The Personal Luther, Essays on the Reformer from a Cultural Historical Perspective (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History) 9004348875, 9789004348875

Table of contents :
The Personal Luther: Essays on the Reformer from a Cultural Historical Perspective
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 Luther’s Ego-documents: Cultural History and the Reconstruction of the Historical Self
2 Luther’s Conscience: A Template for the Modern West?
3 Luther’s Friendship with Frederick the Wise
4 Luther’s Relational God. Finding a Loving Heavenly Father
5 Fleshly Work. The Sex Act as Christian Liberty
6 The Masculinity of Martin Luther. Theory, Practicality, and Humour
7 The Tenderness of Daughters, the Waywardness of Sons. Martin Luther as a Father
8 Martin Luther’s Heart
9 Martin Luther’s Perfect Death
10 The Imprint of Personality upon the Reformation
Index

Citation preview

The Personal Luther

St Andrews Studies in Reformation History Lead Editor Bridget Heal (University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Amy Burnett (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Euan Cameron (Columbia University) Bruce Gordon (Yale University) Kaspar von Greyerz (Universität Basel) Felicity Heal (Jesus College, Oxford) Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) Karin Maag (Calvin College, Grand Rapids) Roger Mason (University of St Andrews) Alec Ryrie (Durham University) Jonathan Willis (University of Birmingham)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sasrh

The Personal Luther Essays on the Reformer from a Cultural Historical Perspective

By

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Gustav Adolph Spangenberg (1828–1891). Luther im Kreise seiner Familie, 1866. Inv.-Nr.: G 234. Courtesy of bpk / Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig / Michael Ehritt. Chapter 6, “The Masculinity of Martin Luther: Theory, Practicality, and Humor”, was previously published in Masculinity in the Reformation Era by Scott H. Hendix and Susan S. Karant-Nunn (eds.) (Truman State University Press, 2008). Chapter 7, “The Tenderness of Daughters, the Waywardness of Sons. Martin Luther as a Father” was previously published in Revisiting the Vineyard. Essays on Scott Hendrix’s Thesis on the Reformation as Christianization by Anna Marie Johnson and John A. Maxfield (eds.) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010) 245-255. Chapter 8, “Martin Luther’s Heart”, will also be published in Performing Emotions in early Europe by Joanne McEwan & Anne Scott (eds.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017040735

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2468-4317 isbn 978-90-04-34887-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34888-2 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To Luise and Ute

∵

Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface Xi 1

Luther’s Ego-documents: Cultural History and the Reconstruction of the Historical Self 1

2 Luther’s Conscience: A Template for the Modern West? 25 3 Luther’s Friendship with Frederick the Wise 46 4 Luther’s Relational God. Finding a Loving Heavenly Father 67 5 Fleshly Work. The Sex Act as Christian Liberty 96 6 The Masculinity of Martin Luther. Theory, Practicality, and Humour 120 7 The Tenderness of Daughters, the Waywardness of Sons. Martin Luther as a Father 141 8

Martin Luther’s Heart 155

9

Martin Luther’s Perfect Death 174

10 The Imprint of Personality upon the Reformation 204 Index 221

Acknowledgments In 2006, at a Washington, d.c. meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Lyndal Roper and I sat down after a session devoted to her book, Witch craze. Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany.1 We each desired to know what the other was working on now. She gasped when I said that I was writing about Luther’s body. It quickly came out that we shared similar interests and comparable intentions. As mature historians and congenial colleagues, we quickly realized that the results of our researches would be entirely different. Her labors of a decade have resulted in a full-fledged biography of great length. It has been published in Great Britain and will appear in America in March 2017. At my initial drafting of this manuscript, I had not yet seen it. I acknowledge, nevertheless, the stimulus and model of her scholarship. For my part, I tended to steer away from producing a book that focused as closely as I had thought on ­Luther’s physicality, and images of physicality, per se. I had thought about Luther for forty years, and each time I read in—one hardly reads the whole of D. Martin Luthers Werke—the definitive Weimar edition, I found my attention drawn to topics that constituted recurring themes throughout the great Reformer’s massive opus, or should I say corpus. Beginning in the 1980s, I b­ egan to write in a desultory way, as conference papers and lectures, inasmuch as I working on other subjects for book-length treatments: Luther’s sexuality, his relationship with his wife, his practice of fatherhood. These papers in extended and modified form are included here with the kind permission of their original publishers. Owing to historiographic currents around me, I increasingly thought about other themes that were, I realized, all at least obliquely related to Luther’s emotions as well as other dimensions of his personal existence. During 2015–2016, when I was on sabbatical leave, a series of further essays emerged from my word-processor. This small book is the product of those explorations of Luther’s mentality against the background of his times and the events around him that engaged his attention. It draws very much on that cultural history that has grown up around me in the historians’ profession. I share the effort of many Anglophone and other colleagues to place even abstruse thought within a context of broad cosmic view and social practice. We have all drawn some inspiration from other disciplines. I salute my predecessor and late colleague in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, the eminent Heiko A. Oberman, for his insistence that the year 1500 marked no break in European history, before which allegedly lay Catholic uniformity 1 Lyndal Roper, Witch craze. Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

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and ahead of which lay all the praiseworthy marks of modernity: respect for the individual including womankind, universal literacy, democracy, enlightenment, and capitalism. Luther was a late medieval man. Most of the changes that he may unwittingly have helped to shape entirely got away from him in successive generations and would have been hateful to him. They violated sixteenth-century values. Insofar as it is possible for a twenty-first century person to wrest herself free of her own value system, this is a ten-segment depiction of a man from another era. Luther was not from Mars, however. We can all relate to his profound humanness as he desperately sought ultimate truths for his own wellbeing and then to make these available to his contemporaries for their consolation too, he was sure. Along with his faults, he possessed distinct intellectual, spiritual, and social gifts. I have not shunned the first-person singular pronoun. Its avoidance in the past was meant to enhance the claims of the author and the publisher to objective authority. We have now abandoned those claims in favor of authorial ­subjectivity; we cannot escape that reality.2 When my own experience has borne on a matter under discussion, I have not hesitated to include it. I did not have to wander from archive to archive in preparing this study, in marked contrast to the preparation of others of my books. I thus owe fewer debts of gratitude to institutions: to Portland State University Library for early research on female sexuality in Luther’s thought; to Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, which owns the only hard copy of the Weimarer Ausgabe in the Portland area (there was no internet then); to the University of Arizona Libraries, including the Special Collections Library; to the Herzog August Bibliothek, whose staff know what scholars need and provide it; to the Staats­ bibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, in whose reading room on Unter den Linden I wrote and wrote while on leave; and to the library of the Theologische Fakultät at Humboldt University, Berlin. I extend my deep personal thanks to Ute Lotz-Heumann and Maria Luisa Betterton, who create an incomparable work environment by all that they do and are; they make me happy to come to the office.

2 Susan Crane, ‘Historical Subjectivitiy. A Review Essay’,  Journal of Modern History, 78, 2 (2006), pp. 434–456.

Preface Overwhelmingly, Martin Luther has been treated as the generator of ideas concerning the relationship between God and humankind. Historians of theology have, for example, agonized over precisely when the future Reformer arrived at his distinctive, psyche-relieving insight concerning justification by faith.1 But, in addition, every earmark of the friar’s increasingly dissenting thought has been explored voluminously. This book deliberately departs from that church-historiographic tradition.2 Luther was a voluble and irrepressible divine. Even though he had multiple ancillary interests, such as singing, playing the lute, appreciating the complexities of nature, and observing his children, his ­preoccupation was, as he quickly saw it, bringing the Word of God to the people. He regarded the Catholic Church as having deprived the populace of the unique and sufficient scriptural wellspring of God’s will for His earthly creatures; Luther was the appointed instrument of the Word, its correct interpreter to his age and to as much of posterity as should take breath upon the earth before the Endtimes, before the return of Christ and the Last Judgment. Luther’s view was that this terminal event could not lie more than a century in the future and would probably occur much sooner. He did not contemplate a society that might either celebrate or damn his audacity five hundred years in the future, in 2017. This book is not about Luther’s theology except insofar as any ideational construct is itself an expression of the thinker who frames it. Luther frequently couched his affective utterances within a theological framework. Nor is it a biography; it does not portray a whole life. Rather, it concentrates on several heretofore neglected aspects of the Reformer’s existence and personality. Over my career, I have had numerous occasions to read among Luther’s works and to reflect on the personage who so tirelessly wrote, whether in the form of 1 See Bernhard Lohse’s summation of the leading positions on this question, along with his personal choice, in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), pp. 97–110. A most accessible, admirable brief treatment of the emergence of Luther’s key theological precepts is in Robert Kolb, Martin Luther, confessor of the faith. Christian theology in context (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Another of its strengths is that it takes account of Luther’s evolving, changing concepts, as, for example, of predestination. 2 Perhaps not unrelated to my aspiration is the discussion by and surrounding Donald Wiebe, ‘The failure of nerve in the academic study of religion’, in William E. Arnal, Willi Braun, and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Failure and nerve in the academic study of religion. Essays in honor of Donald Wiebe (Sheffield, uk: Equinox, 2012), pp. 6–31, on the significance of theological studies within the discipline of religious studies.

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­ olemical treatises, pastoral guides, liturgies, university lectures on books of p the Bible, letters, biblical translation, or sermons.3 All of these contain, in addition to the very serious matter they expound, evidence of the man. Luther was an accessible human being. My reading inspired me to respond to a ­number of the subliminal or neglected themes that continually presented themselves. Each essay was inspired by topics that reasserted themselves as p ­ ersonal ­expressions of the man. Each could be seen as a dot in a n ­ ever-complete pointillist portrait. Or each represents a core-taking, a drilling down into the mass of Father Martin’s ever vaster being in an effort to see what came up. An anonymous reader of this manuscript has preferred the metaphor of a statue viewed from different angles. The unifying quality is that these essays as a group treat the personal Luther—I deliberately avoid the word private as unsuited to the sixteenth century.4 Only three of these chapters have appeared before, and that in festschriften or conference proceedings that are somewhat hard to come by. Even these have been rethought and rewritten. Being on the most personal subjects, marriage and masculinity, sexuality, and fatherhood, these could hardly be omitted. Seven, however, are new. They have not been given as lectures or in seminars.5 I am convinced that a great many unpursued topics, amply present in Luther’s corpus, could yet be explored. I myself am at work on an essay on Luther’s anger.6 The subjects that appear here are meant to demonstrate what such core-taking (or statue-viewing) on a range of mainly unexplored facets of the Reformer’s personality and experience can yield. I hope to have opened the way for other secular researchers to explore the seemingly endless interests of this complicated individual. 3 Luther did not ordinarily write out complete sermons. His messages from the pulpit were often taken down verbatim by listeners who knew shorthand and then transcribed just afterward. Prominent and most indispensable among these was Luther’s famulus and a deacon in the Wittenberg parish church, Georg Rörer (1492–1557). On aspects of his career, see Stefan Ullrich Michel and Christian Speer, eds., Georg Rörer (1492–1557). Der Chronist der Wittenberger Reformation (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2012). 4 I am purposely avoiding the discussion, originally set in motion by Jürgen Habermas, over the public and private spheres. 5 I presented a much abbreviate version of ‘Luther’s Friendship with Frederick the Wise’ at the January 2017 meetings of the American Society of Church History in Denver. During fall semester 2016, members of my graduate seminar, on Luther, read two or three of the chapters and graciously gave me their critical feedback. 6 I acknowledge the pathbreaking integrative work of Mark U. Edwards, Jr, Luther and the false brethren (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1975); and Luther’s last battles. Politics and polemics, 1531–46 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1983).

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I also hope to show that perspectives of cultural historians offer the broadest possible evidentiary base within which to analyze a figure of the past. Cultural history is an expanding and boundless concept. It enjoins the researcher to place the historical object of investigation in the fullest context. It is less accessible to a junior scholar who has not yet accumulated the breadth of familiarity with the multiple dimensions of the frame of reference that was available in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. I like to think that I have built up a rich acquaintance with Luther’s environment through dozens of visits to archives and museums, quite beside reading Luther’s writings. I have inquired into the mental world of this Wittenberger, his family, and his neighbors. The route to the mental is not alone via what one has read and what one knows about the imposition of social norms. It includes the life of the body and sensory experience. It includes the raucous sound of the jackdaws outside Luther’s window as in 1530 he sat in the Festung Coburg and waited for news from the imperial diet in Augsburg. It includes Lucas Cranach’s slack-hanging, closedeyed body of the crucified Christ in the predella of the altarpiece of the city church (St. Mary’s) in Wittenberg. That body, too, expresses Martin Luther’s point of view. It includes his sense of the physical presence of Satan; even if the Reformer did not throw his inkwell at him, he could have. It includes his casual exchange with Katharina over the stinking bodies of the people in the church. A cultural historical approach to Luther’s search for a Heavenly Father who loves him and to whom he can relate will differ markedly from the treatment of the same subject by a systematic theologian. His feelings toward God, along with his moods, ebbed and flowed. My own quest is for the emergence at last of that loving Father whom Luther badly needed for his own stability. By what device did Luther shape this caring and personal God? To be embedded in a culture does not prevent the creative person from breaking with prevailing norms. Generating disjuncture is itself a form of innovation: the extent and nature of those norms cannot be restored. Luther shifted the seat of authority from the papacy to the Bible. Although he did not intend to supplant the pope, he did regard himself as the most accurate ­interpreter of Holy Writ. He could not help himself; this was his emotional self-definition. He had brought the Bible back to its God-intended position of primacy as a ­religious authority. He may have consulted his colleagues about the best translation of words from the Hebrew, but other people’s versions of baptism or the eucharist, also based on their readings of Scripture, were ­ultimately verboten if they did not coincide with his own. He grew embittered in his older age as he saw, both in Wittenberg and elsewhere, proliferating departures from his ideals. This discouragement, too, is part of the personal Luther.

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My intended audience for these essays is any literate person who cares to grapple with Luther’s personality. I anticipate that included in this category will be both scholars, graduate students, and a curious lay public. All of these have responded to my work in the past—and the last, the lay public, especially to my appearances at their churches in southern Arizona. All of these have the potential themselves to think of other areas of the Reformer’s opus out of which we might also take core samples in the future. Both here and in German-speaking lands, these educated people will constitute the readership of the outpouring of Luther biography that is beginning to appear. In contrast, however, with the new life-portraits of Heinz Schilling,7 Scott Hendrix,8 ­Armin Kohnle,9 and Lyndal Roper as mentioned,10 my collection of specialized essays is, as said above, not a biography. It makes no effort to encompass the existence of the man. Rather, my hope is to shed additional light on those topics that I have selected to examine and that this light may increase our insight. I strongly recommend perusal of any of the more comprehensive treatments. 7 Schilling, Martin Luther. Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs, eine Biographie (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012); going, I hear, into its second edition now. 8 Hendrix, Martin Luther, visionary Reformer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 9 Kohnle, Martin Luther. Reformator, Ketzer, Ehemann (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015). 10 Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017).

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Luther’s Ego-documents: Cultural History and the Reconstruction of the Historical Self Up until today, historians have been deeply interested in a genre of sources that testified to the early modern European self.1 Historical researchers’ best fantasy at the end of the twentieth century could well have been to come across a trove of personal letters or a diary that testified to the experience— better yet, the inner life—of a person of the past. Well-known examples from early modern Germany that have been exploited by colleagues are the family ‘history’ of Hermann von Weinsberg;2 the letters of Magdalena and Balthasar 1 I do not share Kaspar von Greyerz’s misgivings about the use of the word ego. In my opinion, long since Freud’s concepts of psychosexual development, this word has been integrated into a much broader descriptive framework of the self. Greyerz, ‚Spuren eines vormodernen Individualismus in englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Winfried Schulze (ed.), Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), pp. 131–145, here at p. 132, n. 4. Especially valuable examples of a previously burgeoning literature are Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick, and Angelika Schaser (eds.), Selbstzeugnis und Person. Transkulturelle Perspektiven (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012), made up of 24 diverse essays that range geographically and over time; especially valuable is the editors’ introduction, pp. 1–20, which briefly summarizes the history of the search for authentic self-expression; Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 10 (Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2002); Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, and Patrice Veit (eds.), Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500–1850), Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 9 (Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2001), with 22 essays, and especially the introduction, pp. 3–31; von Greyerz (ed.), Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs München 68 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007), made up of 10 essays; Winfried Schulze (ed.), Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin : Akademie-Verlag 1996), provides a very useful summary, pp. 11–30, with dense documentation. He relates the search for selftestimonials to the earlier quest for mentalities of the past; except that these were collective. See also Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissancce to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 17–28. 2 The most recent treatment based on Hermann von Weinsberg’s diary and family history is Matthew Lundin, Paper memory. A sixteenth-century townsman writes his world (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2012).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004348882_002

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Paumgartner;3 and the life-story of Thomas Platter.4 Unquestionably, Martin Luther’s correspondence compares well with these.5 We could make a good case for his Table Talk as well. Nevertheless, as Claudia Ulbrich, Hans M ­ edick, and Angelika Schaser have noted, specialists pursuing this subject found that they could read ‘more and more texts as ego-documents’.6 They especially pressed for readings that opened the way for the expressions of non-elites to be included. Winfried Schulze preceded them on this point, leading us back to its first advocate, J. Presser. Schulze offers a tentative list of literature types that might yield something of past selves.7 Presumably certain categories of literature were still unlikely to produce revelations concerning the selves who penned them. What of the authors can be discovered in theological treatises or the texts of treaties? These were, one takes it, cold and objective, revealing nothing of the personal traits of the men (yes, men8) who composed them. Or, find the personhood of the authors of the various treaties that made up the Peace of Westphalia! Further research can, of course, expose other sources on each of them who was prominent.9 3 Described by Steven E. Ozment, Magdalena und Balthasar. Briefwechsel der Eheleute Paumgartner aus der Lebenswelt des 16. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt / M.: Insel-Verlag, 1989). 4 Horst Kohl (ed.), Thomas Platter, ein Lebensbild aus dem Jahrhundert der Reformation (Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1912). 5 Kaspar von Greyerz draws attention to the fact that letters have not always been accorded the status of Selbstzeugnis that I am naturally assuming for them: Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit, p. 7. He takes issue with that. I would add that business letters too are often ego-documents. In this volume, see the essay on other sources by the ever-original Valentin ­Groebner, ‘Erasmus’ Bote. Wer braucht wieviel Individualität im 16. Jahrhundert?’ pp. 157–171. 6 Selbstzeugnis und Person, p. 1. They do not develop this idea. For the latest thoughts of the ‘Berlin-Basle’ cohort of experts on the expression and/or the formation of the self, see Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Lorenz Heiligensetzer (eds.), Mapping the ‘I’. Research on self-narratives in Germany and Switzerland (Leiden: Brill, 2015), esp. pp. 1–33, which begins with a summation of scholarly interest in Selbstzeugnisse and the interpretive problems inherent in them. 7 Schulze, ‚Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte? Vorüberlegungen für die Tagung “EGO-DOKUMENTE”‘, in idem (ed.), Ego-Dokumente, here at p. 21. 8 Elsie Anne McKee has convincingly argued that Katharina Schütz Zell should be regarded as a theologian—which, however, her contemporaries would have rejected. See Katharina Schütz Zell. The Life and Thought of a Sixteenth-Century Reformer (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1999), esp. i. 233–327. I do not accept McKee’s verbal argument in August 2014 that Idelette de Bure Calvin was a theologian (International conference on women and the Reformation, Theology Faculty, University of Zurich). 9 Derek Croston, Westphalia. The last Christian peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), is the latest general treatment.

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We can take a great deal away from the German Reformer’s works, however. Martin Luther was initially a member of the vastly predominant nonelite classes of Germany. He remembered his mother carrying brush-wood on her back. To be sure, after the humblest of backgrounds, his father made some money in copper-mining and was able to educate his sons. His literacy alone began to set Martin apart, and the more so when the language he mainly read was Latin. But Catholic churchmen pose obstacles of their own to us. Luther was a churchman. So was Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas allegedly wrote millions of words—I shall not tally both his Summae—words with effects lasting into our times but that contained only one expression of his own opinion. No personal letters have survived.10 His ideal was self-effacement, the virtual disappearance of individuality, the achievement of complete humility. Whether they succeeded or failed in their suppression of the self, medieval monks, friars, and nuns were admonished to try to fade into the background of a life of prayer and penance. Great intellectual gifts, such as those possessed by Aquinas and his contemporary Franciscan brother, Bonaventure, or their great predecessor from the world of expanded Benedictine monasticism, Bernard of Clairvaux, challenged pursuers of the sacrifice of personality, for they inevitably came to the attention of their less gifted brethren. These men did not keep diaries unless required to do so by inquisitorial investigators, but their works of theology, their spiritual advice to others and even surviving letters of an administrative nature can be pumped for any slight personal revelation. For comparable examples on the female side, we might look to Hildegard of Bingen and Catherina of Siena, or, in the sixteenth century, to Teresa of Avila. The occupation of any leadership role in a monastic community tested the ability of its holder simultaneously to be as aggressive as circumstances demanded and to be as meek as the proverbial lamb. Self-assertion was in most instances a violation of self-sacrifice—which, however, psychotherapists have long since rendered compatible, not least in the theory of ‘passive aggression’.11 But, in general, the principle of following, of demanding no credit for any labor or quality, of pursuing anonymity, permeated Western monasticism, whether dedicated to enclosed stability (in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience) or to mendicant provision for the life of the flesh. Secular clergy, for their 10 11

David Knowles, The evolution of medieval thought (London: Longman’s Green, 1962), p. 258. Introduced after World War ii by William C. Menninger. See https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior which provides a brief history and description of the concept. Idem, Psychiatry in a troubled world. Yesterday’s war and today’s challenge (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 563.

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part, oriented themselves toward a different paragon, one that could dwell uncorrupted in the inveigling world. As sometime preachers, these even needed to display winning traits of personality—wit, dramatic talent, reliability, canniness, ­compassion—to the laity in their charge, for it helped both image and influence to be at least sufficiently popular. In the late Middle Ages, the regular and secular clergy had for many purposes merged through the ordination of the former. Humility was nonetheless an ideal to which both aspired. As an ordinary friar, Martin Luther was hard-pressed to subdue his personality. So great was his need of divine approval that he, in effect, commandeered his confessors’ ministrations to an unsuitable degree. He was the protuberant nail that would not remain pounded down. Yet he desired to be good. To the Augustinian Eremites, goodness partly consisted of being content with the prescriptions of the order and the Church and finding adequate solutions within them. Luther’s persistent personal discontent was a category of sin. It was the product of this man’s irrepressible own traits. He insisted on seeking help. He demanded undue attention from those who oversaw him.12 This quality was an aspect of Luther’s innate being. He would never, could never, shed it. His career from beginning to end was one of personal insistence on finding, then on establishing, solutions that pertained to his own needs as well as to others’. This quest permeates all his works. The Catholic authorities in preparing for Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms in spring 1521 were correct in listing all categories of the friar’s works up till then as departing in certain respects from established orthodoxy precisely because each one, whether offered as spiritual consolation or as improved theology, demonstrated an attitude of independent critique. It was precisely that independence that had to be quashed, for it violated the militant Church’s subscription to the rule of complete obedience of its hierarchically organized ranks. It was insubordination. That this clean, orderly hierarchy and submission within it were illusory is not here under discussion. The Church judged Luther by this standard, as well as by its opinion of the injury that Luther’s teachings would inflict upon the confidence of laity and lower-level clergy alike. John Osborne’s play Luther has Cardinal Cajetan telling Luther this during their meeting in Augsburg, and it is realistic. During the Reformer’s episodes of temptation (Anfechtungen), the devil accused Luther of teaching falsehood and leading people astray.13

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Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Sein Weg zur Reformation 1483–1521 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1981), p. 68 for a summary of Luther’s novitiate; and after, pp. 75–76; 86–87. John Osborne, Luther (New York: New American Library, 1963), act 2, scene 4, p. 90: ‘Don’t you see what could happen out of all this? Men could be cast out and left to themselves

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Everything Luther wrote expressed his intelligent, emotional, biblically informed, politically naïve or astute, sometimes compassionate, sometimes contemptuous, late-medieval personhood. We might hope to say the same thing about any profuse writer of the past, except that in most cases we cannot trace their experiences, their connections to developments and persons in their immediate environs. Thomas Aquinas conceals his personality from us. Such individuals marvelously succeeded in self-subordination. How did James Weisheipl manage to write a biography of the Dominican intellectual?14 In Luther’s case, we can reconstruct not only his general milieu based on what we know about his times. Nor is the sheer girth of the Reformer’s opus the key factor in enabling the construction of our understanding. Rather, the main feature of Luther’s writings is that he meant to tell his readers exactly what he thought, to persuade them on a human-to-human basis, and to be utterly sincere. John Martin has written concerning the sincerity of Renaissance writers, among whom he counts the Wittenberg divine.15 Surprisingly, Martin treats the Renaissance as an era rather than a cultural movement. Perhaps Luther, who was hardly a humanist in the sense of loving classical literature, although he drew heavily on the movement’s signal attainments—though he espoused ad fontes and though he admired Lorenzo Valla16—was most like the Italian and the Northern European devotés of the classical world in being sincere. If so, his frankness was spontaneous and no imitation. He lays out before us in nearly every line he wrote, his honest opinion; he can sometimes be tactical but hardly ever restrained. As a (changeable) human being within a vivid and fluctuating environment, of course, his views were not constant throughout his adult life. That he wrote voluminously is a token of his movement upward in society, for in the sixteenth century, usually only members of elites undertook, or could undertake, to leave a written record about themselves. Nobody could claim that his incessant expression went hand-in-hand with the alleged companion of the conscious self, secularization!17 Luther envisioned making contributions toward a godly community, one that cultivated the Word of God even before food crops. If he ever dissembled or held back, he was compelled

14 15 16 17

forever, helpless and frightened?…. That’s what would become of them without their Mother Church—with all its imperfections …’. James A. Weisheipl, Thomas von Aquin. Sein Leben und seine Theologie (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1980). John Martin, ‘Inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence: The discovery of the individual in Renaissance Europe’, American Historical Review 102, 5 (1997), pp. 1309–1342. wa tr 1, no. 259, p. 109: ‘Lorenzo Valla ist der best Walh …’. See Kaspar von Greyerz’s introduction to Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit, pp. 1–2.

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to do so for political reasons. He did not like to comply. Elector Johann and his son and successor Elector Johann Friedrich had to order him to stop insulting their cousin, Duke Georg of Saxony, for example, not only because it was socially unacceptable for a lowly friar to attack a personage of high rank, but because of the objective injury that might redound to them and all the Ernestine Wettins. Luther insisted on describing the world as he perceived it to be at the time he wrote. His fame and above all, the sympathy of his rulers, enabled him to survive the possible consequences of his temperament until he died a natural death. Gabriele Jancke lays heavy weight upon the patronage that Luther was able to win from the three successive electors, and she draws particularly upon the 1545 preface he wrote to the collection of his works that was being undertaken.18 There is much more to tap than such a preface alone, namely the vastness and personal nature of the Reformer’s entire written productivity. ­Martin Luther’s works, D. Martin Luthers Werke, are a gigantic ego-document. The scholar who recognizes them as such must bring notable competency to her encounter with it. She must have a good familiarity with the late Middle Ages and sixteenth-century Germany as a whole in order to use Luther’s writings effectively—and this is equally true of every investigator of past persons. He will have to sort out the general characteristics of the age. He must have a good introduction to Luther’s life in all its features, whether professional or personal. Jancke is correct in pointing out that every self is embedded in its times.19 Through a lens so prepared, it may be possible to judge which of the Reformer’s views are reflective of the broader culture and which are an expression of a particular person’s set of qualities; which are situation-bound and which have more enduring applicability. These spheres, of course, cannot be cleanly separated, and Luther does not separate them. We see his hybridity. In every setting, he offers a unique combination of cultural product and inherent personality; of nurture and nature. Furthermore, he developed, and the conditions around him fluctuated; they demanded differing responses. A huge body of ego-documents is not as straightforward a resource as we might hope. We cannot now divine to what extent the young Luther took his father as a model of masculine behavior—although he did expressly imitate the ­paternal 18 Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis, pp. 152–157. 19 Jancke, ‘Jüdische Selbstzeugnisse und Ego-Dokumente der Frühen Neuzeit in Aschkenas. Eine Einleitung’, in Birgit E. Klein and Rotraud Ries (eds.), Selbstzeugnisse und Ego-Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Juden in Aschkenas. Beispiele, Methoden und Konzepte (Berlin: Metropol, 2011), pp. 9–26, here at p. 15; and also her Autobiographie als soziale Praxis, p. 210, on individuals as part of a social network bound by modes of communication.

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role in ‘joking’ with his wife as a key to marital harmony. We know, too, that Hans Luder was outspoken. Although outwardly conformist as a Catholic, he did not admire the functioning of churchmen; and he was disruptive on the occasion of his son’s first Mass. He felt frustrated by his son’s withdrawal from Hans’s plan of continued advancement for the family. Luder had put himself forward as an entrepreneur, rising from the farm to the higher ranks of ­Mansfeld City’s society.20 Martin was like his father in these broad features of his behavior. He had a prominent ego. Despite his early self-denigration, in fact his interest in establishing self-worth ultimately overshadowed it. He could, like Mother Theresa of Calcutta, have kept his spiritual afflictions under wraps, away from the eyes of his fellow friars. He was unable to do this. In the end, he rose in the world, by virtue of his irrepressibility, albeit farther than he had ever anticipated. He had the same expectations of his own wife that Hans had of ‘Hannah’: that she should be receptive and submissive toward him, pious, a hard worker around the home, and a good mother. He absorbed some of his mother’s aspects as well: her sincere piety, her belief in the presence of ­devils—as is so often the case with women of the past, her finer features, through the lesser valuation of her gender by society, recede beyond recovery. As a widow, she became legally ‘orally dead’, ‘Mundtot’, lacking a man to speak for her. Her son Jakob, Martin’s only surviving brother, probably filled this role during the brief time between Hans’s and her own death.21 Beyond these shadowy and speculative links, we are left to take Martin ­Luther as the unicum, the unique human being, who he was, an unprecedented and never repeated personality who happened to leave his imprint on the early modern European world. This is why we are drawn to his voluminous ­self-witness, after all. The various genres of his work lend themselves to the display of differing aspects of himself. The huge section of the Weimar edition called his Writings (Schriften) has no inner cohesion beyond the Wittenberger’s declaration of his own authority. He has come to the truth, and his word as an introduction to God’s Word should be taken seriously. He is God’s implement; this is the governing principle. Here are attacks on the popes and other adversaries, on processions, on the invocation of saints, on monastic vows; and here are works of persuasion, directed toward the German nobility, the city councilors of the Holy Roman Empire, or the city of Leisnig. Here are his sermons and his lectures. Here are his ministerial tools: his little prayer book, his catechisms, his hymnal. Here he instructs the unlettered on a simple plane in 20 21

Wieland Held, ‘Die soziale Umgebung von Martin Luthers Elternhaus’, in Günter Vogler (ed.), Martin Luther: Leben—Werk—Wirkung (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), pp. 13–29. Ian Siggins, Luther and his mother (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1981).

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the homilies delivered in Saint Mary’s city church; and there he teaches the learned on a higher level with his university lectures on books of the Bible. Yet his Schriften have the united feature of sincere self-expression. They admit us to the development of his convictions and his mentality. We Reformation scholars know his varied writings well. Especially his theology has been thoroughly explored.22 In every case, he assessed his probable audience and met it at the point of mutual comprehension. He was an astute judge of capacity. He was also realistic. His students and peers were able to grasp his more abstruse analyses. The people in the community, however, could not tell you what he had just preached on, even if they complimented the sermon’s deliverer on going out of the church. They were only interested, Luther lamented, in Scapha, scapha, ficus, ficus.23 The pastoral Luther desired with all his heart to convey Bible stories together with their significance even to minds disinclined toward ideas. When he ascended into the pulpit, he declared, he ignored the forty or so learned men who were present and ‘looked down’ to the hundreds of simple people who were there.24 Luther’s most basic explications of his faith’s rudiments were designed, through slogan-like repetition, to sink into the brains of these, even if only gradually. He wanted ordinary parishioners to recite the vernacular Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, if possible the Creed, and to sing the liturgical hymns that he and others had set to familiar tunes for them. He wanted them to know, under stimulus of the crucifixes in the sanctuaries if not of his own words, what it meant when he told them, ‘Christ has died for you!’ He wanted them to absorb at Christmas the fundamental lesson of the 22

23

24

The newest magisterial treatment of Luther’s religious ideas is Reinhard Schwarz, Martin Luther, Lehrer der christlichen Religion (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). A widely acknowledged prior description is Bernhard Lohse, Luthers Theologie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung und in ihrem systematischen Zusammenhang (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). wa tr 3, no. 3544, p. 396. The wa editors did not annotate these words. Google only presented this quotation from Luther. I consulted Dorothea Wendebourg and Johannes Wallmann, and the latter called the expert Reinhard Schwarz in Munich, who initially opined that they meant something like, ‘Shit, shit, fuck, fuck!’ meaning that all the peasants were really interested in was their animals’ manure and their own, their animals’, and their crops’ fertility. He subsequently thought the words were belittling rather than vulgar, as in ‘I don’t give a fig about that’. These words could have referred, too, to foolish talk that people engaged in. Luther elsewhere quotes ‘the pope and his followers’ as saying ‘lulaffen and alfenzen—that is, they talk silly about whatever they wish’. John Nicholas Lenker (ed.) Sermons of Martin Luther (8 vols., Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, n.d.; reprint of 1905 edition), i: 170. wa tr 3, no. 3573, p. 420.

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Incarnation, Jesus given in the flesh. He wanted them, even if over a lifetime of repetition, to have a basic repertoire of Bible stories: the creation of the world, Adam and Eve and the Fall of humankind, especially the life of Christ and the reason why he came, and the institution of the Last Supper. This was, Luther thought, not an overpowering agenda. His preaching to ordinary audiences, he told his guests, focused on simple, motto-like passages drawn from Scripture. ‘I strive in my preaching to select a passage and stick with it; I do that so that the people can say, “This was the sermon”’.25 Luther also wished to convey to his hearers his own emotions on reading key parts of the Bible. In preaching on the baptism of Christ in 1530, we hear his personal engagement elicited by God’s approval of His son: Now, how could God pour out Himself upon us or present Himself more sweetly than when He says that it pleases Him well that His son speaks in such a friendly manner with me, so heartily intends the best for me, and suffers for me with such great love, dies, and does everything. Don’t you think that when a human heart rightly perceives God’s pleasure in Christ, when He serves us so, it would have to spring into a hundred thousand pieces out of joy, for then it would see into the deepest part of the fatherly heart, yes, into the bottomless and eternal goodness and love that God bears us, and has borne us in eternity.26 All of Luther’s preaching had this fundamental agenda in mind. Men of high intellect and worldly power could bear these messages too, for after all, they had to become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven! Simplification did not injure them. Luther’s utter confidence (despite his private temptations or Anfechtungen) colored his homiletics. He was, he believed, someone whom God had called upon to declare the Scripture to those who named themselves Christians. The anecdotes he included were no longer the fairytales of latemedieval preachers but adhered more closely to the biblical account or were drawn from the concrete lives of the people beneath the pulpit. In their language, Luther related his rhetoric and his experience to them. He did not shun first-person pronouns; he sometimes, suitably, talked about himself. He was sincere about the heart-exploding impact for him of God’s announcing, ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased!’ He laid himself out along with the Bible. This category of his writings is an endless source of information on the personal Luther. 25 26

wa tr 3, no. 3173b, p. 210. wa Schriften 29, ‘Sermon aus dem 3. Kapitel Matthäi von der Taufe Christi’, pp. 228–229.

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In the content of both tracts and sermons, Luther as author demonstrates his adherence to the ubiquity of devils and angels. These creatures, pitted against one another in the cosmos, manifest the duality in the fallen creation, the struggle between life and death. Modern followers of Luther may redden when they notice his sermons on guardian angels or whenever he stresses the constancy of Satan’s effort to lead humanity astray. They are uneasy in reading his unrelenting hate-filled rhetoric against the Jews. We must recall that this vast ego-document presents a figure who is half a millennium removed from us and our current value system. Luther stated what he thought, in his own time. He felt no obligation to withstand our scrutiny. He expected that long before 2016, probably within a century of his life-span, the world would have ended and his predictions been borne out. If his sermons have a unified purpose depending on audience and warrant Luther’s inclusion of his inner being, how does a single treatise, not a sermon, likewise manifest Luther’s personality? De votis monasticis Martini Lutheri iudicium. 1521. provides a ready instance to the examination of which we must—to derive the maximum from it—bring our acquaintance of the times and the man.27 Here at last, over fifteen years after his own entry into a monastic order, and after enduring his father’s dismay for nearly as long, he was ready to repudiate his membership as well as the system of which it was a part. Having come to this decision, Luther was unwilling even to bow to Elector Frederick the Wise’s insistence that he publish nothing further without princely permission. Luther’s temperament, his sense of urgency in broadcasting ‘the truth’, allowed no hindrance, and he pressed ahead.28 This booklet had to appear first, therefore, in Switzerland, for the Wittenberg printers had been warned. A second edition followed in Wittenberg, nevertheless, with or without the elector’s approval. We understand completely why the gauntlet-casting Reformer dedicated the work to his father. There is no subtlety here; the son Martin wanted his father to know that Hans was right about monasticism.29 This dedication was an act of filial submission and reconciliation. It was written, however, in Latin, which, it is important to note, his father could not read. Mastery of this language was essential to the son’s acceptance into the world of learning. His father’s attitude was opposed, closer to the popular maxim, Gelehrt, verkehrt! or, ‘He who is learned is on the wrong path!’ Luther claimed space for disobedience on both these scores, and additionally cited the Bible: ‘Qui amat patrem et 27 28 29

wa Schriften 8, pp. 564–669. Ibid., the editors’ background, pp. 564–572. Luther said at dinner that his father had been happy when he left the monastery: wa tr 1, no. 881, pp. 439–440.

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matrem plusquam me non est me dignus’ (‘Whoever loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me’).30 Martin was, after all, an adult. This form of the quotation was, as said, not accessible to the father. By more than one device, then, Luther combines incompatible sentiments, submission and independence, in this one treatise. This dedication, seen from more than one standpoint, reveals his ambivalence. The body of the work, too, declared the recently won convictions of this son. Monastic oaths were not to be found in the Word of God, which by now, Luther had elevated to primacy. Not everything Christ said was to be taken as a command but might fall into the category of a possible choice for those who were able: ‘Qui potest capere, capiat’. (‘Let him who is able to receive this, receive it ’)31 This was surely true of virginity and celibacy. We know that Luther was in a state of transition in his personal life; he had come to affirm the rectitude of marriage as an estate created by God. Some of his colleagues would shortly marry. The goal, in any case, had to be faith rather than the fulfillment of commanded deeds. Vows, he said, were adversaries of faith in that they demanded preoccupation with adhering to them rather than with an inner condition. This treatise provided the still-formative Luther with another stage upon which to expound that liberating realization, the centrality of faith. To live under monastic compulsion was to oppose the liberty of the Gospel. Again, Luther declared that freedom that he had expounded upon in ‘The Freedom of a Christian’ over a year previously. Its implications remain very much in his thought. This is the very freedom from his ineluctable sinfulness that the young Martin had so ardently sought within the Augustinian Eremites; it had come to him in unsuspected ways. He was still exploring its ramifications. The writer’s rhetorical gifts, his mastery of Scripture, pour forth. He provides a detailed argument from which to launch his condemnation. Vows were opposed to charity, for one was impelled by an oath taken and not by the movement of faith in one’s heart. The pages on monastic chastity may well reveal more about Luther’s own struggles with continence in his years as a friar.32 To point out the personal elements in this or any treatise is not to deny their intellectual worth. This was Luther’s watershed argumentation against a form of collective religious life that Luther himself had espoused and that had represented the pinnacle of Catholic religious ideals for a thousand years. Nonetheless, to ignore or excise the personal investment in these arguments is to deny oneself as a historian some of their depth and textual richness. Voices within the Church 30 31 32

Matt. 10: 37. Matt. 19: 12. wa Schriften 8, pp. 631–637.

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had been raised chiefly against the corruption of monastic ways of life. Luther was revolutionary in calling for their elimination per se. Humans simply could not meet their terms, and their underlying precept of superior spirituality was, he said, erroneous. He knew this from his own experience. This tract is, then, also about Luther’s further liberation. He ended with two biblical citations: ‘… As free people and not as people who make freedom a cover for evil; but as people who are servants of God’ (1. Peter 2: 16). ‘You, dear brothers, are called to freedom. Only take care that you do not use freedom in self-service’ (Gal. 5: 13). We could peruse each of his writings for similar evidence of the life story and psyche of the man with whom we are dealing. The scholarship of the successive generations of Reformation specialists who engaged in the compilation and editing of Luther’s works in the ­Weimarer Ausgabe is simply astonishing. One confronts their amazing expertise and dedication in numerous places, but one of them is surely within the twelve volumes that make up the Deutsche Bibel. These historians of theology, however, were less interested than we are in the effects of culture and personality upon salient figures of the past. Even so, the ways in which the translation of the Bible may reveal Luther’s deepest personhood must be left to the specialist with a mastery of all the biblical languages and the desire to study how Luther related the original words to the Latin versions, and how he chose to render them in his native tongue. The field of Luther scholarship needs a linguistic anthropologist. Undoubtedly, he regarded certain words as preferable for personal as well as theological and linguistic reasons. The volumes of the Weimarer Ausgabe that are devoted to the Bible reveal how, from one edition to the next during his lifetime, Luther altered his language and/or offered alternative passages.33 I do not doubt that much of the Reformer himself is to be found even in this very technical work of translation. Anyone who has translated a text will not need convincing of this. To fathom this question would be a life-long enterprise. One place where Luther explicitly inserts himself is in his prefaces to certain biblical books, such as those of the Apocrypha. Luther shared the opinion that these texts should not be part of the canon. Curiously, nevertheless, he found, and the other leading clergymen of his day found, that they could not dispense with some of them. Especially widely used in elementary schools and catechism classes was Jesus Sirach, alias Ecclesiasticus. Others were Tobias,

33

For a brief look at the problem of differential translation, see Heinz Bluhm, ‘Luther’s ­ erman Bible’, in Peter Newman Brooks (ed.), Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in CommemoG ration of a Quincentenary 1483–1983 (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 177–194.

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Esther,34 and the story of Susannah in Susannah and Daniel. These were especially valuable in teaching girls how to grow into modest, submissive adults; and, in the case of Tobias, in providing boys with guidelines for avoiding the extreme dangers that closeness to women posed. The Book of Judith presented certain problems in that it told of a woman who beheaded a man. Even though the heroine undertook this daring, violent act in order to save her people (as did Esther, but without violence!), her example was occasionally held up to females of any age and condition, but less often than that of Susanna. Argula von Grumbach, however, compared herself to Judith in correcting erring priests.35 Lucas Cranach found the subject of the lovely Judith, her strawberry blond tresses modestly tied up, holding the grisly head that she had severed, to be irresistible—and perhaps, like the image of Lucretia stabbing herself, easily saleable to prosperous men of his day.36 During the seventeenth century, the given names of Susannah and Tobias grew more and more popular among literate middling and upper-class families, and Marion Kobelt-Groch has shown that the Stolberger Collection of funeral sermons at the Herzog August Bibliothek contains sermons for 17 seventeenth-century women bearing the baptismal name of Judith.37 Luther reveals himself in his prefatory remarks. He comments concerning the ancient Jewish people, that they are, as a widow is, always left behind, ‘but nonetheless chaste and holy, and they remain pure and holy in the Word of God, and in the right faith, chastise themselves and pray …’.38 We know from other sources that, to the Reformer’s mind, these are the sought-after qualities of a widow. In his preface to the Book of Tobias, Luther says that this story depicts an ordinary man who endures much pain in his marriage. ‘But God 34 35

36

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38

Luther did not like Esther, however, or Maccabees: wa tr 3, no. 3391a-b, p. 302. Charlotte Methuen, ‘“And your daughters shall prophesy!” Luther, reforming women and the construction of authority’, Archive for Reformation History 104 (2013), pp. 82–109, here at p. 98. Bettina Uppenkamp, ‘Judith—Zur Aktualität einer biblischen Heldin im 16. Jh.’, in Simona Schellenberger, André Thieme, and Dirk Welich (eds.), Eine starke Frauengeschichte. 500 Jahre Reformation (n. p.: Sax Verlag, 2014), pp. 70–77, with many reproductions of Cranach’s renderings, pp. 74–76. For Susannah and Tobias, based on my own look at the evidence of funeral sermons in the VD-17, Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachgebiet im siebzehnten J­ahrhundert gedruckten Bücher, accessed on-line via http://www.vd17.de/index.php?article_id=0&w Width=1010&wHeight=418. Kobelt-Groch, Judith macht Geschichte: Zur Rezeption einer mythischen Gestalt vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhel Fink, 2005), Chap. 5, pp. 84–98, and on this point, pp. 97–98. wa db 12, ‘Vorrhede auffs buch Judith’, p. 6.

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always graciously helps, and finally brings about a happy ending, with the purpose of teaching married people to be patient, bear all manner of suffering, hope in the future, and live in the fear of God and in firm faith’.39 Here once again, Luther is conveying his outlook on marriage—that, as good and blessed a condition as it may be, it entails much suffering, and this must be patiently borne as the gift of a purposeful, attentive God. This may be his theological view, but it is also his personal, pastoral, and social opinion. In his preface to the Book of Jesus Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, this moral guide and teacher touts the usefulness to all society of the principles enunciated within the book’s pages. It is a useful book for the common man, for all its diligence is directed toward producing a God-fearing, pious, and clever citizen or paterfamilias. [It tells him] how he should behave toward God, God’s Word, priests [sic], parents, wife, children, his own body, his possessions, servants, neighbors, friends, enemies, those in authority, and everybody else that a person might name. [It is] a book about domestic propriety, or about the virtues of a pious head of household, which is the same thing as proper spiritual discipline and should be so named.40 Luther well knew that among the book’s other admonitions, there were two that harshly accused women of causing evil. Chapter 25: 21–22, 25 declares, ‘There is no head as cunning as that of a serpent, and there is no anger as bitter as that of a woman. I would rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than with an evil woman …. All evil is slight compared to that of a woman. May she suffer the penalties that come down upon [all] godless people’. Chapter 42: 13–14 states, ‘Just as moths come out of clothing, so does much evil [viel böses] come from women. It is more secure to be with an evil man than with a friendly woman who gives him over to mockery and ridicule’. Perhaps Luther means to mitigate the accusatory sharpness of both of these passages in his own translation, for in contrast to others, he has only ‘much’ evil come from women instead of evil categorically; and the second citation is sometimes followed by

39 40

wa db 12, ‘Vorrhede auffs Buch Tobia’, p. 108. wa db 12, ‘Vorrhede’, p. 146. Cf. wa tr 2, no. 2761b, p. 642: ‘Jesus Sirach gehort [sic] in Hausregiment und ist Hausrecht’, See, however, Luther’s criticism of the excessively high regard in which some preachers held Sirach: wa tr 3, no. 3294b, pp. 254–255; no. 3295a-b, p. 255.

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‘A man’s evil is better than a woman’s good’.41 Luther omits this.42 If Luther consciously toned down these stereotypes of women’s inclination toward evil, then we may find added proof of his more constructive, however traditional, attitude toward womankind.43 Whether or not this intent is present, he never decried the extremes to be found within Sirach’s pages, and we may suppose that those passages too were spoken aloud for rote memorization by little girls and boys in Evangelical classrooms.44 It is hardly necessary to demonstrate that Luther’s correspondence with hundreds of individuals, groups of people, and civic entities may be regarded as part of his written self-witness. His letters admit us to his innermost thought processes and his truest stances. Lyndal Roper has rightly pointed out that epistles were likely to become, were often intended to be, public documents.45 They have to be read carefully and their intention determined. He found it hard to dissemble, and part of his definition of friendship was surely that the two parties involved could address one another in all candour. It is hard to say how aware the Wittenberg scholar was of the tendency, especially in humanist circles, to collect one another’s letters. Erasmus, for instance, was collecting even his own letters, but Luther, in his exchanges with this vexing opponent, was concerned mainly with the Dutchman’s alleged errors, his fame, and his having presumed to complain in writing to Elector Johann about Luther’s vulgar condemnation in ‘The Will Enslaved’. At any rate, other men were collecting Luther’s epistles, and in the nineteenth century the Weimarer Ausgabe would tap previously forgotten repositories in the concerted effort to gather 41

42 43 44

45

The New English Bible, which includes the Apocrypha, has evil categorically coming from women, and a man’s evil being superior to a woman’s good. Cf. the worst accusations of the author(s) of the Malleus malificarum (1487), reprinted in Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, (eds.) Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700. A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 180–188, with its citations from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, including its repetition of ‘All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman’. wa db 12, Ecclesiasticus 42: 12, p. 264. wa tr 1, no. 367, p. 159; cf. no. 444, pp. 193–194. See my forthcoming ‘The problem of spiritual discipline: The indispensability of Apocryphal books among sixteenth-century leaders of the Lutheran churches’, in Euan ­Cameron (ed.), The Bible and issues of household, family, and gender ethics c. 1500–1750, New Cambridge History of the Bible 3 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2016), in press. Roper, ‘“To his most learned and dearest friend.” Reading Luther’s letters’, German History 28, 3 (2010), pp. 283–295.

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every word. The Briefwechsel is a treasure-house of information concerning what was on the Reformer’s mind and his real or calculated reactions to what was going on around him. His emotions are on show, although one must consider in what way. He was generally unrestrained in his frankness. His worldview comes into focus for that investigator who, as noted at the outset, has a developed sense of the range of outlooks of sixteenth-century people and a keen awareness of Luther’s purposes. Even in his exchanges with friends, there can be a certain opacity that is borne of stratagem. Martin Luther liked Georg Spalatin; they became good friends. Luther wrote hundreds of missives—Irmgard Höβ, Spalatin’s biographer, counts over 400 in all46—to this personal secretary and from 1522 court preacher and confessor of Elector Frederick the Wise.47 His intended co-­ recipient was often, however, the elector himself. He incurred no risk in having descriptions of his most private needs pass through the hands of Spalatin, for this astute man was also a master of discretion—as his position required him to be. But especially as he, the elector, and Luther became increasingly ­trusted intimates, it did not seem a betrayal of confidence to reveal at least some things to the third party. Luther was willing to entrust this knowledge to his prince—indeed, his unarticulated goal in writing so profusely and confidingly was to arouse a potentially life-saving sympathy in his powerful electorprotector. Through Spalatin, Luther had entrée to the top, and he acquired in due course the same privileged access to the successive elector, Johann, and to his son, Johann Friedrich, in turn. Spalatin was a flowing spring of international information not only because he kept Frederick’s archive, but also because he was called upon to engage in diplomatic missions.48 Spalatin was apparently skilled at negotiating, gently, or at least delivering messages. The elector was aware that Luther, for his part, was in touch with still other influential persons, including hostile prelates. Frederick desired to have the whole picture, especially as matters of religion took in an ever greater portion of it. Luther was only too pleased to confer upon this prince, whose qualities he sincerely appreciated, awareness that came first to him. After Frederick’s death in his hunting lodge in Lochau in 1525 and Spalatin’s retirement the following summer to the superintendency in Altenburg, 46

Irmgard Höβ, Georg Spalatin 1484–1545. Ein Leben in der Zeit des Humanismus und der Reformation, 2nd ed. [orig. 1956, same publisher] (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1989), p. 79. 47 I count 231 in wa br 1 and 2, 1520–1525. A good number survived owing to Spalatin’s fastidiousness. 48 Höβ, Spalatin, e.g., pp. 255–256.

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Luther’s need of protection was less acute. He had survived the challenges of Worms, and the Peasants’ War was past. He was now truly a celebrity, with such widespread support that, if the Emperor chose to invade Saxony and seize him, he would simultaneously have to incur the wrath of other major princes and neglect the French and the Turkish enemies as well. For the moment, Charles v had enough to do. Further, the new elector Johann was thoroughly supportive of Luther, for he was persuaded of the Reformer’s theological rectitude.49 A genuinely pious man, he surely also perceived advantages to himself in the Reformation program of parish visitation and the curtailment of Catholic institutions. That Johann needed Luther’s advice is clear in the voluminous exchanges between the Wittenberg nightingale and the peripatetic princely court. Johann regularly sought his theologians’ (usually including Melanchthon’s and Jonas’s if not also Bugenhagen’s and others’) opinions. Johann did not have, as his elder brother had, to maintain a defensive pretense of not being acquainted with Luther, nor of even being ignorant of where he was after the Diet of Worms. Johann Friedrich, by contrast, went so far as to dine at the Luthers’ table.50 When Luther was very ill in 1537, the prince came to his bedside to console him.51 In his correspondence, Luther’s vulnerability—his tenderness, his poor health, his fears, his grief, his rage—are also on display. Still, its parts are prepared for a range of purposes, which must be distinguished. They are meant to be interactive; even Luther’s disparagements to potentates hope to elicit a response. Our advantage comes from having, in this collection, an overview. Letters are a medium of self-staging; in dealing with epistolary evidence from late medieval and early modern Europe one cannot overlook their performative function. They must be judged individually, against a background provided by our broad acquaintance. We come to deeper insights via our ability to consider the correspondence all together. Prior generations of church historians have regretted the indiscriminate preservation of even the Reformer’s crudest thoughts.52 Katherina von Bora’s biographer Ernst Kroker, has written that the Table Talk 49

50 51 52

Günther Wartenberg, ‘Zum Verhältnis Martin Luthers zu Herzog und Kurfürst Johann von Sachsen’, in Günter Vogler (ed.), Martin Luther: Leben—Werk—Wirkung (Berlin: ­Akademie-Verlag, 1986), pp. 169–177. wa tr 2, no. 1763, p. 209. wa tr 3, o. 1543b, p. 392. The first serious study of the Tischreden was Preserved Smith’s Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University), published as Luther’s ‘Table Talk’: A Critical Study (New York: ams Press, 1907).

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was directed at a narrow, trusted circle and absolutely not for public consumption. It contains much that is unnecessary, that has scarcely any value for us today, many a hard and free word that could cause offense to sensitive spirits, many opinions and utterances that sprang from a momentary disgruntlement or a momentary anger. Luther himself decisively protested against their publication. But Kroker has to concede that by means of the Table Talk, ‘the man comes closer to us’.53 He might have added that by means of the Table Talk, the woman Katharina comes closer to him as her biographer and to us! Today historians may well consider Luther’s Table Talk (Tischreden) a godsend. Here is the spontaneous, center-stage, but unrehearsed Luther. Like President Nixon with his unrestrained speech in the wired Oval Office, Luther did not guard his tongue as his admiring students and other followers assiduously wrote down much that he said during dinner-table conversations. Luther, however, would not have completely regretted the outcome, for, as said, he wanted his true opinions to be known in the world, even when for them to be so might not be ­tactically wise. A man who could declare to the public that what Erasmus had written on freedom of the will was filth was not a wise choice when restraint was desired.54 Church historians and women researchers, to name but two groups, have traditionally been respectively embarrassed and angry when they confronted the Reformer’s casual descriptions of an infant son’s ­excretions or his dismissive, even insulting, comments to Katharina von ­Bora.55 ­Occasionally—the extent may be even greater than I presently suspect— well-intentioned translators for the Saint Louis edition of Luther’s works mitigated the baldness of Luther’s pronouncements in order to save, as they saw it, his reputation. The same men, according to Eric Gritsch’s verbal report to me, in confronting Luther’s correspondence, agreed not to refer to the ­Reformer’s letter to Spalatin of 1525, in which he suggests that they both make love to their wives at the same time;56 or that missive to Katharina shortly before he died in 1546, in which he discussed his impotence with her.57 Such ‘cleaning up’ was carried out in the sixteenth century as well!58 53 54 55 56 57 58

Ernst Kroker, Katherina von Bora, Martin Luthers Frau. Ein Lebens- und Charakterbild, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagssanstalt, 1956), p. 127. wa 18, p. 601 (in istis sordibus pullueres); publication record, pp. 597–599. wa tr 1, no. 1004, p. 505, for example. wa br 3, no. 952, 6 Dec. 1525, p. 635. wa br 11, no. 4201, 7 Feb. 1546, pp. 286–287. Birgit Stolt, ‘Laβt uns fröhlich springen!’ Gefühlswelt und Gefühlsnavigierung in Luthers Reformationsarbeit, eine kognitive Emotionalitätsanalyse auf philologischer Basis, Studium

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In view of its recent arrival at a status of respectability, the Table Talk has not yet been exploited for all that it can yield. Certainly, the Reformer’s memory of past events might not coincide with the earlier evidence of those events, but they do show what Luther thought at the time he made his comments at table, whether about his childhood, his years as a friar, or his hearing at Worms. We gain, above all, insight into his mentality at the moment of utterance, and this itself is no small thing. The Table Talk constitutes a precious ego-document of the middle-aged and elderly Reformer. He performed for his guests, to be sure, and in that sense shaped his rhetoric for their delectation. If within the hearing of Johannes Mathesius, he said that at Worms he had declared, ‘Here I stand! I can do no other. God help me, Amen!’ then this is very likely what he said in the presence of Mathesius. Luther often employed the common turn of phrase, ‘Here I stand’.59 In the early 1540s, it would appropriately sum up his attitude toward the interrogation of 1521. The future pastor of Joachimsthal wrote it down and brought it into service again when he prepared his sermons on the life of Martin Luther.60 He had no idea that in so doing he would lay the groundwork for an ongoing discussion among future specialists. The expert will, again, have to judge whether any statement he made was not genuine at the time, or not compatible with his more considered opinion. I have indicated elsewhere that we have failed to see his deliberate humor in the insults that he directs toward his wife in the dining room. Luther ­engages Katharina in an asymmetrical joking relationship, which in ­anthropological terms means that he teases her, and she does not respond in kind. Joking for the Reformer lay at the heart of intimacy; he had seen his father use it in ­private moments with his mother.61 Isaac joked with Rebecca.62 Jesting f­ acilitated the success of the marital bond.63 Up till now, women have considered L­ uther’s jibes simply hurtful, a sign of the misogyny of that age. They are that too. A  ­critical reader of this manuscript before publication desires me to make Litterarum 21 (Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, 2012), p. 235, about the editing of the well-­ intentioned Aurifaber. 59 E.g., wa tr 1, no. 807, p. 386. 60 Johannes Mathesius, Historie, Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes, Doctoris Martini Luthers, anfang, lehr, leben vnd sterben, Alles ordendlich der Jarzal nach, wie sich alle sachen zu jeder zeyt haben zugetragen (Nuremberg: n.p., 1567), fol. xxvi (recto). 61 wa br 2, no. 1659, pp. 166–167. 62 wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523/24’, p. 346; ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527’, p. 445. 63 ‘Martin Luther’s Masculinity: Theory, Practicality, and Humor’, in Karant-Nunn and Scott H. Hendrix (eds.), Masculinity in the Reformation Era, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 83 (Kirksville, mo: Thomas Jefferson Press, 2008), pp. 167–189; reprinted below in somewhat expanded form as Chapter 6.

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clear that I find them offensive. I do. But I am not Katharina von Bora. On one occasion, Luther may have cut too close to the quick. Luther informed his dining companions that he needed more than one wife so that he could have more offspring. Katharina retorted that if he took another wife, she would return to the convent and leave their children with him!64 His reply is not recorded. Without the Table Talk, we would not know that Luther had once thought that the name Jesus had an effeminate sound?65 This too provides insight into his ear for speech, his sensitivity to soft and hard sounds and to gender differentiation in language. A large remaining question looms before us: To what degree was Luther aware of himself as a singular personality? To what degree did he strive to contribute to the formation of an image? Scholars will want to discuss this. He seems to me to lack sufficient self-discipline to concentrate on self-shaping. He did note that he was angry too often; this was one of his characteristic sins, one that he regularly took to God in prayer. The man who is frequently angry lacks the essential ingredient of restrained calculation that self-formation requires. Luther reflects on himself in terms of his relationship to God, and also to people in his immediate environment, people who require a response, whether they are great like Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland and southwest Germany or one of the Luthers’ small children at the dinner table. He assesses himself to the end of his life as a frequent sinner. He also perceives himself to be a celebrity beyond his home territory, and he likes the clout that seems to give him. He had become famous by expressing his sincerest views, and he may have become convinced that this was the route to influence. He was frustrated when, for reasons of danger to his person, he had to spend the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 entombed (as he thought) at the Festung Coburg and tried to influence decisions from afar. His overriding consideration, however, was to articulate God’s scriptural truth to the Emperor and the world, and he feared that through conceding anything to the Catholic faith, that truth would be compromised. It is surprising that he approved Melanchthon’s Apologia despite the two men’s differences of opinion on some points. He was bombarded with complaints from other men about Melanchthon’s readiness to give in to Catholic pressure, and Luther himself was mistrustful. On this occasion, perhaps he did step outside himself and reflect, as we do, on the parameters of his culture and his times, 64

65

wa tr 2, no. 1461, p. 105. Luther had once remarked while lecturing on Genesis that if the Fall had not occurred, wives would bear numerous offspring at once, like some animals (wa Schriften 42, p. 162). Luther appears to have identified multiple progeny with fully developed masculinity. wa tr 2, no. 1746, p. 204.

