are the children of wrath,” Luther felt, “and all our works, intentions, and thoughts are nothing at all in the balance against our sins.”¹²⁷ So far as good works go, every one of us would merit damnation. By “good works” Luther meant especially those forms of ritual piety recommended by the Church—fasting, pilgrimages, prayers to the saints, Masses for the dead, indulgences, processions, gifts to the Church; but he also included all “works, whatever their character.”¹²⁸ He did not question the need of charity and love for a healthy social life, but he felt that even a life blessed with such virtues could not earn an eternity of bliss. “The Gospel preaches nothing of the merit of works;† he that says the Gospel requires works for salvation, I say flat and plain he is a liar.”¹²⁹ No amount of good works could atone for the sins—each an insult to an infinite deity—committed by the best of men. Only the redeeming sacrifice of Christ—the suffering and death of the Son of God—could atone for man’s sins; and only belief in that divine atonement can save us from hell. As Paul said to the Romans, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”¹³⁰ It is this faith that “justifies”—makes a man just despite his sins, and eligible for salvation. Christ Himself said: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.”¹³¹ “Wherefore,” reasoned Luther, “it ought to be the first concern of every Christian to lay aside all trust in works, and more and more strengthen faith alone.”¹³² And he proceeded, in a passage that disturbed some theologians but comforted many sinners:

This may have been intended to comfort and revive some sensitive souls who were taking their sins too much to heart; Luther could recall how he too had once magnified the majestic unforgivability of his sins. But to some it sounded very much like Tetzel’s alleged “drop the coin in the box and all your sins fly away”; faith was now to do all the wonders formerly claimed for confession, absolution, contribution, and indulgence. Still more arresting was a passage in which the hearty and ebullient Luther found a good word to say for sin itself. When the Devil tempts us with annoying persistency, he said, it may be wise to yield him a sin or two.

Such lusty and humorous obiter dicta invited misconstruction. Some of Luther’s followers interpreted him as condoning fornication, adultery, murder. A Lutheran professor had to caution Lutheran preachers to say as little as possible about justification by faith alone.¹³⁵ However, by faith Luther meant no merely intellectual assent to a proposition, but vital, personal selfcommittal to a practical belief; and he was confident that complete belief in God’s grace given because of Christ’s redeeming death would make a man so basically good that an occasional frolic with the flesh would do no lasting harm; faith would soon bring the sinner back to spiritual health. He heartily approved of good works;¹³⁶ what he denied was their efficacy for salvation. “Good works,” he said, “do not make a good man, but a good man does good works.”¹³⁷ And what makes a man good? Faith in God and Christ.

How does a man come to such saving faith? Not through his merits, but as a divine gift granted, regardless of merits, to those whom God has chosen to save. As St. Paul put it, remembering the case of Pharaoh, “God has mercy on whom He will have mercy; and whom He wills He hardens.”¹³⁸ By divine predestination the elect are chosen for eternal happiness, the rest are left graceless and damned to everlasting hell.¹³⁹

So Luther, in his medieval reaction against a paganizing Renaissance Church, went back not only to Augustine but to Tertullian: Credo quia incredibile; it seemed to him a merit to believe in predestination because it was, to reason, unbelievable. Yet it was, he thought, by hard logic that he was driven to this incredibility. The theologian who had written so eloquently about the “freedom of a Christian man” now (1525), in a treatise De servo arbitrio, argued that if God is omnipotent He must be the sole cause of all actions, including man’s; that if God is omniscient He foresees everything, and everything must happen as He has foreseen it; that therefore all events, through all time, have been predetermined in His mind, and are forever fated to be. Luther concluded, like Spinoza, that man is as “unfree as a block of wood, a rock, a lump of clay, or a pillar of salt.”¹⁴¹ More strangely still, the same divine foresight deprives the angels, nay, God Himself, of freedom; He too must act as He has foreseen; His foresight is His fate. A lunatic fringe interpreted this doctrine ad libitum: a youth beheaded his brother and attributed the act to God, of Whom he was merely the helpless agent; and another logician stamped his wife to death with his heels, crying, “Now is the Father’s will accomplished.”¹⁴²

Most of these conclusions lay annoyingly implicit in medieval theology, and were deduced by Luther from Paul and Augustine with irrefutable consistency. He seemed willing to accept medieval theology if he might disown the Renaissance Church; he could tolerate the predestination of the multitudinous damned more easily than the authority of scandalous tax gathering popes. He rejected the ecclesiastical definition of the Church as the prelacy; he defined it as the community of believers in the divinity and redeeming passion of Christ; but he echoed papal doctrine when he wrote: “All people who seek and labor to come to God through any other means than only through Christ (as Jews, Turks, Papists, false saints, heretics, etc.) walk in horrible darkness and error, and so at last must die and be lost in their sins.”¹⁴³ Here, reborn in Wittenberg, was the teaching of Boniface VIII and the Council of Rome (1302) that extra ecclesiam nulla salus—” no salvation outside the Church.”