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within which he prayed and expounded. Perhaps he was learning to be a better politician. Nevertheless, he believed in the objective validity of his perceptions and his judgments.66 He was not prepared to compromise. If the rhetorical we can find the man Luther throughout the huge, self-­ revealing corpus of his works, how do we prepare ourselves to do this? As people of a wholly different era, experience, culture, and set of values, how can we historians arm ourselves for a trip beyond the world in which we are embedded. Erik Midelfort, in rendering advice to modern social historians of ideas, suggests, ‘Social historians of the Reformation need to learn to read pamphlets and sermons and vernacular translations as well as tax rolls and visitation ­protocols …. The eclecticism for which I speak has no better name than erudition, a goal rather than a method …’.67 Thirty years after Midelfort wrote, cultural historians would need to add to the sources listed, every category and vestige of a past society, including the bodily gestures of personal interaction, patterns of landscape preparation, the esthetic tastes of all classes, manners of dress, social rituals, and choices and service of food. The cultural historian has taken on more than one can possibly achieve, the accumulation of every genre of evidence of a collective cosmic view that produced, surrounded, and held to itself an individual about whom understanding is sought, in this case Luther. This is eclecticism writ large. This is what the current mode of ‘interdisciplinary’ study surely means to enable, although it has been used by administrators as a code and rationale for dismantling discipline-based academic departments. A corollary of this platform for preparation would be that one could only take on the examination of a complicated, significant individual like Luther after a lifetime of scholarly preparation! The young should take on simpler projects, but each one differing from the previous, in preparation for ever more expansive enterprises ahead. No amount of accumulated expertise, however, can overcome the fact that we are rooted in another time, culture, and set of values. Our every formulation of a question, characterization of the past, selection of information, and final analysis is an expression of the present us. Only in our imaginations can we transcend the changes that have intervened over half a millennium and purport to become acquainted with the ‘true’ Martin Luther. A vigorous 66

67

See Bernhard Lohse, ‘Philipp Melanchthon in seinen Beziehungen zu Luther’, in Helmar Junghans (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag (2 vols.,Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 1: 403–418; 2: 860–863. H.C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Toward a social history of ideas in the German Reformation’, in Kyle C. Sessions and Phillip N. Bebb (eds.), Pietas et Societas. New Trends in Reformation Social History (Kirksville, mo: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1985), p. 21.

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imagination, along with assiduous data-collection, is a decided advantage for a historian. It helps us at least to become convinced that we have crossed the mountain range between us and the objects of our investigations. Research in any age is also hindered by the biases of those who undertake it. The late Heiko A. Oberman once publicly lost his temper with me for referring to differences in approach between confessionally committed historians and those who were not. (He apologized later.) I must stand by what I said. Church historians are frequently clergy, or they are devout Lutherans (or Catholics or post-Calvinists or other Christians) for whom the Reformer is a founding father to be admired and touted (or belittled) during their teachings careers.68 But how is it any less biased to approach the Reformer from a convinced secular perspective and to insist on ferreting out and featuring the offensive convictions he held, toward Jews, peasants, women, Catholics, and Turks? When the most accomplished church historians and secular historians at work today exploit Martin Luther’s expansive ego-document, their findings are bound to differ. The former are more likely to find the Reformation a harbinger of and aid in the formation of treasured features of Western life. In 2009, the so-called Wissenschaftlicher Beirat advising the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland and the national government on how to observe the quincentennial in 2017, approved a list of 23 theses that rendered the late-medieval religious movement a turning point toward the good in all human history. These articles ­assert that the Reformation contributed to the formation of democracy, tolerance and mutual respect among people, the fruitful interaction of faith and the Enlightenment, the foundation of charitable institutions, the free economy, the dignity of the individual, and multiculturalism, among others.69 Those who cooperated on the subcommittee in drawing up this list possess among themselves tremendous erudition in respect of Luther, Lutheran theology, and early modern religiosity in general. From the secular side, I am equally as convinced that the life work of one man living five hundred years ago did not have it in its power, and certainly its author would not have wished, to articulate those ideals. It would seem that these learned individuals did not avail themselves of the ­opportunity to plumb the emotional depths (but only the ­intellectual heights) displayed in this voluminous ego-document, the W ­ eimarer Ausgabe. 68

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For a personal statement that I would see as representative, see Gury Schneider-Ludorff, ‘Kirchengeschichte als Wissenschaft’, in Bernd Jaspert (ed.), Kirchengeschichte als Wissenschaft (Münster/Westphalia: Aschendorff, 2013), pp. 182–189. ‘Perspektiven für das Reformationsjubiläum 2017’, Wittenberg: Luther 2017—500 Jahre Reformation, published as a pamphlet without a date but probably 2009. I translated it into English for the committee.

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Luther would have been, in his own time and place, opposed to every one of these alleged outcomes. Nor could he, to mention another extreme allegation, have contributed toward the German people’s obedience of Adolf Hitler or their cooperation in attempting to eliminate all Jews. Luther should be exempt from grandiose blame as well as praise. It is surely true that each successive generation of the representatives of the Reformation or any movement does purport to appropriate intact the orthodoxy of their Founding Parent, and to transmit it unmodified to a new body of practitioners. But we professional historians should be sufficiently astute to see that however much they try to do this, that very orthodoxy recedes in their successive conflicts over just what Luther said and what he meant. In the meantime, the entire milieu in which Europeans lived had changed. Like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, some of the same elements are present in the later sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century, or in France or Scandinavia, but they combine and recombine with wholly other elements. The kaleidoscope analogy immediately ceases to work as new factors enter the scene. In studying these, we ourselves are changed, both in response to alterations in our discipline and in our experience. Each time we approach the same material—in this case, the Weimarer Ausgabe—we have somewhat different perspectives. Perhaps we were religiously affiliated, and now we are less so; we were not feminists, but now we are; we have encountered theorists whose work has led us to think differently; we have found documents in archives or presented in a summer seminar that modify our view of prevailing early modern European practice. A list of such shifts could be endless. Kaspar von Greyerz reminds us that we cannot in any objective sense capture the essence of a pre-modern person.70 The long-term perusal of Luther’s works reveals that this late-medieval ­German was not static either. He slowly came to the realization that he could attain salvation through faith in Christ; he gradually discovered the Bible and explored its implications; he toyed with retaining the ‘Hail, Mary!’ and a sacrament of penance, and he changed his mind; he clearly declared his belief in predestination, indeed nearly double predestination, and then consigned it to God’s hidden will, all the while continuing to wrestle with the doctrine in private; he contained his sexuality and then he married and gave vent to it; he had little contact with young children and then lots of it; he advocated a popular role in selecting pastors and then he withdrew that advocacy; he thought it unwise to resist imperial orders and then in some circumstances, bearing on faith, wise; his prejudice against Jews hardened. These are but examples. 70

Kaspar von Greyerz, ‘Ego-Documents: The Last Word?’ German History 28, 3 (2010), pp. 273–282.

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Like us, people of the past were dynamic, continually undergoing change; their conditions perpetually altered; and we who examine the past struggle to tie down conclusions that may then prove less consistently tenable. Of late, it seems that the most apt description of early twenty-first century historians’ views of the past is that all phenomena were and are variable and can easily elude our grasp. Our conclusions are slippery. What is sure is that the Weimarer Ausgabe exists and that it does, as Luther intended, reveal the voluble person. Composed in various genres for different audiences, and responding to a number of circumstances, the Weimar edition offers scope for further insight into Luther that has not even been conceptualized.71 The juxtaposition of its pieces enables us to gain yet further by ‘peering between the cracks’. Through this comprehensive examination, we acquire a glue that enables the construction of a composite portrait. It is impossible to confine the Wittenberg Reformer to a particular communicative network within Germany, for he bolted over the boundaries that had been set for an ordinary friar and even for a theologian. He commanded the attention of every group. He derived from Everyman, but he was singular in his day. 71

Lyndal Roper has made innovative and deep use of the Weimarer Ausgabe in her forthcoming biography of the Reformer. I heard her give a paper on Luther’s changes in his name, at the April 2015 meetings of the society called Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In her absence, I read her paper on Luther’s dreams aloud, in mid-June 2016 at a conference called ‘The Cultural History of the Reformation’, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

chapter 2

Luther’s Conscience: A Template for the Modern West? As 2017 approaches, bringing with it the five-hundredth anniversary of the ­beginning of the German Reformation, we may be sure that distant movement resonates within a very different set of modern values because of its founder’s invocation of conscience at the Diet of Worms in April 1521. When surrounded by dignitaries and threatened with universal condemnation and even execution as a heretic, Luther affirmed the authorship and content of his published works and famously declared, Unless I am contradicted by the testimony of Scripture or by the insights of rational argument—I believe neither the pope nor the councils alone, for it is certain that they have often erred and been in conflict with one another—I am compelled by the words of Scripture that I have cited. As long as my conscience is held captive by God’s Words, I will retract nothing; for it is unsafe and threatening to salvation to act against one’s conscience. God help me, Amen!1 Luther’s brave defiance has endeared him to contemporary Western audiences. Part of our identity is based on an ideal of individual self-formation, including fidelity to one’s highest moral principles, whether or not one is religious. Faithfulness to one’s conscience has become a secular shibboleth too. The ­competing strands of individualism and multiculturalism in the braid of present-day goals, however, point out to the reflective person that conscience today is by no means uniform. The conscience can be invoked in the service of, theoretically, incompatible aspirations. In Luther’s day, this was not the case. Diversity of ethnicity, expression, lifestyle, achievement, and spirituality was not sought but was rather—the highest elites aside—the ineluctable results of geography, class, circumstance, and genetic makeup. Luther held a view of the conscience (Gewissen, conscientia) that made it, in theory, uniform in all true Christians. As he formulated his own 1 wa Schriften 7, ‘Verhandlungen mit D. Martin Luther auf dem Reichstage zu Worms 1521’, p. 838, which, however, adds the contested closing words, ‘Ich kan nicht anderes, hie stehe ich. Got helff mir, Amen’. Cf. p. 886.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004348882_003

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beliefs, conscience became a key concept.2 It occurred frequently in his speaking and writing, and he assumed that his audiences would fully understand what he meant by it. He drew upon a theology of confession to which Thomas Aquinas had contributed significantly but that did not establish the limits of pertinent thought in the fifteenth century.3 The troubled Luther was aware of and admired the more consolatory writings of men like Jean Gerson and ­Johannes Nider, who acknowledged the occasional problem of the overscrupulosity of conscience that Luther suffered from. Luther expressed gratitude for Gerson.4 Their pastoral solutions did not provide him with relief, however, at least not yet.5 As post-Freudians and ethnographers, we may well agree that the conscience is a construct imposed on infants beginning at birth, similarly as the psychoanalytic founder’s universal mother or other nurturer brought a value system, including a requirement of gradually increasing self-control, to bear on the newborn’s unfettered demands. More recent social scientific theories modify this scheme, but in every case a variation on value implantation is imposed on the young person. This implantation is a life-long process, within which the individual is itself shaped and then, reciprocally, begins to shape others around it. The Thuringian lad whom we are considering absorbed folkish social patterns and Catholic dictates that stressed right behavior. It seems as if Luther naturally tried to please those in authority around him, but he did not easily come by their approval. His youthful conscience demanded that he perfect his life-style and include in it as many pious actions as he could, both to appease his fellows and to please God. I will concede to Steven Ozment that this young man (but not all of society) labored under the burden of the unrelenting demands of a ubiquitous, money-grubbing late-medieval institutional Catholic Church.6 This conscience measured itself by signs of approval in its 2 On the origins of conscientia and Gewissen, see H.D. Kittsteiner, Gewissen und Geschichte: Studien zur Entstehung des moralischen Bewuβtseins (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1990), pp. 13–18. Kittsteiner’s special interest is, however, the effect of the Enlightenment upon the European conscience. 3 Yrjö J.E. Alanen, Das Gewissen bei Luther, Annales Academiæ Scientiarum Fennicæ, B, 29/2 (Helsinki: Finnische Literaturgesellschaft, 1934), pp. 27–30. 4 wa tr 2, no. 2457 a, p. 468. 5 For a short introduction, see Thomas G. Brogl, ‘“Ÿeglich Nãch Sín Vermugen”: Johannes ­Nider’s Idea of Conscience’, in Sigrid Müller and Cornelia Schweiger (eds.), Between Creativity and Norm-Making. Tensions in the Early Modern Era, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 165 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 61–76. Also, in general, Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1977). 6 Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and S­ witzerland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 9, 12, 21–32.

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environment, and the Augustinian Eremites hardly made daily expressions of loving approval their pattern of life. Monasticism is rooted in a fundamental, by definition ascetic, disapproval of telluric existence. Its adherents must be continually watchful for assertions of the ego and the flesh and press them beneath the threshold of action; if possible, even beneath the threshold of awareness so that they do not produce sins of thought. As a multi-part institution that was dispersed throughout Europe, Christian monasticism was an expression of that official dualism that came, gradually, to dominate the Western Church in the sixth and seventh centuries. It disapproved of the demands of the body, but it equally condemned the suicide in which some sensitive and logical adherents might have found a solution. The realities of monastic life were certainly in contrast to its highest ideals; and monks, nuns, friars, and canons made astonishing gifts to the social and cultural life of their day. Those very gifts, however, whether in the realms of the arts or social relief, were sometimes at odds with the brothers’ and sisters’ ascetic pronouncements, as critics both within and without the movement occasionally pointed out. Their aim was, ultimately, to inform and activate the consciences of all their members. Luther may be said to have undergone a crisis of conscience as he searched early on for a means of reconciliation with the Heavenly Father. He personally needed approval. We do not have to resort either to Freud or to Erik Erikson in stating this, for we are surrounded by sensitive souls who seek out our own affirmation. We teachers all know latter-day young Martin Luthers! So widespread in our own time has the desire for personal validation become that it has led the American educational system in the direction of elevating the conferral of self-esteem over the transmission of knowledge and skill. In his own setting, Luther acquired significant learning in the midst of his inner quest. He was highly motivated. He studied the formative figures, from Greek philosophers to fifteenth-century theologians, who had produced among themselves the Church as he found it. As he would declare at Worms, he often found them to be incompatible with one another. Where was a conscience engendered by cacophonous voices to find repose? Luther’s trip to Rome provides a lens through which we may view his suffering. His assignment in 1510 to accompany a senior member of his order to the capital of the Western Church constituted an unsought-for pilgrimage to the second-most important destination available to a Christian, after ­Jerusalem.7 Luther hoped primarily to tap the Treasury of Merit by his deeds in order to benefit the soul of his dear grandfather Heinrich Luder. Perhaps he only 7 Or consider the redating suggested by Hans Schneider, ‘Martin Luthers Reise nach Rom— neu datiert und neu gedeutet’, in Werner Lehfeldt (ed.), Studien zur Wissenschafts- und zur Religionsgeschichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 1–157, esp. p. 6.

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­gradually realized that he himself might find relief in this almost altruistic fulfillment of an agenda of penitence toward which the Church directed its visitors. The prescriptions included the minute and specific, and this 27-year-old friar tried to comply with them. He visited the seven principal churches; he made his confession; he prayerfully, arduously ascended the stairs of Pontius Pilate at the church of Saint John Lateran. In addition, he stopped by other prominent sites, such as the Pantheon and the catacombs that allegedly contained the bones of some 70,000 early Christians including martyrs.8 He found no assurance that his efforts within the indulgence system had won mitigation for his ancestor, nor did he derive respite for his own conscience. His father’s father surely still had to endure the purgative flame, and he himself remained in his estimation, as we could put it today, rotten to the core. In this deathenmeshed age before the discovery of bacteria and antibiotics, Luther himself would have to join his grandfather whenever he succumbed. He could not rely on living to the age of 62. Eons in purgatory were the best outcome his troubled conscience could hope for, and his entry into its regimen could come at any moment. He held in the back of his memory the earlier reminder by an older member of his order that whenever he said the Creed, he affirmed his belief in ‘the remission of sins’. This was in the nature of a ‘factoid’, which held worth, to be sure, but which in order to yield the most benefit needed to be embedded in a net of equally large principles of forgiveness that altogether proved irrefutable. The pastoral writings of Gerson and Nider belong in this category. Luther would find his main source in the Bible, however. The Bible would alter his conscience. Thirty years earlier, Luther later remembered, not even doctors of theology possessed Bibles. The only place to find one was in a monastery.9 The Bible was regarded as almost irrelevant, and Italian clergy, he said, mocked northerners because they believed everything in Scripture.10 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Luther said one day, had not read a Bible until eight years after he had received the doctorate in theology.11 The Reformer maintained that 8

9

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Herbert Voβberg, Im heiligen Rom: Luthers Reiseeindrücke 1510–1511 (Berlin [West]: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1966); Italo Michele Battafarano, Mit Luther oder Goethe in Italien: Irritation und Sehnsucht der Deutschen (Trento: Dipartimento di Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Filologici, 2007), pp. 9–36. wa tr 2, no. 1522, p. 129. On Luther’s own use of a Bible when he was a friar, see M ­ artin Brecht, Martin Luther. Sein Weg zur Reformation 1483–1521 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1981), pp. 90–96. wa tr 2, no. 1327, pp. 48–50. wa tr 3, no. 2844, p. 24.

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this was true of many other Catholic doctors of theology.12 Preachers throughout Europe—and there were far more, and more occasions of preaching, than Protestant scholars have wished to allow—did cite the Bible, but Luther may well have been correct that they were not directly acquainted with it but had ‘heard tell’. They mixed sources, sometimes for entertainment purposes, and thought nothing of embroidering on a Bible story. Luther generalized, ‘For 500 years the Gospel has not been properly preached …’.13 He asserted in a sermon in Erfurt on the way to Worms that out of 3,000 priests, there might have been fewer than four proper preachers. But everything they said about the Gospels was likely to be a fable ‘about the old donkey or a tale out of Ditterich von Bernn [sic], or mixed in with the heathen masters Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, etc., who are entirely against the Gospel’.14 The elaboration of the Virgin Mary’s life and role is another case in point. Luther desired to go to the font of divine truth, the Book itself, rather than accept what others said about it. He was not profoundly influenced by the humanist movement, but in this instance, for his most personal reasons, he shared their pursuit of fontes, original sources. His first advanced degree, beyond the master of arts, was the baccalaurius biblicus, received in March 1509. The times and places of the transformation of his conscience are inaccessible to us now. It is apparent that as Luther engaged in his biblical studies, he gradually shifted the touchstone of belief from the dictates of the Church to those of Scripture alone.15 At the same time, he derived influence from ­Augustine, to whom the meaning of Scripture was self-evident.16 There is little doubt that what he experienced in Rome focused his attention on ecclesiastical abuses and facilitated his movement away from one standard and toward another. He began to scrutinize not mainly his own irrepressible sinfulness but key aspects of Catholic teaching and practice. Over the following years he asked himself a number of questions. Was the pope indeed the vicar of Christ 12 13 14 15

16

wa tr 3, no. 3580a, p. 429. wa br 3, no. 668, p. 172. wa Schriften 7, ‘Sermon … geschen zu Erfurdt am Sontag Quasimodogeniti’, pp. 810–811. It is uncertain with whom Luther studied or exactly what between late 1507 and March 9, 1509, when he was awarded the degree. See Martin Brecht’s account of his studies, Martin Luther (3 vols., Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1981–1987), i: 98. Most important is the new volume, Volker Leppin (ed.), Reformatorische Theologie und Autoritäten. Studien zur Genese des Schriftprinzips beim jungen Luther (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), and Leppin’s own essay therein, ‘Duo Cherubim adversis vultibus. Zur Herausbildung und texthermeneutischen Bedeutung des Grundsatzes Scriptura sui ipsius interpres’, pp. 141–174. On this point see J.M. Porter (ed.), Luther, Selected Political Writings (Philadelphia: F­ ortress Press, 1974), p. 4.

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who spoke with irrefutable authority? Could this human being compel subscription to a list of doctrines, including seven sacraments? Could priests and canonized saints, including the Virgin, serve as intermediaries between the individual Christian and God? Was there a Treasury of Merit of Jesus and the saints that the Church could tap and apply to the temporal purgation of sinners in exchange for their or their family members’ self-sacrificing acts or gifts of money for ecclesiastical purposes? If the Bible was indeed the Word of God, why did these privileges not appear there? Did Scripture substantiate as superior the withdrawal of individuals from society into celibate, oath-bound communities? As he applied himself to his studies, to preaching, and to lecturing at the University of Wittenberg over the course of a decade, the friar’s conscience came to transfer its allegiance from approved thought to what he discovered in the Bible. This collection of ancient texts transfixed him. It seemed to confirm his suspicions of calculated, self-serving departure from the simplicity of Christ, the Saviour’s teachings concerning the love of God and neighbor, and his atoning sacrifice on the cross. It may be only by chance that the issue of indulgences provided the means by which Luther came to public attention. If any of the other matters on which he was coming to differ as he examined Holy Writ had had the same urgent social and economic meaning, it could have lent him an alternative vehicle. Indulgences, however, were not only indefensible theologically but they daily injured the common people of Saxony and Thuringia. They played on people’s fears and stole money out of their purses. Luther’s own neighbors were lured into making these contrived purchases. Years later, the Reformer told his guests what became the famous story of his conscience being changed and finding peace at last as he sat in the cloaca and reflected. His insight must have been more gradual, but in the end, after years of rumination (mainly not in the cloaca!), it percolated upward into his coherent brain and into articulation. He saw that God judged a person to be righteous on the basis of his faith alone. Now, at last, Luther’s conscience could relax. He himself was comforted.17 He tried to extend that consolation to the laity in sermons.18 By 1518, he could prescribe a gentle, faith-based approach for confessors which reflected his own relative peace.19 Simultaneously, when 17 18

19

wa tr 2, no. 1681, p. 177. His most famous retrospection came in 1545, in the preface to the collection of his Latin writings: wa Schriften 54, p. 186. wa Schriften 7, ‘Sermon von dreierlei guten Leben, das Gewissen zu unterrichten’, pp. 792–802. I find the logic here somewhat incoherent, but Luther does intend to instruct consciences. ‘Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis conclusions. 1518’, wa Schriften 1, pp. 629–633.

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he appeared before Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg in that year, he did not give in to the legate’s insistent urging that he retract his views. Luther summarized his position in a letter to Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt: ‘… I will not become a heretic by contradicting that opinion through which I became a Christian. I would sooner die—be burned, driven out, and accursed!’20 Luther, then, had modified his definition of conscience well before invoking it at Worms. A summation may be found in the sermon he gave on March 24, 1521, Palm Sunday, a week before departing on his journey to the imperial diet in early April. He was impassioned and felt frustrated by his inability up until then to bring the common people of Wittenberg into his personal transformation. He felt a sense of urgency. You think this is trickery (Gauckelwerck), he reproves them, but I am announcing the truth! ‘It would be better that I had not preached a single word to you than that you should remain the way you were before!’ The truth he lays before them is that Christ has come, riding on the back of a young donkey, to bring them relief. Luther here tells his own tale of a donkey, but a very different one from his preacherly forebears. Their consciences have been troubled by the impossibility of doing what the law (Gesetz) demanded. But now the Son of God arrives in all humility to offer them the love and assurance of his Father. You, too, are a donkey, but an older one. If you allow him, ‘Christ sits in your heart, where his regiment is, [and] makes your heart glad’. Christians should ride upon their old donkey and willingly follow where Christ on the younger one leads. Christ will make your conscience good (gueth).21 Upon this stone alone a person should build his conscience (sein gebissen bawen).22 The words Gewissen and conscientia recur throughout Luther’s opus; they are in his learned works, his correspondence, and his offhand remarks at table. In 1524, he wrote to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz that his, Luther’s, conscience did not belong to him alone but to all good Christians including his Magnificence. Conscience was a shared criterion of right and wrong based on the Bible.23 He wrote to the city council of Herzberg in 1530 and urged moderation in the punishment of a woman who had used too short an ell, a measure of cloth length. ‘If you are too harsh, perhaps your conscience will be regretful and bite you afterward’.24 Then it would be too late to find a remedy. He did not say it expressly here, but he meant that this conscience judged every assertion 20 21 22 23 24

wa br 1, no. 100, p. 217. wa Schriften 9, ‘Sermo in die Palmarum’, 1521, pp. 634–637. Ibid. p. 633. wa br 3, no. 711, p. 244. wa br 5, no. 1742, pp. 665–666.

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by the Bible, as the councillors’ own conscience must. At dinner one day, he opined that Catholics had anxious consciences. His own goal was to preach the Gospel and consolation (Trost) to anxiety-stricken, humiliated, despairing, and foolish consciences.25 He assured his prince, before being summoned to Worms, that he had only ever taught and written in accordance with his ‘conscience and duty’.26 In these heady, confident days after his deliverance from the imperial diet, Luther went so far as to accord to each Christian the ability to judge the validity of doctrine, based on his or her own familiarity with the Bible. In 1522, Luther preached, … The Lord Christ here [Matth. 7] commands and empowers all Christians to judge all teaching and to decide whether it is right or not …. Now I have a decision [to make] whether I may accept it or not. For you have to be so certain that this is the Word of God, as certain as you live, and even more certain that you must place your conscience upon it …. You must have the ability to say: that is God speaking, or it is not; that is right, that is untrue. Otherwise you cannot endure [bestehen], it is not possible.27 The Catholic clergy in the Wittenberg All Saints’ Chapter House, whose adherence to the old ways Luther was begging the elector to reform, seized Luther’s argument from conscience and turned it, they hoped, to their own benefit. In the summer of 1523, the brothers invoked their own consciences as the grounds on which they remained true to the Catholic Mass.28 Luther presumably rejected this logic inasmuch as he saw their conscience as false, as one not focused exclusively on Scripture. But already in these early years of the Reformation, other theologians were espousing the principle of sola scriptura but were not assuming the same positions that Luther was in the process of articulating. Luther’s disappointment during the 1520s lay in the realization that the Holy Ghost had not imprinted creedal unanimity on every pious heart. For a short time, he had felt sure that it would. Luther early saw himself as a divine instrument in rectifying entrenched abuses. But during the period that Franz Lau and Ernst Bizer referred to as a time of wild growth (Wildwuchs), from about 1520 to about 1525, many

25 26 27 28

wa tr 2, no. 1682, p. 178; wa tr 2, no. 1974, pp. 284–285. wa br 2, no. 371, p. 254. wa Schriften 10 / 1, ‘Am achten sontage nach Trinitatis Euangelion Math. am Sibenden’, pp. 332–340. wa br 3, no. 648, p. 135.

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voices took exception to Luther’s own.29 His confrontations with Karlstadt are well known.30 When Luther briefly returned from the Wartburg, the Zwickau Prophets were confounding Melanchthon and appeared to advocate believers’ baptism. That matter had not come up in Zwickau.31 That Karlstadt himself was drawn to pedobaptism is proved by the parish visitors’ findings when he departed from Orlamünde and left behind not only his wife and their unbaptized child but also some members of the congregation who did not wish to initiate their infants in the faith.32 Karlstadt himself wrote against sparing hesitant consciences;33 the practice of the ‘true faith’ should be, to his mind, decisively introduced out of fidelity to God. In the event, Luther was not far behind in accepting, as he came to see it, the erection of the true church, with the aggressive aid of the state. Frederick the Wise was already Luther’s ‘emergency bishop’ (Notbischof). As Catholic institutions lost ground, the assignment of new clergy required his permission. He often sought Luther’s judgment on this candidate or that. Thomas Müntzer’s treachery in accepting divine revelation to each person threatened Luther’s sense of a unified conscience based on the Word of God. 29 30 31

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Franz Lau and Ernst Bizer, Reformationsgeschichte Deutschlands: Ein Handbuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), pp. 17–43. Mark U. Edwards, Jr, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 34–59. Their core issue in Zwickau was the direct inspiration of the individual by the Holy Spirit. Each of them could see himself as a channel of the divine who needn’t be bound by Scripture. See also Thomas Kaufmann, Thomas Müntzer, ‘Zwickauer Propheten’ und sächsische Radikale. Eine quellen- und traditionskritische Untersuchung zu einer komplexen Konstellation (Mühlhausen: Thomas-Müntzer-Gesellschaft, 2010). Kaufmann is right that the ­constellation was complex. Whether or not Thomas Drechsel was the ‘third’ Zwickau Prophet, he was an adherent of Müntzer and then Storch who fled the city and turned up in Wittenberg to bear witness personally to his experience of direct divine communication. He confronts Luther at the same time as Storch and Marcus Stübner were in Wittenberg. See my discussion of Drechsel’s economic position in Zwickau in Karant-Nunn, Zwickau in transition, 1500–1547. The Reformation as an agent of change (Columbus, oh: Ohio State University Press, 1987), pp. 107–108. wa br 3, no. 822, p. 430. Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (2 vols., Leipzig: Friedrich Brandstetter, 1905), ii: 219; Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, Reg. Ii 198. Ob man gemach faren, vnd des ergernüssen der schwachen verschonen soll, in sachen so gottis willen angehen, 1524, a pointed contradiction of Luther’s stance at that time. This is available via Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=_TBlAAAAcA AJ&pg=PT2&dq=Ob+man+gemach+faren+soll&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbwOu 1vLrPAhVL2WMKHTqiAecQ6AEIKTAB#v=onepage&q=Ob%20man%20gemach%20 faren%20soll&f=false.

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One of the Zwickau radicals, the smithThomas Drechsel, whom the Reformer angrily dismissed from his presence when he professed to being a visionary, remarked as he departed, ‘Whoever doesn’t agree with Luther is a fool!’34 He meant that Luther would entertain no one’s interpretation but his own. Luther defended the constancy of God’s Word ‘from the beginning’.35 Simultaneously, the Anabaptist conscience resembled that of the Catholics in stressing the human ability and obligation to control sinful inclinations; despite the ­differences (which Luther did not perceive) among representatives of this loose group, they often did not share Luther’s sense of the meaning of Scripture. Most prominently, Luther sincerely found a rationale for infant baptism in the New Testament, but nearly all Anabaptists considered this to be strictly contrived. Luther made no concessions to consciences such as these. He remarked from time to time, sharing a view of many contemporaries, that Anabaptists practiced sexual promiscuity.36 When asked whether Anabaptists could be saved, Luther replied, ‘We have to judge by Scripture’.37 He meant his own version of Scripture. He saw his own paramount attainment as having brought the true Bible into the light.38 The Reformer’s most widely known conflict over the issue of the biblical formation of conscience was that over the eucharist. The protocols of the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 reveal the fervor with which Luther argued against a rhetorical use of the word is (est) in construing the presence or absence of the physical Christ at the celebration of the Lord’s supper. For the Wittenberger, the entire Word of God stood or collapsed based on the retention or rejection of its literal contents. At Marburg, Johannes Oecolampadius reproved L­ uther, ‘Don’t cling so firmly to Christ’s humanity and flesh; lift your thoughts to Christ’s divinity!’ Luther responded, ‘I know God only as He became human, so I shall have Him in no other way’.39 He bore within him the spiritual wound of Zwingli’s refusal to conform even as he purported to subscribe to sola ­scriptura. 34 35 36 37 38 39

wa tr 3, no. 2837b, pp. 14–17, here at p. 16. wa tr 2, no. 2138, p. 334: Luther prefers the stability of the Word of God to miracles, he says. wa tr 1, no. 975, p. 493, in this case ‘die gartenbrüder’. Cf. wa tr 1, #1329, p. 51. wa tr 2, no. 1444, p. 102. He says this over and over again. One example is wa tr 2, no. 2358b, p. 432: ‘… das Euangelium wieder rein an den Tag gebracht ward [by him]…’. Walther Erich Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (Leipzig: n.p., 1929), p. 27; and lw 38, pp. 3–90. See http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/ FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3163&qp=16 Yale Divinity Digital Image and Text Library, the full translated transcript of the Marburg discussion of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, p. 19. Consulted 7 August 2015.

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The matter came up again and again, as in his lectures on Genesis six years later: We have Christ’s clear word about the Lord’s Supper, where he says concerning the bread: ‘This is my body which is given for you’, and concerning the cup: ‘This is the cup of the New Testament in my blood’. Therefore, when the fanatics depart from faith in these words and discuss how these things can be so, they gradually get to the point where they simply deny this word of Christ and attack it …. Therefore, we must simply maintain that when we hear God saying something, we are to believe it and not to debate about it but rather take our intellect captive in the obedience of Christ …. Thus it is in the Word alone that the bread is the body of Christ, that the wine is the blood of Christ. This must be believed; it must not and cannot be understood.40 From our broader perspective, we now perceive that this debate was not ­merely about one of the theological articles on which the learned men at M ­ arburg were attempting to agree. Luther found Scripture in general, the foundation stone on which he built his conscience, called into question. Those who disagreed with him were not Christians. The greatest and most vehement quarrel that the true Christians have is with false brothers …. Because they …want to bear the Christian name and be regarded as and called Christians, we should not tolerate their utterances and deeds that are improper for Christians. For we theologians actually take on the governance of conscience and say that this function pertains to us through the Word. We will not allow this to be taken from us by any means.41 Luther means not just any theologians but his own followers. The success of the Sacramentarian position, advanced by other theologians, would have dire, pervasive consequences beyond the communion table. Luther ranted over dinner that all heretics should die. They are ‘liars and murderers’ (lügner und mörder)! They violate their consciences!42 In the latter accusation, Luther is maintaining that their true consciences, those based like his on the unified 40 41 42

wa Schriften, 42/1, p. 118; translation from lw, Jaroslav Pelikan (ed.), Lectures on Genesis, chapters 1–5, vol. 1 (Saint Louis, mo: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), p. 157. wa tr 2, no. 2189, p. 354. wa tr 1, no. 291, p. 122.

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Truth of Scripture, knew better than to introduce a figurative meaning to Christ’s speech. Zwingli and Oecolampadius knew better! They did not really believe what they argued. He wrote persuasively to Landgrave Philipp of Hesse that Sacramentarians militated against their own consciences and could not quiet the pangs that afflicted them as a result. They got in the habit of denying the presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharistic elements and could not allow themselves to turn back even though they knew they were wrong.43 On another occasion, he lumped them together with every other ‘demonic’ category: ‘Mahommed [sic], the papists, the sacramentarians, the Anabaptists, and other gang members (Rottengeister) have no certainty [Gewissheit]… for they do not hang on God’s Word. They interpret God’s Word in accord with their reason’.44 The Waldensians were always sad, for their consciences gave them no consolation.45 Müntzer and Oecolampadius, he said, had distorted consciences that doubted and shifted.46 As for the papists in Luther’s list, these had malformed consciences. They had to carry their false teachings and the promiscuity that resulted from vows of celibacy ‘on their conscience’. Their genuine conscience, founded upon the Bible, would inform them of their errors.47 It would tell them, he remarked one day, that they must receive the eucharist in both kinds.48 The peasants’ invocation of three of Luther’s teachings in their uprising in 1525 again impressed upon the Reformer how easily misunderstood his message could be. This shock came together with his fundamental prejudice against members of his father’s ancestral group, the peasants, as a class. As a regular preacher to peasants who came in to the Wittenberg city church (Saint Mary’s) from their nearby land-plots, he often complained that they (as well as the urban laboring classes) did not understand anything he said. His visceral judgment was that for the most part, they fell into that majority of nominal Christians who would not be saved. God had not formed their consciences to incline toward the divine Word. They did not have the gift of faith. Yet he was obligated to preach comfort for the few who could benefit.49 During the ­aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt, as the regional princes swept through the countryside torturing and executing participants, Luther may have r­eflected 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

wa br 5, no. 1573, pp. 330–332. ‘… Weil sie ins Nein kommen sind, wöllen und können sie nicht zurück’. wa tr 1, no. 787, pp. 373–374. On another occasion, he conceded that many Catholics would be saved because they relied on Christ (wa tr 2, no. 1644, p. 161). wa tr 2, no. 2630b, p. 561. wa tr 1, no. 1045, pp. 527–528. wa tr 1, no. 898, p. 447. wa tr 1, no. 1058, pp. 533–534. wa tr 2, no. 1804, p. 220.

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on the stresses of torture. He cut its victims no slack. If, he pronounced, a person being subjected to judicial torment confessed to something he—Luther used the masculine as usual—had not done or did not believe, he, too, violated his conscience.50 The conscience, he seems to say, is part of the result of God’s gift of faith to His chosen ones. It is an implanted guide to Scripture and refuses intellectual examination. It should simply be followed. Torture is no excuse for betraying it. The devil regularly challenged Luther’s own conscience—usually at night as he lay next to his wife, when he should have been sleeping. These temptations to disbelieve (Anfechtungen) attacked the very nexus between conscience and Scripture. Luther did not describe their content in detail, but he did occasionally offer generalizations. He stated at the table one day that the devil often accused him of causing great harm, much dismay, and much evil with his teachings.51 Satan tried to dislodge his faith. This divine knew the Bible well, and he saw its inconsistencies. We may take it that the devil knew it equally well. In Scripture, Luther thought, sometimes, Jesus spoke as a human, and sometimes he spoke as God. Why did he not represent his nature coherently and consistently? The Reformer admitted to the troubled Frau Lysskirchen of Freiberg that worry over God’s providence and whether he would be saved afflicted him, too, and not just her. ‘I know this sickness well and have lain in the sick-room [Spital] with it up to the point of eternal death’.52 The question of predestination came up regularly in the dining room. Luther’s concept of the hidden God gave him and other believers their own hiding place. One should not apply reason to matters of faith. Luther quickly came to the view that individual consciences, or at least their public manifestations, did have to be forced. To instruct consciences by means of preaching the Word was not having the success by itself that Luther had envisioned for it. At the beginning of 1528, Elector Johann sought Luther’s advice about the nonconformity of the chief military officer (Hauptmann) at the Veste Coburg, Hans Mohr. Mohr had already been interrogated concerning his Sacramentarian view of the eucharist, and Johann appended the protocol of that hearing to his letter. Mohr had apparently invoked his own conscience and refused to recant. At an unspecified time, the man had already been instructed to keep silent about his belief lest it spread. Luther recommended that the prince condemn Mohr to perpetual silence, but in the aftermath, J­ohann dismissed his official.53 By that date, Luther and his ruler were persuaded that 50 51 52 53

wa tr 1, no. 180, p. 81. wa tr 1, no. 613, p. 290. For Luther’s scatological remedy, see wa tr 2, no. 1557, p. 132. wa br 12, no. 4244a, p. 135. wa br 4, no. 1208, p. 348; no. 1209, pp. 349–350.

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the R ­ eformer’s conscience conformed perfectly to the biblical standard to which all others should be held. God had called him and not them, Luther was certain. Similarly, Luther advocated dealing mercilessly with the Anabaptist Hans Sturm, whom the authorities tortured in order to extract complete information from him. He was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. While he was held in the castle in Wittenberg, Luther ‘often’ visited him and tried to convert him, but he would not budge.54 Luther regarded Sturm as possessed by the devil. The electors were relentless in their pursuit of Anabaptists. They accorded them not the slightest dignity of conscience.55 In 1530, Luther wrote to the Thuringian Reformers Justus Menius (Eisenach) and Friedrich Myconius (Gotha), who had been examining accused Anabaptists, of his utter contempt for these ‘blasphemous and most seditious’ men.56 Both Luther and Melanchthon again referred to their consciences in arguing that the elector should steer clear of any alliance with other Protestant princes (most prominently Landgrave Philipp of Hesse) that aroused the fears and counter-alliances of Emperor Charles v, who had, they noted, commanded peace. Tactically, it was far preferable, they told Johann and his advisors at a meeting in Torgau (followed up by letters), to persuade the emperor of their completely peaceable and submissive intent—with the crucial exception that their prince should not obey the emperor’s instruction to turn over to his representatives ‘all heretical preachers and all former priests, monks, and nuns’ for punishment. Johann realized the risk he ran of moving Charles to deprive him of the Saxon electorship. This he wished to avoid at all costs, and yet he was a devout follower of Luther.57 Luther and Melanchthon stressed separately to their ruler that if he were to contribute to the coming of war, this would violate their consciences. They would leave his lands, they threatened.58 Melanchthon underscored Luther’s judgment with the full force of his epistolary rhetoric: He referred to the prince’s, his subjects’, and his soldiers’ Gewissen. He concluded with the image of Johann’s loss of his own Gewissen and his alienation from God: ‘It is the greatest comfort in all suffering to have a good conscience and not to have God as one’s enemy. If we were to take up the sword first and with a bad conscience to begin a war, we would have lost this consolation. Great 54 55 56 57

58

See Luther’s account of Sturm’s end, wa tr 3, no. 3699, p. 544. wa br 5, no. 1399, pp. 42–43; no. 1404, pp. 49–50. wa br 5, no. 1532, pp. 244–245. For the broad picture, see Eike Wolgast, Die Wittenberger Theologie und die Politik der evangelischen Stände: Studien zu Luthers Gutachten in politischen Fragen (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1977). wa br 4, no. 1246a, pp. 421–422; no. 1258, pp. 447–450.

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worry and concern move me to write this’.59 Luther penned, ‘Because of other concerns and the force of my conscience, I have not been able to write about it [the proposed defensive league] to Your Electoral Grace’. He strongly urges Johann not to bind himself. ‘This [the league] is not from God but derives from human wit. It is a temptation of the devil’.60 On this subject, these two friends are of one mind. The topic came up repeatedly, however, for Landgrave Philipp desired to establish a ‘defensive league’. Luther calls the landgrave ‘a restless man’.61 Luther recognized that treading a line between the demands of politics and one’s conscience was immensely difficult. He was torn between rendering political advice to his prince based on practical circumstances, and remaining true to biblical principles.62 His conscience did not permit both. In the end, however, he deeply admired the diplomatic skills that Elector Johann had displayed at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, where every day he had been subject to the ridicule and scorn of the prelates and Catholic princes. Johann had assured the emperor of his peaceful intent, championed the Augsburg Confession, and quietly refused to relinquish the preaching of the Gospel in his lands. For the time being at least, he had appeased Charles v. Luther explored the matter of conscience while sitting in the Festung Coburg in 1530 as his prince and his colleagues who were not under ban of empire negotiated at the Diet of Augsburg. At one point, Luther laid down general guidelines for what his fellow Saxons could agree to and what not. He explained that if the emperor commanded the elector to eat fish on Friday, that would not bear on Johann’s conscience, for he would just comply as a favor to His Imperial Majesty. If he even required the elector to attend Mass, that would be all right inasmuch as physical attendance could not force him or anybody to regard the Mass as a sacrifice. But if the emperor were to outlaw the preaching of the Gospel, the elector could not in good conscience obey, for the Gospel is God’s own Word. He praises his governor for having the best pastors and preachers in the world, along with a catechism, and these together will reap a significant Christian harvest among the dear boys and girls in his lands. ­Luther imagines God heaping praise upon ‘dear Herzog Hanns’ for being such a superlative cultivator of God’s most noble treasure. Johann is God’s g­ ardener and caretaker.63 All this success, and God’s entire tribute to the elector, depends upon the preaching of the Gospel. 59 60 61 62 63

Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider (ed.), Philippi Melanthonis [sic] Opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. 1 (Halle: C.A. Schwetschke et Filium, 1834), no. 530, cols. 979–980. wa br 5, no. 1424, pp. 75–78. Ibid. wa tr 2, no. 1715, p. 191. wa br 5, no. 1572, pp. 324–327.

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It is not altogether clear when and how Luther believed that young children acquired a conscience. He implies that it is inherent. ‘Children believe rightly’, he says.64 At their birth and when they are toddlers, their consciences are untrammeled. Inspired by the five-year-old Magdalena one day, Luther comments that children ‘know nothing of sin, live without envy, anger, avarice, unbelief, etc., [and] as a result are happy and have a good conscience. They fear no danger …[and] will pay a Groschen for one apple’.65 He characterizes them positively as simple, einfältig, just as Christ said that adult Christians would have to become in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. This elemental condition presumably needed to be reinforced and amplified by means of early education. The age of seven was the turning point. Children younger than seven did not want to kill or commit adultery, although they might steal or eat too much.66 Even if the formation of the adult conscience does not stand out in Luther’s treatise of 1524, ‘To the city councillors of all cities in Germany, that they should found and maintain Christian schools’, the Wittenberger did have this process in mind.67 The nature of the elementary school curricula that would be created in due course, especially those for girls’ schools, reveals this motive. How else was the old, outmoded Catholic conscience to be weaned away from its confidence in good works and translated to a new variety of nourishment by Scripture alone? Luther would have found our ideal of enabling ‘critical thinking’ to be misguided. Yet in a limited sense he stands as a monument to critical thought. Each individual thinker would have had first to internalize precisely Luther’s scriptural criterion of the truth. Whether explicitly stated or not, we could argue that the Lutheran retention of auricular confession—confession spoken into the clergyman’s ear— derived from and was part of the effort to inform the Christian’s conscience.68 The collective confession of sins adopted by Zwingli and later by Calvin 64 65 66 67 68

wa tr 2, no. 1394, p. 83. wa tr 1, no. 660, p. 311. A groschen was made up of 12 pennies and was the twentieth part of a Rhenish Gulden. A groschen for one apple was a bizarrely high price. wa tr 2, no. 1532, p. 124. wa Schriften 15, ‘An die Ratherren aller Städte deutsches Lands, daẞ sie christliche Schulen aufrichten und erhalten sollen. 1524’, pp. 27–53. I have been insisting to the critical evaluators of this manuscript that, within Saxony, auricular confession as the admission of transgressions spoken by each individual into the ear of the designated clergyman was retained, although not the late medieval enumeration of all sins. Compare the images of confession in Rogier van der Weyden’s 1445–1450 altarpiece, ‘The Seven Sacraments’, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, with that of Johannes Bugenhagen hearing confession in the Lucas Cranach altarpiece (ca. 1546) displayed in St. Mary’s Church (‘the City Church’) in Wittenberg.

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allowed the individual to dissemble. When the new Evangelical churches were fully formed, each person in Luther’s homeland would need to appear before her pastor or deacon the day before Holy Communion was served and explore the state of his heart and of his knowledge of the rudiments of the faith. Confession is often called exploration (Exploratio) in visitation protocols. Lutheran confession was distinct from its Catholic predecessor in not allowing (much less requiring) the confessee to describe every sin in order for the subsequent absolution to be valid. Rather, a plaguing category of transgression might be named, and the confessor might suggest general remedies. Too, he sought to test the sincerity of an applicant’s sorrow for sin. The confessor was well acquainted with his neighbors in the prevailing small-town setting. The person seeking absolution would be little able to disguise misdeeds, even attitudes, of a social nature. But there were also secret sins. The clergyman was then expected to verify each layperson’s mastery of the contents of Luther’s short catechism, and ideally to know how this glossary and summary of the terms of the faith was related to his and her conscience. This process of examination was related to the notion and the solidification of conscience. Despite his having made a transition to a new basis on which to judge religious truth, Luther, made his confession periodically to his pastor Johannes Bugenhagen. If Bugenhagen was away or if he himself was traveling, he confessed to another available colleague. In the three weeks before he died, L­ uther ­confessed and was absolved twice before receiving communion.69 Luther presumably no longer woke his confessor in the night in order to relieve his ­stricken conscience—though the devil stole his sleep from time to time— and yet he was, quite literally, conscientious about baring his soul according to the new standard. He felt his sinfulness. He put his major sins into categories for his dinner guests one day; he made his general confession to them! He did not pray enough; he did not thank God enough; he was too often angry; and he cursed Duke George (too often? At all?).70 Looking back to his youth, he recalled that he had tormented his body miserably, ‘but now we live like nobles’. Now he indulged himself, as his portraits show.71 His innate personality was still that of the young Augustinian friar who yearned for divine approval. 69

70 71

Christof Schubart, Die Berichte über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, Texte und Untersuchungen (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1917), #69, ‘Justus Jonas, Michael Cölius und Johannes Aurifaber, Bericht über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis’, p. 60. wa tr 1, no. 583, p. 269. Lyndal Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers’, A ­ merican Historical Review 115, 2 (2010), pp. 351–384. I don’t believe Melanchthon’s report that

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He wished to be good and to be considered good. He enjoyed some success, at least in the second half of this equation, now that justification by faith informed his conscience. Confession was a liturgical means of overseeing the consciences of others. Luther intended the ritual to be instructive, reinforcing, and comforting. If a member of the congregation—or on a higher plane, a clergyman himself— doubted whether he had regarded the Scripture properly and acted accordingly, his confessor could advise him. At its best, confession might confer psychic peace. Luther’s alienation from his former friend Johannes Agricola in the late 1530s could be seen as a contest over conscience. The grounds for their disagreement were highly theological—whether the preaching of the law needed to precede, as Luther said, the preaching of the Good News of the Gospel; or whether, as Agricola maintained, the law was contained in the Gospel, and only the Gospel should be preached, as a consolation of troubled ­conscien­ces. Agricola evidently thought that one could appreciate the divine gift of the atonement without undergoing the prior despair of not being able to fulfill the law. Luther desired Christians first to feel in their consciences the impact of being lost forever when they could not conform to the law. He exclaimed, ‘Who would be able to know what Christ was and why Christ suffered for us if nobody knew what sin or law were?’72 Only then should the message of the atonement be added to relieve the consciences of the faithful.73 For his departure from Luther on what seems to us an obscure matter, Agricola would never be reconciled with the Reformer.74 Luther mourned aloud at the table over the alleged betrayal and loss of this friend.75

L­ uther ate and drank very little. If he exercised very little, however, he could have grown corpulent on a somewhat modest diet. 72 See Mark Edwards’s summary of this conflict, Luther and the False Brethren, ch. 7, pp. 156–179. wa Schriften 50, ‘Wider die Antinomer. 1539’, pp. 468–477; this quotation, p. 473. The editors’ introduction sets the stage, pp. 461–466. 73 See Luther’s reiteration of this point in wa, tr 3, no. 3025, p. 146; wa tr 3, no. 3554, pp. 405–406. 74 See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Agricola for a brief summary of his life. Consulted 3 May 2016. On the struggle over Gesetz and Heil on through the sixteenth century, see Matthias Richter, Gesetz und Heil: Eine Untersuchung zur Vorgeschichte und zum ­Verlauf des sogenannten Zweiten Antinomistischen Streits (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & ­Ruprecht, 1996), and esp. a simplified summary of the tension between Luther and Agricola, pp. 59–66. 75 wa tr 3, no. 3650a-d, pp. 480–485.

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Conscience was a key concept in the Reformation. Its redefinition marked a watershed between Catholic expectation of works righteousness and Protestant reliance upon the Atonement. For Martin Luther conscience was the place where faith, God’s grace, and Scripture came together. Conscience, he thought, was uniform in all true Christians, all those to whom God had given the gift of faith. These could never earn a clear conscience, for they fell into and remained mired in sin every day of their lives.76 Yet the Bible informed them, and sermon, song, and catechism engraved upon their awareness, that Christ had paid the penalty for their constant violations of the law and reconciled them with God the Father. This should make their hearts glad. Christ had opened up paradise to them. The theologians’ expectation was, however, that every Gewissen should adhere to the same literal apperception of Holy Writ—the same one believed and articulated by the Reformer himself. Sixteenth-century church and government sought a nearly identical affirmation of legality, uprightness of life, and adherence to religious principle among those subject to it, varying mainly on the basis of class, wealth, and office. The ubiquitous sumptuary laws of the day are not simply of interest for their ­content—whether a serving maid may wear silk in her hair—but as an expression of the basic outlook of a culture. We researchers may occasionally encounter a nonconformist or a rebel, but the ‘system’ tries to exert itself in pressing them back into the ranks of their contemporaries. Illustrations showing the rows of men and women at church on Sunday strike us by the near uniformity of their appearance. These were doubtless presented to our eyes as something to be admired, even aspired to. The disorder of late medieval Catholic attendance at a sermon, for example, with people hunkered down hither and yon on collapsible three-legged stools, is decidedly gone. Luther was persuaded that there was a single genuine conscience, one accorded to us by the Heavenly Father, and one that affirmed the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Luther’s vision is quite in keeping with that of his secular and ecclesiastical contemporaries, who, for a few generations, subordinated their divergent interests and cooperated, within their own faiths, in inculcating the laity. They were not participants in some sinister collusion; they adhered 76

In my view, Calvin more effectively made the Fall the generator of all human’s spiritual, mental, and physical sins; these spheres could not be separated, and every person was unworthy of redemption. Calvin’s homiletic mood is unrelenting. Luther is in spirit less negative. His heart can in fact become glad as he reads the Bible, and he proffers that gladness to his hearers. Doctrinally, it may be that Luther was just as condemning of Fallen humanity as Calvin, but the spirit that informs the preaching of these two divines is entirely different.

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to similar ideals concerning godliness and social order. As instruments of God, they each needed to carry out His will for the proper life on earth. This shared goal crossed into Catholic territories as well, although the competing entities within the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church complicated church-state cooperation there. In Protestant, including Reformed, lands, the dominions of church and state were more nearly coterminous.77 Our gladness over our own liberty of conscience overtakes us for wholly other reasons. In its affirmation, we acquire personal autonomy and a range of choices—of belief, of morality or ethics, of life-style—that were anathema to the early modern sensibility. Luther’s vision of the conscience was entirely different from our own in the twenty-first century. He supported the efforts of his princes to bring the populace to heel, and he could be as merciless in his verdicts as any of them. Indeed, as is well known, his immediate world was shocked by his violent pronouncements in ‘Against the robbing, murdering hordes of peasants’.78 He went even farther than average popular opinion, which was often moderated by small-city folk’s own relationship to the peasantry. Nor did he distance himself from the acute anti-Jewishness and a­ nti-Semitism that flourished around him, disseminated with new energy throughout Europe, including Protestant Europe, every Holy Week. It is ironic that this man’s declaration of conscience should inspire us. But most of us are not professional historians. We hear a lofty principle enunciated by a forebear, we excise it from its cultural milieu, and we adopt it as our own. We might remember, too, that after Luther’s death, the so-called witch craze attained an apogee that crossed all denominational lines and engrossed representatives of both churches and states. As in the cases of devils and angels, Luther shared popular beliefs about witches and believed they should not be spared the executioner’s ministrations. Four ‘witches’ were burned in Wittenberg in 1540. Lucas Cranach depicted their charred remains. Despite all the commonalities, all the debts of long standing, that we detect, Luther was nevertheless a great innovator. He gathered venerable, that is medieval, elements together and wove them into new directions and new 77

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I am aware that I am subscribing to the much contested confessionalization thesis of Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard. I do, in fact, find a certain usefulness of that theory in understanding late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century church-state relations in Germany. There is now a vast bibliography, but the important newer developments are summed up by Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘Confessionalization’, in David M. Whitford (ed.), Reformation and early modern Europe. A guide to research (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2008), pp. 136–157. ‘Wider die räuberischen und mörderischen Rotten der Bauern. 1525’, wa Schriften 18, pp. 357–361.

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e­mphases. The Reformer’s creativity lies in his combinations. Prominent among these was his sense of the conscience as rooted in and ever tested by the literal Word of God. An equally visible earmark is the divine offer of consolation to believing souls that are deeply troubled by their inability to refrain from sin. In persuading the electors of Saxony to support him in these positions, he won that official sponsorship without which he would probably have failed to gain sustained and institutionalized attention.79 When Hieronymus Emser consulted Luther’s translation of the New Testament in preparing his own Latin version and altered certain words to fit the Catholic agenda of Duke George, Luther declared that in doing so, the scholar violated his conscience. Emser had to know, the Reformer was certain, that only Luther’s translation was the genuine rendering of the Word of God.80 Only Luther’s translation could serve both men, and Duke George too, as a basis of conscience. Luther had to acknowledge that the world seemed to be full of people who disputed the standard that he proclaimed for his own conscience and for theirs. So varied were they that it was unlikely that they could all be made to submit. At one point, he refers to those who opposed him in 1518 in Leipzig. They had bad consciences but would not confess the truth.81 At another, he refers specifically to the Arians and the Swiss. In the end, he was sure, vengeance belonged to the Lord. ‘It must finally reach the point when one has to let each one stay by his own belief; he must answer for his conscience in the presence of God’.82 The outcome, he was confident, would not be happy for them.

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81 82

Brad S. Gregory, ‘Reforming the Reformation. God’s Truth and the Exercise of Power’, in Thomas F. Mayer, (ed.), Reforming Reformation, Catholic Christendom 1300–1700, 6 (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 17–41, on the wide variety of interpretations of Scripture during the Reformation era and the necessity of state support for the institutionalization of any of them. Only Lutheran and some Reformed churches acquired this prerequisite of permanence. wa tr 2, no. 2256, p. 380. I take Luther not to condemn Emser for borrowing from his translation of the New Testament, for scholars did this regularly without allegedly injuring their consciences; but rather for departing from the accuracy of Luther’s rendering by changing and/or adding his own wording. This altered Scripture and thus the basis for Luther’s conscience. wa tr 3, no. 3329c, pp. 271–272. wa tr 2, no. 2325a, pp. 419–420.

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Luther’s Friendship with Frederick the Wise It is another man than Duke George with whom I am dealing, one who knows me quite well; and I know him not badly.1 It is customary to say that Martin Luther and his ruler until May 5, 1525, ­Frederick the Wise Elector of Saxony, never met. This is most likely true. ­Martin Brecht states, ‘There had not been a direct personal relationship between the Reformer and his prince’.2 They saw one another without interacting at the Diet of Worms in 1521. The learned biographer Julius Köstlin reports that when Frederick exited the hall where the hearing had been held, he was deeply moved. He later that day called his secretary George Spalatin to him in his lodgings and said, with great inner excitement and admiration, ‘The father, Doctor Martinus, spoke well before the Lord Emperor and all the princes and estates of the Empire, in Latin and German. He is much too clever for me!’3 That he did not say this to Luther directly was owing in part to the social gulf that separated them, and in part to the elector’s studious avoidance of face-toface acquaintance in the hope that he could prevent the most drastic political consequences of supporting a renegade friar whom both Church and Empire would ban. The canny, experienced Frederick, born in 1463, could maintain a fiction of not being aware of the outbursts of his low-level, peasant-descended subject. As these outbursts came to possess unsettling significance throughout Europe, Frederick was challenged to maintain this fiction. This was all the more so as Luther unleashed his pen at such figures as Pope Leo x, King Henry viii of England, and Frederick’s cousin, Duke George of Albertine Saxony,4 to select but examples. As one of the seven potentates who elected new Holy Roman Emperors, Frederick was a powerful man, but he was not untouchable—even 1 wa Briefwechsel [hereafter br] 2, no. 455, 5 March 1522, Luther to Elector Friedrich, about the elector himself, pp. 453–457, here at 456. 2 Martin Luther. Shaping and defining the Reformation, 1521–1532, translated by James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 184. 3 Köstlin, Martin Luther, sein Leben und seine Schriften, 3rd ed., Gustav Kawerau (ed.), vol. 1 (Berlin: Alexander Duncker, 1903), p. 421. My translation. 4 Günther Wartenberg, ‘Luthers Beziehungen zu den sächsischen Fürsten’, in Helmar Junghans (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag (2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), i: p. 553.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004348882_004

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if the new emperor was, from the prince’s viewpoint, still an untried youth; and even if the pressing of the Ottomans upon the empire’s southeastern flank made concessions to internal stability highly likely. Charles v’s dire need of support on this score moved him to agree to Frederick’s appeal to deny the pope’s command to produce Luther for a hearing in Rome.5 That hearing took place in Worms instead, beyond the pope’s unfettered reach. If Frederick and Martin did not know one another, how could they become friends? Even as the series Downton Abbey shows British and American audiences to this very day, class differences remained powerful forces in the twentieth century, except in the wake of major disruptions such as the settling of frontiers or the waging of world war. The chaos such events caused was by no means positive, for all human polity and assumption was called into question. It could facilitate the crossing of class lines. Frederick and Martin, each in his respective sphere, shared the conviction from their childhood inculcation that God had created a highly differentiated human society, with the divinely implanted striations intended to remain in place. Even if ‘when Adam delved and Eve span’, there had been no gentleman, and even if the generations of Cain and Abel, and Noah’s children, had to mate with their own siblings, this elemental stage was to be got past quickly in favor of the proverbial pyramid of quality and power, with the possessors of both at the top and few in number. The program was even demonstrated in the seating and standing arrangements in churches, as more pews were introduced; and in the order of receiving the Eucharist. Everything was done according to social rank. Frederick and his intimate circle, indeed, had the privilege of sitting unseen by hoi poloi in the balconies of their castle churches. Frederick the Wise inherited this hierarchical perspective and no doubt believed in its divine origin. He did not marry, for example, his long-term concubine or morganatic wife, nor did he display her at court. She was beneath him—we are not absolutely certain of her name—and his peers would be offended; yet he loved her and provided additionally for her in his will. She bore him at least four children, two of whom he kept nearby. He only put her away, like Augustine his mistress, when he was finally able to suppress the impulses of the flesh and begin to concentrate on his mortality. His socially, relationally suitable friend was his brother and successor, Duke Johann ‘the Constant’ of Saxony. Frederick remarked about Johann to Georg Spalatin in the very room where he would die two years later, ‘I have and know of no other friend on earth than my brother’ [Ich hab und weiβ keinen Freund 5 A detailed survey of Frederick’s life, despite its stated omission of most political details, is Ingetraut Ludolphy, Friedrich der Weise, Kurfürst von Sachsen, 1463–1525 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984).

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auf Erden, den meinen Bruder.]6 Frederick did not use the word Freund in this case to designate simply a relative; he had many kin who made up his Freundschaft in the late medieval sense. Here the elector means friend in a way that we can understand, referring to a reciprocal liking, trust, and the sharing of confidences. Luther could never supplant a blood brother, but in addition, by the standard of his day he was not an appropriate friend. Luther well understood the assumption of class distance.7 He understood that his father’s rise itself, his marrying into a burgher family, his shift from simple copper-miner to lessor of shafts, could have been seen as impertinent. Yet money or the lack of it cushioned every exception and made it more or less palatable to one’s aspirational peers. Social mobility was not a positive value. For the few keen and motivated minds, intellectual training and subsequent prowess at a university could produce elevation, first in colleagues’ estimation and perhaps, gradually, in those men who for reasons of their own observed and admired cerebral prowess. Beginning after the master of arts level, when the Augustinian Eremites moved him to Wittenberg to teach and to study further, Luther began to distinguish himself; while the elector took involved pride in the advance of the institution that he had founded in 1502, the University of Wittenberg, as compensation for losing the University of Leipzig in the land division of 1485. It did not enter Luther’s head that he should command the attention of his ruler. His preoccupations in the 1510s were to reconcile his irrepressibly sinful self with God and to bring the fruits of his only recent encounter with the Bible, through his lectures, to his students. These two goals quickly came to intertwine as Luther found in Scripture the relief from his fears that he would be damned. His new insights not only pervaded his lectures and lent them a passion that invigorated his listeners’ experience. They ineluctably made him an outspoken critic of ills he perceived around him, such as the abuse of indulgence theology. Yet Luther wrote from his heart, naïvely, not thinking that his boldness would impel him into his superiors’ awareness, indeed the awareness of pope and emperor. He was sure that he did not mean to command princes’, prelates’, and patricians’ attention; he wished to rectify wrongs. 6 Ludolphy, Friedrich der Weise, p. 32. Transmitted by Spalatin in his own brief biography of Frederick the Wise, published as Christian Gotthard Neudecker and Ludwig Preller (eds.), Friedrichs des Weisen. Leben und Zeitgeschichte (Jena: Friedrich Mauke, 1851), p. 63. 7 See Luther’s humorous letter of invitation to the Mansfeld chancellor Kaspar Müller to become the godfather of his about-to-be-born first child. Luther jokes that he would have invited the count himself, but people would accuse him of Grossmannssucht, reaching for a great man! wa br 4, no. 1013, 26 May 1526, pp. 80–81.

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The objectives of Elector Frederick and Brother Martin Luder-becomingLuther intersected at several points. Both men shared a desire to attract leading scholars, including those inclined toward humanistic reforms, to the ­University of Wittenberg. Philipp Schwarzerd ‘Melanchthon’ arrived there to teach Greek in 1518 and in following years lectured on the Bible as well. That was one thing. Secondly, like other dynasties in the fifteenth century, the Wettin rulers of Saxony and Thuringia had come to resent more than their forbears the exemptions from tax, jurisdiction, and military service that the Catholic Church and its representatives claimed. The Church was a multi-corporate institution whose intricacies enabled it to evade local and regional issues practically unscathed. It also held the power of the keys, believing that it could impose interdiction and/or consign to hell any who rejected its authority. ­Europeans cared about the salvation of their souls. Nonetheless, as the temporal sword’s frustration grew in the early sixteenth century, Luther sent forth his Ninety-five Theses against Indulgences. The general strain of secular, including princely, resentment collided with the friar’s clarion call and lent each other mutual enhancement. Frederick the Wise now came to know more about this humble subject than he had previously cared about, and Luther realized that, without the elector’s protection, he could well be destined for the pyre. Luther had to win Frederick as his patron.8 With their inner if not their outer eyes, these two protagonists fixed on each other. Frederick the Wise, like Luther, was a genuinely pious man. As a younger man, he had gambled and played at warfare (jousting), but he also undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1493, at enormous risk and expense.9 If the beasts he kept for hunting literally ate his peasants’ crops, he had compensatory grain taken to their villages for distribution.10 His inclination to negotiate with the rebel peasants in 1525 might have been borne of the same pacific tendencies. His timely death spared him the need to join in the slaughter of his rustic subjects. His immense collection of relics afforded its viewers over a million years of dispensation from deserved time in purgatory. Frederick collected these items both for his own spiritual benefit and in order to facilitate 8

Gabriele Jancke sees the importance of patronage relationships for some of the expressions of self (Selbstzeugnisse) in the early modern period: Autobiographie als soziale P­ raxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 10 (Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 2002), esp. part 2, pp. 75–165. 9 Neudecker and Preller, Friedrichs des Weisen, pp. 76–91, including a list, pp. 89–91, of all the noblemen and others who accompanied him. 10 Ludolphy, Friedrich der Weise, p. 86.

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the ­posthumous relief of common visitors. His testamentary provisions for those close to him, including his (illegitimate) children, his former mistress and companion, his very aged dwarf Claus Narr,11 and Georg Spalatin his confidential secretary and friend reveal an attachment to people and a sensitivity to their wellbeing that were not typical of his class.12 He begged his brother and successor Johann to fulfill the terms of his will. In any case, Johann may have benefitted from, as Luther later put it, Frederick’s having ‘taken in with a shovel and given out with a spoon’.13 The instrument of the societally improbable friendship between Frederick and Luther was that very secretary and court preacher, Georg Spalatin. One has long assumed that Spalatin himself was the object of Luther’s epistolary efforts.14 In a recent article, Lyndal Roper regards him as such—and I am not arguing that she is wrong. Rather, Luther comes to direct them to his prince, regardless of whether he addresses Spalatin.15 From 1514 through the death of Frederick the Wise on 5 May 1525, 323 letters of Luther to Spalatin have ­survived—thanks to the latter’s careful preservation.16 It was well understood that letters to one’s ruler were not for public consumption, despite the widespread practice of circulating, indeed of publishing, correspondence; one might, through revelation, unwittingly injure state interests.17 These two men

11 12 13 14

15 16

17

Ibid., p. 96. wa tr 3, no. 3778, p. 610. wa tr 1, no. 653, p. 308. Georg Berbig, Spalatin und sein Verhältnis zu Martin Luther auf Grund ihres Briefwechsels bis zum Jahre 1525, Quellen und Darstellungen aus der Geschichte des Reformations­ jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Halle: Curt Nietschmann Plötz’sche Buchdruckerei, 1906), pp. 1–7; p. 316: ‘ein geistiges Brüderpaar’. Most importantly, see Lyndal Roper, ‘“To his most learned and dearest friend.” Reading Luther’s Letters’, German History 28, 3 (2010), pp. 283–295; with thanks to an anonymous reader of this manuscript for making me aware of this essay. ­Armin Kohnle, ‘Spalatin und Luther: Eine Männerfreundschaft’, in Kohnle, Christina Meckelnborg, and Uwe Schirmer (eds.), Georg Spalatin. Steuermann der Reformation (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2014), pp. 45–56, does not offer new analysis. Roper, ‘“To his Most Learned and Dearest Friend”’, pp. 283–295. Ibid., p. 3. More important as an overview is Christine Weide, Georg Spalatins Briefwechsel. Studien zu Überlieferung und Bestand (1505–1525), Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie 23 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2014). Roper notes (as in n. 14 above) that early modern correspondence was generally public. This is often true. But the elector of Saxony was concerned to preserve the confidential nature of all epistolary exchanges with his brother Johann, for example, and all others that bore on Ernestine state interests. Frederick and Johann corresponded constantly,

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shared a genuine affinity that probably reached back only to their mutual presence in Wittenberg; Höβ believes the men were not acquainted while at the University of Erfurt.18 They could not have imagined how circumstances would later on draw them into nearly constant and even intimate exchange. In Wittenberg, an early matter of mutual interest was the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn controversy.19 Frederick wanted to know his theologian’s opinion on the proposed burning of Hebrew books and delegated Spalatin to find out. Two years later, Luther informs Spalatin that he has been reading Augustine on the Pelagians, from which the future Reformer derives one influence on his emerging definition of justification by faith.20 We should not take their, or anyone’s, ornately loving salutations (’charissime Georgi’, ‘suavissime Christophore [Scheurl]’, ‘­patrono dulcissime’, ‘dulcissime Pater [Cajetan!]’, ‘in Christo amicissimo’) as evidence of closeness, for the words chosen were ordinarily dictated by formula.21 Luther even acknowledged that he could make his correspondents think he was their friend.22 Yet ‘patrono’ is in a different category, for by his choice of that noun in 1518, Luther acknowledges his dependence upon the prince’s confidant. Luther might have been half-teasing Spalatin in calling him his patron, but jokes contain elements of validity. In around 1517 via Spalatin, Frederick promised Luther cloth for a new black monk’s hood (Kütte).23 When Luther realized that he had vastly complicated his ruler’s agenda, he felt a mixture of reinvigorated conviction and fear. After getting back from Augsburg in 1518, Luther submitted to the elector via Spalatin his unvarnished assessment of Cardinal Cajetan. At Frederick’s request, he provides his detailed response to the cardinal’s accusations.24 At the beginning of 1519, the Wittenberger writes his prince that he may have been ‘all too heated and perhaps brought things to light in an untimely manner’ as he had spoken the truth to Cajetan, in their maintaining mounted messengers who were ready at a moment’s notice to gallop off to the court of the other. 18 Höβ, Georg Spalatin, p. 19. 19 wa br 1, no. 9, 1514, p. 28, in which Luther mocks the Cologne theologians. 20 wa br 1, no. 27, 19 October 1516, p. 70. 21 There are certain exceptions, as when Luther addresses Melanchthon as ‘Philippo Melanchthoni Swartzerd, Graeco, Latino, Hebraeo, Germano, nunquam Barbaro’, wa br 1, no. 111, p. 252. Likewise, Luther’s letters to his wife are unique and outside the limits of ars dictaminis. 22 wa tr 2, no. 2311a/b, p. 414. 23 wa br 1, no. 173, 15 May 1519, pp. 386–387, Luther looks back and asks the elector to fulfill his promise of two or three years before, and to add on, he humbly begs, cloth for a white hood too. 24 wa, br 1, no. 110b, pp. 236–246.

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interview and in writing. But in the same letter, he refuses to recant.25 When it was likely that he would be cited to Rome, he expressed to Spalatin, for Frederick’s consumption, how vehemently (vehementer) aggrieved he was that his name and his matter were now mingled with the elector’s. Yet without drawing back, he had just further offended by bringing his ‘Sermon on excommunication’ to publication!26 This denial of ecclesiastical authority was bound to exacerbate existing tensions further. In March of 1519, Luther announces to his ruler that he had agreed to be silent if everybody else did too. ‘They want to bind my mouth shut but open up everybody else’s!’ He asks the prince’s advice.27 How would his conflicting emotions of determination and fear play out? Would the occupants of the ecclesiastical seats of power quickly haul him away, like John Huss, to be burned? Would Frederick indeed cooperate with them? At the early date of 1520, through the instrument of Spalatin as well as directly, Frederick was informed in detail about many opinions and characteristics of the Reformer. With his sincere interest in religion as his life drew toward its spiritual denouement, Frederick desired to know. Spalatin himself was increasingly attracted to Luther’s program of reform and consciously championed Luther’s cause with his employer—except in those cases where to do this would be in opposition to the elector’s broader concerns, such as maintaining peace and not having his electoral standing revoked. The secretary used as well his connection to the Kurprinz and from 1532 elector, Johann Friedrich ‘the Magnanimous’, whom he had been assigned to tutor in 1509, when the nobleman was but a boy of six.28 It cannot have hurt that the lad’s father was early committed to the Evangelical cause, bringing his son along with him. Luther would personally meet Johann twice.29 Spalatin was able to lay some groundwork for Luther’s later sympathetic relationship to the younger future Saxon ruler. Their connection was, however, never as close as that between Johann Friedrich’s uncle, Frederick the Wise, and Luther. Johann Friedrich proved helpful at an early date, 1520–1521, when still 25 26

27 28 29

wa, br 1, no. 128, pp. 289–291. wa br, no. 87, August 1518, pp. 190–191; wa br, no. 88, 31 August 1518, pp. 190–191. See also wa br, no. 90, p. 195, repeating Luther’s embarrassment that the prince has to be involved. ‘Sermo de virtute excommunicationis. 1518’ is at wa Schriften 1, pp. 638–643, and was bound to offend the prelacy. wa br, no. 160, 13 March 1519, pp. 357–358. Gerrit Deutschländer, ‘Spalatin als Prinzenerzieher’, in Kohnle, Georg Spalatin. Steuermann der Reformation, pp. 25–31. Wartenberg, ‘Luthers Beziehungen’, i: 550; idem, ‘Zum Verhältnis Martin Luthers zu Herzog und Kurfürst Johann von Sachsen’, in Günter Vogler (ed.), Martin Luther: Leben— Werk—Wirkung (East Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), pp. 169–177.

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a teenager.30 The burning question for Luther in the fall of 1520 was whether, if he agreed to appear at the Diet of Worms the following spring—he had not yet been summoned—he was being set up for the fate of Huss, even if, as in Huss’s case, the emperor came through with a letter of safe passage. Luther wrote to Johann Friedrich in late October, seeking his intercession with the elector. The young prince had duly written to his doting uncle seeking a guarantee of protection. Frederick the Wise, ever deeply thoughtful, had taken a month and a half to reply. But he then almost took a stand: ‘Highborn prince, friendly dear nephew [vetter, used for close male relatives] and son, I have considered the entire content of your dear letter touching on Doctor Martin Luther, and taken it from you with friendly inclination. You dear one [Euer lieben] should not doubt that I will take this matter under my commendation, to the extent that it is possible and can be tolerated’.31 Luther never made things easier. He was often moved by his emotions. He had seen the papal bull of excommunication and other Catholic works burned on a bonfire in Wittenberg, he reported to Spalatin on 10 December 1520. In the meantime, every hint of uproar alarmed Frederick, who wished above all to maintain peace. If asked in advance, he would not have approved this demonstration of contempt. During the preceding summer, Wittenberg had been the scene of combat between students and journeymen painters, and a bull-and-book burning could easily inflame further hostilities.32 Sometimes the weight of uncertainty bore so heavily on Luther that he wrote directly to his prince, which, as he sensed the elector’s developing sympathy toward the scriptural cause, he felt increasingly free to do. On 25 January 1521, the friar seeks from Frederick a protective guard [Geleit], unbiased judges in Worms, and an assurance that his books will not be physically burned there. For his part, Luther assures him, he is exercising restraint. He has done nothing frivolous or for the sake of personal honour or benefit, but he has only taught and written in accordance with his conscience and his duty.33 In other words, he cannot stop articulating those ideas that by themselves are incendiary! He sounds as though not even the elector of Saxony could silence him. He is not as self-abasing as was customary. A month later, and doubtless for the elector’s edification, Luther writes to Spalatin that wagonloads of his books are being 30

31 32 33

At an early age, Johann Friedrich began to put thoughtful questions on religion to this divine. In late March 1521, the prince inquired of him concerning the relationship of good works to faith, and whether Jesus slept like other humans. wa br 2, no. 393, p. 294. wa br 2, following no. 363, 20 Dec. 1520, written to Luther from the Coburg, pp. 237–238. Luther discusses the conflict with Spalatin in wa br 2, no. 312, 14 July 1520, pp. 142–143. wa br 2, no. 371, pp. 253–255.

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burned in Worms, Merseburg, and Meissen.34 Shortly afterward, he informs the elector that he has dedicated his Adventspostille to him.35 The following week, he dedicates his treatment of the ‘Magnificat’ to him.36 The tension of anticipation is rising. The very next day, Frederick writes to Luther from Worms assuring him of safe passage (Geleit).37 Luther declares to Spalatin that if the dignitaries gathered in that city think they are going to hear him recant, they are wrong. He is confident of that fact in advance.38 In the background, Luther steadily approaches the elector on other, more routine concerns: filling pastoral positions with specific men who needed them; suggesting candidates for faculty vacancies at the University of Wittenberg; reforming the curriculum; increasing Melanchthon’s salary, especially after he married in 1520 and had to maintain a household.39 Occasionally, via Spalatin, Frederick asks for advice on the Bible, as in 1519, when he requests Luther’s explanations of John 7: 16 and John 6: 37.40 Luther is indeed one of his spiritual advisors, along with Spalatin. When Luther writes to Spalatin instead of Frederick, he often concludes now, ‘Commend me to the most illustrious prince!’41 This was license to reveal the substance of their communication to him. Was Frederick amused or alarmed to learn of the rumor that Luther had been conceived in his mother’s womb by an incubus?42 Luther informs Frederick the Wise of developments related to the clergyman himself and to the churches in the empire by forwarding to him via Spalatin letters from other people. Luther has become a celebrity, and objectively regarded, even the elector with all his own connections could be kept more thoroughly abreast of ecclesiastical-political developments with his help. On 25 April 1521, in the evening, Frederick the Wise discussed concealing Luther for a while with his advisors. Frederick was not to know the cleric’s location so that he could deny being party to the scheme.43 34

wa br 2, no. 378, 27 February 1521, pp. 270–271. Just before this, Luther had written Johann Staupitz that they were being burned in Louvain, Mainz, and Cologne: wa br 2, no. 366, 14 Jan. 1521, p. 245. 35 wa br 2, no. 380, 3 March 1521, p. 274. 36 wa br 2, no. 386, 10 March 1521, p. 285. 37 wa br 2, no. 387, 11 March 1521, p, 285. 38 wa br 2, no. 389, 19 March 1521, p. 288. 39 This matter took years to resolve. See e.g., wa br 4, no. 979, 9 Feb. 1526, Luther to Elector Johann; and no. 981, 13 Feb. 1526, p. 32, the elector’s reply. 40 wa br 1, no. 145b, February 1519, pp. 327–331. 41 E.g., wa br 1, no. 187a, p. 424: ‘et me illustrissimo principi commenda!’ 42 wa br 1, no. 238, p. 608. 43 wa br 2, no. 400, p. 306, n. 3; wa tr 5, no. 5353, p. 82, which provides fascinating details such as Luther’s being removed from the coach and put on horseback by four armed men

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It would be helpful to know what the elector of Saxony thought about the Christian conscience as he listened to his humble subject invoke the need to be precisely true to his inner convictions. The potential for heightened emphasis on individual choice resides within this concept, and Luther at this time repeatedly referred to it. The Reformer’s publicly stated adherence to the demands of his conscience is what earns him admiration in the modern West, where, in fact, we do purport to honor personal decision-making and thus selfshaping power. In 1521, powerful princes could claim such authority over themselves, although if their nonconformity were deemed extreme, even they could be banned and cast into outer darkness. Single friars, monks, priests, and nuns were hardly accorded the self-dominion that Brother Martin was arrogating to himself. If questioned closely, even the evangelically-minded grandees of the Holy Roman Empire might have thought he went too far. Yet his adherence to the word of Scripture was appealing in light of the Church’s history of doctrinal embroidery and marked self-service. It was rationally persuasive, and it held out the possibility of a solution to the age-old conflict in Europe between church and state. Luther’s appeal to conscience at this time is remarkable. He himself would rapidly come to deny his contemporaries the right that he exercised in Worms. But just now, at this height of fame, he came down on the side of free decision-making in matters of faith for every person with access to the Word of God, either by reading it or by hearing it preached. It is perhaps fortuitous that he articulated this conviction most forcefully to another member of the high nobility, Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, on 3 May 1521. His coming experience with popular misapprehension of his thought would include mayhem and disillusionment in 1525. But just now, he stated to Graf Albrecht: ‘… Each Christian must consider and judge, just as he must also face death [alone], for faith and the Word of God is each man’s own in the congregation as a whole’.44 At this rare moment, Luther concedes to every Christian the right to decide on matters of faith. He himself, and certainly his followers, would soon withdraw this prerogative. Their rulers would too. Secular and clerical authorities would strenuously disagree on which category governed the doctrinal fidelity and moral uprightness of every citizen. As one of the only channels of communication with Luther during his months on the Wartburg as Junker Jörg, Georg Spalatin read in colorful detail about the clergyman’s constipation. Luther compared himself to a woman

44

and being taken to Eisenach by a circuitous route. Frederick wrote to his brother Johann that he did not know Luther’s whereabouts: Georg Berbig, Spalatin und sein Verhältnis zu Martin Luther, p. 150. wa br 2, no. 404, p. 325.

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giving birth.45 The elector was eager to know everything about the evolving ‘Luther affair’ and may even have been admitted to such intimate awareness of his famous subject’s health. Frederick was increasingly afflicted with ails himself, and word of these inevitably spread from the court to the populace, including highly placed Luther. Did the prince have his secretary acquire and send a means of relief from one of his physicians, for which Luther gave thanks to God?46 Spalatin and/or his employer provided whatever the scholar lacked in the Thuringian Forest for his translation of the New Testament, including Spalatin’s personal Bible.47 As he contemplated returning to Wittenberg from his place of concealment, to stay rather than simply to visit, Luther seems to think of himself as a free agent, no longer bound by the commands of the elector. He writes to Frederick the Wise on 24 February 1522, ‘to his own hands’ (zu eygenn handenn) and not to Spalatin’s, that he will shortly come back to Wittenberg.48 Frederick is gentle in his response via his district official (Amtmann) Johann Oswald in Eisenach. He desires to know the will of God and to carry it out as a godly prince. Frederick writes, ‘If His Grace [referring to himself, providing a script for Oswald] really and fundamentally knew what was right and good for him to bear, tolerate, and allow according to God’s will … His Electoral Grace, for his own person, would have no objection’. But he instructs Oswald to point out to Luther the dangers for his territory and his people if Luther returns now. He urges Luther to be patient and wait until the next imperial diet for a general decision.49 Luther refuses to stay put.50 In an astonishing letter to the elector written in Borna on 5 March 1522, on his way back to Wittenberg and sent on ahead by messenger, Luther violates the most basic rules governing the behavior of subjects toward their rulers. Even the editors of the Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther’s works register their amazement, for this letter is like none other. Luther has received Oswald’s verbal instructions. Nevertheless, he imagines that Frederick’s chief concern is for the friar’s safety. He assures his ruler that if he should be taken captive and killed, Frederick will not be responsible, for Luther will 45 wa br 2, no. 429, 9 September 1521, p. 388. 46 wa br 2, no. 434, early October 1521, p. 395. 47 Höβ, Georg Spalatin, p. 36. 48 wa br 2, no. 454, pp. 448–449. 49 wa br 2, attachment to no. 454, ‘Instruction’ for Johann Oswald, pp. 449–452. Direct quotation at p. 451. 50 See the account and interpretation of James S. Preus, Carlstadt’s ‘Ordinaciones’ and Luther’s Liberty, Harvard Theological Studies 26 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1974), and esp. pp. 51–52; and the brief account of Mark U. Edwards, Jr, Luther and the false brethren (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 20–21.

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not have taken the prince’s advice. He does not say obeyed his command. He does not ‘in any way’ regard Frederick as the man who is designated to protect him, ‘for I detect that Your Electoral Grace is still very weak in faith’. He contrasts Frederick with his cousin Duke George the Bearded, whom Luther has insulted. ‘[In Your Electoral Grace] I am dealing with another man than Duke George; with one who knows me pretty well, and whom I know not badly’. He bluntly states, ‘If Your Electoral Grace believed, he would see God’s glory; but because he does not yet believe, he has not yet seen it’.51 Luther dispenses with nearly all conventions of subordination. The elector drew back. He was inclined toward Luther and Luther’s fundamental teachings as they circulated at that time—Frederick had not heard ­Luther preach. He could not permit this infraction of the principles structuring his proper relationship with this or any subject. He and Spalatin along with other advisors must have considered whether to take the punitive action that could have been justified in such an instance of disobedience. But many factors of church and state, and also personal affinity, bore on Luther’s case. In the end, Frederick instructed his advisor, Hieronymus Schurf, to demand a written explanation from Luther of why he had taken such action without permission. Schurf was to keep his discussions with Luther absolutely secret (in Geheim halten). An underlying assumption was that members of the elector’s class, his princes and friends (including relatives), would ask why Luther had dared to do this without seeking his ruler’s consent in advance. Frederick wished to receive a text from Martin that would be sufficiently obsequious and convincing to protect the prince’s honor and objectively warrant Luther’s return. Luther must also apologize and state ‘that he had not desired to cause difficulty for anyone’. Schurf was further to instruct Luther that he was not to preach in the Wittenberg castle church.52 The Reformer’s absence from the Schloβkirche was to provide an additional buffer between the elector and the imperial rebel. Luther complied either the same or the following day. His rationale exposes his deep conviction immediately following the Diet of Worms that he is God’s agent. ‘The need presses, and God forces and calls [a rhyme: Ursach dringt und Gott zwingt]; it must and will be’. Luther had acted in the name of Jesus Christ, of Lord over life and death. He goes on, ‘For I know that my word and undertaking does not come from me but from God’.53 His second reason is that, in 51 52 53

wa br 2, no. 455, pp. 453–457. wa br 2, attachment to no. 455, 7 March 1522, pp. 458–459. Luther makes similar claims on other occasions. He declared, for instance, to Duke George in late 1525 that Christ’s word had come to light through him, Luther (wa br 3, no. 954, p. 643).

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his absence, Satan has broken into the sheepfold of the Wittenberg congregation that has been entrusted to him. His obligation is to protect the laity in his charge from the ‘wolves’ of false teaching and false practice. ‘God will judge me according to my conscience’, he insists, invoking once again the central defense of his appearance at Worms. Implied is that God is above the elector and that conscience is a paramount factor in the divine assessment of action. Conscience must, we assume, somehow be implanted by and faithful to God. Luther goes on just as unbendingly to the third reason for his leaving his Wartburg sanctuary: ‘I have recently learned that not only spiritual but also worldly power has to give way to the Gospel, whether this happens with love or with pain …’. Even should Luther labor in vain and my enemies laugh, ‘I must nevertheless do what I see and know [is right] to do. Your Electoral Grace should know this and rely with certainty upon it’. He informs his ruler that he, Frederick, is merely the lord over goods and bodies. ‘Christ, however, is also the Lord of souls, to which he has sent me and awakened me. I must not abandon these’.54 In his first sermon to the Wittenberg congregation, delivered on March 9, 1522, he attempted both to persuade and to impress: Therefore, dear brothers, follow me! I have never ruined it [es, the matter, the Word?]. And I am the first person whom God has set on this path. I cannot run away from God but must remain here as long as it pleases my Lord God. I am also the person to whom God first revealed that I should preach and explain His Word. I make certain, then, that you possess the pure Word of God.55 Needless to say, Frederick the Wise was not content with this flagrant elevation by Luther of himself over his ruler. The elector believed himself too to have been appointed by God. Still, Frederick’s own moderation in his further instructions to Schurf is striking. On the elector’s behalf, Schurf is to demand that Luther moderate the tone of his letter so that, once again, it is presentable for the consumption of ‘our lords and friends’.56 Luther does alter the letter so that it may be used for its ostensible purpose. He omits any presumptions of closeness from the new version, and he concludes by begging the elector’s pardon.57 ‘I humbly and submissively beg Your Electoral Grace to regard me with favor and to pardon my returning and taking up residence in Your Electoral 54 55 56 57

wa br 2, no. 456, 7–8 March 1522, pp. 459–462. wa Schriften 10 / 3, ‘Dominica Invocavit. Sermon D.M.L.’, p. 8. wa br 2, attachment to no. 456, p. 466. wa br 2, no. 457, 12 March 1522, pp. 467–470.

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Grace’s city of Wittenberg, without Your Electoral Grace’s knowledge, desire, favor, and consent’.58 Luther’s own mental state is unchanged, for he retains, in closing, his prior statement that the will of Christ, who is lord of souls, is superior to that of Frederick, who governs goods and bodies.59 Frederick might have demanded the elimination of this sentence, which could be seen as a reflection of arrogance. Nevertheless, the elector, too, maintains his previous perspective. In this transaction, each has seen the core personality of the other. Spalatin’s mediating advice lurks in the background.60 Neither man was compelled to accord an inner respect to the other. In reality, they felt it for one another. Each was, in his own sphere, an instrument of the divine, and in addition, each was likeable in the other’s eyes. In the Reformer’s case, it cannot have helped his humility that high-ranking people wrote him of their profound admiration. Hartmut von Cronberg wrote to Luther on 14 April 1522, that he loved him better than a brother of the flesh, for Luther had brought the will of God to the German nation.61 Luther stood at center-stage and was puffed up. In this frame of mind, he wrote unsuitably to Duke George ‘the Bearded’ of Albertine Saxony—which may have secretly gratified Frederick because of intra-familial competition but which had to elicit a reprimand. Luther was rude and inflammatory.62 Again, he was forgetting his rank. Frederick the Wise did not invariably let the celebrity have his way. Luther was convinced, for example, that Gabriel Zwilling, who had gone through a Karlstadtian, iconoclastic phase but repented of it, was a suitable candidate for the pastorate in Altenburg. Frederick repeatedly refused to admit him to the position, finally granting it to Spalatin himself.63 Another major issue between them was Frederick’s unwillingness to interfere with—to eliminate—what Luther considered to be remainders of a superstitious, idolatrous Catholic past in the All Saints’ Chapter (Allerheiligenstift), such as the saying of masses and the retention in any mass of the assertion that it repeated Christ’s sacrifice and was an offering by the officiating priest to God. Luther repeatedly

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wa br 2, no. 457, p. 470. For Spalatin’s alleged reaction, see Berbig, Spalatin, pp. 179–180. wa br 2, no. 457, p. 470. See Berbig’s account, Georg Spalatin, pp. 178–180. wa br 2, no. 475, p. 498. As an example of Luther’s excess, see wa br 2, no. 567a, 3 January? 1523, p. 4: Luther’s salutation, ‘Aufhoren zu toben vnd zu wüeten wider Gott vnd seynen Christ anstatt meynes diensts zuuor!’ wa br 2, no. 485, 8 May 1522, pp. 519–521.

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petitioned Frederick directly and through Spalatin to abolish these liturgies.64 He preached against them as well. Finally, on 7 August 1523, the elector ordered him to cease this preaching. He had named a committee of Hieronymus Schurf, Philipp Melanchthon, and Johann Schwertfeger to tell him to desist. The delegates reported back to the prince that Luther had refused; ‘he will not relent on the Gospel!’65 Luther wrote again on 19 August 1523, to the prior, the deacon, and the canons of the All Saints Chapter. No doubt aware of the irony involved, these clerics invoke their own consciences!66 On the one hand, Luther was a plague upon his cautious ruler; on the other, the Reformer wrote Spalatin (for Frederick’s consumption) that he would sacrifice his life if he could free the elector from his connection to Luther.67 A year before the prince’s death, Luther needled him via Spalatin for his refusal to receive the Eucharist in both kinds. Such a person should abstain altogether, Luther thought, knowing that abstention was not an option for this pious soul and fastidious psyche.68 Spalatin alarmed Luther when he broached his desire to leave his post late in 1524. Spalatin felt that people did not listen to him at court. Luther argued that with Frederick the Wise, Spalatin occupied a position of trust. This possibility burdened the Reformer, for two weeks later, he added that Spalatin would leave the elector in the lurch if he departed. Luther reminds him that Frederick may be near the grave.69 Indeed, Frederick the Wise was to die soon, but not without, at the very end, taking Martin Luther’s advice: in the early morning of his last day, 5 May 1525, he received Communion in both kinds. Spalatin had been with him almost incessantly as he felt his end approach, and without a doubt it was that secretary, confidant, court preacher, and friend of the elector who thought he ought to do so in light of the Gospel text.70 He had also heard the mass in German translation. He was ultimately persuaded of Luther’s rectitude. Spalatin records, ‘It [Frederick’s death] was a fine, gentle, quiet, proper Christian departure from this vale of tears, [which he bore] with all patience, and without a doubt with true faith in Christ. For until the end he hung firmly, heartily onto 64 E.g., wa br 2, no. 572, 14 January 1523, pp. 16–17; no. 586, 1 March 1523, pp. 34–35; no. 594, 11 March? 1523, pp. 46–47; no. 634, 11 July 1523, pp. 111–113; no. 794, 17 November 1524, pp. 376–377. 65 wa br 2, no. 642, 7 August 1523, pp. 121–123; attachment, p. 124. 66 wa br 2, no. 648, pp. 130–132; and p. 135. 67 wa br 2, no. 668, 12 October 1523, pp. 168–169. 68 wa br 2, no. 727, 4 April 1524, pp. 265–266. 69 wa br 2, no. 800, 30 November 1524, pp. 393–394; no. 803, 12 December 1524, p. 398. 70 Höβ, Georg Spalatin, pp. 278, 579.

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God’s promise of grace’.71 Miracles accompanied the elector’s death and validated his goodness. A nighttime rainbow was seen in the sky, and a child was born without a head. Each of these had its obvious message.72 Luther was ever inclined to believe in such signs. Luther quickly wrote letters of comfort to the new Elector Johann and to his son Johann Friedrich. He told the latter that it was a mercy that Frederick had not had to witness the peasant revolt, ‘for all his life he had carried on a peaceful, quiet, restful governance’.73 Luther carefully adhered to the conventions of writing to princes. Luther did not say—for this did not coincide with his own outlook—that as he lay dying, Frederick had recommended leniency toward the peasant rebels.74 He wrote this later on to Johann Rühel, a doctor of both laws and relative (Schwager), who had sent him a transcript of Thomas Müntzer’s confession made while under torture.75 In a subsequent letter to Rühel, Luther expressed the same contempt for the peasants that he had vented in his tract, ‘On the murdering, robbing hordes of peasants’. ‘Let the guns roar among them!’ he pronounced.76 Years later at the table, Luther looked back on Frederick as too lenient in meting out civil punishment. He summed up Frederick’s attitude toward capital punishment with the statement, purporting to quote the elector, ‘Yes, it is easy to take somebody’s life, but you can’t give it back’.77 The court consulted Luther about the ceremonies for Frederick the Wise. Some of the suggestions pleased him (placet), and some did not (non placet). Luther consciously left sufficient tradition and tribute to station in place to meet both an Evangelical standard and the taste for courtly pomp.78 Luther himself preached two successive funeral sermons for (as I am arguing) his 71 Spalatin, Friedrichs des Weisen, p. 68. 72 wa br 3, no. 874, 23 May 1525, pp. 507–508. 73 wa br 3, no. 868, 15 May 1525, pp. 497–498. The letter to Johann is no. 867, 15 May 1525, pp. 496–497. 74 Johannes Mathesius, Historie, Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes, Doctoris Martini Luthers, anfang, lehr, leben vnd sterben, Alles ordendlich der Jarzal nach, wie sich alle sachen zu jeder zeyt haben zugetragen (Nuremberg: n.p., 1567), sermon 5, fol. xlvii (recto). Mathesius in unreliable on many points, however. 75 wa br 3, no. 874, 23 May 1525, pp. 507–508. 76 wa br 3, no. 877, 30 May 1525, pp. 515–516. 77 wa tr 3, no. 2910b, p. 74. 78 wa br 3, no. 862, 7 May 1525, pp. 487–488. See the more comprehensive and analytical treatment by Natalie Krentz, ‘Protestantische Identität und Herrschaftsrepräsentation. Das Begräbnis Friedrichs des Weisen, Kurfürst von Sachsen (1525)’, in Elizabeth Harding and Natalie Krentz (eds.), Symbolik in Zeiten von Krise und Gesellschaftlichem Umbruch.

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departed friend, and Melanchthon provided a Latin oration. Melanchthon’s had a classical model, but Luther’s would constitute a frame of reference for the emerging genre of Leichenpredigt, which within the ranks of the Reformer’s followers from mid-century would become virtually requisite for the burial ceremonies of all ranks of citizens. We cannot see into Luther’s heart as he preaches—years later, when his and Katharina’s dearly beloved daughter Magdalena died, Luther managed to keep his public grief under control as a model for his neighbors. But his message in the first sermon is telling: it is all right to mourn. That is, one should not shriek and tear one’s hair as the heathens do, but should exercise some restraint. Nonetheless, our feelings of bereavement, he says, are real, like those that Abraham felt for Sarah when she died. People of lower station may grieve one another’s passing, but we might sorrow even more when we have all lost a great lord or prince, ‘a great and pious lord and prince or similar, excellent people, who have been adorned with high gifts and lovely virtues … whom everyone has loved and considered worthy and relied upon together with his virtue’. He declares, the elector ‘had a fine, firm faith in Christ and a proper recognition of the Gospel, for which he had suffered for several years’.79 Here is the resolution of their tension of 1522, when Luther had declared his ruler to be of little faith. There is no doubt, the preacher tells his hearers, that the elector ‘sleeps in sweet, lovely peace and will certainly arise again on the Last Day and have a body that is more radiant and brighter than the sun’.80 In closing the second sermon on 11 May, he repeats that there was no doubt about the elector’s faith. Frederick confessed Christ and that Christ had died to atone for his sins. At the Last Judgment, the prince will arise and go to meet his lord and be with him eternally.81 This certainty was to be Lutherans’ consolation. Conclusions Scholars have always assumed that the volume of correspondence between Luther and Spalatin bore witness to their own deep friendship.82 They did

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80 81 82

Darstellung und Wahrnehmung vormoderner Ordnung im Wandel (Münster: Rhema, 2011), pp. 115–130. wa Schriften 17 / 1, 10 May 1525, pp. 196–197, 199, 203. The second sermon, of 11 May 1525, focuses more on our transformation at the Last Judgment and less on Frederick (ibid., pp. 212–219). wa Schriften 17 / 1, p. 204. wa Schriften 17 / 1, p. 229. Lyndal Roper, ‘Reading Luther’s letters’, as in n. 14 above; Armin Kohnle, ‘Spalatin und Luther: Eine Männerfreundschaft’, in Kohnle, Georg Spalatin, pp. 45–56; Björn Schmalz,

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care for one another. Both admired many classical writers, although Spalatin inclined more toward the Renaissance humanist appreciation of them than Luther did. Nonetheless, Luther knew and admired Cicero, which presumably included his treatise, ‘Laelius: On Friendship’. As classically adept men only two months apart in age, their bond could be said to resemble that between Laelius and Scipio Africanus in the mid-second century B.C. They appreciated one another’s learning and were able to discuss questions of theology, with Spalatin the asker and considerer, and Luther the teller. Spalatin was regarded as a skilled translator and a practiced diplomat for the Saxon court. As Luther was translating the Bible, he asked the courtier about the German rendering of names for animals. In their face-to-face meetings when the elector stopped off in Wittenberg, they doubtless exchanged more delicate information that did not find its way into their epistolary corpus. The court was almost constantly on the move.83 Spalatin was able happily to occupy a subordinate position both in relation to the elector and to the Reformer. Spalatin was not intellectually assertive and was gradually brought to admire and then to accept Luther’s definitions of the faith. Luther came to like Spalatin very genuinely. Just the same, his matter, he considered, was of such crucial import that he allowed himself to use the secretary’s own proximity to Frederick to advance his cause. No other explanation fully takes into account the vastness of Luther’s surviving correspondence with his prince and the prince’s confidential aide. Luther’s lesser esteem of Spalatin is revealed in the fact that the emerging celebrity saved almost none of Spalatin’s letters to him, which were numerous. Only two percent of their total surviving reciprocal epistles derives from Spalatin. This by no means indicates Luther’s indifference; Luther genuinely cared for his wife, and he did not preserve her missives either. Much of Luther’s correspondence with Spalatin had a specific purpose that either directly or obliquely involved the elector. In saluting Spalatin as his ‘patron’, he really intended to reach the only patron who could lend him certain aid, his prince. After ­Frederick’s death and Spalatin’s removal to Altenburg, Luther wrote him less often, which hurt Spalatin. Between 1526 and 1528, Luther wrote to S­ palatin 41 times; this was simply far less often than previously. On one occasion, after a three-and-a-half-month silence, Luther excused himself by saying he did not

83

‘Georg Spalatin am kursächsischen Hof’, in Dirk Syndram, Yvonne Fritz, and Doreen Zerbe (eds.), Kurfürst Friedrich der Weise von Sachsen (1463–1525). Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Tagung vom 4. bis 6. Juli 2014 auf Schloss Hartenfels in Torgau (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2014), pp. 92–102. Thomas Lang, ‘Zwischen Reisen und Residieren: Beobachtungen zum Residenzwechsel des Kurfürsten Friedrich iii. von Sachsen’, in Syndram, Kurfürst Friedrich, pp. 80–91.

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want to disturb his friend during his honeymoon.84 Mark Greengrass, too, has noted the suddenness with which Luther ‘dropped’ Spalatin when he could no longer be useful.85 In those early years of uncertainty concerning the fate of what we call the Reformation, Luther made his most concerted attempt to win over Frederick the Wise. He was able to do so, partly in posing intellectual arguments, but partly, too, in baring his soul and humanity to the magnate. Frederick’s psyche did not erect the barriers to emotional contact with ‘lesser people’ that some dignitaries’ did. We note this in his ongoing relationship with his mistress, his testamentary legacies, his closeness to at least one (illegitimate) son Bastel, even his designation of his dining partners (140 people were at other tables on this ordinary occasion) on one day, Sunday Cantate 1522, for which a plan has survived, as simply Spalatin and his court fool Albrecht.86 With these two alone, the elector did not need to be guarded. He could be himself. Frederick was able to care for Martin Luther. Was this despite or because of Luther’s religiously convinced misbehavior? Frederick came to share Luther’s post-Worms conviction that he was God’s instrument and mouthpiece. He was cautious, he was hesitant. But he was able to forgive the outspokenness of one who just could truly have been a latter-day prophet. Luther, for his part, in preaching at each of the two religious services for the dead elector, took back his accusation that the prince lacked faith. ‘Frederick’, he said, ‘had a fine, firm faith in Christ and a proper recognition of the Gospel, for which he had suffered now for several years. He is with Christ’, he declared.87 The mores of that time tried to keep people apart who did not belong ­together, or at least to regulate their interaction. In the early spring of 1544— before the deluge of Luther’s death, the War of the League of Schmalkald, Johann Friedrich’s capture by Charles v, and the transfer of the Saxon electorate to Duke Moritz—when Johann Friedrich was away at the Diet of Speier, his consort Sybille wrote a letter to Luther from Weimar that was uncommon in its content. It expressed great loneliness and longing for spiritual and social assuagement. ‘If it could have been that we were as close to you as Torgau, we would have bidden you [to come] to us. Then we could have had a little happiness with you, and you would have comforted us somewhat’.88 It greeted 84 85

wa br 4, no. 989, 27 March 1526, pp. 41–42. Greengrass, ‘An “epistolary Reformation.” The role and significance of letters in the first century of the Protestant Reformation’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 444. 86 Ludolphy, Friedrich der Weise, pp. 83–84. 87 wa Schriften, 17 / 1, May 10, 1525, p. 199. 88 wa br 10, no. 3977, Hilarius [day], pp. 546–548, here at p. 547.

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Katharina von Bora with warmth and would have included her in the invitation.89 Sybille desired to be friends with the couple and would have enjoyed their visit. But Weimar was far away from Wittenberg. Luther responded, obsequiously, with words of palliation. As a disillusioned and sickly man, he may have thought back to the time, twenty years removed, when he held his ruler’s attention, when they had ‘met’ on at least a weekly basis and ‘revealed’ (via Spalatin) their truest convictions. His reply attempted to console her. Luther addressed as ‘friend’ a wide range of people and groups of people in his correspondence. As indicated earlier, I am not accepting his labels, for they are often formulaic. In a genuine sense, Spalatin and Luther remained friends. But after this colleague’s removal to Altenburg, their interaction was far less frequent.90 It experienced a brief revival in the spring and summer of 1530, when Luther was forced to stay in Ernestine territory at the Festung Coburg during the Diet of Augsburg, and Spalatin was present in Augsburg. Luther pumped every possible source for more information or another point of view. More typically, Luther’s newer friend, based on their shared undertakings and daily interaction, was Philipp Melanchthon. These men were in sociological terms appropriately paired. The details of their cooperation as well as their significant differences are well known.91 Luther was not accustomed to remaining close to individuals who did not share his own theological views. Those closest to him taught him over the years that perspectives are not monolithic or shaped by only one factor. They taught him, to his abiding regret, that the Holy Spirit does not produce the same interpretation of Scripture in his own and every other person’s soul. Friendship, like marriage, was a school in which one tolerated at least a modicum of disappointment if not compromise. As long as Luther lived, Melanchthon managed not to incur his colleague’s alienation. Here again, as in the case of Frederick the Wise and Georg Spalatin, the Reformer had a pressing need of Melanchthon’s skills. Interdependence is a legitimate ingredient of friendship even though today we might regard that element with some cynicism. One could even regard the friendship between Luther and his ruler as one of mutual perfecting: Luther held out his bold, 89 90 91

wa br 10, no. 3978, 30 March 1544, pp. 548–549. See n. 82 above. For two summations, see Bernhard Lohse, ‘Philipp Melanchthon in seinen Beziehungen zu Luther’, in Helmar Junghans (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag (2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), i: 403–418; ii: 860–863; and Wilhelm H. Neuser, ‘Luther und Melanchthon—Ein Herr, verschiedene Gaben’, in Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, Wilhelm H. Neuser, and Christian Peters (eds.), Luthers Wirkung. Festschrift für Martin Brecht zum 60. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1992), pp. 47–61. A more recent, and very valuable, one is Timothy J. Wengert, ‘Melanchthon and Luther / Luther and Melanchthon’, Lutherjahrbuch 66 (1999), pp. 55–88.

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death-defying commitment to, as he saw it, religious truth, and the elector his more considered but equally genuine search for the truth, rooted in the world, however, and in Ernestine dynastic interests. Looking back later, Luther testified to convictions that they came to share. Frederick had been accustomed to remark—on what occasions, Luther does not say—that no rational argument concerning the faith could be advanced that could not be cleverly refuted. ‘Only God’s Word stood fast’, Luther quoted the ruler, ‘like a wall that one could not conquer and rip down’.92 Immediately after Frederick’s death, electoral representatives of high rank met their counterparts from the Albertine Duke George’s court. They convened in Naumburg. The cousins’ delegates met at least quarterly to discuss issues of shared responsibility and concern. On this occasion, George’s men challenged Johann’s failure to apprehend Luther, as they had often challenged Frederick’s failure to do so. Johann’s men responded that neither the new elector nor his deceased brother had any intention of accepting the Reformer’s teachings except insofar as these were rooted in ‘divine Holy Scripture’. They asked George in the future to spare their lord further admonitions on this question.93 Frederick reminded Martin of the earthly reality within which he had to strive to root his ideals. Each man had something to offer the other that was equally essential to success.94 Years later, Luther remembered this prince as sapientissimus, ‘the most wise’.95 He mentioned him in conversation long after the elector’s death.96 The Reformer had been a beneficiary of Frederick’s wisdom and his example. How the elector benefited from Luther’s teaching, we are left to infer. He did not allow scribes at his dinner table.

92 93

wa tr 2, no. 1976, p. 285. Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar (THSAWei), Reg. A, Nr. 236, titled only 1525 Mai bis Dec., fols. 32r-33v, this meeting taking place on 25 May 1525. 94 C. Stephen Jaeger, ‘Friendship of Mutual Perfecting in Augustine’s Confessions and the Failure of Classical amicitia’, in Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (eds.), Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 185–200, which explores the reciprocal efforts, the complementarity, of the saint and his friend Alypius, which, however, depends on their mutual conversion to Christianity. 95 wa tr 2, no. 1358, p. 69. See Luther’s description of how Frederick received the advice of his counselors, wa tr 2, no. 1934, p. 266. He called them in and had them come forward one at a time to have their say, while he listened with closed eyes. After receiving all opinions and analysis, the elector came to a decision, incisively pointing out why he had chosen the path he had. Luther can only have learned this from Spalatin. 96 E.g. wa tr 3, no. 3287a-b-c, pp. 250–251.

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Luther’s Relational God. Finding a Loving Heavenly Father The story of the young Brother Martin as a tormented soul who sought forgiveness and, yes, love from an all-seeing, often irate, and justice-bent divinity is engrained in our memories. In the presence of his boarder, the future divine Johannes Mathesius (d. 1565), Luther later recalled his preoccupation with his irrepressible sinfulness and his serious effort to comply with the Catholic Church’s demand that he duly confess not just every bad deed—of which there is a record of very few—but every sin of omission and every lustful and malevolent thought whether he acted upon it or not.1 Only in fulfilling that requirement, and by keeping his conscience scoured out with frequent revelation to an absolving priest could he hope to attain eternal life. If death came upon him suddenly, as it did to many all around him, and he were momentarily uncleansed, who could be sure how many eons in the purifying flames of Purgatory awaited him, or even, for a mortal sin into which a man of his temperament had unwittingly slipped in his mental life, perpetual torment in hell itself. The Church, indeed, saw its bona fide role, as placing the mercy of Christ at the laity’s disposal by facilitating these lustrations of the soul. In the years between about 1505 and 1512, Luther found no access to an amiable, forgiving heavenly Parent. He recalled later that a foreshadowing of more profound relief came in the person of an aged Augustinian friar, an unnamed brother, who counseled him. This presumed elder of his friary in Erfurt demanded that he recall what he said each time he recited the Creed: ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins’.2 Martin did recite that line, and he did ostensibly adhere to that principle. But he evidently subscribed to it with his brain and with his lip service but not with his heart. This admonition appears to have given him pause—a rather long pause, one that would bear theological fruit. Philipp 1 Johannes Mathesius, Historien, Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes, Doctoris Martini Luthers, anfang, lehr, leben vnd sterben, Alles ordendlich der Jarzal nach, wie sich alle sachen zu jeder zeyt haben zugetragen (Nuremberg: n.p., 1567), sermon 1, fol. v (verso). 2 Mathesius, Historien, Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes, fol. v (verso). See the account of Philipp Melanchthon, The Hystorye of the Lyfe and Actes of Martine Luther Doctour of Diuinitie …(London: n.p. 1561), fol. Bvi (recto), in English translation.

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Melanchthon’s retelling adds the detail that the brother informed Martin that the Holy Spirit gives your heart assurance that your sins are forgiven.3 The role of the Holy Spirit as a key element in the communication system of the Divine would prove crucial to this friar in the years ahead. Luther could not have achieved the spiritual peace that he ultimately did without envisioning God as a feeling heavenly Father who cared deeply about the wellbeing of each of his earthly children.4 The Wittenberg Reformer came to feel assured of a close, personal relationship to his divine Progenitor. Yet at an intellectual level, he realized that God, in order truly to be God, was anything but volatile and emotional. His encompassing awareness was just that, all engrossing; He was, in His plan for the salvation of (some of) His people (Heilsgeschichte), imperturbable.5 In one of his sermons on the Book of Genesis (1523–1524), where the divinity is considering the degraded state of His human creatures before deciding to destroy nearly all of them with the great flood, Luther admonished his hearers, ‘Great sadness was said to be in the heart of God, who nevertheless is immutable and judges with tranquility ….  Man speaks about God and thinks he has such a God as you believe Him to be. If you think He has forgotten you, then He has forgotten; if you believe He is a Father to you, then He is a Father’. Noah thought God was angry, but He could not be.6 In the same series, referring now to Psalms 44 and 16, he repeated, ‘To stand, to sleep, to watch, etc.—all [such] things are attributed to God. Just as I feel, so 3 Melanchthon, Hystorye, fol. Bvi (recto). 4 I advise every reader of this essay to come to it with at least the background of having perused Horst Beintker, ‘Luthers Gotteserfahrung und Gottesanschauung’, in Helmar Junghans, (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag (2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), i: 39–62 (text) and ii: 732–748 (notes). This is a theological treatment that explores the strands of the Reformer’s formal ideas, whereas I come to this topic as an explorer of the author’s emotional state within his circumstances. 5 Michael Parsons, Luther and Calvin on Old Testament narratives: Reformation thought and narrative text, Texts and Studies in Religion 106 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), ch. 2, ‘God and Humanity’, pp. 17–34. 6 wa, Schriften, 14, ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523 und 1524’, p. 187, 14 June 1523. This comment was recorded by both Georg Rörer and Stephan Roth, and both versions are included here in the wa, pp. 187–188 (‘qualem esse credis: si tui oblitum cogitas, oblitus est, si patrem, pater est, etc. …’). Rörer recorded, ‘Non debemus id deo zu eigen, non potest irasci, ridere, ist ein wesen in quo non est alteratio. Istam alterationem sentiunt spirituales, ut Samuel quando unxit Saul. Ita cogitarunt, “Ach got hat sie got [sic] umbkheret,” etc. Oportet loqui de deo ut homine. Regula notanda in scripturis. Si puto cum iam reminisci mei, tum fit, si iratum credo, et tamen interim manet immutabilis. Ita fuit /// cum Noa, qui libenter avertisset iram dei, sed non potuit, cum omnibus suis petivit pro salute mundi, sed impetrare nihil potuit’.

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God regards me’. But, Luther confirms, the deity is immutable. He cannot be or feel these things.7 For the remainder of his career as teacher and preacher, and as the only model of God compatible with his own spiritual life, Luther adopted and presented a divinity of anthropomorphic dimensions, a God of wrath and reconciliation, of grief, love, and mercy. I am arguing here that Luther did not merely adopt the vocabulary of feeling in order to relate a distant deity to the theologically and in part fully illiterate audiences to which he often spoke. Rather, he himself demanded that God care for him, and he employed Scripture, both Testaments, as a framework of evidence. He found plentiful descriptions of God’s dis/affections in Scripture to support this point of view. How often during the Reformation era did opposing points of theology and perceived societal or felt psychological necessity drive the differences between what was ­formally taught in faculties of theology and what was presented to the laity from the pulpit! The clergy of the sixteenth century did not yet regard theology as divided into systematic and pastoral categories. In theory, religious doctrine was a seamless garment. What reached lay ears may have been meant to be identical to, if a simplified variety of, what the future men of the cloth learned in their training, in whatever format they learned it—which even by 1600 was still not uniformly in a university faculty of theology.8

The Old Testament

One of the first biblical places in commenting upon which Luther presents a God who cares for his human children is, of course, the Book of Genesis. A methodological problem that immediately shows itself is identifying the Reformer’s intended audience. His earlier sermons (1523–1524; republished in 1527) and his later lecture(s) (1535–1545) were all highly demanding of ­listeners 7 wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose’, #21, p. 213. See also Parsons, Luther and Calvin, pp. 17–34. 8 I have written about this many times, for example, in ‘Preaching the Word in early modern Germany’, in Larissa Juliet Taylor (ed.), Preachers and people in the Reformations and early modern period (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 193–219; reprinted in paperback 2003. Luise SchornSchütte, Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit … dargestellt am Beispiel des Fürstentums Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, der Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel und der Stadt ­Braunschweig (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), really starts with the seventeenth century. For the German Southwest, see Bruce Tolley, Pastors and parishioners in Württemberg during the late Reformation, 1581–1621 (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1995). Saxony was significantly behind southwest Germany in enforcing a high level of clerical training before the Thirty Years’ War although Elector August (r. 1553–1586) dearly desired to do so.

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even as they included entertainment.9 Texts that have come down to us in Latin may have been directed toward the Latinate men of that university community, whereas ordinary people, and virtually every woman, had to hear the Word presented in German. Luther knew this, for in commenting on Psalm 19 in 1530, he looked ahead to the era of missions: ‘This Psalm is about the necessity of making the Gospel known throughout the world …. The Gospel will be preached in all languages, and not in one alone [my emphasis]’.10 In his own time, German was necessary whether or not the men who recorded his words, such as Georg Rörer, Stephan Roth, and Veit Dietrich did so, then or afterward, in Latin. Indeed, it is for the expressive, earthy resonance of Luther’s speech with the people’s own talk for which this intellectual is known to this day. The princes themselves had to be addressed in German, and Luther explicated the Word to them too.11 Luther was acutely aware of the need for simplification in the pulpit. He compared the Hänslein and the Elslein, Jackie and Little Elsa, before him to infants for whom the preacher bared his udders and gave them the milk (of the Gospel) to drink. Abstruse matters should be saved for the Klüglinge, the clever and educated ones.12 Little work has been done on ­Luther’s audiences. We must also remember that Luther started with a text. He did not invent the conversations between the Deity and His human creatures. As a ­theologian 9

10 11

12

In the wa, the editors refer to this as Luther’s longest lecture or, as it should more correctly be seen, as a comprehensive series of lectures of the lectio continua type—or it could be seen in published form as a coherent commentary. It was, however, read aloud in segments to an academic audience. See Hans-Ulrich Delius, Die Quellen von Martin Luthers Genesisvorlesung, Beiträge zur evangelischen Theologie 111 (Munich: Chr. [sic] Kaiser Verlag, 1992), pp. 7–11, for a brief discussion of what the presentations of 1535–1545 actually were. Luther quickly came, however, to believe that a different message should be preached to the common people, especially the peasants, than to those above them who were, as Luther hoped, among the elect and sincerely interested in their faith. The angry, punitive God should be preached to them instead of consolation. E.g., wa tr 3, no. 3094, p. 169. wa Schriften 31 / 1, ‘Psalmenauslegungen 1529–32’, Psalm 19, pp. 339, 340. Elector Johann took exception in January 1530, when, out of anger over the citizens’ failure to act in accordance with his social teachings, Luther announced that he would cease to preach. Johann couched his request that Luther resume at least weekly preaching in terms of other people’s, such as visitors’, disappointment at not hearing him. I suspect that, in fact, the devout prince was himself desirous of hearing this compelling homiletician and spiritual leader as often as he could. wa, Schriften 32, Paul Pietsch’s analysis of existing evidence, pp. xix–xxii. wa tr 3, no. 3421, pp. 310–311; no. 3579, pp. 427–428.