The most revolutionary item in Luther’s theology was his dethronement of the priest. He allowed for priests not as indispensable dispensers of the sacraments, nor as privileged mediators with God, but only as servants chosen by each congregation to minister to its spiritual wants. By marrying and raising a family these ministers would shed the aura of sanctity that had made the priesthood awesomely powerful; they would be “first among equals,” but any man might at need perform their functions, even to absolving a penitent from sin. Monks should abandon their selfish and often idle isolation, should marry and labor with the rest; the man at the plow, the woman in the kitchen, serve God better than the monk mumbling in stupefying repetition unintelligible prayers. And prayers should be the direct communion of the soul with God, not appeals to half-legendary saints. The adoration of the saints, in Luther’s judgment, was not a friendly and consoling intercourse of the lonely living with the holy dead; it was a relapse into primitive polytheistic idolatry.¹⁴⁴

As for the sacraments, viewed as priestly ceremonies conferring divine grace, Luther severely reduced their role. They involve no miraculous powers, and their efficacy depends, not on their forms and formulas, but on the faith of the recipient. Confirmation, matrimony, episcopal ordination of priests, and extreme unction of the dying are rites to which no special promise of divine grace is attached in Scripture; the new religion could dispense with them. Baptism has the warrant of St. John the Baptist’s example. Auricular confession may be retained as a sacrament, despite some doubt as to its Scriptural basis.* The supreme sacrament is the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist. The notion that a priest, by the incantation of his words, can change bread into Christ seemed to Luther absurd and blasphemous; nevertheless, he argued, Christ of His own will comes down from heaven to be present consubstantially with the bread and wine of the sacrament. The Eucharist is no priestly magic, but a divine and perpetual miracle.¹⁴⁵

Luther’s doctrine of the sacraments, his replacement of the Mass by the Lord’s Supper, and his theory of salvation by faith rather than by good works, undermined the authority of the clergy in northern Germany, Furthering this process, Luther rejected episcopal courts and canon law. In Lutheran Europe civil courts became the only courts, secular power the only legal power. Secular rulers appointed Church personnel, appropriated Church property, took over Church schools and monastic charities. Theoretically Church and state remained independent; actually the Church became subject to the state. The Lutheran movement, which thought to submit all life to theology, unwittingly, unwillingly, advanced that pervasive secularization which is a basic theme of modern life.

IX. THE REVOLUTIONIST

When some bishops sought to silence Luther and his followers, he emitted an angry roar that was almost a tocsin of revolution. In a pamphlet “Against the Falsely Called Spiritual Order of the Pope and the Bishops” (July 1522), he branded the prelates as the “biggest wolves” of all, and called upon all good Germans to drive them out by force.

He was at this time almost as critical of the state as of the Church. Stung by the prohibition of the sale or possession of his New Testament in regions under orthodox rulers, he wrote, in the fall of 1522, a treatise On Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. He began amiably enough by approving St. Paul’s doctrine of civil obedience and the divine origin of the state. This apparently contradicted his own teaching as to the perfect freedom of the Christian man. Luther explained that though true Christians do not need law, and will not use law or force on one another, they must obey the law as good examples to the majority, who are not true Christians, for without law the sinful nature of man would tear a society to pieces. Nevertheless the authority of the state should end where the realm of the spirit begins. Who are these princes that assume to dictate what people shall read or believe?

A Bavarian chancellor charged that this was a treasonable call to revolution. Duke George denounced it as scandalous, and urged Elector Frederick to suppress the publication. Frederick let it pass with his usual equanimity. What would the princes have said had they read Luther’s letter to Wenzel Link (March 19, 1522)?—“We are triumphing over the papal tyranny, which formerly crushed kings and princes; how much more easily, then, shall we not overcome and trample down the princes themselves!” ¹⁴⁸ Or if they had seen his definition of the Church?—“I believe that there is on earth, wise as the world, but one holy, common Christian Church, which is no other than the community of the saints.... I believe that in this community or Christendom all things are in common, and each man’s goods are the other’s, and nothing is simply a man’s own.” ¹⁴⁹

These were casual ebullitions, and should not have been taken too literally. Actually Luther was a conservative, even a reactionary, in politics and religion, in the sense that he wished to return to early medieval beliefs and ways. He considered himself a restorer, not an innovator. He would have been content to preserve and perpetuate the agricultural society that he had known in his childhood, with some humane improvements. He agreed with the medieval Church in condemning interest, merely adding, in his jovial way, that interest was an invention of Satan. He regretted the growth of foreign trade, called commerce a “nasty business,” ¹⁵⁰ and despised those who lived by buying cheap and selling dear. He denounced as “manifest robbers” the monopolists who were conspiring to raise prices; “the authorities would do right if they took from such people everything they have, and drove them out of the country.”¹⁵¹ He thought it was high time to “put a bit in the mouth of the Fuggers.”¹⁵² And he concluded ominously, in a blast On Trade and Usury (1524):

It was.