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one of whose central precepts was the primacy of Scripture, Luther was compelled to respect the literal account that passed under his eyes. Genesis is ­replete with interactions between the divine and the human and with portrayals of God’s feelings that this preacher-lecturer could not dismiss. At times, he struggled to reconcile the stories with his doctrinal positions. A salient theological solution to these seeming incompatibilities was the precept of ‘the hidden God’. The scriptural Word contained what the Divinity wished His children to know about Him, but God had secret intentions, known only to Himself.13 The faithful must be accepting of this. This host repeatedly told his dinner guests that they should not inquire into what God desires to be concealed: ‘We should abstain from questions and thoughts about hidden matters and consider the revealed will of God’.14 Luther preached on various days of the week and, especially on Sundays, in the afternoon as well as the morning. The Sunday and weekday afternoons gave him something of a chance to use the lectio continua pattern preferred later on by Calvin—that is, of supplementing the traditional pericopes and feast days of the late medieval Church calendar, by engaging in the ongoing explication of entire books of the Bible. Luther would have known who the likely audiences would be. Between 1535 and 1545, he read his lectures on Genesis on Monday and Tuesday to learned recipients.15 These could easily bear the following: … Holy Scripture speaks according to the thought of those men who are in the ministry [that is, including the Patriarchs]. Because Moses says that  God sees and punishes, this is truly done in their hearts …. Noah is a minister of the Word and an organ of the Holy Spirit. God reveals His  malice in the hearts of His ministers and prophets. God is from eternity, therefore, firm in His plan and constancy; He sees and knows all things. … God is depicted as though He had eyes, ears, a mouth, nostrils, hands, [and] feet, just as Isaiah, Daniel and other prophets see as though in ­visions. Those parts of Scripture speak of God as though He were a man. 13

14 15

Julius Köstlin, The Theology of Luther in Its Historical Development and Inner Harmony, 2nd ed., trans. Charles E. Hay (2 vols., Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1897), i: 493. wa tr 2, no. 2164b, p. 342. One of Luther’s typical utterances on predestination, wa tr 3, no. 3655b, p. 492. wa Schriften 42, G. Koffmane, ‘Einleitung’, p. ix.

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God is a spirit, which cannot have flesh and bones, nor can he be moved by emotions.16 If he may have described an impassive God to theologians and university students, such a One would have found little sympathy among laborers and peasants.17 Emotionally Luther bore these a kinship. When he described the horrors of the Fall of humankind in his sermons on Genesis that Caspar Cruciger saw into German in 1527, he portrayed not merely Eve and Adam as vulnerable in the face of the Tempter’s wiles; the Creator, too, cannot bring Himself to fulfill His threat to Adam that if he should eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he should surely die. When God covers Adam and Eve’s exposed bodies with garments in view of the fact, Luther says, that they did not yet know how to manufacture these, ‘This is a bit of consolation and a sign of His mercy that He treats them in such a friendly manner and provides them with clothing’. Not even in their accursed state does God fail to care for them. He evidently compromises His principles, and contradicts His previous warning, ‘you shall surely die’, in not instantly meting out their spiritual death.18 Shortly, God will grant Eve the further comfort of fecundity and bringing forth Cain.19 The preacher repeats throughout his commentary that we mortals should not seek to grasp God’s secret ways and intentions with our reason. Rather, we should approach the riddles of Scripture in the ‘simplest’ (einfeltigest), unanalytical state of mind. ‘If a person understands that this has physically occurred, I would gladly accept that; for I would not wish to depart from the words’.20 Inasmuch as Luther explicitly regards the entire book as pointing toward the redeeming figure of Christ, the Divinity has already provided a remedy for the awful end of Cain’s shunning.21 Yet Cain is not eligible to enjoy that remedy. Luther depicts God’s wrath toward this fratricide as implacable. For Cain, ‘there is no faith nor consolation; the G ­ ospel 16

17

18 19 20 21

wa Schriften 42, Vorlesungen über 1. Mose 1535–1545, p. 293. See his more casual statements of God’s impassivity, as in wa tr 3, no. 3071b, p. 164: ‘Deus numquam irascitur. Si irasceretur, so weren wir vorlorn. Numquam percutit nos nisi permissive, ut hoc malo ad poenitentiam nos invitet, et ut eum invocemus’. See Luther’s comment as he began to preach on 2 Corinthians 3 in 1531: ‘Ego non libenter praedico hanc Epistolam, quia non est pro vulgo, quod sich nicht kan drein richten’. wa Schriften 34 / 2, no. 79, ‘Predigt am 12. Sonntag nach Trinitatis’, 27 August 1531, p. 156. wa Schriften 24, ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527. Über das erste Buch Mose. Predigten. 1527’, p. 115. wa Schriften 24, p. 124. wa Schriften 24, p. 120. wa Schriften 24, p. 710, Luther’s closing words: ‘… Beyde … wort und Exempel nichts anders zeigen und leren den den einigen Christum. Gott sey ewig lob!’

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has been taken from him, and he is deprived of the presence [erkentnis] of God. He sees nothing but the gruesome seriousness of God because of his sins’.22 Yet in some circumstances—evidently worse than those provided by Eve’s and Adam’s gustatory disobedience—and well before the Final Judgment, God must kill most of His children. Luther agonizes over God’s troubled heart and His regret over having created humanity. He asks rhetorically how God could sorrow over His act when He is ‘the Highest Wisdom’. His provisional answer is that, in this language, God wished to demonstrate ‘the fathers’ lament and outcry … that they lived to experience such a threat and awful judgment of God …’.23 Luther reverts to a theological answer, one hard for common people to digest: … With God everything had already been decided. If He changes something, it is nothing other than that He wants to turn it around, as He from eternity has provided. But He makes the change so that the pious people of that time can think: ‘Ach, God had it in mind to change and to turn around’. One perceives this practice often in Scripture, [namely] that God is spoken of in terms as we feel them; for just as we feel Him, so is He to us. If you think he is angry, it is nothing else than that you feel Him to be so. Often in the Psalms we find, ‘Wake up, Lord! Why are You sleeping, why do you conceal Yourself?’ and similar language. But His nature and will do not change unless He so presents Himself to us and has us see and feel Him thus.24 The Holy Spirit has made Noah feel as if God were troubled and emotionally burdened by the raging sins of humanity. Luther presently returns to the ordinary understanding of regret and anger. ‘… See, what sort of faith was present [in Noah], which was able to stand in the face of such gruesome anger!’25 God instructs Noah on the details of building and filling the ark. The patriarch obeys with his full faith, just as the Wittenberger attempts to do. The entire Book of Genesis is just one very prominent example of God’s speaking to His chosen people. God’s treatment of His creatures within and outside the Garden of Eden still has relevance in the early sixteenth ­century. 22 23 24 25

wa Schriften 24, p. 140. wa Schriften 24, p. 168. wa Schriften 24, p. 169. wa Schriften 24, p. 183.

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Luther writes in the preface that he prepared for the 1527 edition of his ­sermons, that this book provides ‘pretty examples of faith, love, and bearing the cross among the dear holy Fathers Adam, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, ­Jacob, [and] Moses … from which we learn to trust and love God’.26 God vows not to destroy all of them again before the Last Judgment and gives them the rainbow as His sign and token. He reserves the right, though, Luther says, to take down an individual city or a land.27 God instructs Abraham to be circumcised along with all the men in his extended family and household (volck) as the fleshly witness to a covenant between Himself and them.28 God acutely disapproves of the lifestyle of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and tells Lot to depart while He does away with those sites and their inhabitants. He enables Abraham and Sara to conceive Isaac in their advanced age. He gives a speech to Isaac assuring him of the success of his ‘seed’ in populating a wide territory. Luther’s commentary—along with the Scripture itself—has the effect of making God’s socialized presence ubiquitous and the interaction with Him of the faithful in Christ unavoidable. On the one hand, Luther may wish to moderate his own seemingly privileged intimacy with God by means of his dispassion, his repetition to his audiences that the Divinity is entirely immoveable. But on the other, in his human estimation God must be personally encountered by each of the faithful. An encounter by definition must involve at least two parties. Luther’s assertions of God’s complete immoveability are a theological abstraction and a rhetorical device for the few, the Klüglinge; his studied humanizing of the Genesis stories, based on an existing text that cannot be gainsaid, brings the Divine and human beings close together. Luther himself requires that closeness. Further, the reality of the First Book of Moses is that it hands down stories of God’s regular interventions in the earthly world. In telling and interpreting the legends of Sara and Rebecca, of Hagar and Ismael to the people of Wittenberg as examples of God’s actions in the patriarchal past, Luther brings the Bible down to a comprehensible level. This too is his goal, for the Old Testament, in his mind, points to Christ; it is the essential background to the Incarnation and the Passion. The Old Fathers had not yet experienced Christ, ‘but have seen him in faith and from a distance as through a blue, dark cloud; while the clear bright sun shines in our eyes’.29 ‘Abram’, Luther declares, ‘was a proper, 26 27 28 29

wa Schriften 24, p. 15. wa Schriften 24, p. 199. wa Schriften 24, pp. 316–317; his treatment of circumcision is much longer and more elaborate in vol. 42, pp. 602–624, 642–648, 669. wa Schriften 36, ‘Predigten 1532’, p. 257, from Luther’s second funeral sermon for Elector Johann, pp. 255–269.

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yes, a complete Christian’.30 Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are themselves preachers of Christ, inspired by the Holy Spirit, teaching the Word of God.31 They are upright men who, despite their flaws, mysteriously ­understood the Trinity and the Atonement without Christ’s having been born—without the Johannine particle that got Erasmus into trouble, and without Anselm’s Cur deus homo. He comments that all of Genesis manifests the Trinity.32 Abraham fully subscribes to the doctrine of justification by faith.33 The Book of Genesis is ‘richer in [analogous] images of our Lord Christ and his kingdom than any other book in Scripture’ [the Old Testament].34 Luther’s commentaries on the Psalms, ‘which are very dear to me’, reveal the same characteristic.35 Such currents both compete and combine in the ministry of this complicated Wittenberger. God’s emotions in Genesis vary. He is satisfied with the quality of His ­creation; He rests. He can be punitive toward Adam and Eve, yet out of mercy He mitigates the full potential horror of their punishments. He is furiously condemning of Cain for killing his brother.36 He is troubled, sad, and angry with his creatures, including his animal creatures, before the Flood.37 He condemns without mercy the people other than Noah and his closest relatives. He seems to repent of his destructive wrath when the full magnitude of His deed settles upon Him afterward.38 The Divinity is furious with Sodom and Gomorrah b­ ecause, in Luther’s opinion, they were confident of God’s grace based on their enjoyment of ‘wealth and excess’.39 He likes Sara but insists 30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39

wa Schriften 24, p. 303. wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523 und 1524’, e.g. 400–403; wa Schriften 24, p. 182. wa Schriften 24, ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527. Über das erste Buch Mose. Predigten. 1527’, pp. 30–31. wa Schriften 24, Ibid., p. 291: About Abram, ‘So gewinnet er gar ein andern newen wahn und verstand uber [sic] die natur, Das heisset nu allein durch den glauben rechtfertig werden’. wa Schriften 24, ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527’, p. 710. wa Schriften 31 / 1, ‘Psalmenauslegungen 1529–32’, passim, e.g., Psalm 118: 23, p. 61, is about Christ. Luther considered this principle to apply to the entire Old Testament, as we know. His learned Christian contemporaries did the same. Handel’s Messiah is structured around this assumption. The quotation about the Book of Psalms is from wa Schriften 38, ‘Eine einfeltige Weise zu beten’, p. 361. wa Schriften 24, Ibid., pp. 137–140. wa Schriften 24, Ibid., p. 168. wa Schriften 24, Ibid., pp. 196–198. wa Schriften 24, p. 351.

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He knows that she is laughing over the promise that she shall bear a son.40 He is compassionate toward Hagar and Ismael and provides for this rejected son.41 He is well pleased with Jacob.42 He seems to compensate Leah for Jacob’s lack of affection for her by making her more fertile than Rachel.43 In the stories contained in Genesis, God has a more varied relational repertory than in Luther’s theological framework. In the latter, the Divine exhibits Himself proportionally toward those whom He has chosen to save and those who will be damned.44 Toward those with faith, he is ‘solely goodness’ (eytel güte), and toward those without it he is ‘solely rage’ (eytel zorn).45 God’s face is as neatly divided as a late medieval altarpiece of the Last Judgment, with the horrified souls on Christ’s left headed for an eternity of inexpressible suffering, and those on his right lifted upward into perpetual bliss. All the same, God may choose to afflict those whom He has elected; they may suffer from a sense of God’s absence. Luther says that when your faith is restless and your heart is afraid, God is showing you that you are able to do nothing except through divine grace.46 In describing Joseph’s imprisonment after his accusation of attempted rape by Potiphar’s wife, Luther remarks that God does not abandon His saints ‘but [He does] draw back His hand a little and lets them be rejected and oppressed’.47 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten … 1523 und 1524’, p. 275. wa, Schriften 24, p. 374. wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten … 1523 und 1524’, p. 379. wa Schriften 24, p. 558. Intermittently throughout his life, Luther revealed that he believed in predestination. The Reformer as pastor and counselor quickly relegated this doctrine, including its specific dimensions in his scheme, to the realm of the Hidden God and stressed it ever less. Yet it arose time and again, including at his and Käthe’s dining table. See his touching letter of 1531 to Barbara Lyβkirchen, for example, revealing how this doctrine had afflicted ­Luther himself: wa br 12, no. 4244a, p. 135. In this 1527 edition of his sermons on Genesis, Luther wondered how the Divinity could have regretted having created the world and all within it. How, he wondered aloud, did the Great Flood fit in with Predestination. ‘… Es bey Gott schön [sic] alles ist beschlossen gewesen, Endert ers aber, so ists nicht anders den das ers wil umbkeren, wie er von ewickeit versehen hat. Aber die enderung thut er, das es die frommen leute zuvor fülen, Die haben so gedacht: Ach Gott hat es nu ym synn alles zu endern und umb zu keren’. wa Schriften 24, p. 169. Loyola, too, adhered to some version of predestination but instructed his followers not to preach it as it was susceptible of misunderstanding : The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by Anthony Mottola (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1989), p. 141. wa Schriften 24, p. 578. wa Schriften 17 / 2, Fastenpostille, p. 22. wa Schriften 24, Das erste Buch Mose, Predigten. 1527, p. 644.

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The manner, content, and extent of God’s self-revelation remain a problem for Luther. At his dining table one day, Luther held forth on the seeming opposite poles of God’s curse of Adam and Eve, and the divine blessing of sacrificing His son. He offers no firm solution, except that God can do as He pleases.48 His guests move the Reformer to take up the theme of the righteous God again and again over the years, for this is a question that, like divine providence, appears to trouble them anew. Luther’s answers are not all of one stripe; he protested that one cannot approach such matters with reason. One day in the latter part of 1531, he held forth on the Old Testament God. God dearly loves his human creatures and will nourish, protect, help and rescue them. At the same time, He must test the faith of His children and so visits them with trials or, as in the case of the ancient Egyptians who held the Israelites captive, unspeakable punishments. Some people’s hearts are hard as iron and cannot be reached in any other way. He takes His vengeance against the godless. He will not relent in dealing with those who have fallen away, such as King Saul. But God’s faithful are the apples of His eye, those who fear Him and believe in Him. He will hear and help all those who earnestly call upon Him. Luther stumbles in explaining, however, why the Heavenly Father would punish the children ‘into the third and fourth generation’. This, he says, is a gruesome threat. And yet all descendants who turn to God in repentance receive an exemption from that curse. They are exempted from the ­consequences of the law, not least as an example to others who might receive the call similarly to repent. Rational faculties have nothing to do with this process, for it involves a turning of the heart. The heart becomes confident of divine love and favor. To think that God has overburdened humanity with too many plagues and misfortunes is to be God’s enemy. Love of God is demanded of us. We are commanded to call upon His name in distress and in thanksgiving! All good things come from God.49 A qualitative evolution during the decade between the mid-1520’s and the mid-1530’s—that is, between his first complete treatment of the Book of Genesis and his towering second engagement with it—was the elevation of the Holy Spirit to a dominating, indispensable explanatory force. Much of what eluded rational explanation, Luther now attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit had not been absent earlier, but its role in the retelling is expanded. The patriarchs and prophets are entirely Trinitarian. The Holy Spirit reveals to Adam that one of his sons has been slain by the other.50 If God 48 49 50

wa tr 1, no. 587, p. 273; cf. wa tr 2, no. 2182b, p. 351. wa tr 2, no. 2271b, pp. 397–398. wa Schriften 42, p. 209.

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must be ­impassive in the face of destroying His creation in the Great Flood, the Holy Spirit experiences sadness (tristitia).51 Luther argues that ‘without the Holy Spirit, whose sustainer Christ alone is, humanity would be able to do nothing other than wander and sin’.52 The Reformer sees Noah as an instrument of the Holy Spirit; he receives its messages in his heart.53 The Holy Spirit would shortly relay God the Father’s thoughts to Abraham; He calls to Adam via the Spirit.54 This revelatory device saves the Deity from being overly anthropomorphized. It helps to preserve God’s supreme constancy and impassivity. It tends to remove Him, however, from direct accessibility; the Holy Spirit is the Father’s representative. But Luther is inconsistent. He portrays God as enjoying talking directly with Noah. God is even garrulous during their exchanges!55 The lecturer must refer back to the text. Luther continues to expound to the educated men before him that not even the patriarchs came face to face with God but rather received instructions or learned of His dis/approval through the convictions of their hearts or by means of dreams and visions conceded to the Old Fathers and the prophets. Sometimes these received angelic messengers as when two visitors came to Lot’s house in Sodom and ensured his escape from the encompassing evil there.56 Especially in his voluminous later lectures on Genesis, Luther stresses Evangelical clerical ministrations as channels of divine communication with His people. The preached Word, the heard confession with the conferral of absolution, the administration of baptism and the eucharist—by the mid1530s, when he began to read his commentaries, Luther had integrated his concept of the post-Catholic ministry into his scheme of divine relatedness to the church. ‘You hear a man when you are baptized, when you use the sacred meal, but the word you hear is not of man but the living word of God’.57 To be sure, Luther was a member of the ecclesiastical corps, and the Word of God to His laity passed through his lips. He was its beneficiary along with the lambs of the congregation. But did the Heavenly Father not relate to Luther as an individual, especially if he served, as he thought, as an instrument of religious transformation?58 If Noah and Abraham heard God’s voice by means of 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

wa Schriften 42, p. 274: ‘Haec tristitia est tristitia proprie Spiritus sancti’. wa Schriften 42, p. 290. wa Schriften 42, pp. 293, 297. wa Schriften 42, pp. 437, 439. wa Schriften 42, p. 324. wa Schriften 42, e.g., p. 667. wa Schriften 42, p. 667. I myself find that Luther counted himself among the ranks of the prophets mainly during his phase of emergence. He defended his unlicensed return from the Wartburg in 1522

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the Holy Spirit in their hearts, did not Martin Luther also enjoy it? The Wittenberger had wiped away the panoply of intermediaries and Holy Helpers with whom Catholics had peopled and continued to populate their cosmos. The loss of the Virgin as intercessor was an especially drastic shift. Many ordinary folk only gradually and under pressure relinquished their internal confidence in such adjutancy. Women in labor were especially persistent in invoking Saint Margaret or applying the ‘belt of the Virgin’ to their suffering abdomens. ­Luther’s followers everywhere who were in positions of authority labored in a different sense, one now legal and disciplinary, to suppress ‘superstitious’ reliance and to concentrate spiritual attention on the person of the Savior. Luther was not a modern man, however. He preached three times in 1530 and 1531 on angels, both good and bad (devils).59 These invisible creatures of God provided one remaining means for individuals to hear from God in mediated form, for both angels and demons carried out the will of God. He is uncertain when Lucifer and his cohort fell, but it needed to be before the creation of the first couple so that Satan could, in the form of a serpent, mislead Eve.60 ‘The Holy Scripture teaches us’, he declares, ‘that God didn’t want to have many gods [separate divinities with divine powers], but it says that whatever happens is God’s own doing’.61 Yet as God’s instrument in bringing misfortune, such as the breaking of a bone, Satan is involved. During a period of drought, he remarks, ‘I believe that 40,000 devils sit in the clouds and prevent it from raining; they blow into [the clouds] and drive away the rain’.62 He only half-jokes that each bishop at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 had as many devils on him as a dog has fleas.63 Angels and devils completely surround the individual through his and her life. They are literal and by no means metaphorical. Some demons could be incubi and other succubi, mating with human beings but, in his view, not able

59

60 61 62 63

to Frederick the Wise, ‘For I know that what I preach and what I undertake (mein Wort und Anfang) comes not from me but from God’ (wa br 2, no. 456, p. 460, 7 or 8 March 1522). Michael Parsons thinks that Luther regarded himself as a prophet of the End Times (Luther and Calvin, p. 130). Calvin more successfully sustained his sense of being God’s mouthpiece. See Max Engamarre, ‘Calvin: A prophet without a prophecy’, Church History 67, 4 (1998), pp. 643–661. wa Schriften 32, ‘Sermo de angelis Coburgi ao. 30’, 29 Sept. 1530, pp. 111–121; wa Schriften 34/1, ‘Predigt am Tage vor dem Michaelisfeste’, 28 Sept. 1531, pp. 222–242; loc. cit., ‘Predigt am Michaelistage’, 29 Sept. 1531, pp. 243–269. Cf. wa Schriften 34 / 2, ‘Von guten und bösen Engeln Matth. 18’, pp. 222–370; wa Schriften 37, ‘Predigt am Tage Aller Engel‘, pp. 539–544. wa Schriften, 42, pp. 18, 114–117, 138; wa tr 1, no. 319, p. 130. wa Schriften 34 / 2, p. 236. wa tr 3, no. 3174a, p. 210. wa Schriften 34 / 2, pp. 263–264.

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to conceive offspring.64 Devils are better able to use reason than humans are, but angels are more numerous and in the end more powerful and physically stronger than their evil counterparts.65 Children need urgently to be taught that they each have a guardian angel: Dear child, you have your own angel. When you pray in the morning and at night, the same angel is beside you, will sit by your bed, has on a little white shirt [Röcklein], will care for you, rock you and guard you so that the Evil Man, the devil, cannot come to you, etc. This messenger of God is with children when they eat, and also when their parents leave them alone.66 People’s angels correspond in their capacities to the position and power that their charges occupy in earthly society. Angels are ranked in heaven, and guardian angels are also differentiated.67 Luther firmly believed that he had his besetting demons as well as his own angels. He cultivated awareness of them so that he might battle the former and appreciate the latter. For everyday purposes, the Reformer is unable to regard Satan as firmly under God’s governance. Theologically viewed, however, he is: ‘That no hair of your head is consumed is owing only to God’s protection and guarding of you, for if the devil were able, he would rip your eyes out and shoot a bullet through your heart’.68 God doesn’t always let the devil have his way, ‘unless a blow is needed that we have well deserved’.69 These were not an adequate substitute for the Heavenly Father, nor were messages related through sermons and sacraments—as important as these were, and as central to Luther’s teachings. Luther wrestled with awful thoughts that he was sure the devil poured into his heart. He speaks repeatedly to his dinner guests about his battles with Satan. The Evil One was unrelenting. In the face of his attacks, Luther could go from the wonderful assurance of faith in one moment to the certainty of its absence in another. God—for the Divinity authorizes Satan—could rip Christ out of one’s heart and cover Himself up ‘so that we can find no comfort in Him’. Our conscience, he continues, feels as if it 64 65 66 67 68 69

wa Schriften 42, p. 269. Martin Brecht summarizes Luther’s witch-beliefs, Martin Luther, vol. 3, Die Erhaltung der Kirche 1532–1546 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1987), p. 254. wa Schriften 32, p. 117; 34 / 2, pp. 225, 234. See also wa tr 1, no. 1222, p. 609. wa Schriften 34 / 2, p. 248. Children should never think they are totally alone and should thus avoid the (unspecified) sins that they might be tempted to commit if by themselves! ‘Predigt am Michaelistage’, 29 September 1533, p. 152. wa Schriften 34 / 2, p. 238. wa Schriften 34 / 2, p. 240. Cf. wa tr 1, #180, pp. 81–82.

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had lost Him and then trembles and shakes as if only wrath and disfavor were directed at us—which we, in view our sins, well deserved.70 Luther can easily identify with the Psalmist as he explicates the seven penitential Psalms in 1525. These were traditionally used in monastic penance and convey a sense of being so entrenched in sin that God cannot possibly show His gracious facet.71 Luther does find solutions as he tries to relate to an Old Testament God. One of these lies within the Psalter. To be sure, this ancient importunist, allegedly David, too, has a God of variable personality. Perhaps this fact resonates within the Reformer. The Psalmist is sometimes in despair and receives no certain answer. At other times, he engages in imprecatory prayer, that is calling down (he hopes) God’s wrath and physical punishment upon his enemies. Luther does this intermittently throughout his published corpus. He heaps scorn upon the Catholic Church and its officers, upon the Jews, upon his Protestant opponents such as Thomas Müntzer and the Sacramentarians, and upon the Turks. He would effect their ruination if he could. We can imagine that in his own prayer-life, he asks God to help him quell his anger.72 Luther can also find great sweetness in the Deity of the Psalms. He states in his commentary on Psalm 118, ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is friendly, and His goodness endures forever’, for example, that without ceasing, God ‘always and always’ does his best for us. ‘… God is friendly, not as a person is but [as one] who from the ground of His heart is always inclined and favorably disposed to help and to do good [to us]; He does not gladly rage or punish unless He must and is absolutely compelled by the unrelenting, unrepentant, stubborn evil of human beings’.73 In his discussion of Psalm 111, he opines that the characterization of God as ‘gracious and merciful’ is entirely accurate.74 Many episodes in the Book of Genesis might challenge readers to take this view of the Divinity. References to God’s ‘goodness’ (güte) and His ‘benevolence’ (benevolentia) in that setting seem formulaic. We come again to the ­two-dimensional God of Judgment. He is completely good to His faithful and utterly wrathful toward those who have not regarded the Word. All the patriarchs are dreadful sinners, Luther thinks. He goes on about the evil of Jacob’s incest with Rachel and Leah, for example.75 Nonetheless, these fathers 70 71 72 73 74 75

wa Schriften 17 / 2, ‘Fastenpostille’, p. 20. wa Schriften 18, ‘Die sieben Buβpsalmen. 1525’, Psalms 6 (p. 479), 32 (p. 485), 38 (p. 491), 51 (p. 498), 102 (p. 507), 130 (p. 516), and 143 (p. 521). wa tr 1, no. 583, p. 269, Luther listed anger as one of his five principal sins. wa Schriften 31 / 1, p. 69. wa Schriften 30 / 1, p. 414. wa Schriften 14, p. 405.

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are Christ’s forebears, mysteriously understand their role as such, and are inscribed in God’s eternal Book of Life. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. Reading the Reformer’s sermons and commentaries on Genesis is like peering through a powerful telescope in an effort to detect how the universe has altered since the Big Bang—the Big Bang in our case being that time when the Wittenberger began to articulate his core doctrine of justification by faith. How does his new theological conviction play out as he approaches the Fall of humankind? Although Luther insists as a matter of essential belief that the patriarchs all adhered to it, the nature of the stories contained in ‘the First Book of Moses’ is such that God’s ire is disastrously visited upon His sinful creatures who have made themselves intolerable by their grievous misdeeds—in short, their works. Certainly, certain sermons sound as though humans could choose whether to disobey God or conform to His will. Preachers naturally wanted their human flocks to behave better. Stay by the Word of God and don’t let the world draw you from it, he admonishes in 1536, ‘so that you do not let yourselves be led into ruin and damnation’.76 Luther is hard-pressed to reconcile the literal Word, the account itself, with the Word as an abstraction of devotion as he has fundamentally reinterpreted it. Even Luther occasionally strains to understand how God could, in the Flood, destroy infants who were still innocent, as well as ‘others who had innocently been led astray’.77 At the dinner table one day, Luther declares, ‘Our Lord God is a man [sic] who lets no evil go unpunished. Ferdinand must give an accounting [herhalten], Denmark was punished … France was punished, Venice was punished’.78

The New Testament

Martin Luther finds his solace in the New Testament, in the figure and person of Christ. Essential to this hypostasis of the Divine is the incarnation. He quips at the dining table that God realized He was too great for human beings to grasp, and so He made Himself small in His son.79 The preacher held forth convincingly, both at home and in the church, on and around Christmas Day, which in his time and place was often counted as the first day of the new

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wa Schriften 41, ‘Predigten 1535–1536’, p. 589. wa Schriften 42, pp. 323, 331. wa tr 2, no. 1771, p. 212. wa tr 2, no. 1814, p. 224.

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year.80 In 1534, he movingly proclaims, ‘For one’s heart really to be able to embrace it [that Christ was born for us] would cause it to burst and die. Experience tells of how some people even die from fright and sorrow, some because of great joy. In like manner, this gladness is so great that were the human heart fully to assimilate it, body and soul would be torn apart and the person would expire’.81 For Luther, the engaged paterfamilias and progenitor with Katharina von Bora of six children, God’s love of humanity finally stands revealed, in that stall, in that manger, among those beasts.82 This divine can personally join the rejoicing as the heavenly throngs proclaim this event to the shepherds abiding in the fields. Luther ignores old technical questions such as whether midwives attended Mary or whether she experienced pain in giving birth.83 These are Scholastic irrelevancies. He does affirm her perpetual virginity, but fundamentally, he is preoccupied here with the arrival of the God-Made-Flesh and dwelling among us. Now he can believe in God’s love for His human creatures even though he technically still affirms an impassive Deity. The angels told human beings not to be afraid. They themselves were consumed by the happiness of the event they announced. ‘Glory be to God on high!’ We should praise God. There is no peasant who plays the bagpipe who does not like to be praised! Don’t neglect to thank God. ‘This little child Jesus, the angels sing, will establish God’s honor [on earth]’. 80 81

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Martin Brecht comments that every Christmas, at the table, Luther expressed his joy at the birth of Christ: Martin Luther, iii: 245. Translation taken from Holy Christmas Day, second sermon (preached in the afternoon on Christmas Day at the parish church, 1534), in Eugene F.A. Klug (ed.), Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, mi: Baker Books, 1996), p. 118. The three volumes under this title, all edited by Klug, all published in 1996, in fact are Georg Rörer’s notation of L­ uther’s so-called Hauspostille, which, despite the common label, were delivered one third of the time from the pulpit in the city church, St. Mary’s Church, in Wittenberg, or even ­occasionally in the castle church there. For the originals, see Martin Luther, Haus-Postille, version of Georg Rörer, Johann Georg Walch (ed.), Luthers sämmtliche Schriften (St. Louis, mo: Concordia Publishing House, 1892), vol. 13b. In the WA these are dispersed. Birgit Stolt, ‘Laβt uns fröhlich springen!’ Gefühlswelt und Gefühlsnavigierung in Luthers Reformationsarbeit (Berlin: Weidler, 2012), p. 248, brought the tr entry to my attention in which Luther said, ‘Gott mus mir viel freundlicher sein und mit mir reden den mein Keta irem Martinichen’ [her new son Martin, Jr]. wa tr 2, no. 1237, p. 29. A student of mine has pointed out that in a Christmas sermon of uncertain date, Luther does state that Mary gave birth ‘without pain and without injury’; he did, then, retain a portion of the attributes of Mary’s parturition that set it apart from other women’s. John Nicholas Lenker (ed. and trans.), Sermons of Martin Luther (8 vols., reprint of 1905 ed., Grand Rapids, mi: Baker Book House, n.d.), i: 140.

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He will bring people to recognize God properly and say, ‘I am nothing— my righteousness, piety, wisdom, skill, wealth, [and] power all amount to nothing; the baby Jesus is everything’. When we accept this, we will see in God the source of all our strength, comfort, and joy. He will be our riches ….84 ‘The angels also sang, “Peace on earth!” All who adore this infant will cease to quarrel but will love their neighbors and live harmoniously with them. They will be “fine, friendly, and peaceable people”’.85 Luther asks his hearers to examine themselves to determine whether the message of Christ’s birth does not taste good ‘and if your heart too does not leap and spring up when it hears that the angel announces, “I bring you tidings of great joy!”’86 At the dinner table, Luther wishes aloud that after his death, those who follow him would not be distracted by theological questions but would seek God by the cradle and the diapers of the infant Christ.87 All his life, Luther’s assurance will lie in the incarnation. We see this prominently in his adherence to the doctrine of Christ’s physical ubiquity in the eucharistic elements. Johannes Oecolampadius reproved Luther at the Marburg Colloquy, ‘Don’t cling so firmly to Christ’s humanity and flesh; lift your thoughts to Christ’s divinity!’ Luther responded, ‘I know God only as He became human, so I shall have Him in no other way’.88 This quotation is too good, too central to this Christian’s being, not to repeat. Whereas other Reformers could spiritualize the resurrected Christ and confine his (glorified) body to heaven, Luther could not. He retained a keen interest in physical manifestations of Jesus’s favor with God that other religious pioneers may tone down. He states in June 1533 at the dining table: God has become human for our sake, took on flesh and blood and a natural body. The heretics and fanatics cannot bear this; they want only to have a spiritual God …. The sending of the son is flesh, is an existing thing all by itself, just like baptism and the sacrament of the altar. But they, 84 Walch, Sämmtliche Schriften, Rörer’s ‘Hauspostille’, cols. 1469–70, third sermon on Christmas Day, 1533, in the parish church. 85 Ibid., col. 1472. 86 wa Schriften 29, ‘A Prandio 25. Dez. [1529]’, p. 660. 87 wa tr 1, no. 257, p. 108. Cf. wa tr 3, no. 3654b, p. 491. 88 Walther Erich Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (Leipzig: n.p., 1929), p. 27; and lw 38, pp. 3–90. See http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3163&qp=16 Yale Divinity Digital Image and Text Library, the full translated transcript of the Marburg discussion of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, p. 19. Consulted 7 August 2015.

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the fanatics, make no distinction between the essence and the [ritual] use …. We have certain testimony, Holy Scripture [with its] miracles and deeds, also the sacraments, that God sent His son in the flesh and had him become human, which we have seen, heard, touched, and comprehended. We want to stay with that.89 I have argued elsewhere that this insistence on Christ’s physical presence in the eucharist shows itself in the Reformer’s tolerance, even appreciation, of images within the sanctuaries. He particularly wishes crucifixes to remain in place, for they remind Christians of the tremendous love that their Heavenly Father bore them in finding a means of satisfying His need for justice because of people’s sinfulness.90 Horst Beintker stresses Christ’s revelation (Offenbarung) of God’s love to Luther.91 Luther does not, however, shift his primary allegiance from the paternal hypostasis to the son. Christ reveals and confirms God’s love of Luther and a great many other inveterate sinners. Even if the patriarchs and prophets had been Christians, as he saw it, the truest, most heartfelt reconciliation with God could not occur before Jesus had been present in the body. This was Luther’s emotional stance as much as it was his inherited four-fold method of analyzing Scripture. Even in his lectures on Genesis, Luther brings in the heartwarming event of Christ’s baptism. ‘“This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,”’ he quotes. ‘This will of grace is rightly and properly called the will of [God’s] good pleasure; it is [our] sole remedy and salvation. From all eternity it is ordained, revealed, and exhibited in Christ. This is [God’s] life-giving, precious, and loving will’.92 He waxes lyrical when preaching on John 3: 16–21 itself and not just alluding to it incidentally. In explaining ‘For God so loved the world’ to those who were present on Pentecost Monday, he cannot restrain his emotion: ‘This is nothing other than sheer, inexpressible love, which He gives not out of debt or duty or because somebody has asked and begged Him to; but He is moved by His own goodness. He is the type of Lord who gladly gives. His desire and joy lie in giving, with no ­demand for payment, without demanding anything’.93 In preaching on the same feast day another year, Luther is just as enthused. ‘It is almost the best Gospel [­message] of the year! One should 89 90

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wa tr 3, no. 3330b, p. 274. Revised and submitted August 2015, ‘The mitigated fall of humankind: Luther’s reconciliation with the body’, invited paper given in Oxford; published proceedings planned by Katherine Hill and Lyndal Roper, entitled ‘The Cultures of Lutheranism’; under consideration by Past and Present Books, hoped-for appearance 2017. Beintker, ‘Luthers Gotteserfahrung’, p. 58. wa Schriften 42, p. 296. wa Schriften 21, ‘Sommerpostille’, p. 482.

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inscribe these words as the most complete consolation [consolatio plenissima] on the heart’. He adds, ‘I announce to you that God loves you!’94 A further basis on which to build confidence in God’s love was the fact that, as Luther prayed, Jesus desired to be the actual brother of every person. He voices his gratitude: Lord God, heavenly Father, I regard myself as Your dear child and You as my dear Father, not because I have deserved this or ever could deserve it, but because my dear Lord, Your only begotten son Jesus Christ desires to be my brother and has himself announced this to me and invited me to regard him as my brother, which he reciprocates ….95 Another key scriptural event that elicits Luther’s warmest feelings, even his abandon, is Matthew 3: 17, treated separately from the Book of Genesis this time: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’. This announcement represents the crux of sinners’ reconciliation with the Father. The Reformer’s relief spills over into his homily of 1526 on this passage, not just as an edificatory sentiment that was essential for his congregants to hear; but as an expression of his personal thanksgiving. Now what does this word [‘This is my beloved Son …’] do?…. It ­teaches us to know Christ, in the recognition of whom our salvation entirely and completely lies …. He is God’s Son and pleases Him well. With these words, God makes the heart of the world laugh and rejoice, and He pours out upon all creatures His pure, divine sweetness and consolation. How so? Because if I know and am certain that the man Christ is God’s son and pleases God well—which I must be certain of in view of the fact that the divine Majesty Himself speaks this from heaven and cannot lie—then I am sure that everything this person says and does, the word and deed of this beloved son, must please this very best God.96 94

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wa Schriften 27, ‘Predigt am Pfingstmontag Nachmittag’ (1. Juni 1528), pp. 167–168. A ­ nother classic passage in this same train of thought may be found in wa Schriften 29, ‘­Sermon aus dem 3. Kapitel Matthäi von der Taufe Christi’, pp. 228–229. See also wa tr 3, pp. 99–100: Luther’s discussion with his friends and with his wife about baptism. The ­baptized Christian must believe that she is heilig (saved). Questions about election are impious and must be suppressed. wa Schriften 21, ‘Sommerpostille’, p. 215; drawn to my attention by Frieder Schulz, Die Gebete Luthers, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 44 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1976), p. 175. wa Schriften 29, ‘Sermon aus dem 3. Kapitel Matthäi von der Taufe Christi’, p. 228.

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Luther cannot cut himself off. His outpouring continues. Now, how could God pour out any more or give to us any more lovingly or sweetly than when He declares that he [Jesus] pleased Him well from His heart that His son speaks with me in such a friendly manner, is so heartily inclined toward me, suffers for me with such great love, and dies and does everything else? Don’t you agree that a human heart should properly feel this pleasure that God takes in Christ when he [Christ] so serves us? Out of joy, it [the heart] should spring apart into one hundred thousand pieces; for then it would [be able to] see into the depths [abgrund] of the fatherly heart, yes, into God’s bottomless and eternal goodness and love, which He bears and always has borne toward us.97 Luther’s attraction toward mystical devotion finds expression in these sermons. He does not experience ecstatic unification with the Deity, but he can imagine his own heart springing apart, either upon the birth of Jesus or upon this declaration of God’s good pleasure in His incarnated Self.98 In preaching on John 17, Luther is lyrical: ‘… Through His Word, He makes us absolutely certain that one attributes love and grace to God. This love, with which He loved Christ, His only son, from all eternity, so that it is called a love in Christ and for Christ’s sake, is, in sum, a fiery love surpassing all other, which no human heart can grasp’.99 The son is in an intimate relation with the Father; the Son enables Martin likewise to come closer to the Father. Jesus makes God accessible: ‘No one cometh unto the Father but by me’. The prayerful phrase ‘Through Christ our Lord’ takes on less formulaic meaning. Nonetheless, Luther sometimes admitted to being plagued by doubts about the truth of (some of) what Christ said in the Gospel. He did not specify which of Jesus’s utterances seemed inaccurate, but he confessed that lack of faith was one of his six major categories of sin.100 Another setting within which Martin Luther gives verbal formulation to his relationship with the Father is in prayer.101 Through His children’s prayer, God 97 98

wa Schriften 29, Ibid., p. 229. See new book by Volker Leppin, Die fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (­Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016), which confines itself to the 1520s. 99 wa Schriften 27, pp. 191–192. 100 wa tr 1, no. 585, p. 269. The ensuing discussion at his table seems to indicate that Luther wondered why Jesus spoke on some occasions as a man and on others as God. His discourse was inconsistent. 101 See Luther’s spontaneous comments about whether God hears our prayers: wa tr 1, no. 1212, p. 604.

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yields himself further to us. Luther remarks at dinner that the prayers of the faithful are powerful. It is amazing, he thinks, ‘that a poor human being can speak with the High Majesty in heaven in this way and not be afraid of Him but can know that [God] smiles at him in a friendly manner for the sake of ­Jesus Christ’. Again, it is the incarnate hypostasis of the Divine that gives Luther strength. ‘The conscience must not run away because of its lack of worth or be in doubt or let itself be frightened away’. Prayer is the lifting of one’s heart up to God. It sustains the world.102 On another occasion, he converses about the differences between Catholic prayer as a work and heartfelt prayer.103 In giving his friend Peter Beskendorf Balbier instructions on the art of prayer, Luther interjects, ‘I thank [God] here for such unutterable love, care, and fidelity toward me; it is as though He had placed a great, strong helmet [hut] and wall around my body …’.104 Just as God said to Abram, ‘Do not be afraid … I am your Protector; I am your Shield’, so, as Protestants still sing, the Reformer feels God to be his own mighty fortress.105 He regards prayer as an efficacious force.106 The Lord’s Prayer was close to Luther’s inner infant, as he admitted: ‘Even today I nurse on the Our Father like a child, drink and eat [from it] like an old [toothless?] person. I can never be sated’.107 In his introduction, Luther reveals that he prays for at least an hour first thing in the morning and last thing at night. He addresses the problem of not feeling disposed to pray. He takes his Psalter into his room (kamer) or else goes into the church among the people. He runs orally through the Ten Commandments and the Creed, and if he has time, some sayings of Christ or Paul or some Psalms. He prays out loud ‘as the children do’. This warms him up for his devotions. He then kneels or stands with folded hands and his eyes raised toward heaven and speaks: Ah, heavenly Father, dear God, I am an unworthy, poor sinner, not worthy to lift my eyes or hands toward You or to pray. But because You have 102 wa tr 3, no. 3605, p. 447. 103 wa tr 3, no. 3651, pp. 485–487. 104 wa Schriften 38, ‘Eine einfälltige Weise zu beten, für einen guten Freund 1535’, p. 369. On the unfortunate life-course of Beskendorf / Balbier, see Nikolaus Müller, ‘Peter B ­ eskendorf, Luthers Barbier und Freund’, in Aus Deutschlands kirchlicher Vergangenheit. ­Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Theodor Brieger (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1912), pp. 37–92. 105 wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523 und 1524’, p. 240. 106 wa tr 1, no. 886, p. 443, as one example of his stating this. 107 In another setting, Luther referred to his catechism as Muttermilch, meaning not only emotionally so, perhaps to him—and it did prominently feature the Lord’s Prayer—but as nourishment for every child. wa tr 3, no. 3421, no. 3579.

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commanded us all to pray, and additionally promised to hear us … and because you have taught us through Your dear son, our Lord Jesus Christ, I come to obey Your command.108 We know that Luther did in fact stand at a window to pray while he and Justus Jonas shared a room in Eisleben at the time that the Reformer died. Luther prayed aloud, and Jonas and Michael Cölius were moved by the impassioned words they chanced to overhear.109 But there the Wittenberg divine stood confronted by his own demise. In his general recommendations to Beskendorf, he uses the Lord’s Prayer as an outline and a means of further drawing himself away from the concerns of the world into contemplation of God. Proceed, he suggests, phrase by phrase, relating yourself to each part. Curiously, he does not quite succeed in his quest for detachment, for this very involved man finds ‘Our Father which art in heaven’, ‘Thy kingdom come!’ and ‘Thy will be done’ to call for his, Luther’s, request for divine intervention against idolatry, Sacramentarianism, Anabaptism, the Turks, and ‘all false teachers’.110 Just as the Psalmist calls upon God to precipitate disaster upon his enemies, Luther regards this as a legitimate request.111 Sometimes, he admits, he has such rich thoughts about one or another segment of the Lord’s Prayer that he does not proceed to the next one. Almost apologetically, he adds that the condition of one’s heart is the key to good prayer and not whether you complete a certain program.112 The important thing is to make a ‘little fire in your heart’.113 Prayer can take the form of being silent: ‘If we just held still and let Him do with us according to His pleasure, we would experience how very richly He can compensate us’.114

108 wa Schriften 38, ‘Eine einfälltige Weise zu beten’, p. 360. 109 Christof Schubart, Die Berichte über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, Texte und Untersuchungen (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1917), no. 1, pp. 2–3; also no. 69, p. 60. 110 wa Schriften 38, ‘Eine einfälltige Weise zu beten’, pp. 360–361. 111 Luther seems not to connect such prayers to the anger that, he writes elsewhere, is the work of the devil. For his views on anger, see wa Schriften 34 / 1, ‘Predigt am 6. Sonntag nach Trinitatis’, 16 July 1531, pp. 1–8; and later on the same day, pp. 9–15; and two further sermons specifically on anger, wa Schriften 41, ‘Predigten 1535–1536’, #2, pp. 743–750, ‘Eine Predigt vom Zorn’; and #16, ‘Predigt am Sonntag Cantate’, pp. 578–589. Nevertheless, ­Luther admitted to his guests that anger energized him and sharpened his mind: wa tr 2, no. 2410a-b, pp. 455–456. 112 Ibid., p. 363. 113 Ibid., pp. 372–373. 114 wa Schriften 24, ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527’, p. 638.

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A curiosity about Luther’s recorded prayers is that they are almost all addressed to God the Father Himself rather than to Christ the Son or to the Holy Spirit. No theological dictum insisted this be so. When the Reformer spoke to the Almighty, he spoke almost by definition to the first member of the Trinity.115 An example of an exception may be influenced by the fact that it comes from a sermon on the Last Days, when Christians anticipated that Jesus himself would come to preside over the final separation of the wheat from the tares: Dear Lord Jesus Christ, the Gospel suffers and your name is insulted, Christians are persecuted and murdered, the true doctrine is suppressed, and the regime of the devil together with all evil gains out of hand. All the dear dead Christians and saints who lie forgotten in the earth have turned to dust and powder. Come again and manifest your honor to yourself and to your Christendom. Take vengeance for your name and their [saints’] blood, and bring them forth again into glory.116 Spontaneously in Luther’s emotional eyes, the highest divinity is God the Father. Luther opens his known prayers with self-abasement—with acknowledgment of his shortcomings, his inability to conform to the divine will, and his complete reliance upon God’s atoning gift of His son. Without a doubt this Reformer focuses upon the comfort that God has provided by means of Christ’s death on the cross. In contrast to Calvin, Luther very seldom enumerates humans’ sins or engages in impassioned vituperation. He is simply a sinner; he openly confesses his degraded condition. His reliance upon Jesus is evident, and his confidence in Christ’s satisfaction is also beyond doubt. Martin is deeply grateful, and expressing this is a constant theme. He calls upon the Divine, ‘Dear Lord God, although I have sinned, do not rage against me and be angry; for Christ, my dear lord, has reconciled me with You again by means of his death, has forgiven my sins, and conferred his righteousness and merit upon me as my own’.117 115 See Schultz, Die Gebete Luthers, which offers a kind of survey, but often without the texts themselves. Schultz has collected the prayers from the Weimarer Ausgabe, pointing out that a number of anthologies of Luther’s prayer were published in the early modern period (pp. 79–82, up to 1897). The prayers that are reprinted by Schultz as well as most citations that I have followed to their sources do address the Father. 116 wa, Schriften 34 / 2, ‘Predigt von der Zukunft Christi’ (1532), p. 478. No doubt, many other examples could be found. Luther writes to Melanchthon from the Veste Koburg in 1530 and tells him that he is asking Christ (Christum rogo) to enable him, Melanchthon, to sleep (wa br v, no. 1552, 24 April 1530, p. 286). 117 wa Schriften 25, ‘Vorlesung über Jesaiah, 1527–1529’, p. 228.

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Every now and then, the sun breaks through the oppression Luther feels within this ‘vale of tears’ (Jammerthal), and we perceive the close ­affection with which this man would characterize his bond with his Heavenly Father: Almighty, eternal, merciful Lord and God, who is the Father of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, I know assuredly … all that You have said and what You hold and will hold—for You cannot lie; Your Word is true. From the beginning, You have promised me Your dear and only son Jesus Christ, who has come and has redeemed me from the devil, death, hell, and sin. After that, as additional security and by Your gracious will, You have given me the sacraments of baptism and the altar, in both of which You have offered me the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and all heavenly goods. ­Because You offered, I have used these things; and out of faith in Your Word I have relied upon and received them. Because of these, I do not doubt at all that I am safe and secure against the devil, death, hell, and sin.118 To Luther himself, the knowledge that he had been baptized as an infant as well as his experience of the Eucharist throughout his life were additional sites of assurance of God’s love for him. These two remaining sacraments after his paring back of the Catholic Church’s list, were God’s sign and promise, and each was validated by its presence in the sacred Word. Only these met the essential criteria. However crassly, unreflectively the Wittenberg parishioners may have received the bread and the wine, these elements doubtless nourished Luther’s spirit. In Holy Communion, the Reformer mysteriously came in contact with the living Christ. How this occurred was not to be analyzed. True it is that I am a sinner; that I confess and do not deny. But I am baptized and through the true body and blood of the Lord Christ in the bread and wine that I have received with my mouth, I have been incorporated into and become a member of [the body of] Christ, one loaf [Kuche] with him. In addition, I have his Word, which is certain and cannot betray me, until heaven and earth pass away!119 He refused, as we know, to relinquish the physical presence of Christ in the elements.

118 wa tr 5, no. 5685, p. 320. 119 wa tr 1, no. 502, p. 226.

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Luther, the Same Man

Throughout his life, Martin Luther retained the introspective, self-accusatory qualities that he showed as a young friar. He combined these with a growing sense of his own rectitude—God’s own rectitude as interpreted by Luther— and his determination to share his superior teachings with the world. Such ­contradictory features often coexist in the same personality. The former was more his personal self, the latter his self-presentation to the world; but these facets were not cleanly separable. Luther, indeed, had a certain awareness of both the bad and the good within and around him. He could doubt, and he could rage; he was capable of great love and loyalty toward those in his deepest affections. He adhered to the dominant prejudices of his day and believed what to us are outrageous and damaging folktales. He had a superb sense of ­humor and used it to solidify his bonds of friendship with people at his table and within his circle of correspondents. He was shaped by late-fifteenth-­century small-town Germany. From its perspective, God governed the universe, but He held His wayward creatures to account. Whether or not Father Martin (promoted by ordination above Brother) any longer had to enumerate his sins, he inwardly continued to do so, and to worry sincerely that he might not be fit for God’s mercy. His prayers give some evidence of his ongoing sense of the vast discrepancy between the level and scope of God’s authority and His interest in every sparrow and ‘every hair of one’s head’. We cannot be sure that theological uncertainties were related to the Reformer’s apparent periods of depression, when questions of faith tormented him. Luther perpetually found ways to cushion the more painful logical outcomes of some of his convictions. His yearning led him to solutions. Even as he reminded his fellow theologians and his congregation that reason was unreliable and to set it aside, still he could not relinquish a divinity who was ­impassive and disinterested. In his mind, a God cannot be led by bursts of temperament, and yet the Old Testament is filled with such outbursts. Our divine finds no convincing way to have a detached God and a caring God, or alternatively a wrathful God. In struggling to come to terms with Genesis, Job, and much more, he must interject the Holy Spirit, and he must force the patriarchs and philosophers into the mold of Christ. In some situations, God can be consistent in directing all human affairs, including precipitating catastrophe, and yet have a loving intention toward humanity. He can order Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, yet define such a command as a test of Abraham’s fidelity.120 120 As a loving parent, Katharina could not grasp this command. wa tr 1, no. 1032, pp. 521–522.

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God loves Abraham even though He requires him to despoil his own hard-won fatherhood, his marriage to Sara, and his role as progenitor of his people. He is, Luther says, the figure of Christ, who gives himself utterly for the wellbeing of his people. So, too, are Adam, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Jonah, Job, Moses, and many others. All are Christians before the fact, all are preachers, all foretell the incarnation of Christ, all subscribe to justification by faith. By virtue of this arrangement, all are eligible for salvation; and, Luther thinks, all are written into the divine Book of Life. They have sinned badly, but Christ has reconciled them with the Father; they are saints.121 Such theological conundra beset Luther’s commentaries and sermons on Old Testament books. Somehow, if God has provided for Christ’s atonement from all eternity, and if the Holy Spirit is the one who communicates God’s thoughts and commands to the individual patriarchs, the harshness of the Scriptures themselves undergoes mitigation. The divinity can be a well-meaning Father who takes the larger picture of Heilsgeschichte, His plan for salvation set down before time. Luther relates with difficulty to this God. The human creature owes his first Progenitor love and the kind of fear indicated by the English phrase, fear of God. The catechism of 1531 stated that we should relate to God as loving children do to their loving father.122 How can one sustain those feelings in the face of such destructive force? How can God have predestined all that would occur and yet regret creating a world that initially, He deeply admired? Luther has trouble with the Great Flood as the destruction of all people except Noah. He can turn the Flood into a metaphor on which to draw in his ‘Pamphlet on Baptism’ (Täufbüchlein), but in that context he does not have to hear with his mental ears the screams of infants as they float away from their mothers in terror. Luther offers a dual ordinance of God, the elements of which must coexist with one another: the law (Gesetz) and the Gospel (Euangelium). In his telling, he attempts to employ these as a conceptual framework within which to group those stories that seem to fit under one or the other. ‘God gave the world two kinds of Word: the Law (gesetz), which rages and strangles; and the Gospel (Euangelion), with which He comforts and makes us alive’.123 We cannot meet the demands of the first, and so we stand condemned; we must resort to the second and come to rely upon it. Within the framework of this conviction, he battled against his former friend Johannes Agricola over antinomianism. The application backward of Christian love onto the times of Moses and David had not been wholly effective—retained with insistence though it was. Luther’s injection of Christ and the Holy Spirit into the mentalities 121 wa Schriften 24, ‘Predigten über das 1. Buch Mose. 1527’, p. 598. 122 wa Schriften 30 / 1, pp. 369–370. 123 wa Schriften, ‘Predigten über das 1. Buch Mose, 1527’, p. 578.

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of the Old Testament writers does not successfully assuage the human worshipper’s occasional sense of alienation from God’s whimsical brutality toward even individuals characterized as in the main good and upright, men like the patriarchs. Luther needs Christ to bring him face to face with a convincingly caring Father, one who elicits and deserves people’s love. The Endower of the Atonement, Luther’s life-saving refuge, is such a One. Luther cannot cease to be the post-Advent Christian who he was. The birth of the son in the flesh, and then the hanging of that flesh upon the cross are this divine’s threshold into the immediacy of a loving Father. ‘No one cometh unto the Father but by me’ has profound significance for a man deeply desirous of forgiveness and conciliation. Strictly through his sense of Christ’s manifestation of divine love, Luther is able to work toward and refine his filial bond with the Heavenly Parent, the One who, out of profound love, has sent Christ to dwell among people. Christ proves that God is—not exactly love itself as in the slogan ‘God is love!’—but capable of loving intimacy with each of His children. Luther emotionally demands this. He is a man of affective gifts, and he seeks a God of proportional reciprocity. He remarks one day, when his son Martin, Jr, was an infant, that God loves us even more than he and Käthe did their own children. At that moment, he was not in doubt.124 Luther’s allegiance to, his concerted effort in the explication of, the Old Testament is unchallenged. It was part of Scripture too, and it laid down the Jewish framework within which the Jewish Jesus had to be understood. Jesus himself had declared this.125 Luther struggled to love the divinity who was portrayed there. He adhered at a formal level throughout his career to a doctrine that God was not emotional; He did not get angry.126 Emotionally, however, Luther feared and felt God’s anger. Sometimes he projected God’s wrath upon the devil: God does not punish out of wrath and anger; He corrects as a father does his son. He wounds so that He may heal. All that He does to us is for our improvement, healing, life, and salvation, so that we learn to fear Him, to recognize His goodness and fidelity, to trust Him, and in every time of distress to call upon Him. 124 wa tr 2, no. 1237, p. 5. 125 Luke 24: 44–45. 126 From the mid-part of his career, see wa tr 1, no. 723, p. 349: God reluctantly responds to human beings’ abandonment of devotion by sending the devil to plague them. But God Himself does not rage (zürnen). But Luther is inconsistent on this point. See, for example, wa tr 1, no. 906, p. 457.

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Satan, however, undertakes the violent punition that God assigns to him.127 The needy person and the theologian do not always jibe. Luther and many theologians after him have been persuaded of his success in finding a loving heavenly Parent. Most of the Reformer’s expressions of personal satisfaction, even joy, are connected to the coming of the Lord as an infant and to his being and gladly dying on earth. In the protection of this Lord, Luther himself can die in confidence of his reconciliation with his Heavenly Father. Luther tells his dinner guests that the Divinity is both in and around all his creatures, whether human or a leaf or a blade of grass. He is in the devil and in hell itself. But He is not bound. This is theologically imprecise, but the Reformer means to stress the ubiquity, omnipotence, and the accessibility of God to all His children. God ‘creates, moves, and sustains all things’.128 Ultimately, however, God is above all that is worldly and material. He comes to the elect daily as the Comforter, a central role in Luther’s experience.129 The Thuringian wrote to his mother as she lay on her deathbed, quoting Christ: ‘Be comforted! I have overcome the world!’130 He wrote with conviction. At least at this time, he had overcome the temptation of the devil. He now knew, truly knew in his heart, that God loved him and that his sins, which derived from his fallen self and were rooted in worldly relationships and circumstances, would be remitted. 127 wa tr 1, no. 1172, pp. 579–580. 128 wa tr 1, #240, p. 101. 129 In The Reformation of feeling, I found that Trost (consolation) was at the emotional heart of Reformation Lutheranism. Devotional media across the range displayed this objective; see esp. pp. 96–98, 251. 130 wa br 6, no. 1820, pp. 103–104.

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Fleshly Work. The Sex Act as Christian Liberty Historians looking back across the ages may detect at least two paradigm shifts related to sexuality, turning points in the course of which approved erotic behavior was distinctly altered: (1) in the late-antique transition from classical mores to monastic ones in the Western half of the Roman Empire, which has been superbly traced by Peter Brown;1 and (2) in the ‘Sexual Revolution’, which began in the 1960s in North America and by means of popular media introduced every high school girl, every housewife, and also their male counterparts to such previously suppressed questions as whether (salva venia!) oral sex was acceptable among decent people and whether their orgasms were all that they could be.2 I would like to suggest that the Lutheran Reformation, and in particular Martin Luther himself by his word and example, introduced a shift that is chronologically and qualitatively between those two poles of asceticism and indulgence; it is also less radical. Nonetheless, this shift is notable and warrants our attention.3 Luther’s problematic arose out of his clerical and indeed his human inability to please God by means of self-discipline alone. That his scrupulosity was directed toward the suppression of sexual impulses as well as other sins, his letters, lectures, treatises, sermons, and table remarks provide intermittent evidence. For Martin Luther, the Fall of humankind was the basic premise of sexual expression. God ordained that his children should engage in it—within boundaries, to be sure. Luther sought to adhere to these boundaries in his teaching and in his day-to-day existence. 1 Peter R.L. Brown, The body and society. Men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the serpent (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 2 I first began to work on Martin Luther’s sexuality in 1988 when I presented a paper entitled ‘Female sexuality in the thought of Martin Luther’, at the Seventh International Congress for Luther Research, 1988, in Oslo. 3 Earlier approaches may be found in Waldemar Kawerau, Die Reformation und die Ehe. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 39 (Halle: Verein für Reformationsgeschichte, 1892); and Olavi Lähteenmäki, Sexus und Ehe bei Luther, Schriften des Luther-Agricola Gesellschaft 10 (Turku: Luther-Agricola Gesellschaft, 1955). For illuminating surveys of the broad early modern context, see Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and sexuality in the early modern world. Regulating desire, reforming practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), and specifically on Protestantism, pp. 59–100; and Katherine Crawford, European sexualities, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 55–99. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004348882_006

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Church historians, in the past a largely confessionally oriented category, have spent many generations searching Martin Luther’s works for evidence of his theology. They have sought first its contours and then its roots—the latter when it became apparent that the Reformer did indeed owe significant debts to late medieval nominalism.4 What will the contributions of my own generation of historians, no longer church historians per se, be seen to have been? As we look into the future, should we conclude that the subject of the Reformation and its protagonists has been exhausted and move on, borne by the currents of innovation that envelope us? We cannot avoid contemporary forces in any case, but my view is that these very trends open up new questions and new ways of approaching even our most venerable topics. Beginning in the 1960s, we Reformation historians tended to back away from the depths of medieval theology and to consider the social conditions and assumptions that informed the lives of great thinkers. This was increasingly done, not as Roland H. B ­ ainton did it in Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther—namely to add touches of personal shading and points of contact with everyday readers in what remains fundamentally an account of Luther’s external life and the development of his thought.5 Instead, some historians sought to place Luther firmly within a network of social norms and cultural assumptions. Such work, as on Luther’s attitudes toward Jews and toward women, lent a deeper understanding of important problems, such as why Luther was, although a committed Christian and man of the cloth, nonetheless acutely, to us most painfully, anti-Semitic.6 In considering what less-trodden paths through the thicket of Luther’s being and opus still remained, I gradually realized, under the stimulus especially of European work on ‘self-witness’ or Selbstzeugnis, that even the Reformer’s most theoretical writings were interpenetrated by expressions of his personal stances and frequently by accounts of his experiences.7 Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst author of Young Man Luther (1958), conceded that Luther had 4 The opus of Heiko A. Oberman, but especially The harvest of medieval theology. Gabriel Biel and late medieval nominalism (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1963); (2nd rev. edn. Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1967); and Forerunners of the Reformation. The shape of late medieval thought, trans. Paul L. Nyhus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). 5 Nashville, tn: Abingdon Press, 1950. 6 I find the distinction that is made today between Antisemitism and Antijudaism not to be meaningful in the sixteenth century. Clearly, in regions where the Inquisition was active, converts to Christianity as well as descendants of converts remained highly suspect. This was also true in northern Europe even if to a less rabid extent. There were, in any case, so few converts present in northern society that we cannot gain a realistic sense of degrees of prejudice. 7 Studies of sexuality in and of the European past, including in relation to religion, have also provided a stimulus. Among numerous examples are—these on homosexuality— Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland 1400–1600 (Chicago: ­University

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r­ ecorded very little about his childhood, and thus Erikson had to construct the story of Luther’s quest for identity based more upon Freudian universal structures than upon early events about which the Reformer spoke.8 But I think that Erikson was over-hasty. Luther was exceedingly forthcoming, although the psychoanalyst is correct that Luther’s words are probably more revealing about his state of mind at the time he spoke them than about his actual childhood. His utterances even in his public sermons surprisingly often touched on intimate matters, as though he did not mind receiving Wittenberg’s most lowly parishioners, along with university colleagues and students, into his circle of familiars. Erikson offers an explanation of the younger Luther’s sense of sinfulness by referring to, in addition to thoughts and possible masturbation, the friar’s spontaneous emissions, partly, he says, the result of pent-up anger.9 I find that Luther’s massive works, approximating at completion close to one hundred thick volumes, can be regarded as an expression of his conscious self. We may even gain a basis for speculating about his unconscious self. The best comprehension of these depths lies in the minds of scholars who have scrutinized the whole of society so that collective patterns can be distinguished from the individual and idiosyncratic. One aspect of that examined society would include the ideas about sex and gender that were advanced by scientists and medical practitioners.10 Yet apart from theology, Luther’s specialty, the Reformer was as shaped by the culture of ordinary people in a small-town setting as he was by learned books. In his thoughts on sexuality, he shows little sign of exposure to, say, the anatomical advances of his day. He reflected chiefly on his own experience and those of his neighbors in so far as these came to be known to him; he tries to relate those experiences to his reading of the Bible. One of Martin Luther’s most radical departures from his Catholic past, and one of his most marked contributions to the forthcoming early modern revision of social values, was his integration of sexuality into the upright Christian life—that is, the Christian life in the fallen world. Catholic prelates roundly

of ­Chicago Press, 2003); and Cristian Berco, Sexual hierarchies, public status. Men, sodomy, and society in Spain’s Golden Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 8 Subtitled: A study in psychoanalysis and history (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1958), p. 13. 9 Young Man Luther, 158–163. 10 These have been superbly presented by such scholars as Ian Maclean, The Renaissance notion of woman. A study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life (Cambridge, Eng., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Thomas LaQueur, Making sex. Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 25–148; and Joan Cadden, Meanings of sex differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, science, and culture (Cambridge, Eng., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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attacked him for precisely this abandonment of the Church’s traditional strictures. He and ‘his escaped nun’ could not overcome their lust. The Dominican father Heinrich Denifle continued to articulate this opinion in the early twentieth century.11 From Luther’s standpoint, however, marital sexuality was now incumbent upon virtually every clergyman as well as every layperson. Not only did Luther break with the Catholic celibacy, but he regarded continence as impossible for nearly all human beings, whether clerical or not. God himself had ordained this impossibility to ensure the continuance of the species. Thus, sexual abstinence was in no way superior to marital expression as the Church had taught virtually from its institution. Instead, it was inferior and dangerous to society. Connubial relations were ordained by God as an aspect of His calling to mundane humans. Adults were assigned to engage in ‘fleshly work’ (fleischlich werk), which clearly preceded being fruitful and multiplying. This work existed in Luther’s vision of life in the Garden of Eden between the creation and the Fall, but he is very vague as to whether much time elapsed or whether children were born in that interval.12 The insistence that adults should marry was disseminated in several ways— within a society, we must note, that already favored marriage decisively over either clerical or lay celibacy. During the first round of parish visitations in each territory that became Lutheran, priests who were living with their ‘cooks’ were told to put them aside or marry them immediately.13 The inspectors closely observed what the priests then did, and their marrying was nearly as important as accepting Lutheran teaching. Marriage was the authorities’ distinct preference, especially when children of the union were in evidence. Throughout his career, Luther himself followed the Catholic practice of preaching in favor of marriage on the second Sunday in January, usually using as his text the ­Wedding at Cana to show that Jesus himself, his single lifestyle aside, distinctly approved of marriage. Luther’s followers retained this pericope in the liturgical calendar. Now 11 Denifle, Luther und Luthertum in der ersten Entwicklung, quellenmässig dargestellt (2 vols., Mainz: Kirchheim, 1904), i: 115. 12 Kathleen M. Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Like any long-lived, productive writer, Luther is not entirely consistent. Occasionally, he sounds admiring of those who have the gift (the word itself confers praise) of abstinence. He, the Reformer, did not. 13 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘The Emergence of the Pastoral Family in the German Reformation. The Parsonage as a Site of Socio-Religious Change’, in C. Scott Dixon and Luise SchornSchütte (eds.), The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe (Houndsmill, B ­ asingstoke, uk:  ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 79–99  +  (notes) pp. 214–220. More thorough and ­nuanced by far is Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Farnham, Surrey, uk: Ashgate, 2012), passim, but esp. ch. 6, pp. 211–243.

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preaching regularly, they took the opportunity to elevate marriage and to ridicule the Catholic relegation of it to third-class status, after celibacy and widowed abstinence. Self- and spousal-denial within marriage was not advocated unless illness required it. Luther’s reputation suffered when he condoned bigamy for the sexually driven landgrave of Hesse, Philipp i (whose wife was ill but who bore him several more children), and was condemned for it, at least in the eyes of Catholic prelates and Holy Roman Emperor Charles v.14 Luther tactfully, pragmatically made no remark about his champion Elector Frederick the Wise’s failure to wed, or his producing an uncertain number of irregular progeny. To be sure, in his sick old age, Frederick was no longer indulging himself, but at least two of his illegitimate sons Bastel and Fritz were in evidence at court and provided for in the prince’s will.15 Luther could muster pragmatic solutions when to adhere to principle too closely would have the effect of undoing societal harmony. He recited at the table the troubling case of a widow who crept into her maid’s bed in order to catch her son in an attempted act of fornication with the servant. Alas, the widow fell asleep, and her son unwittingly committed incest with her. This mother conceived and bore her son’s daughter, successfully attributing the birth to another. When this little girl grew up, her biological father fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. Luther favored letting all this pass, for if the story were exposed, only scandal and disturbance could result.16

The Power of the Sex-drive

The medieval Catholic Church tolerated such a wide range of thought (and practice) that it would be folly to attribute to it a uniform attitude of ­misogyny.17 14

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Luther wrote to Robert Barnes in 1531 that he thought that Henry viii could not divorce Katherine, but that, following the example of the patriarchs, he could take a second wife. wa, Briefe 6, pp. 178–188. Luther may have thought that Henry’s motive was mainly sexual. Their given names were Sebastian and Friedrich. See www.kleio.org/de/geschichte/stammtafeln/wettiner/buch2-138a.html (consulted 28 February 2012) for a list of Frederick’s four known offspring by the same mother. Ingetraut Ludolphy summarizes what is known or suspected about this carefully guarded aspect of the elector’s life: Friedrich der Weise, Kurfürst von Sachsen 1463–1525 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), pp. 47–58. On these children’s probable mother, see Iris Ritschel, ‘Friedrich der Weise und seine Gefährtin’, in Andreas Tacke (ed.), ‘Wir wollen der Liebe Raum geben’. Konkubinate geistlicher und weltlicher Fürsten um 1500 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), pp. 296–341, which takes up the question of whether Anna Weller von Molsdorf’s visage is included in a Cranach painting. wa tr 3, no. 3665b, pp. 501–502. For a range of medical and scientific opinions, see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference.

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Some feminists have seen the veritable hatred of women contained in the Malleus maleficarum (1486) as representative of all Catholic churchmen. Perhaps most striking of all in this handbook was the declaration, ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable’.18 Authors of surveys such as Ian Maclean, James Brundage, and Alcuin Blamires have reminded us how varied learned opinion actually was.19 Vituperation of women was perhaps designed to help celibate men adhere to their vows. That factor aside, with only rare exceptions, Catholic thinkers did attribute to the feminine sex at least some degree of intellectual and physical inferiority, credulity, garrulousness, and special affinity for the sex act.20 Many writers made the ‘daughters of Eve’ responsible for arousing and seducing men.21 The medieval monk was advised to avoid the company of women because their presence would cause in him the arousal that he would otherwise have been able to suppress. The blame rests upon the female and not upon the male for his lack of self-control. Eve is the seductress by her very existence. Surely, one of the impulses behind the development of the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary herself in the womb of St. Anne was a perceived need to exempt the Mother of God from Eve’s ineluctable sensual heritage.22 The debate between the Franciscans and the Dominicans over whether the Virgin menstruated was similarly related.23 At times, Martin Luther seems to regard women as devoid of sex drive but as defined by a maternal desire for children. This desire made them consent to the generative act. Such an opinion would have represented an even more radical break with Catholic opinion than I am positing here. But Luther, who is otherwise deeply conservative in defining women’s nature and her proper place in 18 19

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Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters (eds.), Witchcraft in Europe 400–1700. A documentary history, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 188. The excerpts of the ‘Hammer of Witches’ contained in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, pp. 176–229, are sufficient to bear out this assertion. Maclean, The Renaissance notion of woman; Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). By Blamires, cf. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Maclean draws attention to French jurist Andre Tiraqueau’s compilation of authoritative references to women that assert this sex’s inferiority to the male (De legibus connubialibus [1513 and later editions]). James A. Brundage writes of the widespread opinion that women had an ‘insatiable sexual appetite’ (Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], p. 425). Frederick Holweck, ‘Immaculate Conception’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 17 (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1910), consulted online 10 April 2012, at NewAdvent.org/cathen /07674d.htm. Charles T. Wood, ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma. Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought’, Speculum 56, 4 (1981), pp. 710–727.

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society, realistically elevates men’s own libidinal urges such that w ­ omen are not their temptresses but more nearly their equals in the demand for sexual release. He writes from a masculine perspective, yet it is a perspective with a notable difference: he gives the impression of ascribing the generative impulse equally to men. He lards his writings with attacks on monasticism and vows of celibacy, seeming to spare women (except nuns). In ‘De votis monasticis Martini Lutheri iudicium’(1521), he declares that one cannot live chastely and ‘whore’, meaning by the latter to have sexual congress with a woman to whom one is not married. The solution lies not in vows but in matrimony. ‘Let him take a wife and it will be easy for him to obey the law of chastity’.24 He does not say, ‘Take a husband’. He is thinking of men and how they may give vent to their irrepressible urges and yet conform to the will of God. In listing those relatives whom one may not marry, Luther sets down 12 females but only one male, a person’s father. Nevertheless, we may be sure that he likewise forbade marriage by women to equivalent male relations.25 In his treatise on i Corinthians 7, Luther phrases his discussion of marriage as an antidote for sin in masculine terms: the man’s evil desire (böse lust) must find its cure in taking a wife and having legitimate intercourse. Luther does not say in taking a husband.26 Thus far, I have drawn my examples from Luther’s earlier writings, but his proclivity to use male language and examples continues on through his career and his marriage. It is chiefly responsible for our superficial impression that he does not think of women as highly sexed. When we look more closely, we perceive his attribution of fleshly desire to women as well as men. His experience of the marriage bed from June of 1525 may have reinforced this, as we shall see. In his earliest work on marriage, ‘A Sermon on the Estate of Matrimony, 1519’, Luther affirms that after the fall of Adam and Eve, the earlier pure love that the first couple bore one another came to be mixed with, and thereby contaminated by, evil desire.27 Each partner now sought his/her pleasure in the other, and this renders their original love impure.28 Whereas medieval writers expounded mainly in Latin for their fellow clerics’ consumption, Luther, 24 25 26 27 28

wa, Schriften 8, p. 632. ‘Welche Personen verboten sind zu ehelichen. 1522’, wa Schriften 10/2, pp. 265–266. wa Schriften 12, ‘Das siebente Kapitel S. Pauli zu den Corinthern. 1523’, p. 128. wa Schriften 42, Genesisvorlesung 1535–1545, p. 79, for Luther’s description of sex without the Fall. ‘Ein Sermon von dem ehelichen Stand. 1519’, wa Schriften 2, pp. 167–168: ‘Aber nu ist die liebe auch nit reyn, dan wye woll eyn ehlich gemalh das ander haben will, sso sucht doch auch eyn yglich seyne lust an dem andern, und das felscht diesse liebe’.

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the ­pastor and teacher, wrote this in German for any who could read the vernacular. He vividly depicts the evil desire that no person is without, as a fleshly temptation that has become ‘so great and raging that the marital estate has been ever after like a hospital’ that tries to keep men and women from falling into still worse sin.29 He draws, we are accustomed to say, on Augustine’s idea of marital sex as remedium ad peccatum (‘remedy for sin’).30 He explicitly cites St. Paul. Luther includes both men and women when he tells us that a major purpose of marriage is to dampen the fire of lust so that it does not rage (wutet) helter skelter through the city. His choice of language indicates that the commonality would be threatened by it just as if an arsonist were to set households on fire. Its force is so great that if people do not try to keep it within bounds, even within the marriage bed, that bed would become a ‘manure pile and a sow bath’ (eyne mist und ssaw pful).31 Humankind is guilty of too much erotic and self-pleasing feeling: Eve yearned to rule, which is why she hearkened to Satan; Adam accepted the apple even though with his superior intellect and will he knew better, because he loved Eve more than was proper. After their disobedience, the two lusted so mightily for one another that they exceeded even the newly governing natural rule of their sensual beings, without which reproduction would have been impossible. Having sex and producing babies became after the Fall ‘a necessary and natural thing … more necessary than eating and drinking, sweeping up and throwing out, sleeping and waking’.32 Lapsing into exclusively male language once again, Luther accuses that husband who excessively seeks pleasure in his wife of being entirely possessed by a woman.33 A woman’s power over a man reversed the established hierarchy. But in this same commentary, he immediately remembers feminine desire when he describes the burning of a man’s or a woman’s flesh for the other. In the marriage bed, the spouses match one another. The image of desire as flame or burning occurs not just in his explication of Paul’s famous statement that it is better to marry than to burn (i Cor. 8–10). He employs it again and again in his discourses on passion. Desire is ‘a shameful 29 30

31 32 33

Ibid., ‘Ein Sermon’, p. 168. So far, I have not found this phrase in St. Augustine’s writings, but I have not made a systematic survey. See Elizabeth A. Clark (ed.), St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). Luther was certainly well apprised of Augustine’s thought. ‘Ein Sermon von dem ehelichen Stand’, wa Schriften 2, p. 169. ‘Vom ehelichen Leben. 1522’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 276. wa Schriften 12, ‘Das siebente Kapitel S. Pauli zu den Corinthern’, p. 138. Cf. wa Schriften 34 / 1, Predigten 1531, no. 83, 13 September 1531, p. 201.

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burning’.34 Young, unmarried women, in accordance with the nature of their feminine bodies, desire and burn for men. Luther sees the strength of w ­ omen’s desires as proportional to their physical ‘seed and blood’ (samen und geblüt). This belief must be read in the context of then-prevailing gynecological opinion. Women were thought to have seed and blood (menstrual blood) that were essential to conception.35 Luther thought that the more seed and blood a woman had, the more fertile she would be, which is to say, the better able she would be to fulfill God reproductive assignment. An unmarried woman, Luther wrote shortly before his own nuptials, feels the urgent effects of her bodily flow and seed. But the married woman is relieved of these pressures by her husband, and this is why the highest and best chastity is achieved in marriage.36 Not everyone has the same degree and frequency of desire. Luther says, ‘Now, such burning is in some people stronger, in some milder. Some, however, suffer so greatly that they reach orgasm by themselves [sie sich bey ihn selbs besamen]. These all belong in marriage’.37 Luther is not referring here to masturbation, which he elsewhere condemns. Luther was accused of teaching that a woman whose husband could not satisfy her could find another man. He emphatically denies this and insists that he spoke only of women whose spouses were impotent from the beginning of marriage. That husband ‘betrayed his wife’, denying her children as well as a sexual outlet.38 Luther noted that great age differences between husband and wife could have undesirable consequences. In one instance, he is joking with his wife about the 15-year separation between them; but in another, he seems to say that an older man cannot meet the carnal demands of his wife: ‘An old man who takes a young bride kills himself!’39 I am not arguing that Luther ceases to be an heir of Christian dualism. The Christian dwells in the world and in the flesh. The body and the spirit must accommodate one another during this life. That accommodation requires that physical desire never predominates. The body’s urges are so insistent that, if not held in rein, they could come to dominate a healthy person’s very awareness. Luther characterizes this extreme yearning as forward and disgusting 34 35 36 37 38 39

‘die schendliche brunst’, in ‘Ein Hochzeit predigt uber den spruch zun Hebreern am dreizehenden Capitel. 1531’, wa, Schriften, 34/1, p/ 73. See Maclean’s summary of early modern theories of women’s having semen, in Renaissance notion of women, pp. 36–37; Cadden, Meanings of Sex Differences, pp. 93–97. ‘Euangelion am Sontage Sexagesime’, wa Schriften 17/2, p. 158. ‘Das siebente Kapitel S. Pauli’, wa Schriften 12, p. 115. ‘Vom ehelichen Leben’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 278. wa tr 2, no. 2012, p. 293.

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(furwitz[ig] und uberdrus[ig]), but because God has implanted such a nature in us, this lust will never stop tormenting us unless we hang on God’s word. ‘Without exception we are all whoremasters. Even if we are not openly before the world, we are in our hearts’.40 In preaching on Psalm 119, Luther comments, ‘How can a youth keep his path pure?… One teaches the youth the pure way, but it doesn’t help at all; without God’s word they are all impure and godless, no matter how good an outward appearance they may present’.41 In his sermons on the Book of Genesis, Luther marvels that Joseph was able to resist the invitation of Potiphar’s wife. He was still a young man, and ‘flesh and blood are raging and senseless in this temptation, especially when they were in each other’s presence’.42 Desire is one phase of human sexuality, and behavior during sexual union is another. In depicting the horrific consequences of the Fall to his audience, Luther describes the flesh as leprous (caro lepra) and under libidinal oppression; it rages like a beast (brutescat) in the act of generation—nor can human beings keep God in their thoughts during intercourse.43 Sexual pleasure ‘is so abominable and horrible … that doctors may compare it with epilepsy …. Thus true sickness is joined to this work of generation’.44 Reverting to masculine terminology, he exclaims, ‘We cannot use woman without this horrible libidinal fury’.45 Even taking his expository purpose into account, we find Luther expressing revulsion for coitus. As far as we know, he had sex only with Katharina his wife, yet he seems to express guilt for the lack of control he is able to exercise over himself when he is with her. So great is the commotion of intercourse that Luther urges parents to isolate themselves for sexual purposes from other members of their household, to seek ‘a place removed from the eyes of men’.46 Nudity during sex would exceed the limits of moderation. One of the outcomes of Adam and Eve’s transgression was that they saw their nakedness and sought covering. Before they had not blushed in each other’s undressed presence (non erubescebant).47 But now, ‘All peoples, and especially those who 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

‘Auslegung der zehn Gebote (1528)’, wa Schriften 16, p. 511. wa Schriften 31 / 1, Psalmenauslegungen 1529–32, p. 5. See also wa Schriften 42, ‘Genesisvorlesung 1535–45’, p. 351, on sin in human maturation. wa Schriften 24, pp. 635–636. ‘In Primum Librum Mose Enarrationes’, 1544, wa Schriften 42, p. 53. Luther writes this toward the end of his life, after 19 years of marriage. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, pp. 106–107: ‘… honesti coniuges querunt sola loca, remota ab oculis hominum’. ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose gehalten 1523 und 1524’, wa Schriften 14, p. 134.

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dwell more to the north, are averse to nudity. Consequently, more modest and serious people not only disapprove of shortened militares penulas [Wams; doublet or jacket] on youths, but they also avoid public baths’.48 Certainly he would disapprove of these in combination with the codpieces that were so popular in his day!49 The unclothed body as well as that too clearly outlined beneath tight garments would, to his mind, excite husbands and wives to that excess of lust that should be avoided. Nonetheless, Luther does realize that in the course of intimate living, the spouses will see one another unclothed. Consistent with his doctrine of Christian freedom from Mosaic law, Luther nonetheless removes the Catholic obligation to abstain from sex on holidays, certain workdays, or ‘for other physical reasons’.50 What he means by the last phrase, he does not explain. Would he approve of intercourse during menstruation? During pregnancy? He had already declared in 1523 that it was not necessary to lay down detailed regulations.51 The spirit governing his pronouncements is that couples must find their own way of serving as each other’s remedy for sin, with the understanding that they should strive for moderation and mutual consideration and that they not impede conception or endanger a fetus. Luther remarked at the table one day, ‘In marriage, it is not possible to be unchaste, on account of the [wedded] condition, the estate [of matrimony], and the dignity. It is fine, but intemperate, if one makes too much use of what is his’.52 Luther regarded every sexual expression outside of marriage as perverse. This word is also not too strong to characterize his vision of monastic and priestly vows, which did, after all, touch on sex. Celibacy was perverse because it was against God’s natural order. It was virtually never compatible with chastity. And true chastity was of both the body and the heart. The Reformer inveighs against celibacy throughout his life. He insists that you cannot turn human beings into stone or wood.53 Priests, monks, and nuns, because they try to hinder the nature that God has implanted in them, do not remain pure but 48 49 50 51

52 53

‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 105. Gundula Wolter, Die Verpackung des männlichen Geschlechts: Eine illustrierte Kulturgeschichte der Hose (Marburg: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), pp. 43–86. ‘Vom ehelichen Leben’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 292; ‘Das siebente Kapitel S. Pauli’, 12, pp. 101–102; ‘Auslegung der zehn Gebote (1528)’, 16, p. 396. ‘Das siebente Kapitel S. Pauli zu den Corinthern. 1523’, wa Schriften 12, pp. 101–102. Cf. ‘­Auslegung der zehn Gebote (1528)’, wa Schriften 16, p. 396, in which Luther rejects Old Testament purity prescriptions; ‘God cares about the inner purity’. wa tr 3, no. 3142, pp. 186–187. ‘Vom ehelichen Leben’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 279.

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have to defile themselves with silent sins (mit stummen sunden) or ­whoring.54 Luther further explains the term ‘silent sins’, in the Little Prayer Book of 1522 in his list of violations of the sixth commandment: ‘Whoever uses unnatural means or persons—that is, silent sins’.55 He elaborates here that many others are culpable in facilitating arousal: ‘whoever arouses or shows evil lust with shameful words, songs, stories, or pictures; whoever arouses and dirties himself through looking, touching, or willful thoughts; whoever does not avoid causes [of lust] such as overeating or drinking, idleness, laziness, [excessive] sleeping or the company of women or men; whoever excites others to unchastity by means of superfluous adornment, gestures, etc.’ Those who attempt to live without marriage will burn most basely.56 Only one person in one hundred thousand has the capacity to stay unmarried and yet to be chaste.57 Luther may have had his friend Nicolaus Hausmann, erstwhile superintendent in Zwickau, in mind when he wrote that last sentence. But to be truly continent, Luther remarked at the table, a man must be without spontaneous emissions.58 It hardly seems necessary to ask here what Luther thought about such practices as homosexuality, pedophilia, or bestiality—although I list these together because Luther would have thought them equally sinful, I myself would differentiate among them! Where he mentioned them at all, Luther was contemptuous. He says that God let the heathens practice ‘whoring, impure flux, until they thenceforward didn’t use women but abused boys and unreasoning animals. What’s more, the women [satisfied] themselves and each other. And as they maligned God’s work, He gave them over to their perverted senses, of which the heathen books are most extremely, shamelessly full, full’.59 He professes outrage as he gossips at his dinner table about Pope Leo x’s allegedly having died over a boy with whom he had a sexual relationship. ‘Oh, the gruesome shame of the most holy father!’60 He is inclined to accept base rumors 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Ibid., 277; ‘Grund und Ursach, dass Klosterleben unchristlich sei. 1528/31’, wa Schriften 59, pp. 100, 101. ‘Betbüchlein. 1522’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 383. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 126. ‘Das siebente Kapitel S. Pauli’, wa Schriften 12, p. 115. In a letter to three nuns who are contemplating leaving their convent, Luther says that ‘among many thousands, there is not one [eyne; female ending] to whom God has given the grace to maintain pure ­chastity (reyne keuscheith); rather a woman is not able to control herself’, wa br 3, no. 766, 6 ­August 1524, p. 327. Neither is a man. wa tr 3, no. 3297c, pp. 256–257. ‘Vom ehelichen Leben’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 293. wa tr 6, no. 6928, p. 275.

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concerning the popes’ origin and sexuality. He believed that Clement vii was the son of his own sister, who had been impregnated by her father, and that he, Clement, was unbaptized.61 It is not far-fetched, in light of Luther’s emphasis upon women’s confinement to household tasks and to the bearing and rearing of Christian children, to assert that the Reformer regarded women as under obligation to present to their offspring a model of marital chastity. They were also to detect and discipline childish eroticism. Luther the father knew that children too were sexual creatures, and because of that they should marry young. A young man should take a wife by the time he was twenty ‘at the latest’, and a young woman ‘around fifteen or eighteen’.62 Marriage with its attendant sexual expression was the only outward cure for that form of spiritual temptation that so afflicted vigorous youth. Their often vain efforts to suppress fleshly desire led inward, to anxiety and a sense of failure. Flesh and spirit could not be entirely disconnected.63 Luther’s program of sexual restraint may appear to fall far short of the sexual revolution that I have posited for Protestantism. To provide a proper context for my assertion, we need to recall the Catholic preoccupation with sexual sin, such that even single and fleeting thoughts had to be confessed to the celibate priest before the Easter Eucharist. The genre of penitential literature bears ample witness to the central position of sexuality in the clerical authors’ worldview. Society and the Church itself were rife with transgression, and admonition was the practice, if not the heartfelt conviction, of the day. With the Lutheran Reformation—but, in my view, not the Calvinist—souls could be reconciled with their bodies and emerge integrated, with the hope of salvation intact. Luther, who retained auricular confession,64 nevertheless eliminated the detailed accounting that was alleged to titillate clerical, and perhaps also lay, ears. Those who confessed were only to identify the general category of their sin, and clergymen were never to press for details.

Martin Luther as a Sexual Person

The vividness with which Luther writes about sex suggests a mind that knew whereof it formulated. He confided to Georg Spalatin in November 1524 that 61 62 63 64

wa tr 3, no. 3577a-b, p. 423. ‘Vom ehelichen Leben’, wa Schriften 10, p. 303. See Oberman’s mention, Luther, p. 176. I have explained my retention of this term in ch. 2, n. 68.

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he was not made of stone; he was aware of his sexual desire.65 His childhood environment had not been insulated against the mating of animals or people. A  line between city folk and regular contact with farm animals was in the process of being drawn, but even within town walls houses were densely ­occupied—as Nicholas Hausmann said of Zwickau, the people lived on top of one another, ‘like the spawn of toads’.66 In shared beds and bedrooms, children and servants must often have witnessed the ‘leprous’ congress of their parents and employers. Luther regarded human beings as closely related to animals. This was not the result of evolutionary theories, which were to come long after his lifetime. Rather, this was the outcome of his experience of their similarity. The sins that so preoccupied him in the friary in Erfurt were assuredly, when measured by his declared acquaintance with libidinal pressures, those of his imagination. The conviction with which he depicts the irresistibility of the sex drive reveals his awareness, as a young friar and member of a monastic community, of how preoccupying its suppression was. He later recalled, One can endure imprisonment and bondage more easily than [sexual] burning. And that person to whom the gift of chastity is not given accomplishes nothing with fasting, chastisement, staying awake, and other efforts, which harm the body …. My own experience is that I was not much bothered by these things—except that the more I chastised and punished myself in the effort to tame my body, the more I burned.67 This being the case, Luther did in fact marry in part to provide an outlet for his persistent sexual desire. A common admonitory turn of phrase throughout the sixteenth century, used in many settings, was ‘not like the unreasoning beast’.68 Luther urged married couples not to vent their lust in the manner of ‘unreasoning beasts’.69 More deeply embedded in Luther’s psyche was his attraction to anality, most noticeable in his use of scatological language. This is a subject of its own, 65 66 67 68

69

wa br 3, no. 800, 30 November 1524, p. 394. Zwickau Stadtarchiv, A AII, Nr. 28b, fol. 1. wa tr 2, no. 2129b, p. 332. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘“Not like the unreasoning beasts”: Rhetorical Efforts to Separate Humans and Animals in Early Modern Germany’, in James Melton (ed.), Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment. Constructing Publics in the Early Modern German Lands (London: Ashgate Publishers, 2002), pp. 225–238. E.g., ‘Am Andern Sontage nach der erscheinung Christi, Euangelion Johannes. ii.’, wa Schriften 21, p. 70.

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which indeed scholars active after 1983, have occasionally taken up.70 While we post-Freudians must concede that Luther’s interest in, his constant referral to, arses and feces as terms of condemnation and rejection, is part of this human being’s libidinal dynamic, Luther himself did not connect the anus to condoned sensual activity between spouses. If pressed, he would have adhered to the traditional Catholic enjoinder that legitimate congress must include the couple’s willingness to conceive. Luther’s treatments of married sexuality are explicitly genital in nature. Similarly, I will not here connect Luther’s love of food and drink to eroticism, even though the Reformer did not question the monastic view that an excess of either eating or drinking heightened one’s lustful appetites. When away from home, he yearned for his wife’s good beer, and this sentiment could have included his larger pleasure when Käthe was physically present. Her providing him with gratifying food and beverage was part of their sensual if not their directly sexual bond. Luther could wax lyrical about marriage even before he was legally joined to Katharina von Bora. At that point, his parents’ interaction provided a h ­ appy example. Luther had observed the warm bonds between them: his father slept and joked with his mother; did he not also caress her within his family’s sight?71 In ‘On Married Life’ (1522), Luther admitted that he could be accused of making statements about a subject he knew nothing of. It is ironic perhaps that some of his most touching praise of marriage dates from these self-same bachelor days: ‘He who is married but doesn’t recognize [the value of] married life can never be without displeasure, effort, and misery. He must complain and slander [it] like the heathens and unreasoning blind people. He who recognizes it, however, has pleasure, love, and joy in it without end …’.72 We know that Martin and Katherine had a happy marriage by the standard of their day.73 I have asserted elsewhere that Luther’s open display of affection 70

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For example, Heiko A. Oberman, ‘Teufelsdreck. Eschatology and Scatology in the “Old” Luther’, Sixteenth Century Journal 19, 3 (1988), pp. 435–450. An entertaining example is  Luther’s characterization of Sebastian Franck (for his collection of the misogynistic aphorisms of classical authors) as an ‘arse bumblebee’ (introduction to Johannes Freder’s ‘Dialogus dem Ehestand zu Ehren. 1545’, wa Schriften 54, p. 174). I mean literally sleeping here. On Luther’s recollection of his parents’ positive interaction, see, for example, wa TR 2, nos. 1658, 1659, pp. 166–167, mid-1532; and wa tr 3, no. 3181b, p. 213, June 1532. wa Schriften 10/2, pp. 299, 294. Erik Erikson might have taken note of such passages. Surely a single man whose parents’ marriage had been unsatisfactory could not be this laudatory. Both Richard Wagner and Thomas Mann had in mind to write works on Martin’s and Katharina’s wedding. Neither artist fulfilled his wish. See F.J. Hollingdale, ‘Luther at War with the Devil’, Guardian Weekly, April 15, 1990, n.p.

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and his incessant epistolary communication of his contentment to his friends did far more than any spread of doctrine ever could in fostering ­domesticity.74 Domesticity, including clerical domesticity, specifically included publicly acknowledged sexuality. In the realm of theory, it nonetheless appears as if after marrying, Luther took a more pessimistic view of wedded life: ‘Where we come across a wife who doesn’t have misfortune with children or a husband who doesn’t get cross, then that is not right. A proper wife and husband aren’t supposed to have [only] good days. There has to be unhappiness and trouble, or something is not right before God’.75 Marriage, which he called a school, now brought to his very being the full impact of God’s punishment of Eve. Luther witnessed in Katharina all the vicissitudes of pregnancy, childbearing, and caring for infants. All these were the consequence of his mating with his wife. They were a punishment as well as a reward. When he wrote this, he had yet to lose two of his darling daughters, and thus from his point of view, to bear the fullest weight of God’s penalty for sin. In 1525, the year when he and Katharina wed, the Reformer drew his basic outline of the absolute subordination and inferiority of women and their confinement to the household sphere. He does this initially in ‘A Sermon on the Estate of Marriage’.76 In the following years, Luther developed his teachings further.77 We must be cautious in alleging a link between his thought and his personal life inasmuch as this thought would have developed somewhat in any case: more of his reforming career lay after his marriage than before it. Certainly his love for Käthe did not mitigate his conviction, amply detectable before, that women are garrulous, superstitious, ambitious, intellectually weak, and more responsible than Adam for the debacle in Eden.78 In keeping with his belief that husbands joked with their wives as an aspect of their intimacy, Luther teased her on these very points before the men and women at his dinner table.79 Humor is at one level a jolly affirmation. 74 75 76 77

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Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘The Transmission of Luther’s Teachings on Women and Matrimony: The Case of Zwickau’, Archive for Reformation History 77 (1986), pp. 38, 45. ‘In Genesin Mosi librum sanctissimum Declamationes. 1527’, wa Schriften 24, p. 103. ‘Eine Predigt vom Ehestand’, 1525, wa Schriften 17/1, pp. 26–27. ‘Ein Traubüchlein für die einfältigen Pfarrherr. 1529’, wa Schriften 30/3, p. 79. ‘Sermon, first Sunday in Advent. 1530’, wa Schriften 32, p. 214; ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, pp. 88, 103. These are examples only. wa, Tischreden, 3: 26, no. 2847a, December 1532-January 1533: ‘Deus fecit Adam dominum omnium creaturarum, sed cum Eva eum persuasisset, ut etiam dominus super Deum, da verderbt sie alles. Das haben wir euch weibern zu dancken, quando astu et fallaciis inescatis viros’. Susan C, Karant-Nunn, ‘Martin Luther’s Masculinity: Theory, Practicality, and ­Humor’, in Scott H. Hendrix and idem (eds.), Masculinity in the Reformation Era, Sixteenth ­Century

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In connection with sexuality, Luther’s exercise of his husbandly duty may have shown him that, contrary to his expectation that the connubial bed would dampen the flames of lust, marital sex actually quickened desire and enflamed fantasy. After 1525, he writes more emphatically about the impertinent and disgusting demands of the body. He uses the first person singular pronoun in a sermon on marital purity: ‘Our flesh is full of noxious desires, and their forwardness and disgusting nature is great. From this it follows that this disgustingness drives me this way, the forwardness that way, [and] lust casts me over there’.80 At some time during the last decade of his life, he again compares the ‘foul and horrible pleasure’ of intercourse to disease, and specifically to an epileptic seizure, as we have seen.81 The other detectable modification in the pattern of Luther’s utterances has to do with refraining from marrying—and could be an outcome of his now having felt the fuller impact of married life. Earlier in his career—admittedly at a time when he was striving to bring down monasticism—he staked out a position that was only a hair’s breadth from categorical rejection of celibacy as an option for a few who could remain ‘pure’. He rants against the Teutonic Knights in 1523, ‘The stubborn ones still want to compel us [to believe] that a man should not feel the urge of his male body nor a woman that of her female body’.82 Twenty years later, when concupiscence no longer plagued him,83 he preached that some did not want to marry, and that was all right; others were physically unsuitable [malformed? chronically impotent?].84 But women, even if they could remain virgins and were ‘much purer than every angel in heaven’, should nevertheless wed and raise children. This and being helpmeets to their husbands was God’s calling and ordination for all of their gender.85 This had been Luther’s perspective before his marriage, and it remained so afterward.

80 81 82 83 84 85

­ ssays and Studies 83 (Kirksville, mo: Thomas Jefferson Press, 2008), pp. 167–189. E ­Reprinted here, with modification, as ch. 6, containing my theory that Martin and Katharina had an asymmetrical joking relationship. ‘Ein Hochzeit predigt ueber den spruch zun Hebreern’ (1531), wa Schriften 34/1, p. 69. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, pp. 89–90. ‘An die Herren deutschs Ordens, dass sie falsche Keuschheit meiden und zur rechten ehelichen Keuschheit greifen, Ermahnung. 1523’, wa Schriften 12, p. 242. Shortly before his death, Martin wrote to Katharina jokingly that other women no longer tempted him: wa br 11, no. 4195, pp. 275–276. ‘Predigt bei der Hochzeit Sigmunds von Lindenau in Merseburg gehalten’, wa Schriften 49, p. 798. Sermon ‘Am tag Johannis des heiligen Apostels und Euangelistens Euangelion Johannis xxi.’, wa Schriften 17/2, p. 347.

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It is natural for us to recoil before some of Luther’s bald pronouncements on the inferiority and submission of women to men. If we regard Luther’s opinions about sexuality against the background of a rampant misogyny that often attributed to women the more powerful sex drive and a predilection to seduce men, however, the Reformer promoted a more balanced image of the female. He did this by adding to the equation men’s own sometimes raging lust. If women were carnally insatiable, so were men! He dignified restrained marital intercourse as foremost, not secondary, not tertiary, within the ordinance of God. Although sinful, it was part of God’s plan for the post-lapsarian world, and it could only be avoided at a risk of committing far more blameworthy offenses. Luther affirms that husbands, too, serve their wives as a remedy for sin (remedium ad peccatum). The Lutheran world remained misogynist, but at some level it ideologically reconciled men and women. The locus of this reconciliation is the marriage bed, in the home. The parsonage in each village and town becomes the site of publicly admitted, legitimate sexuality, even though the laity were slow in conceding that legitimacy.86 Martin and Katharina nonetheless established a model for the Lutheran world. Whether women’s and men’s theoretical reconciliation through sex carried over into the wider transactional world is another topic—and yet, we might here recall that universal education for girls, the possibility of divorce, and the freedom of wives from battering are principles introduced to the communal value system at this time. Their full realization would take centuries. In the Protestant mindset, for which Martin Luther lays a foundation-stone, sexual expression, even marital joining, remains sinful. To repeat: Protestantism does not wholly abandon the dualism between spirit and flesh to which Christianity early on was heir. Remedium ad peccatum must actually be translated as ‘a remedy for worse sin’. This presents us with a paradox. Did God order humankind to commit sin? Is not all sin abhorrent to the Creator? This problem occurred to Luther. As early as 1522, he sketches out a means by which husband and wife could be spared the consequences of their repeated and willful indulgence in sin. This means is wholly consonant with the doctrine of justification by faith. In ‘On Married Life’, he declares, ‘No conjugal duty occurs without sin, but God exempts it out of grace on the grounds that the order of matrimony is His own work, and He remembers even during and through the sin all the good that He implanted [in marriage] and gave His blessing to’.87 Luther speaks further to this question after his marriage. Humanity has an obligation to try to avoid sin, but the conjugal bond compels them knowingly and 86 Plummer, From priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife, p. 291. 87 ‘Vom ehelichen Leben’, wa Schriften 10/2, p. 303.

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frequently to commit sin.88 But couples need not trouble themselves about this seeming contradiction. God, Luther explains in 1528, covers over (decket) the shame of evil fleshly desire with His holy humanity. Spouses should pay attention to this mystery, honor holy things, and moderate their behavior in carrying out this marital task.89 Luther’s fullest treatment of God’s response to connubial relations may be found in a sermon the Reformer preached in 1545, at the wedding of Merseburg clergyman Sigmund von Lindenau: How can the marriage bed be pure? There is much impurity in marriage. True it is: there is not much purity there …. But [St. Paul] speaks about a certain purity that is supposed to exist in the estate of matrimony, [­namely] that spouses are not to whore or commit adultery. Whatever occurs in marriage beyond that, God covers the heavens over. Whatever is done to the end of producing children, God says yes to, for it is His ordinance, etc. ‘This impurity’, says God, ‘I don’t want to see’. Here parents, father and mother or spouses are pardoned. Because of their innate sinfulness, God will not count it [the sex act] as impurity. He will hold and count it as no sin. God will build a kingdom of heaven [ein Himelreich90] over that work and for the sake of His order and creation will cover up whatever impurity is there, etc.91 Luther thus extends to marriage his fundamental doctrine of justification by faith: As a result of Christ’s Atonement, God will not hold the faithful accountable for sin. In faith, married people should continue to afford one another the outlet and consolation of sexual congress. Even if, in their passion, they surpass Luther’s definition of moderation, God will overlook this. Luther came to understand this marital transgression. Having wedded deliberately and not out of passionate attraction—indeed, having hastened to their first intercourse as an additional legal impediment to anyone who might seek to hinder the recognition of their marriage92—he quickly became enamored 88 89 90 91 92

Sermon ‘Am tag Johannis des heiligen Apostels und Euangelistens Euangelion Johannes xxi.’, wa Schriften 17/2, p. 347. ‘Ein ander Sermon Doctor Martin Luthers, an dem andern Sontage nach der erscheinung Christi, Von dem ehelichen stande’ (Winterpostille, 1528), wa Schriften 21, p. 70. Luther may be punning with reference to the word Himmelbett, which some married couples slept in: a wood-enclosed bedstead, with walls and a ceiling. ‘Predigt bei der Hochzeit Sigmunds von Lindenau’, wa, Schriften, 49: 803. wa br 3, no. 890, 15 June 1525, p. 531: ‘So habe ich auch nu aus Begehrn meines lieben Vaters mich verehlicht und umb dieser Mäuler willen, daβ nicht verhindert würde, mit Eile beigelegen …’.

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of his wife, and this love helped to assuage the objectively offensive aspect of their coupling. He evolved quickly from surprise at finding her nighttime braid upon his pillow to anticipation of their meeting. Before 1983, Reformation historians studiously avoided citing Luther’s letter to his good friend Georg ­Spalatin of December 1525, when Luther had been married for six months: Believe me, my mind exults in your marriage no less than yours did in mine …. Greet your wife kindly from me. When you have your Katherine in bed, sweetly embracing and kissing her, think: ‘Lo, this being, the best little creation of God, has been given to me by Christ, to whom be glory and honor’. I will guess the day on which you will receive this letter, and that night I will love my wife in memory of you with the same act, and thus return you like for like. My rib and I send greetings to you and your rib.93 Modern audiences tend to see a perverse tendency in this suggestion. In view of Luther’s and Spalatin’s ongoing discussion of the evils of celibacy, and of sexuality within the context of marital chastity—whether one or the other of them ought to marry—I would place this rather in the category of Luther’s candid appreciation of his relationship to his wife.94 Both men, he was convinced, had done the right thing in casting aside their earlier misguided vows. We shall never be able to demonstrate that this Wittenberg pair adhered to Martin’s admonition that a state of undress during sex would excessively foster lust. Most probably, they did not, for on another occasion, Luther urged men to embrace their wives, whether they were dressed as during the day, or whether they were naked, as at night.95 Similarly, the rational Luther would not have promoted the symbolism implicit in his partner’s taking the upper position in their mating. The ‘leprous’ Luther, however, might have succumbed to the temptation, for in his outward, practical life he gave Katharina much leeway to administer all matters connected to the household, even though he verbally insisted that he retained the overall mastery. He could tolerate a discrepancy between ideal and necessity when that disparity liberated him to fulfill his role as intellectual and public figure.96 93

wa, Briefwechsel 3, no. 952, p. 635. This is the excerpt that, according to a verbal report from Eric Gritsch, scholars of his generation agreed not to refer to. 94 E.g., wa br 3, no. 800, 30 November 1524, p. 394; wa br 3, no. 857, 16 April 1525, p. 475. 95 Luther’s Works: Lectures on Genesis, vol. 1 (Saint Louis, mo: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), p. 34. I have not yet located this quotation in the wa. 96 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘“Fast wäre mir ein weibliches Gemüt verblieben”: Martin Luthers Männlichkeit’, in Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (eds.) Luther zwischen den K ­ ulturen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 49–65. This is not identical to

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We also cannot know whether the intellectual Luther was aware of the medieval medical view that women needed to achieve orgasm in order to conceive.97 A logical corollary of such a conviction would have been that premature ejaculation was a kind of birth control, which early modern society ­forbade. Smart observers had to realize that non-orgasmic women did in fact become pregnant. Luther was aware of the smell of his wife’s body, and perhaps specifically of her genitals. In praising the marvel of human reproduction, he contrasts the perfectly formed infant with the ‘stinking sack’ that produced it. He remarked in the dining room about his baby son, ‘Ah, that God can set such fine, black little eyes in a piece of flesh [that is born] out of a stinking sack [the mother’s body]!’98 I conjecture that sack is Luther’s casual term for the vagina, through which the infant emerged, the reversed counterpart of the penis, and that stinking refers to the vulva’s scent. Their own marriage bed and the ‘fleshly work’ that transpired there constituted a regular restatement of their devotion to one another as well as their obedience to God. They rejected that Catholic teaching, inculcated upon them both as young religious, that husbands and wives should arrive as quickly as possible at that stage of life where their passions no longer required quenching; when that point came, they should cease to have sex and in so doing become more worthy Christians. Katharina and Martin continued to have sex until, in his early sixties and shortly before his death, Martin wrote to his wife from Eisleben, calling himself her ‘old, poor love, and as Your Grace knows, impotent’.99 This was a matter of great concern to her, and her the ­English-language version, which explores Luther’s sense of humor (n. 78 above), nor to the version included in this volume. 97 Cadden, Meaning of Sex Difference, pp. 142–144 and passim. 98 wa, tr 2, no. 2578, p. 530. By our hygienic standard—probably the highest the world has ever known—it may seem astonishing that sixteenth-century people could note that anything ‘stank’. But occasionally something was so rank that the people in proximity to it noticed. Katharina von Bora remarked to her husband on coming home from church, ‘Ah, sir, the church was so full today that it stank!’ Martin replied, ‘There were also piles of filth there, although concealed. The best thing about it is that they [the people] carried it all out with them again’. wa tr 2, no. 2563b, p. 526. I tentatively think that feces were perceived to ‘stink’, while other bodily odor was taken as normal. The vagina stank because of its proximity to the excremental outlet. But perhaps I am wrong, for Luther remarked about St. Bernard of Clairvaux that he had lived an exemplary and ascetic monk’s life and stank so bad ‘das yhn seine brüder nicht mochten umb sich leiden’. ‘Auslegung der zehn Gebote’, wa Schriften 16, p. 400. See wa tr 4, no. 3979, p. 52, about Johann Bugenhagen’s ‘shit-cure’ for witches’ stealing cows’ milk. 99 wa br 11, no. 4195, p. 75. For an exploration of Martin’s form of address of Katharina, see my ‘The Masculinity of Martin Luther’, pp. 180–182; reprinted in extended form in this volume.

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own letters (not extant) referred to it. A week later, Martin returned to the subject: ‘You should let Master Philipp [Melanchthon] read this letter—for I did not have time to write to him—so that you can console yourself that I would gladly love you if I could, as you know. Perhaps he too knows and well understands in relation to his wife’.100 The fact that society continued to bear prejudice against sexual relations between aged spouses did not bear on their own attitude. Martin Luther was no Adonis. Katharina Lutheryn, who was, along with her husband, often portrayed by Lucas Cranach, did not resemble Cranach’s Venuses or his Three Muses.101 Neither husband nor wife would have been considered sex objects in their days. Physical beauty, however, was not an index of desire, potency, or fertility. Luther’s point was that every human being was subject to the ordinance of God that rendered him and her lustful. Each human being desired the sex act, and nearly everyone was commanded to engage in it for generative purposes. Beyond reproduction, sex solidified connubial ties and could be continued without shame as long in life as a couple desired it. This conclusion both explained the burdensome temptations of his youth and held out to him the only godly solution: marriage. Luther knew that he could not restrain his inherent desire. If he chose a proper mate and contained his lovemaking within their bond, he could at once commit sin, enjoy himself, and meet with divine exculpation. In the marriage bed, the faithful Christian lives out the principle of simul peccator et iustus (‘simultaneously sinner and justified’). Luther was a liberated man, and he became a symbol of the same liberation to all his followers. But liberty, or its near-equivalent freedom, was a contested concept in the Reformation era. German peasants construed the Reformer’s message on Christian liberty to mean that they should no longer be enserfed, for serfdom was not to be found in the Bible. Luther’s concept of freedom was not intended 100 wa br 11, no. 4201, pp. 286–287. Interestingly, in the 1527 edition of his sermons on Genesis, Luther described the mockery that Abraham and Sarah had to endure when she became pregnant with Isaac. They were considered by ‘die ganze welt’ to be too old to have sex. wa Schriften 24, In Genesin Declamationes. 1527. Über das erste Buch Mose. Predigten, pp. 370–371. 101 Lyndal Roper writes of artists’ portraying Martin Luther as a physically monumental figure (‘Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers’, American Historical Review [April 2010]), on this point pp. 351–362. Shortly before his death, Luther remarked to his companions that soon the worms would have ‘a fat doctor’ to feed on! Cited by Heiko A. Oberman, Luther, Man between God and the Devil, trans. by Eileen Walliser-­Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 5. In another account, this phrase was crossed out: Christof Schubart, Die Berichte über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, Texte und Untersuchungen (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1917), no. 1, p. 3, n. 1.

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to alter human beings’ status in this world, where personal conditions were to be adhered to and forborne. So it was with sexuality. The body of fallen mortals retained its tainture. God had to avert his eyes from even approved fleshly work, that which occurred within Christian marriage. Other forms of sexual expression were explicitly condemned, and tolerance of them endangered society. Just as Luther found that he had to consent to the territorial prince’s stepping in as Emergency Bishop to ensure that nothing but proper (Lutheran) religion was upheld, so he also witnessed an increasing encroachment of the state upon the supervision and discipline of eroticism. The oversight of sexuality was an aspect of the jurisdictional windfall that civil authorities reaped in Protestant lands after the exclusion of the Catholic Church. Between the publication of the Carolina Constitutio Criminalis law code in 1532102 and the end of the great witch hunts in the late seventeenth century, secular courts exerted themselves to ensure that no transgression of a resident of the Holy Roman Empire went undetected and unpunished. They failed, of course. Nonetheless, all Europe experienced a comparative intensification of discipline. The Deity could forgive the activities of the marital bed, which were visible mainly to him, but other occasions of sexual outlet were strictly condemnable, both to God and to the magistrate. Michel Foucault in his The History of Sexuality has linked forever in our minds this disciplinary program with the quest for aggrandizement that lay—credibly in the Reformation context—at its core.103 The physical and spiritual relief that Luther afforded to Evangelical clergymen and their wives, as well as to all married people, was still narrowly circumscribed. Gradually, sometimes well into the seventeenth century, the image of the Catholic priest in his hovel, with his ‘cook’ of lower social provenance and dishonorable, and his illegitimate offspring gave way to a new and honorable pastoral domesticity. Yet this change was significant. Within the fallen world, the theoretical reintegration of the Christian’s body and soul held the potential to release the devout from preoccupation with the flesh, to restore the balance that was 102 Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, Die peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls v. und des ­Heiligen Römischen Reichs von 1532 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000). 103 I refer here to The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New  York: Pantheon Books, 1978); in French the first volume of the trilogy is entitled La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). This volume is a long essay on discourses of repression and efforts to consolidate power over sexual behavior. On the relationship between premodern and modern sexuality, see Merry E. Wiesner Hanks, ‘Sexual identity and other aspects of “modern” sexuality. New chronologies, same old problem?’ in Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog (eds.), After the history of sexuality: German genealogies with and beyond Foucault (New York: Berghahn, 2012), pp. 31–42.

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possible within a bygone, now much admired, culture, the Classical. Cultural progress can hardly be measured by the lifting of the moral strictures that every society to some degree imposes upon its members. Civilization’s greatest discontents (to allude to Sigmund Freud’s great essay) were likely to be those most preoccupied with exercising the unfettered will of the id. Their triumph might have destabilized the fragile early modern polity yet further. To state this in terms familiar to late-medieval potentates, the wielders of the secular sword were the more compelled to step in where the ecclesiastical sword proved insufficiently effective. The early modern Catholic Church, by contrast, as part of its own disciplinary program, promulgated yet more energetically the superiority of celibacy accompanied by sexual abstinence. The Counter-Reformation model is embodied in Iñigo of Loyola’s alleged ‘Autobiography’. The Church launched a veritable campaign against concubinage, which did have a certain success. As during the Middle Ages, its ideal spirit was ever at war with the body, and the body provided major occasions of alienation from God.

chapter 6

The Masculinity of Martin Luther. Theory, Practicality, and Humour One of the scholarly achievements of the last two generations has been to place Martin Luther back into his times by revealing the extent to which he relied upon the thought of certain immediate as well as longer-term antecedents in arriving at his Europe-shaking ideas.1 Feminists have broadened this perspective in noting how traditional his and his followers’ concepts of the nature and place of women were.2 While the empirical and theoretical l­iterature on 1 A German version of this essay appeared as ‘“Fast wäre mir ein weibliches Gemüt verblieben.” Martin Luthers Männlichkeit’, in Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (eds.), Luther zwischen den Kulturen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 49–65; and then in English as ‘The masculinity of Martin Luther. Theory, practicality, and humor’, in Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (eds.), Masculinity in the Reformation era (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2008), pp. 167–189. The present rendition contains some new material. 2 Merry Wiesner, ‘Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys’, in Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael Samuel (eds.), Disciplines of faith. Studies in religion, politics and patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), pp. 295–308; and on the goals of the ­German ­Lutheran Reformation for women and marriage, Lyndal Roper, The holy household. Women and morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1989). Roper opines that the witch-craze cannot be omitted from any consideration of the trajectory of women’s status in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (‘Gender and the Reformation’, Archive for Reformation History, 92 [2001], pp. 290–302, on this point pp. 292–294). My own views on this subject are summarized for a lay audience in ‘The Reformation of Women’, in Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner (eds.), Becoming visible. Women in European history, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 174–201; and ‘Reformation Society, Women and the Family’, in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation world (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 433–460. A prominent example from the germanophone world is Elisabeth Koch, ‘Maior dignitas est in sexu virili’. Das weibliche Geschlecht im Normensystem des 16. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991). Not everyone shares this point of view. Of English-language writers, most notable are Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Heide Wunder, ‘He is the sun, she is the moon’. Women in early modern Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), a translation from the original German, and in which Wunder does not devote much attention to Luther or the Reformation(s) but stresses the full partnership of women; and Scott Hendrix, ‘Christianizing domestic relations. Women and marriage in Johann Freder’s Dialogus dem Ehestand zu ehren’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 23, 2 (1992), pp. 251–266. An outspoken critic in the G ­ erman

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women in early modern Europe now burgeons, a great deal remains to be done on men as men in the wake of the Reformations. Nevertheless, a good beginning has been made.3 This essay will discuss Luther’s own ideals ­concerning language is Luise Schorn-Schütte, in, for example, ‘“Gefährtin” und “Mitregentin.” Zur Sozialgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrfrau in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Heide Wunder and Christina Vanja (eds.), Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen zu Beginn der Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 109–153. 3 Whether they take up precisely the question of Reformation concepts and expressions of masculinity, a number of relevant books and articles have now appeared. Prominent among them are Elfriede Moser-Rath, ‘Familienleben im Spiegel der [Catholic] Barockpredigt’, in Werner Welzig (ed.), Predigt und soziale Wirklichkeit. Beiträge zur Erforschung der Predigtliteratur, separate volume under the rubric of Daphnis, Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur 10, 1 (1981), pp. 47–65; Eileen Dugan, ‘The funeral sermon as a key to familial values in early modern Nördlingen’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989), pp. 631–644; Clare A. Lees (ed.), Medieval masculinities. Regarding men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), especially the preface by Thelma Fenster (pp. ix–xiii), and the editor’s introduction (pp. xv–xxv); Lyndal Roper, ‘Stealing manhood. Capitalism and magic in early modern Germany’, and ‘Was there a crisis in gender telations in sixteenth-century Germany?’ in idem, Oedipus and the devil. Witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 125–144 and pp. 37–52 respectively; Scott Hendrix, ‘Masculinity and patriarchy in Reformation Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56, 2 (1995), pp. 177–193; Maria E. Müller, ‘Naturwesen Mann. Zur Dialektik von Herrschaft und Knechtschaft in ­Ehelehren der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Wunder and Vanja (eds.), Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen, pp. 43–68; Heribert Smolinsky, ‘Ehespiegel im Konfessionalisierungsprozess’, in Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (eds.), Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 198 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995), pp.  311–331; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘“Fragrant wedding roses.” Lutheran wedding sermons and gender definition in early modern Germany’, German History, 17, 1 (1999), pp. 25–40; Rüdiger Schnell, ‘Geschlechtergeschichte und Textwissenschaft. Eine Fallstudie zu mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Ehepredigten’, in idem (ed.), Text und Geschlecht. Man und Frau in Eheschriften der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 145–175; idem, Frauendiskurs, Männerdiskurs, Ehediskurs. Textsorten und Geschlechterkonzepte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1998); Heike Talkenberger, ‘Konstruktion von Männerrollen in württembergischen Leichenpredigten des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts’, in Martin Dinges (ed.), Hausväter, Priester, Kastraten. Zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), pp. 29–74, and also Dinges’s introduction, pp. 7–28; R.N. Swanson, ‘Angels incarnate: Clergy and masculinity from Gregorian reform to Reformation’, in D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in medieval Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 160–177; Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit, Orte der Unzucht. Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999), passim; several of the outstanding essays in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), Gender in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In respect of France, several essays adduce literary evidence of a crisis of masculinity:

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proper masculine behavior and his private attempt to embody those ideals, which to my knowledge modern scholarship has not addressed. The two parts will examine his theory and his life. In contrast to John Calvin, Luther has left ample evidence of his private self, which makes possible educated guesses concerning his own manhood. A

Luther’s Theology of Being a Man

I take Rüdiger Schnell’s admonition very much to heart that we must differentiate among the types of texts within which Luther—although Schnell is not writing specifically about Luther—articulates his views and the audiences for which his utterances were intended. Schnell rightly observes that all sorts of opinions on women, men, and marriage existed in the late Middle Ages, and that the nature of their hearers or readers can help us to understand their differences and arrive at a better assessment of a particular author’s position.4 Thus, Luther’s formal treatises on, say, the Book of Genesis will not be unrelated to his social views, but they were presented in Latin to well-educated men, and they may well differ from popularizing treatments in the vernacular for dissemination to a broad laity. Schnell also insists that writings vary according to rhetorical genre. Commentary about women in Latin may well fall into the category of misogynistic writings of the type that celibate-and-suffering clergy composed for delivery to other clerics, for example. By contrast, sermons about marriage were given every January (the second Sunday after Epiphany on the Continent) to entire congregations. Preachers did not intend to discourage ordinary women and men from getting married, and they presented marriage in a favorable light. Indeed, it is from this homiletic tradition that Luther drew Kathleen P. Long (ed.), High anxiety. Masculinity in crisis in early modern France, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 59 (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2002). 4 Schnell stresses this both in the introduction to Text und Geschlecht, and in Frauendiskurs, Männerdiskurs, Ehediskurs, passim. This is doubtless true for other language areas, or, apropos of the Latin literature, for all of Europe. To balance the widespread perspective that medieval authors almost uniformly disparaged women, see Alcuin Blamires, The case for women in medieval culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Cf. Blamires, Woman defamed and woman defended. An anthology of medieval texts (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992). Nevertheless, there is a pervasive asymmetry between masculine and feminine qualities, with the female the inferior, even in that literature that employs them. See Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘“… And woman his humanity.” Female imagery in the religious writing of the later Middle Ages’, in idem, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (eds.), Gender and religion. On the complexity of symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 257.

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much of his praise of the marital estate and within which he defined roles and relationships. He rejected the former but retained and elevated the latter. Luther’s frame of reference is thoroughly binary. He regards the entire inanimate as well as animate world as divided into female and male. One day he held forth in Latin, to the learned men at his dinner table, on Genesis 1: 27: ‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them’. Luther elaborated as follows: Male and female He created them. Even though this statement is made principally about human beings, nevertheless it is to be assigned to all creatures in the world, to those that fly through the sky, to the fishes of the sea, to the animals of the land. Thus has God engraved matrimony upon all creatures, as upon trees, the sky, [and] the land; and one can distinguish this in stones. If indeed there are masculine and feminine among trees, they produce fruit longer and more happily when the masculine and feminine, like the sexes, are planted close to one another; the masculine always extends his branches toward the feminine as if embracing her; and the female lifts up her own branches to the male. In the same way, the sky is the male, the earth the female, which is made fruitful by her husband the heaven. The same thing can be seen whether in stones or gems, as, I think, in corals, emeralds, and others. And so marriage is depicted in all creatures, even among the hardest stones. This magnification of marriage is beautiful.5 Already we see that by its very nature, the male is higher, loftier than the ­female, as heaven is to earth, as the sun is to the moon, and that masculinity entails the function of impregnating, of rendering the female fruitful.6 This fundamental vision of the masculine is, of course, in no way original with Luther but can be traced back to the ancient world. It was consistently expounded during the ­Middle Ages.7 Men are higher and women lower; men are made to be fathers and women to be mothers. The sexes’ bodies reflect and ­constitute their ­respective 5 wa tr 1, no. 1133, p. 560, where other dinner guests’ transcriptions of this opinion are also noted. This particular record was made by Veit Dietrich. Cf. tr 1, no. 7, p. 4: ‘Marriage occurs in all of nature, for among all creatures there are male and female. Even trees marry, and gems. Thus, among rocks and stones there is also marriage’. 6 ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 114. Throughout nature, the male is superior to the female. 7 Joan Cadden, Meanings of sex difference in the Middle Ages. Medicine, science, and culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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destinies. Luther declared in 1531, ‘Men have broad chests and narrow hips, and for that reason they have more understanding than the women, which have narrow chests and wide hips and lower bodies [Gefäß], so that they ought to stay at home and sit still in the house, [and] keep house and bear and raise children’.8 The story of the creation is the foundation of Luther’s relational scheme. Adam was made fully in the image of God, which was a ‘most excellent and noble’ thing. His understanding was most clear, his memory the best, his will most pure. He had no fear of death. His eyesight was very likely clearer than an eagle’s.9 In Luther’s reading, even before the Fall women were different from and lesser than men. ‘A woman is similar to our Lord God, similar not in her tits or navel [this is a euphemism for her genitals], but because she exercises dominion within the family’.10 Eve was, after all, taken from Adam’s side and presented to him to aid and comfort him. Adam is the recipient and beneficiary of God’s generosity. As the male, Adam was always capable of higherorder reasoning than Eve, whereas ‘she was unsophisticated and simple’.11 As the more rational being, Adam would have understood and obeyed the divine command to avoid the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Satan knew this. The devil approached Eve because he was aware that, as a woman, she was vulnerable.12 Eve doubted the instruction of God; she questioned it and was able to be persuaded that it would do no harm to eat that apple, that ‘we shall not die’.13 ‘Eve was led astray, not Adam, because Eve believed what she heard from the serpent; but Adam knew that it was not the truth but voluntarily consented to the devil, thinking, “Because she eats, I shall eat”’.14 8 9

10

11

12 13 14

wa tr 1, no. 55, p. 19. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 46. See also Kathleen Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 3, pp. 99–139. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 45, p. 51. Luther is inconclusive as to just to what degree women are made in the image of God. He agrees that women are not excluded from the glory of the future life. Still, they are weaker and lower in status. He asserts, using the traditional metaphor, that the sun is more excellent than the moon but that the moon, too, is an excellent body. Nevertheless, ‘the woman did not equal the glory and dignity of the man’ (pp. 51–52). ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523/24’, wa Schriften 14, p. 129. So much of these sermons is in Latin that one must imagine a learned audience—but this is not absolutely certain inasmuch as preachers in the vernacular sometimes drafted their homilies in Latin. Decisive, in my view, is the length and detail of this series, along with the language. wa Schriften 14, pp. 130–131. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, pp. 117–120. ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523–24’, wa Schriften 14, p. 133.

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Man, with his greater perceptivity, was not deceived but was aware of choosing to transgress. Luther imagines Adam saying to himself afterward, ‘It is my fault, for I was ordained to be governor and lord of the woman, and I should have forbidden her’.15 Before the Fall, Adam was Eve’s superior in his nature and in his functions. Eve was his auxiliary and subordinate.16 They loved one another, nevertheless, and were partners in their dominion over the earth. Their tasks were light, for in the Garden of Eden God provided everything they needed. Luther adheres to the view that Eve’s responsibility for the debacle was primary. Adam’s allegedly more acute intellectual powers do not move the Reformer to assign greater blame to him.17 In Luther’s eyes, Adam’s penalty was appropriately lighter. Eve deserved and she received the more severe punishment. God laid down the basic superiority of the man in nature at the Creation. Even after the Fall, Adam retained the image of God.18 Yet both Eve and he were susceptible to ‘vices of the spirit’ that they had not known in their state of innocence: ‘incredulity, the ignorance of God, despair, hatred, and blasphemy’.19 The enduring societal definitions of both sexes’ duties were consequences of the Fall. The gentle features of Adam and Eve’s harmonious interaction in the brief prelapsarian interlude now hardened, were binding upon both, and became potentially problematical. Cast out of Eden into a thoroughly inhospitable world, Adam now, as we know, had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow until he returned to the dust out of which he had come.20 At the moment of their disobedience, the mother and father of humanity became lustful. Humans’ bestial appetites are ‘manifest signs of original sin’.21 In commenting on this, Luther decisively rejects that prominent strand of intraclerical misogyny, most famously represented by the Malleus maleficarum, that labels women

15

16 17

18 19 20 21

wa Schriften 14, p. 138; cf. Luther’s later thought about Adam’s reasoning in ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 136. Adam allowed himself to be persuaded that punishment would not follow. This theme appears again in Luther’s 1527 series of sermons on Genesis, ‘Über das 1. Buch Mose. Predigten. 1527’, wa Schriften 24, pp. 29, 83–84. See Isotta Nogarola’s dialogue ‘with’ Ludovico Foscarini on whose fault was greater, in Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr (eds.), Her immaculate hand. Selected works by and about the women humanists of Quattrocento Italy (Binghamton, ny: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), pp. 57–69. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 51. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 86. Genesis 3: 18–19. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 89.

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more carnally desirous than men.22 Luther finds both sexes to be overcome with desire. Throughout his mature works, he attributes as powerful a sex drive to men as to women. Indeed, one could argue from his writings that many men’s lust surpasses that of most women’s and that men pose a greater threat to women’s safety and to the social order. This was the conclusion of an active pastor rather than an isolated theoretician. Luther readily adopts the Augustinian assertion that husbands and wives serve one another as remedium ad peccatum, a remedy for sin—that is, for worse sin, for Luther regards even marital sex as unavoidably fraught with sin.23 In the act of generation, he laments, people are unable to think of God.24 Human mating is like an epileptic seizure or a fit of apoplexy.25 Sexual desire serves to guarantee the perpetuation of the species, and for that reason and because it protects society against unrestrained lust, God covers its shortcomings over with the mantle of his grace.26 Luther decisively rejects what R.N. Swanson has termed the third gender, emasculinity, namely that of men who have taken religious vows of celibacy with its concomitant abstinence.27 A constant theme in his learned tracts, his sermons, his correspondence, and his spontaneous dinnertime utterances is his scorn for the Catholic insistence on celibacy. Because virtually all men find their sex drive, which God implanted in them, irresistible, prelates, priests, monks, and friars will ineluctably fail to be continent. Because they are not married, their failure will sow disorder on every side, precisely what Luther finds to be the case in Catholic lands. He stresses the irony of the pope’s rejecting clerical marriage and thus effectively preferring fornication in its many forms.28 Luther is persuaded that God requires marriage of every male, except 22

23 24 25 26

27 28

The famous assertion of Dominicans Heinrich Krämer and Jakob Sprenger that ‘all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable’ is most readily available in the North American market in Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters (eds.), Witchcraft in Europe, 1100–1700. A documentary history, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), esp. pp. 183–188. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 88: ‘… opus est muliere etiam ad remedium peccati’. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 53. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, pp. 89, 100. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Female sexuality in the thought of Martin Luther’, unpublished paper presented to seminar on Luther and women, Seventh International Congress for Luther Research, Oslo, Norway, 1988. On the last point, see, for example, ‘Predigten des Jahres 1545’, wa Schriften 49, no. 19 [4 August], p. 803. ‘Angels Incarnate’, pp. 160–177, passim. Refer to n. 3 above. wa, tr 3, no. 2978b, p. 129, for example—but this is a regular theme, not just in Luther’s informal conversations.

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that very rare individual who possesses the divine gift of abstinence. Otherwise, men’s irrepressible sexuality must be channeled, in keeping with God’s will and the public need. With the Fall comes men’s assignment to nourish and provide fully for their spouse, children, and household. Doing so is a truly onerous task, despite the fact that Adam’s penalty was, Luther thinks, light compared to Eve’s.29 Even though many of Luther’s contemporaries no longer tilled the soil as Adam had been condemned to do, all men had to work in the public sphere at their vocation. The husband, Luther summarizes, ‘governs the home, takes part in public affairs, wages war, defends his own, tills the earth, builds, plants, etc.’.30 Men rule, teach, and preach. Luther informally outlines the life-course of men: first comes infancy, and then at seven years boyhood, when they are to be introduced to basic literature and the liberal arts; they begin to notice the world when they are 14 and to be taught higher subjects. At 21 they want to marry. At 28 they are heads of households and patresfamilias. At 35 they take part in governing public affairs and the church. At 42 men are in top form; they are kings. But from there on their acuity begins to decline, and by 70 they are in quite another condition.31 Occasionally a woman has some good advice, but offices are given to men.32 Women, by contrast, are confined to the home; and Luther is convinced that they should nearly always stay there. Metaphors of woman as a house, or like the snail, which carried its house around on its back, were widespread, and Luther employs them.33 Men’s burdens are especially great, for they not only go out of the house to work and earn, but they must also oversee house and hearth. The wife submits in all things. Her dominion is circumscribed and even within the home is delegated to her by her husband, who supervises all that she does. By nature the masculine physique is stronger than the feminine, but quite apart from inborn tendencies, the postlapsarian woman, as part of her penalty for sin, must endure far more than the pain of childbirth. She will have all the discomfort and ails that accompany pregnancy.34 The husband must be 29 30 31 32 33 34

‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523/24’, wa Schriften 14, p. 141. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, pp. 151, 158. wa, tr 3, nos. 3161a, 3161b, pp. 203–204. ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527’, wa Schriften 24, p. 107. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 99, and esp. 151–153. ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 87. Luther opines that but for the Fall, women would have had several children at one time rather than, as in his day, the most fertile women being pregnant every year (162). He means by this that in the prelapsarian milieu, parents could have foregone sex except for the occasional multiplebirth reproduction, I think.

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patient with his wife on two scores: first, because she is physically and intellectually weaker; and second, because in her function as parturient she will be subject to many fleshly ills. Luther foresees that masculine patience will have its limits. He nonetheless urges it upon all men.35 They should not beat their wives—unless there is no other recourse; rather, they should speak seriously with a disobedient spouse. ‘Unbeaten is the best’, he declares.36 But husbands are duty-bound to control their wives’ untoward behavior, just as they must that of their children and servants. Luther uses the word effeminate as many other men of the day did: to indicate qualities of weakness and inferiority.37 By comparison, that which is masculine is strong and superior. Men must not grudgingly enter into matrimony but do so with conviction. They should love their wives devotedly and enjoy reciprocity. Long before his own wedding, Luther surpasses both Peter and Paul in his enthusiasm for marriage. He agrees that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’, but one should not be reluctant but should rejoice in the pairing. Likewise, he exceeds Peter in urging husbands to love their wives. The word love in English bespeaks many kinds and degrees. Peter’s notion of love was probably calm, just as Luther’s was at the time he married. But Luther writes in 1519, as well as later, about the strength and singularity of marital affection, which he terms ‘bridal love’. He applies it not alone to the honeymoon but to a couple’s entire life together.38 In sum, in his theological works Luther depicts Adam as initially ­magnificent, both physically, intellectually, and spiritually. The shortcomings of contemporary men are owing to sin. God’s creatures were deformed by original sin. All their afflictions are marks of the human departure from God’s commands. Now men are still superior to women, but they are charged with greater obligations than they can easily fulfill. They administer the public and the p ­ rivate

35 36 37

38

‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, wa Schriften 42, p. 160. ‘Predigten des Jahres 1525’, no. 8 [15 January], wa Schriften 27/1, p. 27, ‘ungeschlagen ist am besten’. See, for example, ‘The freedom of a Christian’, trans. John Dillenberger, Martin Luther, selections from his writings (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 66: ‘childish and effeminate nonsense’. I could not easily locate this in the wa. ‘Ein Sermon von dem ehelichen Stand. 1519’, wa Schriften 2, p. 167. See also ‘Ein ander Sermon Doctor Martin Luthers, an dem andern Sontage nach der erscheinung Christi, Von dem ehelichen stande’, wa Schriften 21, pp. 67–68. The latter dates from 1528, two and a half years after Luther had entered into wedlock, but its content is fully consistent with what he had written earlier.

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sphere,39 and they must earn enough money to sustain their families. Luther himself was unable to bear all the burdens that he allocated to husbands in his teachings. B

Luther as Realist at Home

Luther made a serious effort to conform his life to his principles. He took very seriously the husband’s headship over his wife. He and Johannes Bugenhagen, city pastor in Wittenberg, became very impatient with the city scribe of Zwickau, Stephan Roth, whose wife kept running off. In 1528, they jointly wrote to him: Grace and peace in Christ, and authority over your wife. Your lord and mistress has not yet come to me, my dear Stephan, and this disobedience of hers to your wishes displeases me. Indeed, I am beginning to be somewhat put out with you, too, because you are soft-hearted; and out of the service by which you should have helped her, you have made a tyranny and have treated her so tenderly heretofore that it would seem to be your own fault as well that she now ventures to defy you in everything. Certainly, when you saw that the ass was greedy for fodder, that is, that your wife, because of your indulgence and consideration, was becoming unmanageable, you should have remembered that you ought to obey God rather than your wife and not have allowed her to despise and trample under foot the marital authority, which is the glory of God, as Saint Paul tells us.40 Luther was persuaded that men who were overly permissive in dealing with their wives compromised their masculinity accordingly. Throughout his works, he intermittently disparages ‘she-men’ (Siemänner). In doing so, he reflects the opinion that prevailed among his contemporaries, some of whom carried out rituals of degradation against men whose wives dominated them, such as 39

40

I use these words rhetorically, without accepting Jürgen Habermas’s assertions about the early modern separation of public and private spheres (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft [Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1962]). See a moderate, appealing modification in the essays contained in Caroline Emmelius, et al. (ed.), Offen und Verborgen. Vorstellungen und Praktiken des Öffentlichen und Privaten in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004). wa br 4, no. 1253, p. 442.

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­ aking them ride backward on a donkey.41 Luther chided his own wife for talkm ing too much and accused her of wanting to be clever. He commented casually to the men at his table, ‘God created man with a broad chest, not wide hips, so that the man in that part of him can grasp wisdom; but that place where filth comes out is small; this is reversed in a woman. For that reason she has much filth and little wisdom’.42 Both Katharina and Martin accepted the theoretical roles assigned to them. At least in the presence of others, Käthe addressed her husband as Herr Doktor; and Martin everywhere used the familiar Du in speaking to his wife. In the abstract, Martin was in charge of all that his wife, children, student boarders, and servants did; but in a practical sense Käthe administered every facet of the household. Between these spouses it was doubtless understood that in some technical sense, all the authority that Käthe wielded was delegated to her by her husband. By whatever means she acquired the power, she oversaw the finances, pantry, and nursery. Martin could not have been the world-shaking clergyman and scholar who he was without conceding this domain to her. He trusted her completely and could not have dispensed with her multifaceted labor. Partly for this reason, he took the unorthodox measure in his will of naming her the guardian (Vormund) of their children.43 She wielded the household scepter, saving, as he noted, only his masculine right. The Luthers’ sexual relationship was central to their marriage. The f­ requency and conviction with which Luther attacks vows of celibacy may lead us to conclude that the Reformer had been all too familiar with sexual desire as an Augustinian friar. In 1519, six years before he wed, he still maintained that celibate chastity was the best state, but he insisted that no one was without ‘evil fleshly lust’.44 He continued to regard sexual desire as tainted by sin. When he insisted in 1525, just after marrying Katharina von Bora, that he had not wed Käthe out 41

42 43

44

This theme occurs in many guises. A readily available example is the sixteenth-century broadsheet print, ‘Kein edler schatz ist auff der ert/Dann ein frums weib die her begert’, reproduced and translated in Ozment, When fathers ruled, pp. 52–53. All of the dangersof-women themes, prominent in art and literature, provide other examples. Among these are Phyllis riding Aristotle, Virgil in a basket, Samson and Delilah, and Solomon worshipping idols. wa tr 2, no. 1975, p. 285. On this point, see the summary of Martin Treu, Katharina von Bora, 2nd ed. (Wittenberg: Drei Kastanien Verlag, 1996), p. 72; a curious treatment is Tibor Fabiny, Martin Luther’s last will and testament. A facsimile of the original document, with an account of its origins, composition and subsequent history (Dublin: Ussher Press; and Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1982). ‘Ein Sermon von dem ehelichen Stand. 1519’, wa Schriften 2, p. 168.

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of love, he meant that lust had not motivated him. He had not, as he put it, ‘burned for her’; rather, he esteemed her. Quickly, however, he came to appreciate their intimacy, and his enjoyment reinforced the conviction with which he advocated wedlock. He could be unrestrained in his private correspondence. He wrote to his friend Georg Spalatin on December 6, 1525, upon Spalatin’s marriage, Greet your wife kindly from me. When you have your Katharine in bed, sweetly embracing and kissing her, think: Lo, this being, the best little creation of God, has been given to me by Christ, to whom be glory and honor. I will guess the day on which you will receive this letter, and that night I will love my wife in memory of you with the same act, and thus return you like for like.45 Probably more revealing of the Luthers’ sex life, however, is the Reformer’s moving letter to Käthe of February 1, 1546, two weeks before he died. He tells her that the letter is from her ‘old, poor love, and, as Your Grace knows, impotent’. He assures her jokingly that he no longer fears that he will be tempted by ‘the pretty women’.46 On February 7, he returns to the subject of his impotence. He urges her to consult Philipp Melanchthon, who will understand and give her advice. He assures her, ‘I would gladly love you if I could, as you know’.47 The fact that Luther brings this up in his letters suggests that it is a recent development as well as something that urgently concerns her. He implicitly reveals that sex is a regular part of their life together and that the lack of it will be distressing to her. Both of these passages offer evidence that in contrast to his clerical predecessors, Luther integrated sexuality into his condoned existence as at once a pastor-theologian and a husband. He has decidedly abandoned ‘emasculinity’ as ideal and as practice. He criticizes St. Jerome as having been unchristian in what he wrote against marriage.48 In living out and publicizing the new union between piety and the marriage bed, Luther was indeed a revolutionary.

45

46 47 48

wa br 3, no. 952, p. 635. Eric Gritsch informed me in person in October 2005, that up until 1983, the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s birth, by common agreement among themselves, Luther scholars did not refer to this letter. I find Luther’s sentiment touching rather than embarrassing. wa br 11, no. 4195, pp. 275–276. wa br 11, no. 4201, p. 287. wa tr 3, no. 2867b, pp. 40–41.

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A feature central to Martin Luther’s identity as a married man is his sense of humour. Reformation scholars are aware of this aspect of the Reformer’s personal because they regularly encounter his witticisms, and they are assisted in this perception by the sheer volume of Luther’s surviving personal documents. Additionally, the previously less respected Table Talk is now seen as a window onto Luther’s private life that is unavailable for other leading figures in this religious movement. We readers of Luther’s works can be variously shocked and entertained as well as informed. Our time, half a millennium removed from the early sixteenth century, is characterized by prevailing values that do not coincide with those of early modern Germany, and so we must be cautious that what we find amusing, Luther intended to be so. When Luther declares, for example, that the sex act is like an epileptic fit, he means it. In his eyes, sensuous excesses could ‘rage through the streets’ and disrupt public as well as private life, and they did not conform to God’s preference for modest sexual expression—along with moderate eating and drinking—in his human creatures.49 When he directs a vulgar, highly witty arrow at Sebastian Franck for his collection of misogynist aphorisms, calling Franck ‘a great arse-bumblebee’, Luther would likely be annoyed by our levity; he intends to reprimand Franck and all others who think the worst of women. The Reformer’s self-image was as a defender of women as worthy creatures. Luther deliberately cultivated humor in the household setting, ­surrounded by his closest family members and also by guests and boarders. Matters of theology and worship were altogether serious and should be so treated by the whole community. The circle of one’s intimates was the place for men to exercise their comic gifts, to pun and insinuate. Humor lay at the heart of Luther’s masculine authority, as he thought that it should for other heads of household too. He writes to Käthe from Eisenach in 1540, relieved that Philip Melanchthon is recovering from severe illness: ‘Master Philip is returning to life again from the grave; he still looks sick, yet he is in good spirits, jokes and laughs again with us, and eats and drinks with us as usual. Praise be to God!’50 The men at his table could share the comic elements of all manner of things. We recall Luther’s episodes of constipation and depression, but his companions also note those occasions when he was in high spirits. ‘… He was happy and joked with his friends and with me’, wrote Johannes Mathesius, later Luther’s first biographer, in 1540.51 Luther even played with his dog in the dining room.52 49 50 51 52

On avoiding overindulgence, see wa Schriften 10/1, ‘Die Epistell czu der Christnacht’, p. 32. wa br 9, no. 3511, p. 172. wa tr 5, no. 5284, p. 43. wa tr 3, no. 2849b, pp. 26–27.

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In this setting, he teases Lucas Cranch the Younger, who wanted to sit by his new wife and constantly engaged her in conversation.53 On another occasion, he inquires of Muhme Lehna, Katharina’s aunt Magdalena von Bora, with whom she had lived in the convent at Nimbschen, and who was now engaged to be married, whether she would not like to return to the convent. She protests, ‘No, no!’ Luther slyly asks his male table-mates, ‘Why do you suppose that women do not wish to be made virgins?’ All the men smile, in silence.54 Luther once joked that after the Fall, and after their exit from the Garden of Eden, for the remaining nine hundred years of their marriage, Adam and Eve argued about who was at fault: ‘You ate the apple!’ ‘Why did you give it to me?’ Luther comments, ‘They must have had an amazing household regimen!’55 Another time, and despite his disapproval of Jerome’s ascetic advice to widows, he remarks on the disadvantages of marrying a widow: ‘A maiden, as you will. A widow, as she will. Beware of the one who has had two husbands! My horse will kick you!’56 When he attends Hans Lufft’s daughter’s wedding and goes to the festivities after the ceremony, at the bedding of the couple, he advises the groom to be lord in the house—when the bride is not at home! Luther himself placed the groom’s shoe on the top of the hard canopy of the marital bed, so that the groom might dominate in the marriage.57 At the dining table, he expresses approval of this popular custom.58 Luther regularly used humour in interacting with Katharina; to do so was part of his definition of himself as a husband. With the help of anthropologists, I have finally realized what Luther means when he looks back upon his parents’ marriage and recalls, ‘… My father … slept with my mother, and joked with her, just as I do with my wife, and [still] they were pious people, just as all the patriarchs, arch-fathers, and prophets did and were’.59 I used to think that gescherzt (joked) was a euphemism to cover the sex act. But Luther seldom resorted to euphemisms, and so I was not satisfied with that explanation. Furthermore, despite his oft-professed advocacy of marriage and his demonstrative love of his wife, he expressed what by modern lights are dreadful slanders of women—their responsibility for the Fall, their idiocy, their guile, and their 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

wa tr 5, no. 5524, p. 214; no. 5736, p. 336. Cf. wa tr 4, no. 4138, pp. 161–162, directed at Mag. Ambrosius Berndt, who talked privately with his bride. wa tr 2, no. 2589, p. 534, date uncertain. wa tr 3, no. 3675, p. 514. wa tr 5, no. 5683, p. 319, year uncertain. wa tr 3, no. 3755, p. 593, 1538. wa tr 5, no. 5733, p. 334, year uncertain. wa tr 2, no. 1658, p. 166, mid-1532; tr 2, no. 1659, pp. 166–167, midyear 1532; tr 3, no. 3181b, p. 213, June 1532. The italics are mine.

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s­ usceptibility to temptation because of their pride and lust for dominance. How do these seemingly contradictory convictions fit together? In 1940, the British structural-functionalist anthropologist, Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, identified what he labeled ‘joking relationships’ in African society.60 This concept has become part of the vocabulary of the discipline of anthropology and is now applied to Western groups and settings.61 RadcliffeBrown defines it as follows: What is meant by the term ‘joking relationship’ is a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence. It is important to distinguish two main varieties. In one the relation is symmetrical; each of the two persons teases or makes fun of the other. In the other variety the relation is asymmetrical; A jokes at the expense of B and B accepts the teasing good humouredly but without retaliating; or A teases B as much as he pleases and B in return teases A only a little. There are many varieties in the form of this relationship in different societies. In some instances the joking or teasing is only verbal, in others it includes horse-play; in some the joking includes elements of obscenity, in others not.62 One of the functions of joking relationships is to render minimal the potential for conflict in a bond.63 Luther instinctively regarded the happy marriage as a joking relationship, and as a bond that was sustained by humour. If we observe his demeanor, we 60

61

62 63

‘On Joking Relationships’, Africa 13, 3 (1940), pp. 195–210; ‘A further note on joking relationships’, Africa 19, 2 (1949), pp. 133–140. The former is reprinted in Nelson Graburn (ed.), Readings in kinship and social structures (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 145–150; and in Adam Kuper (ed.), The social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 174–188. One amusing example is Wilfried Schütte, Scherzkommunikation unter Orchestermusikern, Forschungsberichte des Instituts für deutsche Sprache 27 (Tübingen: Günter Narr Verlag, 1991). In Kuper, Social anthropology, p. 174. On the constructive nature of joking relationships, see, for example, Phillips Stevens, Jr, ‘Bachama joking categories. Toward new perspectives in the study of joking relationships’, Journal of Anthropological Research 34, 1 (1978), pp. 47–71. For a summary of patterns of such relationships in so-called primitive societies, see Charles S. Brant, ‘A preliminary study of cross-sexual joking relationships in primitive society’, Behavior Science Notes 7, 4 (1972), pp. 313–330.

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may perceive that Luther lived out his jocular tie to Katharina. The evidence is chiefly in the form of his letters to her and his frequent interaction with her in the dining room, in the presence of their guests. No single interpretation is sufficient for either context; both letters and jokes have various levels of meaning. But one of these levels is indeed his performance of the husband’s teasing, the ridicule, the mirthful insults of the marital commitment. He was the comedian, and she was the straight woman. Theirs was an asymmetrical joking relationship. His often charming epistolary jousts are well known, in particular the salutations. In 1534, he greets her as ‘my friendly, dear lord, Lady Katherin von Bora, Mrs Dr Luther in Wittenberg’. He continues teasingly, ‘Yesterday I got hold of a bad drink and had to sing. If I don’t drink well, I am sorry, and I would so enjoy it. And I thought what good wine and beer I have at home, and in addition a beautiful lady—or should I say lord’.64 In 1540, he writes to her as ‘the rich lady of Zulsdorf, Lady Mrs Doctor Katherin Ludherin, physically resident in Wittenberg but mentally sojourning in Zulsdorf, my little love, to her hands’.65 In 1545, he says, ‘To my friendly, dear housewife Catherina [sic] of Luther von Bora, preacher, brewer, gardener, and whatever else she can be’.66 In 1546, he addresses her, ‘My dear housewife Katherin Ludherin, Mrs Doctor, swinemarketeer of Wittenberg, my gracious lady, to her hands and at her feet’.67 On February 10, 1546, eight days before his death, Luther pens, ‘To the holy, anxious lady, Lady Katherin Luther, Mrs Doctor, resident of Zulsdorf in Wittenberg, my gracious dear housewife’. He calls her ‘my most holy lady Mrs Doctor’.68 Luther’s language is all the more witty for its complex topography. It expresses his great love of his wife; it puns and plays mightily. It reveals his ongoing recognition that she is a member of the German nobility and that he himself is of humbler provenance. It also acknowledges his cession to her of masculine activities along with his awareness of not being able to function as a theologian and pastor without her. In spite of what they both accept to be husbands’ and wives’ proper arenas, he must transfer to her such a degree of authority that she is his ‘empress’ and his ‘lord’.69 His use of Lady and gracious refers both to her social rank and to her daily, practical superiority in 64 65 66 67 68 69

wa br 7, no. 2130, p. 91. wa br 9, no. 3519, p. 205. wa br 11, no. 4139, p. 149. wa br 11, no. 4201, p. 286. wa br 11, no. 4203, p. 291. Luther calls Käthe his empress in the closing of a 1530 letter to Nicolaus Hausmann. wa, br 8, no. 1527, p. 217.

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e­ verything having to do with the household and family. In their private life, he is her subject and her dependent. By unspoken agreement, he is willing to take on feminine traits and to permit her masculine ones. He jokes with her in the body of his letters too: ‘Today at eight we drove away from Halle, yet we did not get to Eisleben but returned to Halle again by nine. For a huge female Anabaptist met us with waves of water and great floating pieces of ice; she threatened to baptize us again, and has covered the whole countryside’.70 Most holy Mrs Doctor! I thank you very kindly for your great worry, which robs you of sleep. Since the date when you started to worry about me, the fire in my quarters, right outside the door of my room, tried to devour me; and yesterday, no doubt because of the strength of your worries, a stone almost fell on my head and nearly squashed me as in a mouse trap.71 As interlopers in the dining room, we observe that the Reformer gives vent to the gamut of emotion from love to rage. A relaxed and self-confident host. he jokes here too with Katharina, whereas she is invariably serious in the responses that we are party to. One day Käthe comments to her husband in the hearing of their guests, ‘Ah, sir, the church was so full today that it stank!’ Martin replies, ‘There were also piles of filth there, although concealed. The best thing about it is that they [the people] carried it all out with them again’.72 It is perhaps astonishing that Luther spent so much time at the table holding forth on marriage and the nature of women. We often forget that Käthe is present. Occasionally, she takes part in the conversations. She weeps openly over the death of their daughter Magdalena, and Martin comforts her.73 She rubs salve on his arthritic legs, and as she does so, he pronounces, ‘The Latin word uxor, wife, comes from unguendo, smearing unguent’.74 Katharina may have dashed out occasionally to assist the serving maids, and she left the table when she was in the early stage of pregnancy and was nauseated.75 Otherwise, she was the hostess, and she heard what to us are often dreadful—but sometimes highly approving—utterances of her spouse on the nature of womankind. I suggest here that the barbs Luther directs at women are intended partly for his 70 71 72 73 74 75

wa br 11, no. 4191, Jan. 25, 1546, p. 269. wa br 11, no. 4201, Feb. 10, 1546, p. 286. wa tr 2, no. 2563b, p. 526, date uncertain. wa tr 5, no. 5491, p. 187, September 1542. Magdalena died in August. wa tr 5, no. 6100, p. 488, date uncertain. wa tr 3, no. 3298b, p. 257, 1533.

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wife’s ears specifically and form part of their joking relationship. They are, as Luther perceived it, a means of maintaining good will and thus strength in his marriage. If we assume that Katharina is the target of her husband’s observations, we may receive his slurs today with somewhat less hostility. At times, he speaks in Latin, which would have been comprehensible to her when on a simple subject; at times he speaks in German; and often he mixes the two. She understands what he is saying. Katharina enjoys the dining-room conversation and takes part in it. Laughing at her, Luther inquires whether she has said an Our Father before she preached so many words.76 One day an Englishman is their guest, and he does not speak German. Luther says, ‘I suggest my wife to you as your instructor in the German language. She is particularly fluent. She can speak so well that she far surpasses me. But eloquence is not to be praised in women. It befits them to lisp and stammer; that is more suited to them’.77 At another meal, Luther opines that women’s eloquence about domestic matters surpasses that of Cicero, but their thoughts on politics are worthless; whatever they can’t achieve with words, they accomplish by means of tears.78 Katharina is there; she listens. Perhaps she has ventured a remark on a political issue. Women need, her husband thinks, to wear a veil to remind them of their proper subordination.79 He uses a different metaphor on another day when, presumably, Käthe has again uttered a point of view: ‘No blouse is as unattractive on a woman as when she wishes to be clever’.80 Luther declares that women are not to be trusted. We are given no context for this ukase. He says, ‘What goes in through their ears comes out through their mouths’. Thus, men should not entrust secrets to them.81 On the surface, this is not amusing. But as a joke between Käthe and him, it takes on a different coloration. When Luther holds forth about mismatched couples, it may be that he recalls the fifteen-year separation in age between Katharina and him: ‘When an old man takes a young woman to wed, that is a very ugly spectacle, for she can take no pride or pleasure in him; the opportunity is gone. There is no longer anything attractive or strong about him. An old man and a young woman are against nature’.82 Discoursing on the division of the entire creation between 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

wa tr 2, no. 1975, p. 285, June 1531. wa tr 4, no. 4081, p. 121, 1538. wa tr 1, no. 1053, p. 531, first half of the 1530s. CF. wa tr 2, no. 1979, p. 286, summer 1531. wa tr 1, no. 1229, p. 611, first half of the 1530s. wa tr 2, no. 1555, p. 130, date uncertain. wa tr 3, no. 4434, p. 311, March 1539. wa tr 4, no. 4474, p. 332, 1539; cf. tr 5, no. 6322, p. 601, date uncertain.

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male and female, Luther declares, ‘In the woman are defects in strength and intelligence. The defect in strength is tolerated because the men nourish them; we wish [they did not have?] the defect in their intelligence [defectum ingenii desideramus], but we should also consider their character, for marriage is a necessary thing which may be seen in all of nature’.83 Luther enjoins the young Lucas Cranach, who has just married and is quite enamored of his bride, ‘Don’t behave that way! Before half a year has passed, you will have had enough! You will prefer any maid in the house to your wife!’84 The unseen, unheard participant in this conversation is Katharina von Bora Lutheryn. We cannot see her husband and her exchange glances, but they probably did. We know for a fact, from Luther’s correspondence, that six months after declaring that he had not married his wife for love, he was infatuated with her. He joked to his men friends that, as a bride, in order to stay near her beloved, Käthe had sat by Luther as he worked. She had once interrupted him to inquire, ‘Doctor, sir, is the Hofmeister in Prussia the margrave [of Brandenburg’s] brother?’85 Her simplicity tickled Martin, but he fully reciprocated her ardor. Years later, he teases her by repudiating a feeling that they both acknowledged. At another meal, he informs his guests, within her hearing, that thirteen years before, he would have preferred to marry Eva Schönefeld. ‘At that time, I didn’t love my Käthe, for I suspected her of being proud and arrogant. But it pleased God well that I should have mercy on her. And God be praised, that was good advice!’86 If he had asked his friends, he recalled, they would have pressed him not to marry Käthe but somebody else.87 He announces publicly that Käthe can persuade him to do anything she pleases, for he concedes the dominion in the household to her, saving only his right and his honor. He takes aim at her, however: ‘The governance of women never achieved anything good’.88 At another meal, he picks up the same subject: ‘When God made Adam the lord over all creatures, everything stood in its good and proper order, and everything was governed in the best way. But when the woman came and wanted her hand too in the soup and to be clever, everything fell to pieces and became a disorderly wasteland’.89 This is not merely the Reformer’s opinion on the origins of evil; he is joking with his wife. Perhaps 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

wa tr 4, no. 4783, pp. 498–499, from the 1530s. wa tr 5, no. 5524, p. 214. wa tr 2, no. 1656, p. 165, mid-1532. wa tr 4, no. 4783, p. 504, from the 1530s. wa tr, 2, no. 1656, p. 166, mid-1532. wa tr 3, no. 2847a, pp. 25–26, 1532–1533. wa tr 1, no. 1046, p. 528, date uncertain.

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one day he found fault with the food; or else he was inspired by, as he saw it, Eve’s guilt in feeding the apple to Adam. To a discussion about the blessing of a good marriage, he adds, ‘That man is a martyr whose wife and maid don’t know how to do anything in the kitchen. This is the first calamity out of which many evils follow!’90 Luther’s letters to close friends and especially to his wife are larded with jokes. Likewise, his commentary at table should be regarded as jocular as well as serious when it touches on Käthe, womanhood, marriage, and housekeeping. We need to read the Table Talk from a different perspective than in the past. Luther’s view of the masculine spousal role stands revealed here, if only we peer through an altered magnifying glass. He believed that the husband should joke with his wife in expressing love and instructing her. He should ‘look through his fingers’ (as the Germans said) at his wife’s faults. Humor provided a mechanism for preventing or diminishing tension among those who lived (and ate) in close proximity to one another so that they might discuss sober matters and yet endure their closeness. Husbands, in Luther’s demonstrated opinion, can contribute to nuptial contentment by maintaining good humor toward their wives even as they make their criticisms known. The Luthers’ asymmetrical joking relationship by no means diminishes the fact of Martin’s late medieval world-view—of his sincerity in regarding women as lesser creatures than men and properly subordinated to them. Yet, in the service of facetiousness, he may well have sharpened the hyperbolic edge of his expression. If we see the wisdom of Rüdiger Schnell’s admonition concerning the identification of audiences, we must put Katharina Lutheryn back in the dining room. C

Martin Luther’s Masculinity

Luther was more tradition-bound than he liked to think in his definitions of the proper traits and activities of and relations between women and men. His mental universe was still thoroughly binary. Nonetheless, he initiated changes in the concept of masculinity among his followers—and he was aware of attempting to do this. He altered both theory and practice for Lutheran clergymen by joining their marital sexuality with sanctity. Even though the sex act included sin for both husbands and wives, God, he said, overlooked this sin in the service of Christian procreation. Luther brought clerics into close, committed familiarity with their wives and daughters. Whereas Catholic priests had been formally obliged to maintain a 90

wa tr 3, no. 3675, p. 515, 1530s.

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distance from women, Lutheran pastors now knew the feminine sex in more than the proverbial biblical sense. Catholic religious men had known them as well, but with a sense of transgression, even in those cases where they paid an annual concubinage fee to the bishop. Certainly, some priests must have engaged, too, in psychological intimacy with their long-term ‘cooks’, the mothers of their children; but in the Church’s eyes, this would only have compounded their infraction. Luther rejected this model not alone on the grounds that celibacy led ineluctably to promiscuity. He was persuaded that God’s presentation of Eve to Adam as consort and helpmeet was meant to set the pattern for all adult humanity. ‘It is not good that man should be alone’.91 Proper masculinity kept spousal company. On June 13, 1525, at the age of 41, Luther took spousal company. If we may ­believe his reminiscence about his parents’ marriage, his father provided a template for mature sexuality and the psychic dimensions of spousal interaction. Without advice books, simply by following the paternal route, Luther made his way. He joked regularly with his wife, and he had sex with her. These were central to his concept of being a man. Joking enabled him to flirt and criticize simultaneously. His seemingly harsh bantering was an effort to maintain an ideational boundary even though Katharina regularly permeated it. Comedy enabled him to tolerate Käthe’s indispensable transition across the gender divide into that realm of dominion that was properly male. Only by compromising his theoretical principles could Luther gain the freedom he required to write and to take part personally in the shaping of a new religious polity.

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The Tenderness of Daughters, the Waywardness of Sons. Martin Luther as a Father A great deal of attention has been paid in the last generation to Martin Luther as a human being—as an anti-Semite or not, as a man who lost his temper and raged against theologians who would not accept his interpretation of Scripture and the theology built upon it, as a husband, and to some extent as a father.1 More remains to be said on the last subject. Luther had a keen interest in parenthood and its processes, from pregnancy through birth and childrearing. In general, references to Luther and fatherhood have treated boy-children and girl-children without adequate differentiation.2 In the main, biographers have used the Reformer’s domestic life as a brief interlude to demonstrate their subject’s fundamental humanity.3 The thesis of this essay is that Luther treated 1 The notes provide examples only. Heiko A. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), especially pp. 94–136. Kenneth Hagen, ‘Luther’s So-Called Judenschriften. A Genre Approach’, Archive for Reformation History 90 (1999), pp. 130–158; and most recently Thomas Kaufmann, Luthers Juden (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2014). Mark U. Edwards, Jr, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1975); idem, Luther’s Last Battles. Politics and Polemics 1531–46 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1983). (At least implicitly) in Merry E. Wiesner, ‘­Luther and women. The death of two Marys’, in Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael Samuel (eds.), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 295–308; reprinted in Ann Loades (ed.), Feminist theology. A Reader (London: spck, 1990), pp. 123–137; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘The transmission of Luther’s teachings on women and matrimony. The case of Zwickau’, Archive for Reformation History 77 (1986), pp. 31–46; Wiesner and Karant-Nunn, Luther on Women, a Sourcebook (Cambridge, Eng., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), passim; Scott Hendrix, ‘Luther on marriage’, Lutheran Quarterly 14 (2000), pp. 335–350. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘“Fast wäre mir ein weibliches Gemüt verblieben.” Martin Luthers Männlichkeit’, in Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (eds.), Martin Luther zwischen den Kulturen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 49–65. 2 Ewald Plass, for example, in What Luther Says. An Anthology (3 vols., St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1959), under ‘Children’, makes no distinction between sons and daughters. 3 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand. A Life of Martin Luther (New York: New American Library, 1950), pp. 223–237; Martin Brecht, Martin Luther. Shaping and Defining the Reformation 1521–1532, trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), pp. 195–204; Gerhard Brendler, Martin Luther. Theology and Revolution, trans. Claude R. Foster, Jr. (New York and

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his offspring differently depending on their sex and that this was the result of the prevailing social attitudes of the day, his theological convictions, and his psychological makeup. In the previous chapter, I have written about ­Luther’s masculinity and implicitly within it his ideas concerning proper Christian femininity.4 Luther’s division of the universe into male and female and his prescriptions for and perceptions of gendered behavior are visible, too, in the small record that he has left us of his treatment of his progeny. By the standards of his day, when fathers were ordinarily not to undertake any of the burdensome domestic tasks of nurturing infants and toddlers, ­Luther was concerned for his children’s wellbeing, in practice as well as theory, and regardless of their sex. In the abstract, following St. Cyprian, he advocated kissing the newly born, still unbaptised baby, despite its being technically still ‘a child of wrath’, for the very marvel of having caught God ‘in the act’ of creation. He opined that it was all right for fathers to wash diapers if they did so in faith.5 We have no evidence that Father Luther did kiss his brand-new offspring, although he might well have done so. Their births deeply impressed him. It is highly unlikely that he washed diapers in a household presided over by Katharina and Muhme Lehne, where the most unpleasant tasks may well have been carried out by the maidservants. In the concrete, Luther approved of breast-feeding as the best kind of nurture for a baby.6 Indeed, Katharina nursed her infants in the presence of diners.7 When the time came, however, the Reformer advised his wife, at Käthe’s request, on how to wean the year-old Magdalena. He told her from his eyrie in the Festung Coburg in 1530, ‘In my view, if you wanted to wean her, it would be good to do it gradually, so that the first day you would leave out one nursing, and the day after that two, until you have completely stopped’.8 He thought that children ought not to be given wine before they were eight.9 Luther’s infants were present in the dining room when the Reformer’s several devoted followers were recording his every substantial, and many

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Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 302–310; John M. Todd, Luther, a life (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 260–267. ‘The Masculinity of Martin Luther. Theory, Practicality, and Humor’, in idem and Scott H. Hendrix (eds.), Masculinity in the Reformation Era, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 83 (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2008), pp. 167–189; a new version of which is included as ch. 6 above. wa Schriften 10 / 2, ‘Vom ehelichen Leben. 1522’, p. 297. wa tr 2, no. 1554, p. 130. wa tr 2, no. 1631, p. 156. wa br 5, no. 1582, pp. 347–348, June 5, 1530. wa tr 2, no. 1706, p. 188.

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i­ nsubstantial, words. He held them, but, curiously, we only have records of his holding and speaking to or commenting on two of the boys, Martin and Paul, though one of them might have been Margarete.10 At some time in the early 1530s, he remarked to one, ‘How have you deserved, or why should I care for you so much that I make you the heir of all that I have? [How have you deserved] with your shitting, peeing [Roland Bainton omitted these words in his account!11], crying, and filling the whole house with screaming, that I should worry about you so much?’12 Receiving little Martin into his arms, he said, ‘Ah, that God can set such fine, black little eyes in a piece of flesh [that is born] out of a stinking sack [the mother’s body]! It is just as though somebody making a blintz set fine little eyes into it. To make a nose, mouth, hands, and feet from a little bit of flesh in the body of the mother is also an art’.13 On being handed the tiny Paul early in 1533, Luther observed, ‘Dear God, how much Adam will have loved Cain, his first-born son … who afterward became a fratricide!’14 On another occasion, he blessed probably young Martin as he was being taken off to bed: ‘Go along and sleep, dear little child, but be pious. I won’t leave you any money, but I will leave you a rich God—only be pious! He will not desert you. May God help you thereto!’15 These incidents hint that Luther had a readier physical contact with his tiny sons, possibly for no reason other than that his wife thought it more appropriate to hand him his sons than his daughters when he was entertaining dinner-guests. By convention, although mothers cared for and disciplined their children of both sexes when they were little, the Hausväterliteratur specifies that fathers ought to mete out punishment to growing sons (and male servants) and mothers to their daughters (and female servants) regardless of age. In Winkelschulen or dame schools, women could teach the ABCs to both little boys and girls, but the boys were seen quickly to outgrow this tutelage owing to the gender and the gender-limited skills of the instructor. It is, then, possible that Luther was handed only his male children. He joked with a baby son who was on his lap: ‘Are you the pope’s enemy?’16 On another occasion he declared, ‘You are our Lord God’s little fool: by virtue of 10

See the chronological table in Martin Treu, Katharina von Bora (Wittenberg: Drei Kastanien Verlag, 1995), pp. 88–89. There is slight disagreement over which day Paul Luther was born on: Kroker, Katharina von Bora, 4th ed. (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1974), p. 123. 11 Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 235. 12 wa tr 1, no. 1004, p. 505. 13 wa tr 2, no. 2578, p. 530. 14 wa tr 3, no. 2963b, p. 121. 15 wa tr 3, no. 2848a and 2848b, 26. 16 wa tr 2, no. 2306, p. 412.

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grace and remission of sins, you have nothing to fear under the law … come what may!’17 Luther paid attention to his toddlers’ behavior. There are three renderings in the Table Talk of his comment about one of his sons at the age of three, who was unselfconsciously playing and talking to himself: ‘This child is like a person who is drunk: it doesn’t know that it is alive. It lives most securely and happily, leaps and hops. Such children enjoy themselves in great, wide structures and dwellings, where they have enough room’.18 Social attitudes were such in that day that one wonders whether Luther would have admired such leaping and hopping in a little girl. Girls were not expected to lay claim to or expand into large spaces but to stay at home and quiet, strictly under their mothers’ eyes. On their mothers’ laps and at their knees, toddlers of both sexes learned their simplest prayers, Bible verses, and hymns. The proverbial Lutheran paterfamilias, modeled by Luther to successive generations, directed family devotions on a somewhat higher plane, beginning with blessings at the table. Luther’s famous letter to the four-year-old Hans could not have been directed to a daughter, for its language is in three respects designed for a boy. It describes a pleasure garden to which he may be admitted only if he ‘prays, studies, and is good’.19 Girls even of this tender age might be expected to pray and be good, but not to study. Luther declares elsewhere, ‘There is no shirt or dress that looks worse on a woman or maiden than wanting to be clever’, and he supported limiting the curriculum of girls’ schools.20 The objects that are held out to Hans now as rewards are partly gender-specific: whistles, drums, and ‘fine silver crossbows’. Girls, too, could enjoy fresh fruit, play the lute, and dance (modestly), but these other items were reserved for males even in the adult world. Finally, there are ponies in the garden, and this is to attract Hans. We assume that if he gains admittance, he will get to ride one. This is not a reward extended to a girl. Boys, however, needed to learn the military arts; riding would have been among those suitable for a lad descended on his mother’s side from the lower nobility. This would accord with the proffered satisfaction of shooting with ‘little crossbows’. Carrying the theme of the pleasure garden farther, Martin wrote to Katharina on 8 September 1530, ‘I have a large, lovely box of sugar for Hans Luther. Cyriacus [Kaufmann] brought it from Nuremberg, from the lovely garden’.21 17 18 19 20 21

wa tr 2, no. 2550, p. 521. wa tr 5, no. 6099, p. 488. Cf. tr 1, no. 660, p. 311, about young children’s faith. wa br 5, pp. 377–378, dated approximately 19 June 1530, when Hans would just have turned four. wa tr 2, no. 1555, p. 130. wa br, no. 1718, from the Veste Coburg, p. 609.

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On 28 January 1533, on the day his son Paul was born, Luther said to those around the table, partly in jest: ‘God willing, I will distribute my children [sons; among occupations]. I will send that one who wants to be a soldier to Hans Loser;22 the one who wants to study, Doctor Jonas and Philipp can have; the one who wants to labor I will prepare to be a peasant’.23 Their ultimate placement was at a higher rank than soldier or peasant. While we know that Hans studied, and all the Luthers’ sons (Paul became a physician), we do not know what opportunities existed for Magdalena and, later, for Margareta. The Reformer certainly advocated basic literacy for girls as well as boys. In ‘An die Ratherren aller Städte deutschen Lands, daß sie christliche Schulen aufrichten und halten sollen, 1524’, Luther opines, This one consideration alone would be sufficient to justify the establishment everywhere of the very best schools for both boys and girls, namely, that in order to maintain its temporal estate outwardly the world must have good and capable men and women—men able to rule well over land and people, women able to manage the household and train children and servants aright …. It is a matter of properly educating and training our boys and girls to that end.24 There is no question that Luther’s surviving daughters (Elisabeth died as an infant) learned to read and write. Their mother, an ex-nun, was highly literate in the vernacular herself and had some acquaintance with Latin. But their father thought that girls did not need an elevated level of learning. They should be able to read the Bible and other devotional works, write letters, and keep household accounts. They should know how much to pay for necessities and when they were receiving correct weight and change in the marketplace. They should be able to raise their children to Christian piety, which required the assistance of a limited number of texts.25 Beyond a few years of part-time tutelage at school, girls should learn the arts of housekeeping from their mothers.26 Luther had high hopes for Hans, and the boy disappointed him. Before this pattern was clear, the Reformer wrote to Käthe when Hans was five and Magdalena nearly three, ‘Kiss young Hans for me, and tell little Hans, Lehnchen, 22 23 24 25 26

One of the elector’s military officers who became a godfather of baby Paul Luther. wa tr 3, no. 2946b, p. 112. wa Schriften 15, p. 44. See my ‘The reality of early Lutheran education. The electoral district of Saxony—a case study’, Lutherjahrbuch 57 (1990), pp. 128–146, which I admit is a bit shrill. This generalization is borne out by Reinhold Vormbaum (ed.), Die evangelischen Schulordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1860).

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and Muhme Lehna to pray for the young prince and for me’.27 Again, it may have seemed inappropriate for him to send a kiss to a girl-child however much he cared for her. But earlier, in October 1529, when Hans was only four and Lehnchen five months old, he sent a kiss to both.28 A year later, however, he greeted by name only Hans and Aunt Lehna—not Magdalena.29 He sang with Hans in the dining room.30 He wanted, too, to be in touch with Hans’s teachers, such as Hieronymus Weller, and was initially heartened by Hans’s progress.31 A father oversaw his sons’ education. Still, he saw that his son was not intellectually inclined. In preaching on the 8th Psalm, he interjected, ‘My Hans Luther doesn’t study much. He does whatever a person instructs him; in a simple manner, he is led by the [bare] word and doesn’t ask whether it was right or not’.32 Martin did care deeply for his daughters. He was delighted when Käthe sent him a picture of Magdalena—the medium is not stated—at the age of one year, when he was in Coburg. He posted the image on the wall opposite his place at table. He replied to his wife, ‘At first I did not recognize the little whore [hürlin], so dark did she appear to me to be’.33 His sexual label shocks the modern sensibility, and yet his intention is clearly loving. Females were inseparable from their sexual functions in early modern Germany, no matter how young their ages. Elisabeth’s and Magdalena’s deaths grieved the Reformer profoundly. His reactions are well known. When Elisabeth died in the summer of 1528, he wrote his famous letter to Nicolaus Hausmann, pastor in Zwickau: ‘My little daughter, my little Elisabeth, has died. It is marvelous how this grieves me; it has left my spirit almost womanish, so much am I moved by compassion. I ­never could have believed before that parents’ spirits could be so tender ­toward a child’.34 His experience of this baby’s death, as well as his pastoral insights, bring him to write to Margaret of Anhalt that a child’s illness hurts the parents more than the child itself.35 His plentiful outpouring of admonition in 1542 to others around him not to sorrow too much for Magdalena belies his loss, and he does admit that ‘in the flesh’ he is bereft.36 He claims to hold his mourning within bounds, as he required others around him to do in the face 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

wa br 6, no. 1908, p. 271, 27 Feb. 1532. wa br 5, p. 154. wa br 5, no. 1683, pp. 545–546, 15 August 1530. wa tr 1, p. 149. For example, to Weller, wa br 5, no. 1593, pp. 373–375; wa br 5, no. 1684, pp. 546–547, both from the Veste Coburg in 1530. wa Schriften 31 / 1, ‘Psalmenauslegungen 1529–32’, p. 286. wa br 5, p. 335, 5 June 1530. wa br 4, p. 511, 5 August 1528. wa br 8, no. 3211, p. 190, 9 January 1538. wa tr 5, nos. 5494–5500, pp. 189–194.

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of their own losses. But he is audibly affected. He writes to Wolfgang, prince of Anhalt, ‘My most beloved daughter Magdalena has gone to the heavenly Father, dying with complete faith in Christ …. I have loved her vehemently’.37 Martin Luther treats his children in accordance with the gender-specific natures that he attributes to them. At first, male and female infants are quite alike. About the age of seven, he observes, boys undergo a change. Luther calls it climactericus. He depicts a life-course for boys that brings their infancy to an end at seven. The following seven years he characterizes as variativus: ‘the seventh year always changes people’. He uses the word menschen, but in the rest of the passage, we see that he is talking only about males. They develop; they become educated; they grow into patresfamilias and public figures. Girls, on the contrary, ‘may not speak publicly; it is contrary to custom’.38 They remain much as they had been as infants. Magdalena, although 13 years old when she died, was, he thought, still a child and did not suffer in dying: Children don’t dispute; they believe what they are told. For children everything is simple, [and] they die without pain or fear, without argument, without death’s vexing them, without physical pain, just as they go to sleep.39 Girls were a special worry. Among his neighbors on the way to the cemetery to bury Magdalena, Luther says, One has to provide for the children, and particularly the poor girls. We cannot take it for granted [?] that someone else will take them [literally her] on. I have no mercy for the boys: a boy nourishes himself wherever he goes, if he is just willing to work. If he chooses to be lazy, so he remains a rascal. But the poor little girlfolk have to have a cane to lean on. A schoolboy can run after handouts [alms], and he can afterward become a fine man if he wants to. But a little girl cannot do this. She quickly comes to shame if she gets her belly full.40 37 wa br 10, no. 3793, 18 September 1542. 38 ‘Das siebend jahr wandelt alle mhal die menschen’. wa tr 5, no. 5210, p. 10; cf. wa tr 3, no. 3161a, pp. 203–204. 39 wa tr 5, no. 5490, p. 187; see also nos. 5491, 5492, pp. 187–188. He thought that boys did not worry about death either: wa tr 2, no. 2507, pp. 497–498, where Hans anticipates that heaven will offer rivers flowing with milk and rolls growing on the trees. Luther commented that this was further evidence that children do not fear death but have only happy expectations of the afterlife; wa tr 3, no. 3576, pp. 422–423. 40 wa tr 5, no. 5494, p. 191; this is virtually repeated as no. 5550, p. 194.

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Again, a female cannot be separated from her sexuality. If she is allowed free rein, either she will get herself into a sexual relationship, or a male will inveigle her into one. The results will be disaster in a society in which unwed mothers and their offspring were ostracized. As his children grew older, Luther treated them differently according to their sex. Serious punishment of the daughters was Katharina’s business. ­Luther, as father, would have had to mete out corporal penalties to his sons. But just as Luther believe that husbands should ordinarily not beat their wives (‘Ungeschlagen ist am besten!’41), he came to believe that excessive beating of children was wrong. This was a shift from the days before he became a parent, even though he recalled disapprovingly as a adult that one teacher had beaten him fifteen times before noon!42 In 1519, he could still categorically maintain that the father who spared the rod, spoiled the child and was responsible for its ultimate damnation. He admonishes mothers and fathers not to care more for the child’s body than for its soul, and the soul’s wellbeing requires stern measures.43 After the birth of his little ones, Father Martin sang another tune. It was as head of a family that he looked back on having been beaten by his own father: One ought not to beat children too hard. For my father once beat me so hard that I fled from him and was afraid, until he reconciled me to himself. I would not want to strike Hans hard, for if I did he would become timid and would be hostile toward me—and I would know of no greater pain. This is what God does: [He says,] I will correct my sons but by other means—through Satan or [the trials of the] world; but if you will cry out and run to Me, I will rescue you and lift you up. For our Lord God would not like it if we grew hostile toward Him.44 We know that on one occasion, when young Hans had incurred his father’s great disfavor, Luther did not beat him but rather banned him from his presence. He relented only after three days and through the mediation of his wife,

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wa 17/1, Predigten des Jahres 1525, no. 3, 15 January, p. 27. On p. 24, he says, ‘Also soll man auch die Weiber regieren, nicht mit grossen knütteln, flegeln oder ausgezogenen messern, sonder mit freuntlichen worten, freundtlichen geberden und mit aller sanfftmuth, damit sie nicht schuchter werden wie S. Peter j. Pet. [sic] am 3. Capitel saget …’. wa tr 3, no. 3566b, p. 417. wa Schriften 2, ‘Eyn Sermon von dem Elichen Standt’, pp. 169–171. wa tr 2, no. 1559, p. 134; and another version, wa tr 3, no. 3566a-b, pp. 415–417.

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Justus Jonas, and Kaspar von Teutleben. As ever, when the Reformer was angry, his language became immoderate: I would rather have a dead son than an ill-behaved one. Not for nothing did Saint Paul say ‘that a bishop shall be a man who presides well over his household and has well-raised children’, so that other people are instructed thereby, receive a good example, and are not annoyed. We preachers are placed so high so that we can give others a good example; but our misbehaving children vex others. Our bad boys commit sins against our privileges. Yet even if they sin a great deal and carry out all kinds of knavishness, I don’t learn about it; one doesn’t tell me anything about it but keeps it a secret from me …. For that reason one has to punish him and absolutely not look through the fingers or let him go unpunished.45 Luther realizes that those around him connive to keep him from learning of at least one son’s misbehavior, for his volatile temperament brings with it unrest for the entire household. He did not even reflect on corporal punishment for his daughters. Luther was deliberately harder on his sons, he said, than on his daughters, for the latter were soft and vulnerable. He comments in February 1539, when Hans is 12 and Magdalena nine, that people ruin children by letting them have their own will and not punishing them. ‘For that reason, I do not want anybody to let my Hans get away with things. I don’t joke with him as much as I do with my daughter’. About women and girls, the host at table opines, ‘Even if they have shortcomings and faults, one ought not to slander them either with words or in writing, but punish them in secret. Women have many weaknesses; for that reason Saint Peter says from the mouth of God, “The feminine sex is a weak vessel.”’46 At another meal he mouths the misogynistic adage, ‘Weeds grow rapidly; for that reason girls grow more quickly than boys’.47 Luther admits that he allows his daughter more latitude than his son. He expects far less from Magdalena than from Hans. He is personally warm to his daughter but stern and distant with his son. When Hans was a little boy, Luther had been able to express his affection, but the misbehavior of the older child alienates him. In a sermon on Genesis, Luther observed that parents loved 45 46 47

wa tr 5, no. 6102, p. 489. This is undated but probably comes from 1538, when Hans was 11 or 12. wa tr 3, no. 3523, p. 376. wa tr 3, no. 4980a, p. 130.

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their children very much but that their children disappoint them.48 Hans and Magdalena were very close to one another. When it was clear that the girl was going to die, Hans was allowed to come home from Torgau to tell her goodbye. Her demise deeply grieved him, over which his mother was more sympathetic than his father. Hans was dispatched back to school. When around Christmastime Luther learned through his teacher Markus Crodel that Hans remained despondent, the father wrote first to Crodel, telling him that Hans was not to be allowed to come home but was to be compelled to overcome ‘this childish softness’.49 The next day, December 27, he wrote to his son himself, in Latin, instructing him to ‘see that he overcomes these tears in a manly fashion’ and applies himself happily and peacefully to his studies. He is by no means to come home unless he is ill. Luther adds that his mother cannot write to him just now—as though, perhaps, the father had instructed the mother not to encourage Hans in his grieving.50 A widespread stereotype at the time had mothers over-coddling their children, to the alleged detriment of their offspring’s souls. Many of us have read Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther.51 In this study, the psychoanalyst makes Luther’s relationship to his own father decisive in his identity-formation as Reformer. It is perhaps ironic to see how difficult a father Luther himself could be, especially toward Hans—unfortunately, owing to their later births and Luther’s early death, we do not learn how he behaved toward Paul or Martin as they grew older, or toward Margarete. He died while they were still young. At least of Hans, the firstborn son, of whom much is expected, Martin demanded a great deal and did not get it. His daughters enjoyed the advantage of lower expectations. They were to be cheerful, tractable, domestic, pious, and quiet—and as far as we know, Magdalena and Margarete were. Luther was prepared to ‘look through his fingers’ at his daughters’ faults inasmuch as the girls, like all females, were the ‘daughters of Eve’. They were collectively the weaker vessel and had to be molded but also forborne. They were to be joked with, just as husbands joked with their wives as an aspect of marital intimacy. They were also to be loved. ‘Husbands, love your wives’, was, to be sure an enjoinder to one of the spouses in a marriage, but by extension, female progeny were also to be loved. Luther’s view of daughters is closely related to his view of Eve and all her descendants. Males were always 48 49 50 51

wa Schriften 24, ‘In Genesin Declamationes’, p. 614. wa br 10, no. 3830, pp. 228–229. wa br 10, no. 3831, p. 229. Erik H. Erikson, Young man Luther. A study in psychoanalysis and history (New York: Norton, 1958).

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more excellent and stronger, but Luther repeated throughout his life that a good housewife is a jewel beyond price. Nonetheless, all females were afflicted with Fürwitz, a self-asserting desire to know about matters that did not pertain to them.52 But one had to guide and be fond of them anyway. Not so the boys. By virtue of being males, they had greater use of reason and were more deliberate in their transgressions. Fathers ought not to make concessions to them—ought to love them, too, but consistently confront and control their misdeeds. If Hans Luther had grown up to be the towering figure that his father was, such that modern psychoanalysts troubled themselves about his identity-formation, we might have noticed long before now Martin Luther’s high expectations and his resort to emotional withdrawal as a means of punishment. He could be emotionally cold. Another surviving letter from father to son, sent when Hans was probably 11, sounds loving and approving at its outset: ‘So far, my dearest son, your studies and the letters you have written me have pleased me’. As it continues, however, it contains the barely veiled threat of not just parental but also divine retribution should the boy depart from the upright path: … You will above all do benefit to yourself by not creating the impression that you are cut from a different cloth than the rest of your family. Therefore take care to diligently advance that which you have started. For God, who has commanded children to obey their parents, has also promised his blessing to obedient children. See to it that you set your sights solely on this blessing, and do not let yourself be diverted from it by bad examples. For the same God has also threatened disobedient children with a curse.53 Noteworthy is Luther’s admonition to Hans not to diminish the standing of his family. Luther nevertheless loved his family unrestrainedly. In this he may have surpassed the moderation that some early modern writers urged upon their

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wa Schriften 14, ‘Predigten über das erste Buch Mose, gehalten 1523/24’, p. 133, contrasting Adam and Eve: ‘Er ist hoher vorstendig geweßen, sie war schlecht und einfeldig. Non animadvertit Sathanae insidias’. ‘… Dehr furbitz bleibet bey allen weibern’. wa br 8, pp. 18–20, January 27, probably 1537. Translation by Thomas Dunlap, on-line at http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3716 (consulted November 2016).

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readers.54 He tells his dinner guests, ‘I would rather die than that Käthe and the little children should die’.55 On another occasion he reminisces, Ah, how heartily I yearned for my family when I lay deathly ill in Smalkald! I was of the opinion that I would never again see my wife and little children on earth. How deeply this apartness and separation pained me! Now I well believe that in people who are dying this natural affection and love that a husband has for his wife and that parents have for their children is the greatest of all. Now that by God’s grace I have returned to good health, I love my wife and little children all the more.56 A theological indication of Luther’s love for his children may be found in his developing views on the fate of infants who died unbaptised. His early Taufbüchlein contains the long-enduring words that the unchristened baby is a ‘child of wrath’. Yet when ministering to parents who had lost a little one before baptism and who were frightened that he might spend eternity in hell—or perhaps still limbo—the Reformer had words of consolation. Even as he insisted that a baby that had not completely emerged from the birth canal could not be baptised, he said that the women who were assisting ought to kneel down and call upon God in faith. God was ‘mightier than we and may do more than we ask. Without a doubt, He will take up that baby on account of the prayers of the faithful’.57 God would send the Holy Spirit and christen the infant spiritually. This utterance is dated on Christmas Eve, 1539, a day on which we know from other evidence that Luther was also thinking tenderly of the Baby Jesus. In his Christmas sermons, Luther often waxed lyrical. He was genuinely moved by the thought of the Christ Child being given to fallen humanity. The incarnate son of God was crucial to Luther’s conviction that God the Father really could love even this bad Martin. In delivering one of the Hauspostille at his own table on Christmas Day, he tried to convey his heartfelt joy to household and guests. He tells them to look into their hearts and see 54

55 56 57

See Rudolf Lenz, ‘“Ehestand, Wehestandt, Süßbitter Standt”? Betrachtungen zur Familie der frühen Neuzeit’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 68, 2 (1986), pp. 371–405, esp. pp. 390–403; idem, ‘Emotion und Affektion in der Familie der frühen Neuzeit. Leichenpredigten als Quellen der historischen Familienforschung’, in Peter-Johannes Schuler (ed.), Die Familie als sozialer und historischer Verband. Untersuchungen zum Spätmittelalter und zur frühen Neuzeit (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1987), pp. 121–146. wa tr 2, no. 1563, p. 135. wa tr 4, no. 4786, p. 505. wa tr 6, no. 6763, pp. 172, 173.

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whether that word does not also taste good to you, and whether your heart too does not hop up and leap when it hears the angel say, ‘I bring you glad tidings of great joy!’…. If Christ had come with drums and had had a golden cradle, that would have been a fine thing. But it would not be a consolation to me.58 As a father, Luther was unselfconscious. He was not surrounded by school psychologists and parenting classes. He probably saw himself as primarily guided by the Bible, which underscored the gender stereotypes that still obtained in sixteenth-century Europe, partly under biblical influence. He was also guided by his emotions. Luther’s saving grace, from the modern point of view, is the outspoken love that he bore his family. One hopes that Hans, the son, was able to find an analog to justification by faith, by means of which to salve his sometimes strained and burdensome relations with his own earthly father, the renowned Reformer of Wittenberg. From Martin Luther’s perspective, fatherhood was central to Protestant masculinity. Luther had launched a revolution in the clerical world not just of theology but of the social placement of the pastor. In a literal sense, Luther had clergymen rejoin society by marrying and founding households. Henceforward, their liaisons were public and legitimate, and very quickly their spouses came to be drawn from social ranks that were commensurate with their own. Concubines had a more humble provenance, which symbolized their fragile respectability. After the Reformation, pastors, preacher, and deacons no longer paid concubinage and cradle fees, for they were doing nothing to be fined for. Late medieval and early modern secular society regarded marriage and reproduction as the norm. Even though the Catholic priesthood had officially practiced celibacy, chastity in the form of sexual abstinence often did not accompany the unwed state. Probably out of their desire for stability and a sense of the irresistibility of sexual desire, communities tolerated the longterm cohabitation of priests and their ‘housekeepers’. For similar reasons and their monetary advantage, bishops, too, accepted an annual fine and ‘looked through their fingers’ at paired-off clergymen.59 Their progeny were a bit of an embarrassment and an inconvenience. They were barred from craftguilds and from claims to inherit. The Protestant cleric, however, could join the laity in taking pride in the birth of each successive child. He was a progenitor, like the patriarchs of old. 58 59

wa Schriften, ‘A Prandio 25. Dez.’, pp. 660, 663. See Luther’s harangue against concubinage and cradle fees collected by bishops, wa tr 3, no. 3548, p. 400.

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His offspring were legitimate and could proceed into any trade. Whereas Erasmus needed to acquire a dispensation from his illegitimate birth as the son of a priest in order to be ordained, Martin Luther could found a line of descent, a Geschlecht, and establish a pedigree. He felt blessed by fatherhood and shared his contemporaries’ sympathy for all married people who did not have children. In this he shared his own father’s objection to his entering the religious life in the early sixteenth century; Hans had wanted Martin to produce an ongoing generation of Luders, and he was frustrated when it appeared that he would not. The Reformation could have laid the groundwork for a relationship of trust and intimacy between pastor-fathers and their children. The religious ­movement occurred, however, at a time when a spirit of discipline was in the ascendancy. Fathers, Luther thought, should not be soft toward their sons. This outlook had impeded Luther’s closeness to his own father, and the Reformer lived out this conviction in turn toward his male children. He joked with his daughters and criticized his sons. Additionally, owing to their standing in society, both generations suffered under public scrutiny. Unquestionably, numerous clerical fathers manifested great warmth toward their sons nevertheless. They simply did not leave to posterity the testimony of Luther’s vast opus. Whether the Protestant Reformation contained within itself the promotion of closer ties between parents and children is a question still to be posed and explored.

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Martin Luther’s Heart For one’s heart really to be able to embrace it [that Christ was born for us] would cause it to burst and die. Experience tells of how some people even die from fright and sorrow, some because of great joy. In like manner, this gladness is so great that were the human heart fully to assimilate it, body and soul would be torn apart and the person would expire.1 Everyone knows that Martin Luther was an emotional man.2 His love of the Baby Jesus, the Gospel, his wife, and his closest friends is legendary. Equally well known are his negative feelings: toward colleagues who differed with him in their theology, toward the papacy and its hard-nosed followers, toward Jews and Turks, and toward peasant dirt and unruliness. Luther’s personality, his temperamental qualities, surely helps to explain his success in establishing his fame and notoriety throughout Europe within very few years. Ordinarily we look to his deeds as external acts and to the theological precepts that he articulated when we outline his impact to our classes. He wrote the Ninety-five theses against indulgences, he appeared at the Diet of Worms, he explained justification by faith and the exclusive authority of Scripture. We tend to overlook the spirit that informs all of these. The spirit he advocates is as instructive as his doctrinal teachings. He attempted to manifest this spirit. In virtually everything he wrote, Luther opened himself as a person, exercising restraint, observing formalities, chiefly where the nature of his goals or his 1 Translation taken from Luther’s sermon on ‘Holy Christmas Day’, second sermon, ‘preached in the afternoon on Christmas Day at the parish church 1534’, in Eugene F.A. Klug (ed.), ­Sermons of Martin Luther (3 vols., Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1996), 1: p. 118. These three volumes are in fact Luther’s so-called Hauspostille, which, despite the common label, were delivered one-third of the time from the pulpit in the city church, St. Mary’s Church, in Wittenberg, or even occasionally in the castle church there. I have checked Klug’s translations against Klug’s source, Johann Georg Walch’s edition of Luthers sämmtliche Schriften, vol. 13b (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia Publishing House, 1892 [this is the edition I had access to]). While Klug has taken certain literary liberties, he does not depart from the Reformer’s core meaning. 2 Initially prepared for and delivered in June 2011 at conference, ‘Emotions in the Medieval and Early Modern World’, Centre for the History of Emotions Conference, the University of Western Australia, Perth.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004348882_009

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respect for some personage demanded that he do so. Otherwise, he was on display. For us historians, this is useful, for we may fairly regard Luther’s vast opus, this huge ego-document, as a mother-lode of self-revelation. He would have liked the maternal reference, for he used these images often himself, as in ‘To this day, I suckle at the Lord’s Prayer like a child, and as an old man eat and drink from it and never get my fill’.3 Had Luther been as reticent as, say, Thomas Aquinas, biographers would have to content themselves with reconstructing formally expressed thought within an impersonal context in the hope of providing some illumination.4 John Calvin is not nearly as revealing as Luther, yet his utterances have allowed biographers to identify psychic patterns.5 But Martin Luther is an ‘open book’. He allows us to look into the core of him, into his very heart. He hides little.6 For the present purpose, I am looking not so much at Luther’s formal precepts concerning the heart but at the messages he articulated for the full range of listeners in the Wittenberg setting. I have used especially Luther’s Hauspostille, for these were taken down and faithfully redacted by Luther’s long-term amanuensis Georg Rörer, who strove to record exactly what the Reformer said when he preached. His efforts to preserve and publish Luther’s works are famous. The Hauspostille appeared  in 1559, two years after Rörer’s death, with the notation on the title page: ‘… taken from Master Georg Rörer’s (of blessed memory) handwritten books, just as he perceived and c­ ollected them, faithfully, with no changes, omissions, or a­ dditions’.7 3 ‘A Simple Way to Pray’, Luther’s Works, vol. 43, Devotional Writings, Gustav K. Wiencke (ed.) (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), p. 200; drawn from ‘Eine einfälltige Weise zu beten für einen guten Freund’, wa Schriften 38, pp. 358–375. 4 For example, James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works (New York: Doubleday, 1974). 5 Recent Calvin biographers have not passed up opportunities to do so: William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Yves Krumenacker, Calvin: au-delà des légendes (Paris: Bayard, 2009); Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 6 See Winfried Schulze’s summary of approaches to historical persons’ self-revelation: ‘EgoDokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte? Vorüberlegungen für die Tagung “Ego-Dokumente,”’ introduction to idem (ed.), Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), pp. 11–30. Also, Stefan Elit, Das Ich in der frühen Neuzeit. Autobiographien—Selbstzeugnisse—Ego-Dokumente in geschichteund literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Cologne: M. Kaiser, 2005); and most recently, Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit. Individualisierungsweisen in interdisziplinärer Perspektive, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 68 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007). 7 ‘aus M. Georg Rörers seligen geschriebenen Büchern, wie er die von Jahr zu Jahr aus seinem des Doctors Mund aufgefaßt und zusammengebracht, treulich, ohn alle Aenderung,

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Veit Dietrich’s parallel rendition of the Hauspostille is less reliable;8 and the more famous Kirchenpostille, or cycle of sermons for every season of the church year, initially compiled by Zwickau burgher Stefan Roth, underwent substantial alteration, including by but not confined to Luther himself. Personal remarks were often edited out, before publication. The Kirchenpostille is more ­intellectual and spare. This examination can lead us in several directions: first, into the dimensions of Luther’s conceptualization, especially as he relates from the pulpit his central teachings to a popular, significantly unlettered audience in Wittenberg despite the university’s presence there; second, into his role in conveying late-medieval mystical spirituality to his contemporaries; and third, into his part in preparing the ground for the Lutheran emphasis on interior transformation that was soon to come and that would later evolve into what we term Pietism.

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When I was in graduate school and reading widely on the Reformation for the first time, Luther’s engagement with Erasmus on the freedom of the will stunned me for the Reformer’s categorical condemnation of reason: ‘Reason, by her conclusions and syllogisms interprets and twists the Scriptures of God whichever way she likes …. Her babblings are folly and absurdity …’.9 In his final sermon in Wittenberg in 1546, he stated that reason was the highest whore of the devil.10 Luther’s sermons reveal that throughout those parts of his ­preaching career of which we have record, he persistently voiced this conviction to the congregations before him. In contrast with Calvin among the natives

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Abbruch oder Zusatz’ (Jena: Christian Rödingers Erben, 1559). Current opinion seems to be that Rörer’s transcription—Rörer was known as a master of shorthand—of Luther’s sermons, both those given at home for the domestic household, Augustinian prebendaries, boarders, and guests; and those given in the city church, is the most reliable in reproducing the actual content: Klug, Sermons of Martin Luther, 1: p. 14. This appears as vol. 13a, Dr Martin Luthers Hauspostille nach Veit Dietrich, in the Walch collection (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1904). Walch’s original vol. 13 (1743) bears this notation in its title: Dreizehenter Theil, welcher Die Doppelte Hauspostill oder ­Erklärung der Evangelien auf alle Sonn-, Fest- und Aposteltage enthält …(Halle: ­Gebauer, 1743). Ernst F. Winter (ed.), Erasmus-Luther, Discourse on Free Will (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974), p. 125. wa Schriften 51, pp. 123–134, here at p. 126: ‘… Aber des Teuffels Braut Ratio … denn es ist die höchste Hure, die der Teuffel hat …’.

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of Geneva, he was popular among the people of Wittenberg. Day after day and week after week, Luther urged those in attendance not to resort to the rational examination of Christian doctrine. Rather, he presented the concept of the heart to his listeners: his own, their own, Christ’s, God’s, and those of other biblical characters. He hardly ever addressed humans as souls but characterized them by their hearts. This is the device of synecdoche, in this case designating the whole by one of its parts. The word and concept of the heart reposes at the center of Luther’s rhetorical strategy.11 But to this theologian, the heart could not be merely an instrument for persuading those in his (technically Johann Bugenhagen’s) spiritual care to commit themselves to the truths of Scripture. Rather, the heart was the essence of each person. The frequency of Luther’s use of it is significant in itself. Within it lie character, sincerity, specific belief, faith in God, and all inclinations that as ‘good fruits’ are attributable to the child’s and the fool’s utter reliance upon the atonement for salvation. We must form this mosaic image from the infinite iterations that Luther lays before us in his speech. These faithfully adhere to certain patterns. The theologian departs from the general Catholic view that the literal, physical hearts of sacred persons such as Jesus and Mary possess power and are deserving of veneration. If we seek lines of demarcation between much of late-medieval ­Catholicism and emerging Protestantism, this is surely one: the differential withdrawal from attribution of efficacy in earthly trials to relics, cult objects, and dedicated spaces. It is curious that Luther alone retains the actual, corporeal presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist—but he stresses that we must not examine this affirmation rationally but rather accept it in faith. ‘How it comes about we shall not be able to ascertain with our reason’.12 On another occasion, he confesses, ‘… I also cannot fathom or grasp how Christ descended into hell …. Therefore, my sincere advice is, stick to the simple words and childish

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Birgit Stolt, Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Herzens (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); with thanks to Dorothea Wendebourg for this Hinweis. The title did not pop up in my searches because of the inflected ending of Herz. Stolt summarizes, p. 51: ‘Das Herz ist Sitz des geistigen Vermögens, Verstand, Gefühl, Wille, Urteilsvermögen, Gedächtnis und anderes mehr. In seinem Herzen als dem Zentrum seines persönlichen Bewußtseins und Erkennt­ nisvermögens empfängt der Mensch im Alten Testament die Gebote Gottes, im Neuen Testament Gnade und göttliche Erleuchtung’. Stolt makes Verstand more prominent than I can accept, although mystical rather than rational Verstehen might be acceptable. She does not say this. ‘Holy Week … Fourth Sermon’, preached at the parish church 2 April 1534; Krug, Sermons, 1: p. 457. I have not located this in the 1892 Walch edition of Rörer’s Hauspostille and seek to determine whether Krug mislabeled this sermon.

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pictures and do not let the astute spirits [die scharfsinnigen geister], who want to cogitate deeply … trouble you’.13 In yet another sermon, he declares, There is no room … for a smart intellectual and disputer when it comes to … the Holy Scripture. God gave other disciplines—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine—in which we can be judicious, dispute, dig, and question as to what is right and what is not. But here with Holy Scripture, the Word of God, let disputing and questioning cease, and say, ‘God has spoken; therefore, I believe’.14 To Luther, the heart is not mere metaphor, however.15 It describes that intangible, individual personhood that even as an abstraction is real. This heart exists in reciprocal relationship with the body, for physical needs and vicissitudes can affect character just as the penetration to this kernel of religious certainty (faith) will have ramifications for the subsequent direction of the bodily self. There are bad hearts and good hearts, with Satan and his minions and the Holy Spirit and its angels ever engaged in contest over their possession. Whatever the condition of the heart, the body can never be ‘totally pure and without blemish’.16 The desires of the flesh exist in constant tension with even the most godly heart. The heart apprehends messages, whether relayed via the senses or in revelatory fashion. The Reformer’s sermons were a verbal, performative medium of communication to the hearts of his people. We are told that he was a dignified, deliberate preacher, speaking clearly. His convictions resonate through the homiletic record and are designed both to shake and to comfort his neighbors

13 14 15

16

‘Easter Eve, 1532’, ‘preached publicly on March 31, 1532’, Krug, Sermons, 1: pp. 477–478; Walch, Luthers sämmtliche Schriften (1892), 13b: col. 1870. ‘Easter Monday’, preached at the parish church 1534, Krug, Sermons, 2: p. 31; Walch (1892), 13b: col. 1911. See, out of interest, Scott Manning Stevens, ‘Sacred heart and secular brain’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds.), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 262–282, in which he notes, ‘It is not until the latter half of the seventeenth century that the Sacred Heart begins to emerge as a specific object of popular devotion with a liturgy of its own’ (p. 264). I find an earlier tradition of worshipping Christ’s body parts, with prayers to each of them even if not a full-blown liturgy. ‘Second Sunday after Epiphany, 1533’, preached at home; Klug, Sermons, 1: p. 268; Walch (1892), 13b: col. 1603. Luther continued the entrenched practice of directing his attention to marriage on this Sunday every year. His text was the Wedding at Cana.

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in their trials. The Christmas story inspires him. Preaching before Christmas dinner in 1529, Luther urged his hearers to look into their hearts ‘and see if the Word doesn’t taste [sweet] and if your heart does not also hop and leap when it hears that the angel said, “I bring you glad tidings of great joy!”’17 On Christmas morning 1532, he told his neighbors in the city church, A troubled, sorrowful heart craves nothing more than peace and comfort, to know that it has a gracious God. And this joy, whereby the sorrowful heart has rest and peace, is so great that all the world’s joy reeks in comparison. For that reason poor consciences need to be preached to as the angel here preaches: ‘Hear me, one and all, who are miserable and sorrowful in heart, for I bring a joyful tiding. You must not imagine that Christ is angry with you. For he did not come to earth and become man for that reason, that he might shove you into hell. Much less was he crucified and died for that purpose; instead he came that you might have great joy in him’.18 Yet his sentiment often recurs at other times of the year. All manner of human suffering is endured in the heart, and it is precisely there where it must be relieved. Luther holds out comfort to all who are able to apprehend and hold tight to that salve that God offers in the sacrifice of His son. A theme that permeates Luther’s preaching and that of numerous followers who come after him is consolation (Trost). At Easter, he declares, ‘… We must not only believe that Christ died and rose from the dead in his own person, but also that we partake of this suffering and resurrection as a treasured gift and deserve genuine comfort from the same …. Clearly Christ wishes to comfort us with his resurrection’.19 At a wholly other time of year, he opines, ‘… Christ … was made King that he should evangelize, that is, comfort and strengthen the poor, timid, sorrowing hearts’.20 This is another example of synecdoche, to be sure, but Luther indicates as he uses it that this consolation and this faith must occupy the heart as the seat of personhood. 17 18 19 20

wa Schriften 29, Predigten 1529, no. 78, p. 660. ‘Holy Christmas Day, First Sermon’, given in the city church 1532, Klug, Sermons, 1: p. 106; Walch (1892), 13b: cols. 1447–1448. ‘Holy Easter, 1533’, preached at the parish church, 13 April 1533, Krug, Sermons, 2: p. 14; Walch (1892), 13b: col. 1891. ‘Third Sunday in Advent’, first sermon, 1532, preached at home; Klug, Sermons, 1: p. 64; Walch (1892), 13b: col. 1398. On Luther’s theology of suffering see Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering. Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early M ­ odern Germany (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2012), chs. 4, 5, pp. 84–125.

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The real change which Christ came to effect is an inward change of the human heart, just as I now have a different mind, courage, and perception than I did when we were still controlled by the papacy and before the blessed gospel was revealed anew …. Salvation depends on the heart being enlightened and receiving a new seal, so that it can say, ‘I know that God accepts me just as I am, and that this truly applies to me because He has sent his son, let him become a human being, so that through him I would be able to overcome sin and death and be assured of having eternal life. That is the real transformation! For my heart had never before known or believed that. But now my heart does know and believe that, and for that reason I have a completely different outlook than before’.21 This is the bolt of lightning that had struck Luther, though it was not the literal one that frightened him in a field in July 1505. Beginning not later than his exchange with Erasmus, he shuns inquiries into the availability of this scriptural electricity to all humans. God has placed this matter beyond people’s ken. It pertains to the hidden God, Deus absconditus. Yet, Luther preaches, the permeation of the heart will not only lay to rest all the torments of flesh and spirit that beset us; it will radiate outward in love of neighbor.22 The word ethics is too dry, too abstract for the spirit of service that must seize the Christian heart. He must passionately seek the wellbeing of his fellows. The role of the cleric is to remind his hearers in every setting of God’s deep love for each of them and to facilitate their consolation in ‘this vale of tears’. He frames this conviction in personal terms: ‘What is it that makes the heart pure? The answer is that there is no better way of making it pure than through the highest purity, which is God’s Word. Get that into your heart and order your life by it, and your heart will become pure’. Your neighbor will be the direct beneficiary of the love in your heart, ‘which flows from the inside of the heart like a fresh stream that goes on flowing and cannot be stopped or dried up’. This love says: ‘I love you, not because you are good or bad; for I draw my love, not from your goodness, as from another’s fountain, but from 21 22

‘Holy Christmas Day, Fourth Sermon’, preached in the Lutherhalle on 27 December 1534; Klug, Sermons, 1: p. 149; Walch (1892), 13b: cols. 1495–1496. Luther was possibly aware of a similar communitarian emphasis in the preaching of the famous preacher of Strasbourg, Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg. See Thomas A. Brady, Jr, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 140–144, for a discussion of this element in Geiler’s aspirations for his hearers.

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my own little spring, from the Word, which is grafted in my heart and which bids me to love my neighbor’. Then it flows out abundantly and is there for all who need it, touching both the good and the bad, friend and foe …. Look! This is a love that flows out of the heart, not into it; for it finds nothing in it from which it can draw this love, but because he is a Christian and lays hold of the Word, which in itself is altogether pure, it also makes his heart so pure and full of genuine love that he lets his love flow out to every man and does not stop at anybody, no matter who the person is.23 We today are excruciatingly aware of all the categories of humanity to whom Luther’s love of neighbor did not extend. Luther’s heart seems not to be the passive recipient of God’s gift, yet at no point does he lay down a program for appropriation. The precise relationship in time and action between God’s love and the Christian’s is deliberately vague. Perhaps only the limitations of language make it seem as if the human heart has a capacity to open itself to divine love or to close itself off. This would, however, bring Luther too close to Erasmus’s vision of cooperation with divine grace. God, too, has a heart, and it is filled with love for frail humankind. Jesus’s heart is both the same as the Father’s and stimulated by submission to it. … You must no longer contemplate the suffering of Christ [as the Catholics do]… but pass beyond that and see his friendly heart and how this heart beats with such love for you that it impels him to bear with pain your [bad] conscience and your sin. Then your heart will be filled with love for him and the confidence of your faith will be strengthened. Now continue and rise beyond Christ’s heart to God’s heart and you will see that Christ would not have shown this love for you if God in His eternal love had not wanted this, for Christ’s love for you is due to his obedience to God.24 The devil’s heart, as one might expect, is filled with malicious intent, and the deeds it generates are precisely parallel. Luther counts himself as the object of diabolical predations, personalizing his message as ever. The birth of Christ 23

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‘Sermon on the Sum of the Christian Life 1532’, preached at Wörlitz, 24 November 1532, in Luther’s Works, vol. 51, John W. Doberstein (ed.) (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), pp. 269–270. ‘A Meditation on Christ’s Passion’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 42, Martin O. Dietrich (ed.) (­Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), p. 13.

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should give rise within the Christian heart to unspeakable joy. ‘It is a fact, when this joyous image reigns in a person’s heart, then the evil launched by the devil becomes as nothing, though indeed still very real and damaging’.25 Overall, the goal of Luther’s ministry to others and his wish for himself, as revealed in the Hauspostille as well as others of his texts is as follows: … Where the Word remains in the heart and people diligently ponder it, there it fashions hearts which are pure, obedient, faithful, selfless, ready to help, humble and gentle …. Grant me your grace and open my heart so that I may be attentive to and retain what I hear when Your Word is preached. Among such folks who long for the Word and want to retain it, there the devil finds neither room nor abode, else the longing would be lacking.26 The best that can be achieved in this life is a heart that is ‘circumspect, focused, steadfast, and swept clean [of the thorns of attachment to worldly things]’. ­Luther concedes that ‘trial and tribulation, adversity and temptation will not be lacking’.27 Luther lacked the sanguinity of Zwingli and Calvin, who anticipated that the elect would make improvement, progress indeed that might be perceptible by those clerics and elders who scrutinized them, during their lives.28 The Wittenberger adhered to the position that irresistible sin would cause all Christians spiritual pain—literally, pangs of conscience. As to him during his own youth, this could become an insupportable burden. He saw his pastoral duty as relating God’s reassurance and comfort to such as these and not just to castigate people for their failings. As his sermons repeatedly reveal, Calvin preferred castigation.

25 26 27 28

‘Holy Christmas Day’, Second Sermon (‘preached in the afternoon on Christmas Day at the parish church, 1534’), Klug, Sermons, 1: p. 111. ‘Sexagesima Sunday, 1534’, preached at home, Klug, Sermons, 1: p. 287; Walch (1892), 13b: col. 1655. Ibid., pp. 289–290; Walch (1892), 13b: cols. 1659, 1661. I have argued to the reviewers of this manuscript that Calvin’s preaching, written down verbatim over an eleven-year period by Denis Raguenier and his staff, reveals an unremitting emphasis on the laity’s ability to control its inclinations toward evil if only it would. Even theologically, Calvin includes the possibility of daily improvement in the Institutes: ‘No one shall set out so inauspiciously as not daily to make some headway, though it be slight. Therefore, let us not cease so to act that we may make some increasing progress in the way of the Lord’. Translation from Hugh T. Kerr (ed.), Calvin’s Institutes. A new compend (Louisville, ky: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1989), Part 6, ‘The Christian life’, p. 93.

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This scrutiny of Luther’s insistence on the centrality of the human heart as o­ bject, recipient, and generator of love takes one inevitably to the persistent question of Luther’s mysticism. In his expository writings, he is m ­ atter-of-fact, resorting to the very historical rationalizations that in other settings he ­rejected, explaining why the patriarchs had multiple wives or why Dinah was culpable in being raped. In the natural, earthly sphere, humans had to resort to ­reason.29 Viewed through the lens of the preaching of the Word, however, these explanations of Bible stories in their worldly circumstances, too, become more heartfelt. The capacities of the heart are of a higher order than those of the mind. Luther’s mysticism has been well explored, in studies by Alois M. Haas, Bengt Hoffman, and Heiko Oberman; and most recently by Volker Leppin.30 Particularly Hoffman accuses rationally minded modern scholars of overlooking the intensely non-rational and emotional core of Luther’s religiosity, a conclusion I share if not the path by which to arrive there. There is no need, from my perspective, to make Luther into a slavish imitator of the medieval mystics whom he consistently admired: Bernard of Clairvaux, Johann Tauler, and the ‘Frankfurter’ author of the Theologia Germanica. The unifying quality of Luther’s invocations of the heart would accord with sapientia experientalis or ‘experiential wisdom’, that which comes through a Christian’s perception of the rushing wind of God in her heart. Preaching the Word in a concrete ecclesiastical setting captures this could-be spiritual cyclone and ties it to the ground. As Oberman has noted, we do not find Luther either p ­ racticing or advocating ecstatic union with God, and he did not levitate! Not even his heartfelt joy 29 30

B.A. Gerrish, ‘Luther’s belief in reason’, in H.G. Koenigsberger (ed.), Luther, a Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), pp. 196–209. In her new biography of Luther, Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017), p. 103, Lyndal Roper has opined that the Reformer moved away from the mystical attractions of his younger years, ‘toward a more intellectual engagement with the Bible’. I find, based, as this essay argues, on Georg Rörer’s transcription of Luther’s so-called Hauspostille, that in his preaching to family at home and to the public in the City Church, the clergyman admonished against rational analysis of theology and stressed the emotive transformation of the heart that results from the Christian’s loving interaction with God. The Hauspostille reaches into 1534. Alois Haas, ‘Luther und die Mystik’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 60 (1986), pp. 177–207; Bengt M. Hoffman, Luther and the mystics (New York: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976); Heiko A. Oberman, ‘Simul gemitus et raptus: Luther and mysticism’, in Steven E. Ozment (ed.), The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), pp. 219–251; Leppin, Die fremde Reformation. Luthers mystische Wurzeln (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016).

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­attains the peak of ecstasy. He does not hint at the Eckhartian error of a Vergottung of human beings, of the divine residing so closely within them that the separation of the divine and the creaturely natures becomes blurred. Just as the bestseller, The imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis was not mystical in extreme ways, so Luther’s admiration of Tauler and the Frankfurter need not, and does not, lead to rapture. Nevertheless, Luther’s testimony to and advocacy of the experience of joy at God’s gifts permeates his homiletic record. In his introduction to the 1518 edition of Theologia Germanica, he clearly implies his sense of rootedness in a venerable tradition and of kinship with the content: It is now brought home to me how false it is when many learned people speak disparagingly about us Wittenberg theologians, alleging that we are disseminating novelties. They speak as though there would not have been people in the past and in other places who said what we say …. Read this booklet, anyone, and determine for yourself whether the theology as we do it in Wittenberg is newfangled or in a solid tradition. This book is certainly not new.31 Even though Luther wrote this in 1518, modifying the foreword that he had composed for the 1516 printing, and even though his theology took shape and continued to evolve during the 1520s, there are a number of striking differences between Luther’s own utterances and those of the anonymous Frankfurter of a century and a half earlier. Theologia Germanica uses the word heart hardly at all—and then strictly in a rhetorical sense. Further, it repeatedly speaks of the divination (vergottung in the original32) of the godly person. This smacks quite strongly of the idea of God’s indwelling within the soul, which leans toward Eckhartian heresy. The expert on Luther and mysticism, Bengt Hägglund, prefers to see Vergottung as justification rather than deification.33 My own less theologically expert reading would not allow for that departure from the literal meaning of the word. Likewise, I cannot accept Vergottung as defined by T. Mannermaa.34 Luther’s God indeed pours out his love into the Christian 31

Bengt Hoffman (ed. and trans.), The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 54. 32 Wolfgang von Hinten (ed.) ‘Der Franckforter’ (‘Theologia Deutsch’ [this is the alternative title for Theologia Germanica]). Kritische Textausgabe (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1982), passim. 33 Hägglund, The background of Luther’s Doctrine of Justification in Late Medieval Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 5–10. 34 Mannermaa, Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus. Rechtfertigung und Vergottung (Hanover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1989); see the comments of Robert Kolb, Martin Luther,

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heart (not soul) and refurbishes it entirely, but the person remains who he was before the encounter. Certain qualities may remain as a residue within Luther’s homiletics and his theology that are prominent in the fourteenthcentury devotional work: the receptivity to God’s work, the abandonment of preoccupation with the self, the truly intimate connection to the Deity—without any hint of union between them, however. Additionally, Luther comes to emphasize—and this subject appears repeatedly in his perorations, no matter what the scriptural text—calling in the world. The Frankfurter, by contrast, is perceptibly still part of a culture that values asceticism and withdrawal.35 What binds Luther and this prominent medieval predecessor is the conviction that one’s encounter with God is transformative, engenders the flow of love outward into all human relations, and affords the recipient infinite c­ onsolation in the midst of tribulation. Luther is far more explicit than the earlier author concerning the second and third, and perhaps this is because he is speaking in every instance to an audience that contains a significant admixture of simple and illerate folk. These were not the ones who would purchase and read any of the numerous editions of Theologia Germanica or of The Imitation of Christ that appeared in the sixteenth century. The possibility of inspiring these parishioners and, in the home, servants to open their hearts lay in the audible sermon.36 The model to which Luther adhered more closely is the love of Jesus as expressed by Bernard of Clairvaux. In the Reformation era, preachers of every denomination and stripe cited him with admiration.37 In Luther’s case, we ought not to overlook the role of the mentor Johann Staupitz as a channel of

35

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confessor of the faith. Christian theology in context (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 127–129. Cf. Steven E. Ozment’s treatment of Luther’s departures from the stance of the author of Theologia Germanica in his book, Mysticism and Dissent. Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 14–28. Luther did not press hard on the concept of fides ex auditu as Calvin did—the belief that only the Word preached aloud by an appointed clergyman in church could set the Holy Spirit in motion within the souls of the elect. See my discussion of this in The Reformation of Feeling. Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 103, 112–113. Berndt Hamm, ‘From the medieval “love of God” to the “faith” of Luther—a contribution to the history of penitence’, in Robert J. Bast (ed.), The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety. Essays by Berndt Hamm (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 128– 152, here at pp. 131–134, 147–152. A detailed exploration is Franz Posset, Peter Bernhardus: Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies 168 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1999). Luther especially agreed with Bernhard’s sola fide and sola gratia (pp. 163–234).

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mystical devotion to the young friar in his charge. Luther credited his confessor with showing him how to love Christ and leading him to a new conception of repentance. He instructed, then, Luther’s heart.38 Luther had a keen sense of the limitations of his ordinary hearers, whether in the parish church or at home. The few intellectuals who were present could well benefit from simple reminders of their need to become as little children and to open their own hearts to the experience of divine love that surpassed understanding. The objectives of Luther’s homiletic program were to inform and fill in the great maw of popular ignorance of Holy Scripture by his explorations of beloved texts; to relate these to ordinary lives; both to stimulate his neighbors’ awareness of participating in sin and to extend comfort to those with sensitive consciences; and to underscore the reality and immediacy of God’s loving gifts. Finally, he exerted himself to cultivate love of neighbor in his domestic community, insisting that love of God must find spontaneous expression in this form. Luther’s heart, however oriented toward the heavens, was firmly rooted in telluric reality. God created people on the earth and of the earth; He called them to live out their days in this very embodied sphere, all the while acknowledging the authorial creative Hand and responding to the loving Father. He shared his two-fold existence with his listeners. At least some responded.

iii

The contest over Luther’s ideational legacy was fierce after his death. At its core, it concerned correct belief: how Christ was present in the Eucharist; whether the Christian was obligated to perform good works and how this performance or lack of it was tied to divine grace; whether in the Fall people’s will had been so completely despoiled that they no longer bore in any respect the image of God.39 Each Evangelical party launched polemics against the other and simultaneously differentiated itself from Catholics, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Jews. The Book of Concord only partly resolved differences among Lutherans. At the same time, a disciplinary mood sifted down upon the land. 38 39

Volker Leppin, Martin Luther (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), pp. 78–88. Cf. Leppin’s new book, Die fremde Reformation, n. 30 above. On the last point of controversey, see Robert J. Christman, Doctrinal Controversy and Lay Religiosity in Late Reformation Germany. The Case of Mansfeld, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Thomas A. Brady, Jr, lists six major bones of contention: German histories, in The Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 264.

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Every authority exerted itself to impose not alone proper doctrinal adherence but upright behavior. Church attendance became obligatory, and moral offen­ ses met with harsher punishment than they ordinarily had in the Catholic past. The word heretic was on many tongues. Probably a distinct minority of Lutheran clergy, most of whom adhered in due course to the Formula and the Book of Concord, stood by a version of the true faith that, abstract theology aside, demanded that true Christians allow God to grip their hearts and convert them to profound inner repentance and acknowledgment of divine love. These asserted that faith must alter the heart, and this experience must show itself in the more or less successful leading of a godly life. Such Evangelicals were not Anabaptists, but they shared with that category of believer the conviction that faith, the presence of God’s love, transforms the recipient. Claims of belonging to the community of God had to be borne out by evidence of that membership. The second half of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century before the rise of what most of us regard as the Pietist movement were rich in individuals whose connections to one another and whose reception within their home churches have not been adequately studied: men such as Martin Moeller (1547–1606), Johann Arndt (1555–1621), and Paul Gerhard (1607–1676). We know even less about the ways in which such men appropriated the teachings of their master, Martin Luther— which works in his huge corpus were available to them as early anthologies were compiled, and to which ones they were partial.40 I am a­ rguing here that 40

I have been fascinated to become aware of a deep fissure within the ranks of Pietism scholars between those (prominent among them Hartmut Lehmann and Martin Brecht) who see all groups stressing piety from Tauler to modern Pentecostals as Pietists; and others (led by Johannes Wallmann) who say that such a broad application of this label deprives Pietism of any historical meaning, and who confine the movement to Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke and their followers. For an introduction to Lehmann’s argumentation, see ‘Engerer und weiterer und erweiterter Pietismusbegriff: Anmerkungen zu den kritischen Anfragen von Johannes Wallmann an die Konzeption der “Geschichte des Pietismus,”’ in idem, Transformationen der Religion in der Neuzeit. Beispiele aus der Geschichte des Protestantismus, Veröffentlichungen des Max-PlanckInstituts für Geschichte 230 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 156–175. This volume is a collection of Lehmann’s pertinent essays. Cf. Lehmann, ‘Four competing concepts for the study of religious reform movements, including Pietism, in early modern Europe and in North America’, in Confessionalism and Pietism. Religious reform in early modern Europe (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2006), pp. 313–322. For an overview that is written from this perspective, see Martin Brecht (ed.), Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), Brecht’s introduction, pp. 1–10; and the inclusion of Klaus Deppermann, ‘Der englische Puritanismus’ as ch. 1, pp. 11–55. For Wallmann’s positions, Der Pietismus (Göttingen:

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such men, as well as those members of the laity who sought out their services, their Bible study groups, their devotional works, and especially in Gerhard’s case, their hymns, were true followers of Luther’s heart-centered Christianity. They were indeed attracted to the spiritual writings of Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, the anonymous Frankfurter, Johannes Tauler, and Thomas à ­Kempis; but it may be that Luther served as an indispensable legitimator, publicist, and inspirational funnel of late medieval mystical devotion to these men. As we have seen in excerpts from the Hauspostille, Luther had shared with them his sense of the loving immediacy of God. Perhaps because of his exposure to the mystics’ devotion, he could write of the intimate bond that he shared with the Heavenly Father. How different this is from Calvin’s preached apperception of the Divine! We need to assess the interaction between Luther’s spirituality as preached and practiced (he said) and that which was promoted by some of his later adherents. The heart is manifestly present in the work of each one. Martin Moeller (1547–1606) shared Luther’s concern to impart both knowledge and consolation to his parishioners. Highly literate, he did not attend a university—which in Saxony in the late sixteenth century was still not u ­ nusual. He was well apprised of the mystical ‘classics’ and conveyed them in his sermons and other devotional writings. He held prayer and edification meetings in his parsonage after accepting a post in Görlitz toward the end of his life. Jakob Böhme was a member of his congregation. Moeller’s works were widely reprinted for over a century after his death. These were mainly his sermons for the year around; his meditations on the Church Fathers; his manual for preparing to die; his soliloquy on the Passion of Christ; and his explication of the heavenly wedding of Christ and his Church. He was a peaceable man who did not seek conflict, but he was suspected of harboring sympathy for Calvinism. The following sentiment is representative of the mood he sought to instill in his dying charges as well as those who attended them on their deathbeds: Lord Jesus, you are my bliss, you are my joy, you are my money and my property; you are my honor, reputation, glory, desire, and eternal wealth. I love you heartily, Lord, my strength—you, Lord, my rock, my fortress, my rescuer, my God, the treasure on which I rely, my shield and the callus of my healing, and my protection. If I have you, I have no curiosity about Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); and his Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995, 2008, 2010). Just as I am affirming a role for Luther, so I would not rule out influences from numerous other directions in the formation of the Pietist configuration. See Peter Schicketanz, Der Pietismus von 1675 bis 1800 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), on this point pp. 19–32.

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heaven and earth; and even if both body and soul should [threaten to] wither away [verschmachten], you, God, are throughout the comfort of my heart and my portion. Such faith, such love, such fervor toward you, my Lord Jesus, has taken possession of my heart and strengthened me that I fear neither distress nor death.41 Like Moeller, Johann Arndt (1555–1621) had no formal training in theology. He studied medicine and along with it alchemy. His first major book, Vom wahren Christenthumb heilsamer Busse, wahrem Glauben, heyligem Leben und Wandel der rechten wahren Christen (Concerning True Christianity, Salutary Repentance, [and the] Holy Life and Conduct of Proper [and] True Christians) contains nothing that Luther would have objected to.42 It enjoyed tremendous currency, with 133 editions of all or part appearing in the seventeenth century alone. His second book was just as popular: Paradiß Gärtlein, voller christlicher Tugenden …(Little Garden of Eden, Full of Christian Virtues, [and] How by Means of Devout, Edifying, and Consoling Prayers, These May be Planted in the World, toward the Goal of Practicing True Christianity).43 This was reprinted 42 times in seventeenth-century Germany. Martin Brecht quotes the statement of Giessen theologian Johann Georg May that every household in his city possessed a ­copy.44 Times were different now, and it is perhaps a mercy that Luther had long since gone to his rest. But in my judgment, the spiritual assumptions and mood of Arndt have a prominent antecedent in Luther’s sermons as well as others of his works. Arndt was a professed and practicing Lutheran. Hardly any page of these two handbooks is devoid of the sentiments that Luther had often voiced. 41

42 43 44

Manuale de praeparatione ad mortem = Heylsame und sehr nützlche Betrachtung, wie ein Mensch Christlich leben, und seliglich sterben sol (Görlitz: Rambau, 1605). An earlier edition appears to have been written in 1593, the date of the author’s introduction. The quotation I have used comes from a 1673 edition: Christliche Lebens- und Selige Sterbe = Kunst, Heilsame, und sehr nützliche Betrachtung, wie ein Christ sein gantzes Leben führen, in steter Busse zubringen, und sich allezeit zu einem seligen Sterb Stündlein bereit und gefast halten, auch dermahleins nach Gottes Willen in kräfftigem Glaubens = Trost wider allerley Anfechtung und Schrecken durch einem sanfften und seligen Tod von dieser Welt frölich und freudig abscheiden könne und solle (Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Ellinger, 1673), pp. 193–194. Horn meines Heyls. Not even Grimm makes the meaning exactly clear. In this context, it would appear to refer to thickened skin or the formation of a scab as a defense against attack from without. But it could allude to animal horn as a figurative human shield. Frankfurt/Main: Rosen, 1605. Magdeburg: Schmidt, 1612. Brecht, ‘Das Aufkommen der neuen Frömmigkeitsbewegung in Deutschland’, in idem (ed.), Der Pietismus vom Siebzehnten, pp. 112–203, here at p. 149.

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Faith will alter behavior. Through prayer, Arndt says in Paradiß Gärtlein, the devout ‘come into the company of angels [and] attain heavenly wisdom and the gifts of the Holy Ghost’.45 The words of prayer ‘awaken our hearts, lift up our spirits to God, inflame devotion, strengthen faith and hope, and are useful to those who desire to persevere in asking, seeking, and knocking’.46 In The little Garden of Eden, Arndt prays and urges his readers to pray, Oh, my Lord Jesus Christ, you most noble lover of my soul! Grant me your grace, so that one again I love you from my heart and say to you, ‘Heart’s beloved Lord Jesus, let me find nothing in my heart other than your love! Remove everything from my heart that is not your love, for I desire to have nothing else in my heart than your love’. Oh, how friendly, how gracious and sweet is your love! How it refreshes my soul, how it delights my heart!47 A detailed comparison of Arndt with Luther would reveal whether Arndt placed less emphasis on the love and service of neighbor that would result from the divinely touched heart. Arndt swore to his final breath that he was totally faithful to the Augsburg Confession and the Book of Concord. His emphasis upon the fruits of faith aroused doubts in his most watchful colleagues, who guarded the doctrine of justification by faith against the slightest compromise. Another loyal Lutheran clergyman, Paul Gerhardt (1606–1676), expressed his spiritual fervor in a medium that Luther did make deliberate use of: song. His several hundred hymns enjoyed frequent reprinting and inclusion in numerous anthologies—down till today. Like Moeller and Arndt, the emotionality of his faith aroused doubts in his mistrustful, scrupulously orthodox and stern clerical colleagues. As in the cases of Moeller and Arndt, and many others, their teaching of feeling and their demonstrativeness wakened admiration among their parishioners.48 This very popularity must have exacerbated the resentment among other pastors and preachers. Yet all lived out their lives in respectable ecclesiastical posts.

45 46 47 48

Cited from the 1753 edition (Leipzig: Johann Samuel Heinsii [Heinsius’s] Erben), p. 17. Ibid., pp. 23–24. My translation. Reprinted at the back of Paul Gerhardts geistliche Lieder, 2nd ed. (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974), pp. 211–212. See Christian Bunner’s biography of Gerhardt, Paul Gerhardt: Weg—Werk—Wirkung, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), for a general account of some of Gerhardt’s fellows’ mistrust.

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Gerhardt’s lyrics are alive with feeling. He even resorted to the venerable Catholic practice, previously rejected by Lutherans, of meditating on each of the wounds of Christ at Eastertime.49 Johann Sebastian Bach is indebted to him for ‘O Sacred Head Now Wounded’. For Pentecost or Whitsun, Gerhardt offered the following first two verses of a much longer hymn: O you sweetest joy, O you most beautiful light, Who does not leave us untended in our love and sorrow, Spirit of the Most High, Highest Prince, Who will hold and sustain us in all things Without ceasing, Hear, hear what I am singing! You are the best gift That a person could name. When I wish for you and have you, I have exhausted all my wishes. Ach, yield yourself, Come to me in my heart, That you who were born into the world Choose me to be your temple.50



iv

These men are but examples drawn from within the formally defined Lutheran sphere who embody in their outlook and spirituality a derivational line from Luther’s preaching. Moeller, Arndt, and Gerhardt were correct in tacitly maintaining that they trod the same way as their model and authority, Martin ­Luther. To be sure, they, like Luther, had read Tauler and ‘the Frankfurter’, but a crucial figure linking and legitimating those writers and them themselves was the Wittenberg Reformer. These Lutheran clergymen insisted in the face of orthodox neo-scholasticism and dour resistance that God’s love must inflame the hearts of human beings in order to make them Christians. The inflamed heart could not help reciprocating its feeling, both to the Heavenly Father 49 50

Paulus Gerhardts geistliche Lieder, pp. 25–32. Ibid., p. 51.

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and to those living here, the proverbial neighbors. Luther’s legacy took many forms and directions, but we should not forget this one as well. Leppin has noted, however, that in the main, the Age of Orthodoxy took diverse Lutherans in another direction, that of correct theology.51 Nonetheless, ­ Luther’s example lent approbation to various expressions of love, including the erotic bonds between clergymen and their lawfully wedded wives, and it condoned expressive religiosity among those who came after him. Luther was not only temperamentally emotional. He also regarded the heart as the centerpiece of faith; his coat of arms, designed by him in 1530 at Saxon electoral heir apparent Johann Friedrich’s request, laid out for all the world to see the sum total of his belief, in symbolic form. Apparently Luther’s design was executed in Nuremberg, for on 8 July 1530, he responded to Nuremberg secretary Lazarus Spengler’s inquiry as follows: Because you wish to know whether my coat of arms conveys what I desire it to, I shall answer most amiably and tell you my original thoughts and the reasons why my seal is a symbol of my theology. The first [element] should be a black cross in a heart, which retains its natural color [red], so that I myself may be reminded that faith in the Crucified saves us. For that one is justified who believes in his heart. Even though it is a black cross, which mortifies and which also cause pain, it leaves the heart its natural color. It does not kill but leaves a person living. ‘The just shall live by faith’ but by faith in the Crucified. Such a heart should stand in the middle of a white rose, to show that faith gives joy, comfort, and peace. In other words, it places the believer within a white, joyous rose, for this faith does not give peace and joy as the world gives. That is why the rose should be white and not red, for white is the color of the spirits and the angels. Such a rose should stand in a sky-blue field, symbolizing that such joy in spirit and faith is the beginning of the future heavenly joy, which begins already but is grasped in hope [and is] not yet revealed. And around this field is a golden ring, symbolizing that such blessedness in heaven lasts forever and has no end. Such blessedness is precious, beyond all joy and goods, just as gold is the most valuable, most precious metal.52

51 Leppin, Die fremde Reformation, p. 207. 52 My translation. wa br 5, no. 1628, p. 445.

chapter 9

Martin Luther’s Perfect Death i

The Late Medieval Good Death

Martin Luther was not afraid to die. He said so repeatedly. When he was ­extremely ill, as in 1527 and 1537, he placed himself in God’s hands—his most serious compunction having to do with the effects of his absence and lack of support on his young family.1 Luther was born into an era in which the ideal of the ars moriendi, the art of dying, was current.2 By at least 1517, he was surely familiar with Johann Staupitz’s ‘Büchlein von der Nachfolgung des willigen Sterbens Christi’, published in 1515;3 and he offered to lend George Spalatin his copy of a handbook, ‘opusculum de arte moriendi’.4 It is unknown how many lay people gained access to the images contained in the block books on good dying that circulated in some priestly hands.5 By means of the preached word, we may imagine that at least city dwellers had impressed upon them the need to make a sincere confession to a priest on their deathbed and allow neither guilt nor bodily pain thereafter to interfere with their Church-mediated destination. If they gave in to despair in the interim, the dark creatures of Satan waited under the bed and perched on the bedpost to seize that soul the moment its physical host expired and claim it for eternal perdition. If the dying person, aided 1 See Martin Brecht’s description of the Reformer’s behavior when he thought he was dying in 1527: Martin Luther, vol. 2, Ordnung und Abgrenzung der Reformation 1521–1532 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1986), pp. 204–205; and his life-threatening episode in 1537: Ibid., vol. 3, Die Erhaltung der Kirche 1532–1546 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1987), pp. 185–189. 2 See Franz Falk, Die deutsche Sterbebüchlein von der ältesten Zeit des Buchdruckes bis zum Jahre 1520 (Cologne: Bachem, 1890; reissued Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1969), especially the nine illustrations. For a broader survey of late medieval dying, see the texts collected by Hiram Kümper, Tod und Sterben: Lateinische und deutsche Sterbeliteratur des Spätmittelalters (Duisburg and Cologne: WiKu-Verlag Dr Stein, 2007). 3 ‘De imitanda morte Jesu Christi libellus. 1515’, in I.K.F. Knaake (ed.), Iohannis Stavpitii … Opera qvae reperiri potvervnt omnia (Potsdam: A. Krausnick, 1867), i: pp. 50–88. 4 wa br 1, to Spalatin, no. 39, 6 May 1517, editor’s preliminary notes, p. 95. 5 Arthur Imhof, Ars moriendi. Die Kunst des Sterbens einst und heute (Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), pp. 32–51; Blockbücher des Mittelalters: Bilderfolgen als Lektüre, edited by Gutenberg Gesellschaft and Gutenberg Museum (Mainz: Gutenberg-Museum, 1991), pp. 164–169;342–345; Arnold Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter, 4th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), esp. ch. 21, ‘Der Tod und seine Liturgie’, pp. 659–683.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004348882_010

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by the crucified Christ and numerous saints, remained faithful to his deathbed confession, eucharist, and extreme unction, then the salvation of his soul was assured. In that case, the angels prevailed at the moment of departure, bearing the spiritual person upward, and the diabolical imps scattered away in frustration. In 1519, when Luther penned his ‘Sermon on Preparing to Die’, and despite his having the same year, in a work to comfort an ill Frederick the Wise, dismissed invoking the fourteen Holy Helper saints as superstition, the saints as a larger ‘communion of saints’ are still present at the Christian’s decease.6 They are united with the recumbent one in the sacrament of the E ­ ucharist, which Luther recommends taking at the point of dying. The devil, too, is very much on hand as a counter force, conniving to draw sufferers away from divine reassurance. Luther’s imagined deathbed was still fraught with danger.7 Even as, over the years, Luther worked out his greater reliance upon justification by faith in determining eternal futures, nevertheless especially to be avoided were disorderly and dishonorable deaths, including as a result of accidents, strokes, or heart attacks, which were unexpected. These usually made it impossible for representatives of the Church to fulfill their role, and increased the likelihood that the frightened or suddenly struck-down Christian would be inadequately reconciled with God before breathing his last. The Wittenberg jurist and prior Henning Göde, Luther said at his dinner table, did not think he was about to die and regarded the last rites as unnecessary. But two days later he was dead. This should warn people to prepare properly for a good death. He admonished his hearers that we should always be prepared to take our leave in a Christian manner.8 People who succumbed by murder and suicide were especially culpable, without the official faith as yet making adjustments for circumstances and states of mind. Nevertheless, Luther touchingly comforts the widow of a suicide. The devil had taken hold of her husband, he said, but Christ was more powerful than the devil.9 Zwingli’s death on the field of battle horrified Luther; he compared it to that of the heretic Arius and took it as evidence of the Zurich Reformer’s errors and unenviable destination.10 He  ­regretted 6 7

8 9 10

Neil R. Leroux, Martin Luther as Comforter: Writings on Death, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 133 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 45–80. I will not pause to consider Richard Marius’s biography portraying Luther as terrified of death. Marius was trained in rhetoric, and when he wrote his biography, he was facing his own death. wa tr 1, no. 529, p. 247. wa br 4, no. 1366, pp. 624–625. Johannes Mathesius, Historien, Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes, Doctoris Martini Luthers, anfang, lehr, leben vnd sterben, Alles ordendlich der Jarzal nach,

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John the Baptist’s ‘shameful death’.11 When in 1533 he wrote a letter of sympathy to Benedict Pauli (1490–1552), who had just lost his son in a fall from the house-top, possibly in a bird-hunting accident, Luther realized that the paternal grief was even greater because death had claimed the son suddenly.12 In uttering his wish for a good death over and over, Luther included his desire for calm, prayerful interaction with God when his stündlein, the hour of his death, finally arrived.13 In his recommendations concerning prayer in ‘Eine einfältige Weise zu beten … 1535’, he concluded the part on the Lord’s Prayer, ‘When the time comes, give us a gracious little hour (stündlein) and blessed departure from this vale of tears, so that we are not frightened by death nor lose heart, but with firm faith commend our souls into Thy hands’.14 Martin thanked God that his boisterous, outspoken father managed to die a good death.15 In Luther’s vision of that ultimate challenge, angels and demons would still be present and still contend for possession of his soul. He was confident that the forces of evil would lose. This break with the greater fears of his ancestors constituted the main difference between Luther’s dying and theirs. Of course, Luther taught that not all people would be saved. But what would damn them was their lack of faith throughout their lives and not their expressions of discomfort as they were about to expire. Such expressions would, he thought, be unfortunate if they were not representative of the faithful existence to which the Christian had at least outwardly adhered. But they alone were not damning. They might create doubt in onlookers’ minds, but in the end, only God knew the destination of each soul. Luther did, in fact, believe in God’s Providence in determining the future of each human being. At the time he died, the full weight of Calvin’s double predestination had not sunk in. Luther’s heirs and successors would rant against it in their latter-century polemics. For the Wittenberg Reformer, the crucified Christ was firmly implanted at center stage. We see this in the predella of the Cranach altarpiece in the Wittenberg

11 12 13

14 15

wie sich alle sachen zu jeder zeyt haben zugetragen (Nuremberg: n.p., 1567), fol. clxxvii recto. Cf. wa tr 3, no. 3372b, p. 295. wa tr 2, no. 1801, p. 218. wa tr 1, no. 949, pp. 477–480; Leroux, Martin Luther as comforter, p. 195. More important is U. Mennecke-Haustein, Luthers Trostbriefe (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1988). For theological revisions, see Austra Reinus, Reforming the art of dying. The Ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2007); and the astute review by Jared Wicks, Theological Studies 69 (2008), pp. 923–924. I have not made greater use of this book because it confines itself to ideas, and I am pursuing a specific important person’s actual experience and practice of death. wa Schriften 38, pp. 358–375, here at p. 362. wa tr 2, no. 1388, p. 81.

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City Church (St. Mary’s). Christians should not seek more specific knowledge than this but should take comfort in the fact of the son of God’s atonement. As ­Luther wrote to Frau Lisskirchen in Freiberg/Saxony in 1531, whenever the worry occurred to her about whether God had foreordained her for salvation, she should spit it out as though it were a piece of excrement that had fallen into her mouth.16 Luther himself had suffered from this illness many times, he told her, even to the point, he said, of eternal death. He had learned to deal with his concern. Predestination was confined to God’s hidden will and was strictly not for humans to inquire into. Still, he speculated at the dinner table that no more than ten percent of all human beings would be saved.17 Touching are the details of Luther’s own routine in Wittenberg when visiting the sick-bed of someone who lay in danger of death. He went to the bedside and leaned closely over the ill neighbor. He inquired about the nature of his or her illness and what treatment he had had. He asked whether he bore this trial patiently, for it had been sent to him by God because of sin. If he found that the individual was piously disposed, he turned to the consoling assurance that Christ had died for him and all sinners so that they could be reconciled with their Heavenly Father. They needed not fear death but be grateful for God’s great good deed. Luther would pray diligently for this person’s wellbeing. In case the afflicted thanked him and said that he could not demonstrate his gratitude, presumably in a tangible manner, Luther said this was not necessary. It was his office and his duty. He then added a parting reassurance that the sick parishioner should not be afraid. God was our gracious Father and had given us His guarantee in the Word and sacrament that we were redeemed from sin and hell.18 ii

Luther’s Own Good Death

Luther had not been feeling consistently well. Since at least 1542, in his correspondence the divine had described himself as ‘old, decrepit, lacking energy, tired, [and] cold’. In January 1546, he added ‘one-eyed’ to his list of adjectives.19 Philipp Melanchthon informed the elector’s chancellor Gregor Brück that a year before, Luther had had an episode of chest pain that he dealt with by 16 17 18 19

wa br 12, no. 4244a, p. 135. wa tr 2, no. 1336, p. 55. wa tr 2, no. 2194, pp. 356–357. wa br 11, no. 4188, to Jacob Probst in Bremen, p. 263. N. 2 provides the antecedents of this self-description.

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taking pomegranate peel.20 At his age of 62, he knew that his mortality would show itself soon, for seldom did people reach the advanced ages that are common in the West today. He was weak, he could (as his letters reveal) no longer have sex with his wife, and he was angry—angry that the baroness von Solm allowed Jews to live on her lands, angry that the people of Wittenberg did not pay his teachings the mind that Luther thought they deserved. He thought of moving to another city. He was sickly and discouraged.21 For personal ­reasons— the benefits of his siblings from the mining industry there, out of a desire to foster accord within the family of the counts of Mansfeld who ruled the land where he had been born—he allowed himself in the middle of winter to be drawn into mediation among the counts. For a man of his debilities, the trip was a foolish undertaking.22 He would have preferred to die at home in Wittenberg, and he expected to encounter the proverbial Reaper (no longer Grim) quickly upon his return. In his Eisleben funeral sermon for the Reformer, before the corpse was taken back to Wittenberg, Michael Cölius observed: ‘… Longer than a whole year ago … he went around with thoughts of death; he preached about death, he spoke about death, he wrote about death …’.23 In his subsequent funeral sermon (which has not survived, but a later version was printed), Justus Jonas said that Luther kept a personal book of prayers, which in the end ­contained twenty (biblical) verses of consolation (Trostsprüche) to help him during his own dying.24 20

Christof Schubart, Die Berichte über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, Texte und Untersuchungen (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1917), no. 25, p. 27. 21 This is the discouragement that Gerald Strauss refers to in the subsequently controversial conclusion of Luther’s house of learning. The indoctrination of the young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 302–304. 22 Wolfgang Roth, probably the secretary of Count Albrecht von Mansfeld, considered, or his boss considered, Luther’s participation to have made the effort at settlement successful: ‘… hat im fürnemmsten stuck, als kirchen, schulen, spital und anders belangend, einen seer christlichen, nutzbarn vertrag, neben dem herrn Jona aufgericht, die andern punct aber in weltlichen und zeitlichen sachen fast bis zum endt abgeredt’ (Schubart, no. 18, p. 19). But the effort failed. The apothecary in Eisleben Johann Landau reported not later than June 1546, ‘Adhuc autem fervet discordia inter comites acrior etiam quam antes. Mors enim Lutheri eos coire corpore coegit non animo’, no. 78, p. 80. Arno Sames bears this out: ‘Luthers Beziehungen zu den Mansfelder Grafen’, in Helmar Junghans (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag (2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 1: pp. 591–600 and 2: pp. 935–938; here at 1: pp. 599–600. 23 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 28, ‘Michael Cölius, Leichenpredigt auf Luther’, 20 February 1546, p. 30. 24 Schubart, no. 15, ‘Justus Jonas, Leichenpredigt auf Luther’, held in the afternoon of 19 February 1546, in the Andreaskirche, Eisleben, p. 18. Cf. ‘Etliche tröstliche Vermahnungen in

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Our sources of information on Luther’s demise are plentiful, both because of his celebrity and because of the general concern of the European people of all ranks about achieving the good death.25 If the Reformer had not expired totally at peace and affirming what he had taught, his central doctrines—­ justification by faith in Christ’s atonement and not by works, the preeminence of Scripture in determining theological verities, and the falseness of papal ­supremacy—would have been called into question, indeed refuted. The frequent printing and reprinting of every epistolary and homiletic description of his death reveal a market for such publications that owed as much to curiosity about the qualities of his morbidity as to his fame.26 Cölius scolded in his funeral sermon of February 20 in Eisleben that already some people were spreading the rumor that Luther had been found dead.27 Luther was never alone or untended. He and his cohort at the time of his demise included his two sons, Martin and Paul, who were 14 and 13 (who had returned from visiting their uncle in Mansfeld), as well as Dr of Both Laws and superintendent in Halle Justus Jonas, Mansfeld court preacher Michael Cölius or Coelius, Wittenberg theology student and future Ernestine court preacher Johannes Aurifaber,28 Luther’s famulus and personal attendant Ambrosius Rudtfeldt of Delitzsch, and nameless servants.29 In the establishment where the negotiations among the counts took place, at least the Reformer and the first six slept together in beds distributed around a large upstairs room, but Luther had resort to a stüblein, a little room directly accessible from the larger shared accommodation, which gave him separate space. sachen das heilige Wort betreffend (Sprüche mit denen sich Luther getröstet hat) 1530’, wa Schriften 30 / 2, pp. 697–710. 25 See Schubart, Luthers Tod und Begräbnis. 26 Schubart prefaces each of the 90 documents he reprints or summarizes with a brief history of its initial appearances in print. Each significant description of Luther’s departure seems to have given rise to its own controversy among specialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Schubart explores some of these in Part ii of his book, pp. 92–113; not even to mention the efforts of Catholic defamers to convince their own publics of, for example, Luther’s ‘suicide’. Catholics shared the view that a ‘bad death’ would have proved the diabolical nature of the Protestant revolt against the Mother Church, and a few exerted themselves to contrive this. See Schubart’s bibliography, pp. 136–145, which separately lists two ‘polemical periods’, 1591–1688 and 1889–1898. 27 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 28, ‘Michael Cölius, Leichenpredigt auf Luther’, p. 30. 28 Aurifaber seems to have been present because of his personal connections with the counts of Mansfeld. 29 Luther evidently brought all three sons over to Eisleben, but Hans, who was 19, must have stayed in Mansfeld longer, for he is not referred to as with his father.

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Justus Jonas, Martin Luther’s long-term, intimate colleague and friend (they nonetheless did not address each other by their first names except once, in ­Luther’s extremis), was so upset by what had transpired at 2:45 a.m. on 18 ­February 1546, that he could not write to his ruler, Elector of Saxony Johann Friedrich. Count Albrecht gave him leave to dictate to his own secretary, probably Wolfgang Roth.30 Jonas was so shaken that he could not (yet) have embroidered his account or allowed others’ memory to change his own grasp of things. His own prestige as doctor of both laws and a theologian was sufficiently secure that he did not attempt to bolster his image with his prince. Johann Friedrich knew that Jonas and Melanchthon were Luther’s closest friends. The prince had consulted them often. The clergyman’s duty at that moment, beginning at about 3:30 a.m. and ending at 4:00 a.m., he said (the hours were s­ ounded in this town), was to recount to the elector precisely what had h ­ appened. After Luther, Jonas was the senior member of the Saxon party of mediators, and the task fell to him. Luther had complained of illness shortly before arriving in Eisleben. He recovered his customary appetite and gregariousness, however, and ate and conversed well at the plentiful midday and evening repasts. He praised the food and drink and joked that the table of his fatherland suited him well.31 He took an active part in the negotiations for which he had come there, sitting still for an hour at a time, and sometimes an hour and a half. He slept and rested adequately (zimlich, which had a different meaning at that time than in modern German), and Jonas knew this because ‘his servant Ambrosius, I Doctor Jonas, his two little sons Martinus and Paulus, together with one or two more servants, slept in the room with him’. He and Coelius assisted every night in maintaining his personal practice of warming the cushions of his bed (think of Thuringia in January!), and every night over these three weeks the Reformer greeted them happily, ‘often with these words’: ‘Doctor Jonas and Herr Michl [sic], pray for our Lord God, that everything goes well with His church and His matter, [for] the council at Trent rages greatly!’32 This is both a joke and 30

31 32

This would explain why Roth was so well informed of the details that he could describe them the following day in a letter to Johann Hiltern, mayor in Regensburg, and Hans Bauer in Nuremberg (Schubart, no. 18, pp. 19–21). Jonas’s letter is reprinted in Schubart, no. 1, pp. 2–6. Or, as Count Albrecht von Mansfeld’s probable secretary Wolfgang Roth put it on February 19, ‘Lieber herr doctor und herr Michael, bittet ja fleissig für unseren Gott, daβ es ihm mit seiner kirchen sachen wol gehe, dann das concilium zu Trient und der bapst sind seer zornig auf in’. Schubart, no. 18, p. 20. If Luther said this frequently to Jonas and Cölius, he was clearly following events in Trent as closely as he could. The wit lies, of course, in

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a deadly serious entreaty. Luther meant by this that all three men ought to pray for the ongoing success of Luther’s way, the way God desired things to continue in His church and on earth, for the Catholics raging against Protestantism at the Council of Trent would try to prevail over God Himself. Luther was a master of the picturesque insult. Here he accuses the Catholic Church of seeking to undermine God’s own plan. Furthermore, every night Luther had by him, as he always did at home, his sterkküchlein, a little cake to fortify him in case he got hungry in the night; water in case he grew thirsty; and his wife’s ­home-prepared aquavit, a cure-all alcoholic distillate which was nonetheless expensive and generally within the purview of noble and other elite women to prepare and distribute to ill members of their households. According to Jonas, Luther had had Katharina’s own preparation sent to him and had it by him when he went to bed.33 Katharina was in some sense present in Eisleben. His letters to her during the weeks before his death testify to their strong relationship. He had written to her on February 14.34 On February 17, a Wednesday nach Valentini, in the morning, the princes Wolf zu Anhalt and Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, urged him to rest and not take part in the discussions. He must have been visibly fatigued. Jonas added his own admonition to comply. Luther stayed in the little room, the stüblein, took off his leggings [beinkleider] and went around in his slippers [scheublein]. From time to time, he looked out the window and prayed so fervently that the men who were with him in the room, including Jonas, overheard him. It was his custom to pray in the evening looking out a window. Yet he was happy. He asked, ‘Doctor Jonas and Herr Michl [sic], I was born and baptized here in Eisleben, what if I should stay here?’ But he went to the common dinner at midday and was his usual bon vivant. He talked a great deal and pointed out lovely sayings in the Scripture. In the general conversation, he said to one or two people, ‘When I settle the business between my dear territorial lords and, if it is God’s will, heal this rift, then I want to go home and lay myself down to sleep in a coffin and give the worms

33

34

praying to God for the success of His own plan, and also in the accusation that a Church council would rage against God! See Melanchthon’s last letter to Luther, dated 18 February: ‘Reverende domine doctor et charissime pater ….Honestissima coniunx vestra mittit medicamentum, quod petiistis’. Matthias Dall’Asta, Heidi Hein, and Christine Mundhenk (eds.), Melanchthons Briefwechsel. Kritische und kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15, Texte 4110-4529a (1546) (StuttgartBad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2014), no. 4162, pp. 113–114. It would seem that he had carried some with him and was asking that she replenish the supply. wa br 11, no. 4207, pp. 299–301.

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(a good fat doctor35) my body to consume’.36 Before supper, however, he began to complain of painful congestion in his chest but insisted it was not his heart. He asked to be rubbed down with heated towels, and this was done. It seemed to relieve him enough that he went down to the meal, remarking that ‘being alone doesn’t bring jollity’ (allein sein bringet nit frölikeit). He ate well and was happy, even entertained the gathering with jokes. Before the grace was said at one of the meals on this day, his sons’ hijinks amused him.37 Jonas, Cölius, and Ambrosius recalled later that a topic of discussion at supper was whether in the afterlife, we would recognize one another. Luther affirmed that we would, and by facial features.38 Luther left the table, and his sons followed him. After the meal, he complained again and was again rubbed down with heated blankets or cloths (tücher). Jonas writes another account of Luther’s death, still on February 18: at this point he was given two spoonsful of wine into which unicorn horn had been grated.39 This was given him (zu trinken geben) by Churht (Curt, elsewhere Conrad40) von Wolframsdorf, although he is not shown among the people listed at the end of this letter as having been in the room. Luther had compunctions about ingesting this, so von Wolframsdorf took a spoonful himself to overcome Luther’s hesitation. In a later recollection, the unicorn horn is attributed to the countess, the wife of Count Albrecht, but the count brings it into the room and personally grates it.41 Jonas says that at this point, the princes (who were not in the room) and ‘we’ wanted to call in the doctors, of whom there were two, one with the doctorate, the other with a master’s degree in medicine. But Luther wouldn’t allow it, and he slept for two 35

‘einen guten feisten doctor’; Schubart, p. 3, n. 1: ‘Im Originalkonzept wieder ausgestrichen, fehlt daher in der Reinschrift’. But in no. 18, Wolfgang Roth, 19 February 1546, p. 20, Roth does report this line: ‘… den würmen einen guten feisten doctor, zuverzeren geben’. 36 This was in no way unaccustomed language for Luther. On 30 March 1544, he had written to the solicitous Electress Sybille of Saxony, ‘Ich habe lang gnug gelebt, Gott beschere mir ein selig stundlin, darin der faule, vnnütze madensack vnter die erden kome zu seinem volck vnd den Würmern zu teile werde’. wa br 10, no. 3978, p. 548. 37 Schubart, Luthers Tod, Wolfgang Roth, no. 18, p. 20, ‘wie ich selbst gesehen’. 38 Schubart, no. 69, ‘Justus Jones, Michael Cölius und Johannes Aurifaber …’, printed midMarch 1546, p. 61. 39 Schubart, no. 2, p. 7. 40 Schubart, no. 69, p. 62. 41 Schubart, no. 69, pp. 61–62. From here on, people’s memories of the precise order of events and when Luther said exactly what becomes less than uniform. I am not concerned with their uninamity but with the nature and credibility of what they recalled. Whether Luther said, ‘In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum’, once or three times is, for my purposes, not important. The situation was fluid, with friends, visitors of rank, and servants no doubt coming into and going out of the room.

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or two and a half hours on a couch. Waking and watching until 10:30 p.m. were ­Jonas, Cölius, the company’s host (der wirt), who is described as the city scribe of Eisleben, and his wife (wirtin), and Luther’s two sons, Martin, Jr, and Paul, who are always referred to as small (klein). Luther awoke and asked that the bed in the larger room be warmed for him.42 This was done, and he stepped across the threshold without assistance, declaring as he did so, ‘In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum!’ (‘Into Thy hands I commend my spirit’). Coelius went to bed in evidently another bedroom (dabei), but Jonas, Ambrosius, the two ‘little’ sons, and the servants (die diener) lay down in the same room where L­ uther was. Luther fell asleep and snored naturally (mit natürlichem schnauben). But at 1:00 a.m. he awoke in pain. Martin Luther was afraid: ‘Dear God! I am in much pain and anxiety [bang, angst]. I am dying! [Ich fahr dahin, Simeon’s song]. I shall most likely remain in Eisleben!’ Jonas and Cölius comforted him and urged him to ‘call upon our dear lord, Jesus Christ, our high priest, our only mediator!’ If they remembered his ‘Sermon on Preparing to Die’, they may have reminded him that fear of death was the devil’s work. ‘In order fully to appreciate and rely on the Sacrament, you must recognize the vitious nature (die vntugend) of the horrific image of death, the gruesome image of sin, and the terrifying image of hell. The devil promotes these, burdens people with fear of death, and love of living’.43 Whatever spiritual direction they offered him, Luther then collected himself and began to pray: O my heavenly Father, the God and Father of our lord Jesus Christ! You God of all consolation, I thank you that You have revealed Your son J­ esus Christ to me, in whom I believe and whom I have preached and confessed, whom I have loved and praised, whom the tiresome pope and all godless people insult, persecute, and slander. I ask you, my lord Jesus Christ, let my soul be commended to you. O heavenly Father, even if I must depart from this body and be ripped away from this life, I know for certain that I shall remain with You forever and that out of Your hands nobody can seize me!44 He wanted the little room warmed up, which it already was, and they a­ ssisted him in going there. The sick man exclaimed to Jonas, ‘O Lord God, Doctor Jonas, why do I feel so sick? The pressure in my chest is so hard!’ For some 42 43 44

Schubart, no. 2, p. 8, the cushions and pfühl; no. 69, p. 62: ‘bretten und kissen’. This was originally published in 1519. I used Eyn sermon von der bereyttung zum sterben (Wittenberg: Nickel Schyrlentz, 1524), Aiiii recto-verso. Schubart, no. 69, pp. 61, 63.

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reason, he was sure the cause was not his heart. ‘I will stay in Eisleben!’ He walked around the room and asked for more warm cloths, had them applied, and sweated. He observed that this was the ‘cold sweat of death, for my illness increases’.45 The men hastily had both doctors in the city roused from sleep and brought. They had Count Albrecht awakened, and he and the countess quickly came to the room. The countess’s aquavit and the remedies of the doctors all were tried. Luther began to pray, ‘My heavenly father, eternal and merciful God, You have revealed Your dear son our lord Jesus Christ to me. I have taught about him, I have confessed him, I love and honor him as my dear savior and redeemer whom the godless persecute, slander and insult. Take my soul to Yourself!’ Then he repeated three times, ‘In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum, redemisti me deus veritatis’, and also, ‘God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son’. Luther had declared years before in a sermon that everybody should inscribe these latter words on their hearts, ‘as the fullest consolation’.46 He sought refuge in this precept now. In the meantime, the doctors and the theologian’s friends used the best strengthening techniques they knew. Luther began to be quiet as though he had sunk away (dahin), and he did not answer when Jonas and the others called out to him and shook him. The countess ‘and the doctors’ rubbed (einstreichen) aquavit on him. They also rubbed into him lavender water, rose vinegar, ‘and other quickening agents’ that Count Albrecht and his wife had brought with them.47 He began to answer again, but weakly, to both Herr Michael Cölio ‘and me Doctor Jonas, ja und nein’. Cölius and Jonas shouted to him and asked, ‘Most beloved father, do you confess Christ the son of God, our savior and redeemer?’ Luther spoke audibly one more time, a strong ‘Ja’. After this his forehead and countenance grew cold, and no matter how loudly one called out, shook him, and called him by his baptismal name ‘Doctor Martine’, he did not answer again. Somebody unspecified kept rubbing his nose and lips with aquavit. He turned onto his right (the favorable) side, gently breathed in with a little snore [schnarchen] and sighed, and with his hands crossed (the right hand over the left!), went to sleep in Christ between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning.48 ‘As his disciple and 45 46 47 48

Schubart, no. 2, p. 8. ‘Ja, es ist ein kalter todtsschweis; ich werde meinen geist aufgeben! Dan die krangkheit mehret sich’. wa Schriften 27, ‘Predigt am Pfingstmontag Nachmittag’, 1 June 1528, p. 167. Schubart, no. 28, ‘Michael Cölius, Leichenpredigt auf Luther’, p. 32. In her paper, ‘Luther and dreams’, Lyndal Roper notes that Luther customarily slept on his left side. Paper presented at conference ‘The cultural history of the Reformation. Current research and future perspectives’, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, 17 June 2016, p. 12 of the unpublished manuscript.

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­student for 25 years I am deeply grieved’, Jonas concluded.49 ‘He went to sleep in the Lord, cleanly and with great patience, between 2:00 and 3:00 o’clock in the morning’.50 Jonas finally informs his prince of who was present at the Reformer’s death. The first were Jonas himself and the famulus Ambrosius Rudtfeld. These were followed by Count Albrecht, the countess, Herr Michael Cölius, Magister Aurifaber, their city-scribe host ‘und sein weib’, and Magister Simon Wild, physician. Doctor Ludwig is not named, but he was present, and his status as a doctor of medicine was higher than that of Wild. After Luther was already dead, ‘My Gracious Lord, Prince and Lord of Anhalt, Count Hans Heinrich von Schwarzburgk and his consort “and many others”’ came into the room.51 We cannot help but remember that the Luthers’ two sons Martin and Paul were also present throughout, along with one or two servants.52 ­Witnessing the demise of a significant person conferred prestige based on a presumption of intimate acquaintance. All of these individuals, even the humble servants, surely recalled that they had been present in the room, perhaps even themselves tried to heal this man by rubbing into his skin—on the instructions of the countess and the medicus Wild—one of the strong and sweet-smelling preparations that these ­well-to-do people had brought along. We might say that Luther was embalmed, or at least anointed with precious substances, before his departure and not after! Luther’s associates thought it important to make it known that during his three weeks’ stay in Eisleben, Luther had preached four times—in this ­capacity, himself articulating the Word of God to the people—and had also confessed and received absolution twice. He had, they recounted, taken communion on both those occasions. Not only that, but he had ordained two men as ‘priests’, again acting as a representative of the Deity.53 Luther had thereby, in all of these functions, experienced a Protestant equivalent of the Catholic 49 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 1, p. 5. 50 Schubart, no. 2, p. 9: Jonas: ‘entschlief im herrn seuberlich mit groβer geduldt zwischen 2 und 3 hora fru mittag’, no. 18, p. 21. Wolfgang Roth says, ‘ganz seuberlich’. In New High German, seuberlich (säuberlich) means cleanly or neatly. 51 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 2, pp. 9–10. 52 Paul later wrote down the last prayers of his father. Schubart, no. 88, ‘Paul Luther, Bericht von Luthers Tod’, n. d., p. 89. 53 Schubart, no. 18, ‘Wolfgang Roth … an Johann Hiltern … und Hans Baur’, p. 20: ‘Dise drei wochen über hat er alhie vier schöner predig gethon, zweimal die absolution empfangen und communicirt, auch am nechst vergangen sontag zwen priester geweihet’. Jonas, ­Cölius, and Aurifaber also include this summation, which has him receiving absolution only once, in their published report of the details of Luther’s death, Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, mid-March 1546, p. 60; they shared the view that this needed to be known.

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rites of penance, the Eucharist, and the extreme unction that the ars moriendi demanded for the good death. This participation in Christian ceremony had for the men what I am calling ‘ritual equivalency’. These acts, the recorders imply, rendered his death ritually complete and thus the better. It is interesting to consider who physically attended Martin Luther. Luther’s famulus Ambrosius Rudtfeldt had access to his body, helping him from bed to day-bed (faulbettlein) and back. He and the one or two unnamed servants who slept in the room with Luther saw to the heating of the Reformer’s bed and bedding. They, too, may have assisted him in moving about, as may, in this emergency situation, Jonas and Cölius themselves. The medical practitioners Ludwig and Wild may have rubbed the countess’s preparations on their patient, although one account has it that Wild ‘tried … a very precious medication [of his own] that he had in his pocket at all times in case of need’.54 Most probably it was to be ingested. Medical doctors often did not touch their patients at all. Striking is the fact that Count Albrecht’s wife, Anna of ­Honstein-Klettenberg (1490–1559) was a major participant in the effort to prolong Luther’s life.55 In the documents surrounding his death, her name is not given once; she is referred to as Gräfin or Gemahl. It is as though she was merely an appendage to her husband. Yet she came at once to Luther’s bedside; her husband brought her along to this small circle of witnesses. She carried with her her b­ est-concocted healing substances, and she personally rubbed her aquavit and lavender water into Luther’s skin (einstreichen) and applied aquavit under the Wittenberger’s nose and on his lips. This reveals the noblewoman’s status—any serious recipecollecting noblewoman’s status—as a bona fide healer. Throughout the Holy Roman Empire, these highest ranking women gathered formulae and ingredients, even from peasant women, and personally prepared a pharmacopeia that they hoped would alleviate some of their family and household members’ afflictions.56 To the very end, this countess of Manfeld labored over the Luther’s expiring body. She and her coattendants were ­reluctant to conclude 54

55 56

Schubart, no. 69, ‘Justus Jonas, Michael Cölius und Johannes Aurifaber, Bericht über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis’, mid-March 1546, p. 63. This testimony was quickly printed and reprinted. Jonas sent a copy to King Christian iii of Denmark on 15 April 1546 (Schubart, no. 76, ‘Justus Jonas an König Christian iii. Von Dänemark in Kolding’, 15 April 1546, pp. 73–74). geneall.net/de/name/2495/anna-von-honstein-klettenberg/ She bore her husband 11 known offspring. Consulted 7 October 2015. Owing to the survival of her correspondence, one of the best known of these is Electress Anna of Saxony (d. 1585), who hoped especially to remedy her very high rate of infant mortality.

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that this great clergyman had succumbed and f­rantically continued applying their medications until, finally, the outcome could no longer be denied.57 All these accounts omit the enema that Ludwig and Wild compelled the apothecary Johann Landau to carry out on the body of Martin Luther.58 Their concern was that he might have overeaten and overdrunk at his recent meal and that if his digestive system were relieved of pressure from the excess food, he might revive. Landau was dubious: ‘He is dead. What use is it to give him an enema?’ ‘Mortuus est, quid opus est enemata?’59 He did try, and then abandoned a second attempt that the doctors briefly encouraged. Jonas, Cölius, and Johannes Aurifaber vowed that they told the truth when they testified to the peacefulness of Luther’s demise: After this the doctor’s face quickly became pale and his feet and nose grew cold. He took a deep but gentle breath, and with this he gave up his spirit. [He did this] quietly and with great patience, such that not a finger or a limb moved. And nobody could detect any unrest—we testify to this before God upon our consciences—bodily torment, or any pains of death, but he went to sleep gently and peacefully in the Lord, as Simeon sings.60 When Luther died, he did not ask anyone to relay his goodbye to his wife,61 nor did he acknowledge the presence of his sons in the room. Hartmann Grisar would, of course, notice this.62 But so do we. Katharina would have understood 57 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, Jonas, Cölius, Aurifaber, mid-March, p. 64. 58 See Schubart’s consideration of Landau’s letter and whether it is genuine, pp. 110–113. He concludes, ‘Sonst ist der Landausche Bericht als eine gute Quelle zu werten’. 59 Schubart, no. 78, ‘Johann Landau, Apotheker in Eisleben, an Georg Wizel in Regensburg’, before 9 June 1546, pp. 74–80, here at 77–78. 60 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, p. 64. 61 In 1537, when Luther thought he was about to die, he instructed Melanchthon, Jonas, and Creuziger, ‘Tröste meine Käthe! Sie soll den Schmerz ertragen, eingedenk dessen, daβ sie zwölf Jahre mit mir fröhlich gewesen ist. Sie hat mir gedient nicht nur wie eine Ehefrau, sondern wie eine Magd. Gott vergelte es ihr!’ Ernst Kroker, Katharina von Bora, Martin Luthers Frau. Ein Lebens- und Charakterbild, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1956), p. 215. 62 Hartmann Grisar, S.J., Luther, vol. 3, Am Ende der Bahn—Rückblicke (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1912), p. 849: ‘Luther niemals der zu Wittenberg ­zurückgelassenen Lebensgefährtin gedenkt, auch nicht einmal, wie es scheint, bei seinem Tod die Söhne neben sich hatte’. I find Grisar to be moderate.

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this, for they corresponded continuously. She also well knew her husband’s ­attitude, stated at the dinner table in her presence, ‘When your little hour comes to depart from this world, do not worry about your wife and little children’. You must trust, Luther says, that God will care for them.63 But when told of her husband’s death, she expressed concern for the wellbeing of her sons.64 Kroker reports that all three sons returned to Wittenberg in the procession bearing their father’s body thither.65 By our lights, Martin and Paul could have been lastingly affected if not traumatized by witnessing their father’s death.66 Yet their religious culture dictated otherwise. Through the brief ordeal of dying, Luther gives no indication that either angels or demons are contesting over him. This is a departure from the ars moriendi, and it is a departure from this man’s frequent rhetorical and conversational pattern. On this day, in the Reformer’s utterances, we see him talk with God and with Christ. His own testimony of numerous other occasions does show that he regularly felt the presence of angels and of demons. Luther complied with the advice that he had delivered two decades earlier in a sermon on Genesis: When the hour comes and death is before one’s eyes and frightens us with the prospect of the Devil’s craftiness and God’s wrath, do not think that you are bound for the worst or that you have to look around for measures to take …. You must focus your eyes and every sense—and know about or hear of nothing else—only on what God’s Word says. Do not pay attention to what you feel or try to overcome it. Take hold of the Word and let no one take it from you, so that you can say: ‘Here I am in the distress and fear of death. I know, however, that I am baptized and that God has promised me this and that [through the sacrament]. Call up His word no matter how pressingly and strongly death intrudes’.67

63 wa tr 2, no. 2179, pp. 349–350. 64 Kroker, Katharina von Bora, p. 226. Expecially moving is the personal account of her grief that she wrote to her sister-in-law Christiana von Bora (quoted in Kroker, pp. 226–227). 65 Ibid., p. 228. 66 Luther was hard on his son Hans, who had some difficulty recovering from his sister Magdalena’s death. Luther wrote him, ‘Overcome those tears like a man’ and to come home only if he was ill. He signed himself curtly, ‘Your father, Martin Luther’. wa br 10, no. 3831, p. 229; wa br 10, no. 3830, pp. 228–229. See essay on Luther as father above. 67 ‘In Genesin Declamationes. 1527’, wa Schriften 24, p. 184.

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The Disposal of Luther’s Body

Twenty years later, Johannes Aurifaber recalled that he had closed Luther’s eyes.68 Lucas Furtenagel’s pen drawing of the face with closed eyes, perhaps rendered on the day of death but probably the next day, conveys the calm of the good death. Furtenagel made this drawing on February 19, after Luther’s remains had been removed to a coffin.69 The local artist’s rendering has been lost, and Furtenagel’s became the basis for Lucas Cranach the Elder’s posthumous portraits.70 As for the alleged wax model, it resembles the peaceful ­Luther not at all and could have been made, as Jochen Birkenmeier conjectures, generations afterward; if so used, its starkness and emptiness could have offered evidence of a bad death. The plaster casts of face and hands, too, could well have been manufactured later. There is no record of their having been produced in conjunction with Luther’s decease.71 The day after Luther departed this life, Saxon chancellor Gregor Brück wrote to his ruler, Elector Johann Friedrich, that for three nights a comet had been seen in the sky.72 A comet was a portent of a major event, whether for good or ill. Both Brück and the elector, along with many of their contemporaries, 68 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 84, ‘Johannes Aurifaber, Rückblick auf Luthers Todestunde’, Eisleben 1565. Aurifaber refers to himself as twice accompanying Luther on trips ‘und auf seinen Leib gewartet hab’; after his death, ‘und ich ime seine Augen zugedruckt habe’, pp. 86–87. 69 Jonas’s, Cölius’s and Aurifaber’s version is the following: ‘In Eisleben, ehe diese kirchenceremonien alle gebraucht, haben zween maler also das todte angesicht abconterfeit, einer von Eisleben, dieweil er noch im stublin auf dem bett gelegen, der andere, meister Lucas Fortennagel von Hall, da er schon eine nacht im sark gelegen’. Schubart, no. 69, p. 66. Another, anonymous, statement is, ‘Das todte Angesicht Lutheri haben zween Maler abconterfeyet, einer von Eisleben, als er noch im Stüblin aufm Bette gelegen, der andere Lucas Fortennagel von Halle (aber von Augsburg bürtig), da er schon eine Nacht im Sarge gelegen’. Schubart, no. 87, ‘Bericht über Aufnahme und Geleit von Luthers Leiche in Halle’, no date, p. 88. 70 In the exhibition at the Lutherhaus, viewed on 31 October 2015, the curators indicate that the anonymous Eisleben artist’s sketch provided the basis for Cranach’s renditions; that Furtenagel did make two versions of the dead Luther, the first on 18 February and the second the following day; and that wax molds were promptly made from the corpse and provide the basis for the later bronze death mask. They offer no evidence for these assertions but would seem to rely on selected traditions and curatorially desired authenticity. 71 Jochen Birkenmeier, ‘Luthers Totenmaske? Zum musealen Umgang mit einem zweifelhaften Exponat’, Lutherjahrbuch 78 (2011), pp. 187–203. 72 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 25, p. 27.

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believed that Martin Luther’s demise was a milestone for humankind. Whatever political advantages the Wettin family may have hoped for in its support of the Wittenberg friar, the risk was equally great. That risk presented itself again now, as Johann Friedrich contemplated a future in which the compelling personality of the founder himself was no longer present to define an antiCatholic orthodoxy. The prince needed to appropriate whatever authority his possession of Luther’s body lent him. A brief disagreement ensued as to where Luther would be entombed. His corporeal remains were not quite saints’ relics, which in olden times had been thought to work wonders for the regular Christians who had access to them. Nevertheless, his body enjoyed a specialness that over the years would come close, some thought, to exercising miraculous powers.73 The counts of ­Mansfeld expressed their preference to retain the corpse in Luther’s birthplace. The elector was firm in his insistence on having the Reformer’s remains in his castle church, for, as suggested, his own spiritual and political benefit, or at the very least his own economic benefit if tourists came to Wittenberg to visit the grave.74 We should be in no doubt, however, concerning Johann Friedrich’s sincere belief in Luther’s theology as he understood it. Partly motivated by the specter of a reinvigorated, all-consuming Catholicism, he made the error of consenting to the military escapades of the Schmalkaldic League, for which he paid dearly. He was not as confident as his late subject of the verity of the older Luther’s alleged near-motto: Pestis eram vivens, moriens ero mors tua, Papa!75 ‘While living I was a plague to you, but in dying I will be the death of you, Pope!’76 The group of nobility, chiefly from the extended families of the counts of Mansfeld, grew around the bed and in the room. The corpse was lifted onto a pile of three featherbeds and covered again with blankets on top. Jonas, C ­ ölius, 73

R.W. Scribner, ‘The incombustible Luther. The image of the Reformer in early modern Germany’, Past and Present 110, 1 (1986): pp. 38–68. 74 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no.12, ‘Kurfürst Johann Friedrich … an die Grafen von Mansfeld’, 18 February 1546, pp. 16–17; no. 17, ‘Die Grafen von Mansfeld an Kurfürst Johann Friedrich …’, 19 February 1546, p. 19. 75 Referred to in Schubart, no.15, ‘Justus Jonas, Leichenpredigt auf Luther’, 19 February 1546, p. 18. In fact, Luther had brought this up years earlier at his dinner table and attributed it to George Spalatin. wa tr 1, no. 844, p. 410. 76 A later account of Luther’s death has the Reformer writing this on the wall the night before he died (Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 81, ‘D. Matthäus Ratzeberger, Bericht über Luthers Krankheit und Tod’, dated before 1558, p. 83). The earlier and more reliable records do not include this deed. See Schubart’s view, p. 127. For Luther’s own citation, e.g., wa tr 3, no. 3543b, p. 392.

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and Aurifaber note a flicker of hope, as the body was raised, that ‘God would still lend his grace’ and reanimate Luther.77 These friends could not yet accept his passing away. The earthly remains reposed there for five hours, from 4:00 till 9:00 a.m., as burghers joined the nobility in bewailing Luther’s death ‘with hot tears and weeping’.78 Their grief was borne of a genuine sense of loss of a prominent person with whom they had come to identify. Audible, visible lamenting was also still part of the Lutheran culture of death. Luther had stressed that one ought not to mourn unboundedly, but rather to affirm that the departed one was in a better place, sleeping free of pain, stress, and anxiety in a little bed of rest until roused by Christ at his second coming.79 Nevertheless, he understood and tolerated an initial crying when a dear person died. Luther’s corpse was then clothed in a new, white ‘Swabian smock’ (schwebisch kittel, which we see in the Furtenagel drawing), an echo of the white cap or gown that may have been applied to his infantile person as he was drawn out of the baptismal font in 1483. Luther had noted the comparability one day at dinner.80 He was laid out on a ‘bed and straw’ (bett und strohe) until the metal coffin that was being poured was ready to receive him.81 He was then laid in it. Many noblemen and -women came to see him in it, several hundred, men and women, most of whom Luther had known, ‘and a very large number of [common] people (volcke)’.82 Luther’s body spent the night in ‘doctor Trachstedt’s’ private house [herberge]. It was no doubt guarded. At 2:00 p.m. on February 19, a gigantic throng that included the two counts Hans and Hans Hoyer of Mansfeld, their families, 45 armed horsemen, and ‘a very large, impressive [trefflich] number of people’ bore and followed,  as 77 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, p. 65. 78 Ibid. 79 Luther adhered to this view with fair consistency. Sometimes, as a way of comforting himself and others, he referred to a soul’s being with God, but the preponderance of his utterances favor peaceful sleeping until the Last Judgment. He did not say a great deal about Christ’s establishing a thousand-year reign. Luther was with ‘Muhme Lehne’, Katharina’s paternal aunt Magdalena von Bora, when she died in 1537, and he said to her in ­leave-taking, ‘Wohl ihr, den das ist nicht der Tod, sondern ein Schlaf’. He went to the window of her room to pray. Kroker, Katharina, p. 134. Calvin, by contrast, taught the soul’s instantaneous destination, even if its fleshly hull should not join it in glorified form till later on; the day of death was the day of birth into eternity. 80 wa tr 3, no. 3070b, p. 163, saying that when our little hour comes, we want to put on our Westerhembdelin, our little baptismal gown. 81 For the traditional use of straw as the bedding of a dying person in the Middle Ages, see Angenendt, Religiosität im Mittelalter, p. 664. 82 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, p. 65.

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appropriate, Luther’s remains to Saint Andreas parish church. They sang as they processed. When the coffin had been deposited in the choir, Justus ­Jonas preached a funeral sermon on 1 Thessalonians 4: 13–18. Jonas recapitulated ­Luther’s significance and stressed his resurrection from the dead in due course.83 The corpse stayed in the choir overnight, watched over by ten burghers. There is no record of the placement of lights in proximity to the coffin, nor of whether the citizen-guards gave way to emotion. In late-medieval pre-burials, such features would have had significance. On the morning of February 20, Michael Cölius delivered a second funeral sermon. His text was Isaiah 56: ‘Iustus perit et nemo considerat’ (today Isaiah 57: 1: ‘The righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart’).84 This sermon included a detailed description of Luther’s death, for it was a matter of general curiosity. Cölius (and Jonas) desired to nip ­malevolent rumors in the bud that might have left space for evil spirits to gain entry. Between noon and 1:00 p.m., the nobility including the women and another large group of citizens, weeping openly and singing, accompanied the Sarg upon its wagon to the ‘furthest gate’ of the city.85 As Luther’s remains traversed the countryside with their sizeable cavalier guard,86 the villages rang their church bells. Men, women, and children came out to pay respect to the passing cadre, and ‘gave signs of their serious sympathy’.87 I take this to mean that many shed tears. Around 5:00 p.m. the procession reached Halle, where Jonas, who accompanied Luther’s remains, was the ecclesiastical superintendent. It was greeted by an outpouring of emotional welcome. When we came to the city gate with the corpse, the pastors of Saint Ulrich and Saint Moritz … and all [other] servants of the Gospel; in a­ ddition 83

Schubart, no. 15, ‘Justus Jonas, Leichenpredigt auf Luther’, pp. 17–18. The original manuscript is lost. 84 But Schubart, no. 28, the description of the sermon itself, pp. 29–30, says the text was Jes. (Isaiah) 57: 1–2! 85 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, p. 66: ‘bis furs äuβerste thor’. 86 It is interesting that when Luther had arrived in the County of Mansfeld on January 28, more than one hundred horsemen welcomed him. Kroker, Katharina von Bora, p. 224. 87 In the nineteenth century, artists probably inflated the participation of village people until literally throngs of people of every station marched behind Luther’s coffin. See ­Adolf von Menzel’s lithograph, ‘Luthers Leichenbegängnis von Eisleben nach Wittenberg’, ­reprinted in Ulrike Ludwig, ‘Die Leichenpredigt von Johannes Bugenhagen auf Martin Luther 1546: Anmerkungen und zeitgenössische Deutungsmuster zum frühen Lutherbild’, in Irene Dingel and Stefan Rhein (eds.), Der späte Bugenhagen (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2011), p. 76.

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the honorable city council of Halle together with a great number of all [other] councilors [men who were eligible to sit in the council]; also the entire school, the schoolmaster, and all his boys, with customary funeral ceremonies and songs, met us. We were also met at the outer gate by a huge, powerful mass of people, among whom were many honorable burghers, many matrons, young women, [and] children, with such loud lamenting and weeping that we could hear it in the very last wagon. And as we moved from the alleyway by Saint Moritz into the old market, there was such a throng and in the gateway such a press of people around the wagon containing the corpse and the others, that both in the alley and in the marketplace we often had to stop. And we only arrived at the Church of Our Dear Lady very late, almost 6:30 p.m.88 Inside the church, which was very full, the people could barely sing ‘Out of the Depths’ (Aus tiefer not) for crying. Their voices kept breaking. Luther’s body remained in Jonas’s home church overnight. It was deemed to be too late in the day for a sermon. At 6:00 a.m. the bells sounded again, and the procession regrouped to carry the corpse further on toward Wittenberg. A similar group of distinguished people saw it to the gate of Halle. On Sunday, February 21, the party reached Bitterfeld, the next way-station. Bitterfeld was in the lands of the elector of Saxony. Here the elector’s officials, three Hauptmänner, took over the leadership, though two of the counts of Mansfeld and Jonas and his companions, took Luther on to Kemberg. Christian ceremonies were repeated in Kemberg. On Monday, February 22, the mourners with their burden arrived at the ­Elster Gate in Wittenberg. They were met there by ‘the rector, masters and doctors, and the entire praiseworthy university together with the honorable city council and the entire community and citizenry’. All the clergy were there as well, and they and the school boys led the way from the city portal to the castle church, ‘with the customary Christian songs and ceremonies’.89 After the schoolboys were arrayed the appointed officers (Hauptmänner), the young counts of Mansfeld with a cadre of about 65 armed men on horseback, and then the horse-drawn hearse bearing Luther’s coffin. Immediately following this, came a small wagon (weglin) carrying ‘Lady Doctor Katharina Lutherin’ together with several matrons. After them rode the Luthers’ three sons, ­Johannes [sic], Martinus, and Paulus, and Jacob Luther, the Reformer’s brother, a citizen of Mansfeld; their sister’s sons Görg and Ciliax Kaufmann, 88 Schubart, Luthers Tod, p. 66. 89 Ibid., p. 67.

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also resident in Mansfeld, and other relations. These were followed by the rector of the university, who was accompanied by students from the nobility (fursten, grafen, freiherrn). After these came Doctors Gregor Brück, Philipp ­Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, Johannes Bugenhagen Pomeranus, Caspar Creutziger, Hieronymus (Schurf) and other senior doctors from the faculty. Next in rank were all the other doctors and masters, the sitting city councilors, and all others who had sat in the council. At the end came the entire body, ‘the whole large heap and splendid gathering’ (der ganz groβe haufe und herrliche menge) of university students, the citizenry of Wittenberg, then the female citizens, matrons, women, young women, honorable children of all ages—all of them crying loudly and lamenting.90 ‘In all the lanes and on the entire marketplace, the press was so great and there was such a mass of people that it quickly gave rise to amazement. Many confessed that they had never seen anything like it in Wittenberg’.91 Finally Luther’s body in his coffin could be deposited in the castle church near the pulpit. Everybody sang funeral hymns first, and then Bugenhagen delivered a sermon. In the course of it, he himself gave way to tears. He described the calm, peaceful sleep of the righteous and the tumultuous sleep of those who would be condemned at the Last Judgment. Luther fell in the former category, of course.92 Following him, Melanchthon gave an oration in Latin on a classical model. He, too, stated that he could hardly speak for grieving. He opened with a summation: ‘Doctor Martinus Luther of blessed memory taught and explained the correct, pure, necessary, and saving doctrine in the churches …. God is at all times to be especially thanked for having awakened this man …’.93 These divines, like the earlier preachers, praised Luther unstintingly even though Melanchthon protested that he would not. They all saw him as an epochal figure. Finally, several university masters who had been chosen 90 91 92

Ibid., p. 67: ‘Alles mit lautem weinen und wehklagen’. Ibid., p. 67. Eine Christliche Predigt vber der Leich vnd begrebnis des Ehrwirdigen D. Martini Luthers (Frankfurt/Main: Hermann Gülfferich, 1546), fol. Bi recto: ‘Gleich aber, wie im natürlichen Schlaffe, die gesunden inn einem süssen schlaff rugen, vnd da durch erquickt, stercker vnd gesunder warden, Die vngesunden, aber, oder die betrübten, vnd sonderlich die inn tods schrecken oder furcht sind, schwerlich mit schrecklichen treumen vnd vnrugig schlaffen, also, das jhnen der schlaff, nicht eine ruge, sondern ein schrecklicher, wüstere vnruge ist, den das wachen. Also ist ein vnterscheid [sic] zwischen der gleubigen vnd ­Gottlosen schlaff’. 93 Melanchthon, ORATIO Vber der Leich des Ehrwirdigen Herrn D. Martini Luthers … translated by Caspar Cruciger (Zwickau: Wolff Meyerpeck, 1546), fol. Aiii recto (facsimile: Leipzig: Degener & Co., 1927).

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for the task carried the coffin to its grave and deposited it there. Jonas, Cölius, and Aurifaber ended their joint account with an expression of satisfaction that this ‘precious organ and instrument of the Holy Spirit, the body of the worthy Doctor Martini, was laid not far from the pulpit in the castle at Wittenberg, where while alive he had preached many powerful Christian sermons before the electors and princes of Saxony and the entire church’. In concluding, they swore again that in no particle had they deviated from actual events and their own experiences of them.94 Two omissions, however, are noticeable. Martin’s and Katharina’s own daughter Margarete, 11 years old, is not named as in attendance at the celebrations for her father, and yet she was there. Once again, the negligence with which women were treated, even women who were crucial to a story, is by our lights astonishing. Luther’s nephews are there and named, but his own daughter is not. An eighteenth-century rendition based on a now-missing sixteenthcentury description of the funeral does include the fact that Luther’s widow’s ‘daughter’ (with no name) accompanied her in the procession.95 Secondly, it is most likely that Elector Johann Friedrich was present at Martin Luther’s funeral. Castle churches of the late Middle Ages usually provided an architectural means for people of highest rank to conceal themselves from the probing eyes of commoners. The castle church in Torgau provides an excellent example of this. While at least Saxons still claim that it is the first specially designed Protestant church, it cannot be. Its organizing premise is that the electoral family shall not be seen but shall have an excellent view of the pulpit and of the altar. It is not meant for a flesh-and-blood congregation. Johann Friedrich was a devout evangelical Christian and a true admirer of Luther. He was moved by this subject’s demise. He gave Luther’s widow Katharina Lutherin 100 florins so that she could pay Melanchthon the 20 florins he had loaned her and have enough to keep her family decently in the short term.96 He was used to being unobserved, and he certainly did not wish to be seen weeping. 94 Schubart, Luthers Tod, p. 68. 95 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 80, ‘Späterer Bericht über Luthers Leichenbegängnis in Wittenberg’, no date, pp. 81–82. 96 Schubart, no. 31, ‘Kurfürst Johann Friedrich von Sachsen an Philipp Melanchthon in Wittenberg’, 21 February 1546, p. 33. Cf. the more detailed, later (9 June 1546) report of Johann Landau, the apothecary in Eisleben: ‘Domini comites a Mansfeld donarunt Katherinae a Bora, uxori Lutheri, duo milia florenorum in consolationem et tres filios eius a pedibus usque [caput?] splendide vestierunt. Elector quoque centum taleros in solatium misit et pro monasterio persolvit ei tria milia florenorum, aliamque donabat ei domum et filios curae habebat’. Schubart, no. 78, p. 80. But see Kroker, Katharina von Bora, for the difficulty in

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The Mentality of Dying Well

Martin Brecht has declared, ‘The descriptions of Luther’s dying show again how deeply piety had been transformed by him’.97 My argument is that precisely the opposite is true: up to 1546, piety had modified gradually and s­ lightly—and in visible respects hardly at all. Martin Luther and his Reformation did make some changes in the ways people thought of death. The very least that they may have introduced into people’s consciousness was that they did not have to scramble, in life as on their deathbed, to accumulate deeds and merit so that they might not, even at the last moment, sink through the divine fingers into a perpetually torturous hell. The minimum that Luther hoped to impress on even his most dull-minded hearers was that Christ had borne the punishment for their sins and that the heavenly Father was therefore prepared to love all His children. They, for their part, must sorrow for their sinfulness and appreciate the grand beneficence of God. This core of belief, all by itself, if taken sincerely to heart, had the power to change the way Christians viewed their mortal end. It altered the way Luther thought of his demise. His hard-won new convictions truly comforted him as he dealt with his heritage of a judgmental God. He treasured, Melanchthon later said, the admonition of an anonymous aged friar in his order who, when Luther was continually tormented by his sinfulness, reminded him of the line in the Creed that states, ‘I believe … in the remission of sins’. Augmented by his subsequent greater familiarity with Augustine and St. Paul, the Reformer carried this thought with him to the end.98 The collected documents bearing on Luther’s death reveal to us what the entire Weimarer Ausgabe of his works does not: that every night he stood at or sat in or leaned out of a window and prayed. Despite the lack of plate glass in those days, the opaque window still symbolized a ‘seeing beyond’ the confines of a constructed space. He envisioned there the vast magnitude of the creation even as he conceived of it and not as we now know it to be. This same creation was infinitely varied and engaging. Luther noticed plants and rocks and stars. He was conditioned, also, to think of God as ‘up’, in a higher place, in heaven. In his 1530 commentary on Psalm 18, he had dictated, ‘He [God] must come to us; we  can only come to Him in prayer, for he is too high up actually getting the counts of Mansfeld to pay the money out. Katharina received half of the promised sum before she died; pp. 239–240. 97 Brecht, Martin Luther, vol. 3, Ordnung und Abgrenzung, p. 369. 98 Philipp Melanchthon, The Hystorye of the Lyfe and Actes of Martine Luther Doctour of Diuinitie …(London: n.p., 1561), fol. Bviii recto: ‘Luther diligently reduced the myndes of menne to the Sonne of God’.

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above us [hoch droben]’.99 Mentally looking outward and upward was the right position when conversing with the Deity, even though any position dictated by necessity would do. He spoke aloud, and as his companions on his last journey observed, they were pleased by the (unspecified but deeply sincere [emsig]) content of his prayer when they overheard it one evening before he died.100 Luther was sure that he had a close relationship with God, who applied Christ’s atonement to him. This was why he was not afraid to die. In the sixteenth century, people were surrounded by death. The rates of child and maternal mortality, which we are uncertain of, are unheard of in our ears. That John Colet’s mother should have survived all 22 of her offspring, even John, before she herself died, is shocking. That the Anna, electress of Saxony, should have lost all but four of her 15 live-birth children and have succumbed herself to the plague at 43 is unthinkable. The historian is surrounded by heart-rending examples. Luther and Katharina lost a mere one-third of their offspring, but they were sensitive to the greater losses around them. They grieved deeply in 1542 when Justus Jonas’s wife Katharina, their close friend, died in giving birth to her thirteenth child.101 Wittenberg emptied out in times of plague. The Luthers, however, stayed put. They themselves expected the end of life to come at any time. This was a biological reality. Luther and all his contemporaries were also acculturated, inscribed within a culture. Its attitudes, its practices of perhaps centuries, were tied to considerations other than theological definitions, which pertained alone to learned men. They bound people together within networks great and small and enabled them to arrive at mutual understanding. For all Luther’s articulation of a different theology concerning death, and for all his contemporaries’ desire to adhere to it, they shared an established culture of death that pushed them away from a full integration of an attitude of reliance upon the atonement in time of dying. Further, their entrenched practices came instinctively into play—could not be abandoned—despite what they now professed. The latemedieval model of the good death relies at base on right thinking, to be sure, but also on right behavior. Without one’s having departed in accord with that established script, the dying person and his surrounding family and confreres might think that the devil had succeeded in diverting his path in a downward direction.

99 wa Schriften 31 / 1, ‘Psalmenauslegungen 1529–32’, p. 330, Psalm 18: 17. 100 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 1, Justus Jonas, p. 3. 101 wa Br 10, pp. 226–228. Luther is flattened by this event and has no ready words of comfort to extend to his dear friend.

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Luther fulfilled the fundamental prescriptions of the good death. He had lived out his best spiritual imitation of Christ, even though his social and economic conditions were not Christlike. He was perpetually aware of his sinfulness, even though he was, as far as the observer can see, generally unable to dampen his temperament and his appetites.102 Perhaps he had learned, under pressure from his own elector-rulers, to curtail his expressions of spleen to their cousin, the Albertine Wettin duke, George the Bearded. Luther may be said to have ‘sinned boldly’.103 Yet on a daily basis he brought his penitent heart to his conversations with God. Once he had formulated his position, he relied completely on the saving power of faith in the atonement. Despite his acknowledgment of God’s providence in choosing the elect, Luther was certain that he was among the favored ones and that God had implanted saving faith within his soul. He was periodically beset by doubts, as he told Frau Lisskirchen, but he overcame them. He was grateful for the blessings that the Divine had bestowed upon him, most especially for Christ’s willing crucifixion, and he included this in his prayers.104 He came to dying with the ‘right’ mentality. When Luther realized that he was going to die—that in fact he was going to ‘remain’ in the city of his birth—he felt a moment’s fear. ‘Dear God, I am in much pain and anxiety! I am dying!’ This aspect of the Reformer’s experience in Eisleben is little emphasized. It is nonetheless highly credible. Luther was a normal person and never represented himself as morally or ethically perfect. His confidence in his theology was another thing. In the face of present death, he needed Jonas’s and Cölius’s guidance and consolation. Both men urged him to ‘call upon our dear lord, Jesus Christ, our high priest, our only mediator!’105 By the middle of March, when these colleagues of Luther penned this anecdote, they might have wished to show the role that they had played in assuaging the great divine’s fears; they were not merely his appendages. Yet it is highly credible that Luther did experience unease. It was relevant for the world to know that, even if Luther had not received the Catholic viaticum including undergoing prior confession to a priest, he had 102 Melanchthon remarked, however, that he ate little, evidently meaning throughout his mature life, and Melanchthon marveled that he was so tall and strong. Luther was ‘naturally a small feeder’. Hystorye, fol. Biv verso. There is the counter-evidence of his portraits: Lyndal Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s body. The “stout doctor” and his biographers’, American Historical Review 115, 2 (2010), pp. 351–384. 103 See Luther’s letter to Melanchthon, 1 August 1521, wa br 2, no. 424, p. 372: ‘Esto peccator et pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo, qui victor est peccati, mortis et mundi’. 104 Frieder Schulz, Die Gebete Luthers, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 44 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1976). 105 Schubart, Luthers Tod, no. 69, Jonas, Cölius, Aurifaber, mid-March 1546, pp. 61, 63.

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been absolved twice in the previous three weeks and received Communion on both occasions. In this oblique respect, Luther had met the Catholic requirement (if it was at all possible, that is) of freeing himself of the burden of chronic sinfulness through the mediation of an authorized cleric. In 1519, this preacher had still strongly recommended these as requisite to good dying.106 Now, however, Luther and his contemporaries knew that their theology did not demand this; their conditioned emotions did. So did their increasingly militant Catholic opponents. As for the death-bed anointing, which Luther rejected, so high-ranking was he that during that very period he himself had consecrated two men to the ‘priesthood’, that is to clerical status within the evangelical church in the County of Mansfeld. The assumption here is that he who ­consecrates does not require consecration. Once again, I would suggest that consecration in Lutheranism was emotionally regarded as possessing ritual equivalency to extreme unction. Luther was fully qualified to die well. Otherwise, he was aided in his departure by the superintendent of Halle himself. Luther composed himself sufficiently to repeat the Bible verses that were traditional for the dying—without, however, inclusion of the ‘Ave Maria, pray for us now and in the hour of our death’. He says instead the words of Simeon’s sentiment on seeing the infant Messiah at his mother’s purification: ‘Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin’.107 The saints do not audibly gather around the Reformer’s bedside but rather God the Father and God the Son. Nor do angels and devils contest over his soul, even though we know he believed in their ubiquity. Luther mentally points, as in the Wittenberg predella of Cranach, at the slack body of the crucified Christ. Luther prays to God and seems to remind Him that he has been His true follower and articulator on earth; and he prays to Christ the Son. His observers perceive him deliberately, physically (for he was still walking around) to step across the threshold, literally the limes, into the larger room with the words, ‘Into Thy hands I commend my spirit’, making a physical gesture of transition. Luther is engaged bodily in the rituals of dying. In the meantime, those who hoped to prolong his life labored to remedy his body. The dying Christian at the end of the Middle Ages was required to permit medical practitioners, if any, to apply their superior knowledge in case it was effective, for otherwise he or she could be accused of committing s­ uicide. ­Luther’s only qualm seems to have been in taking a spoonful of wine with 106 Ein sermon von der bereytung czum sterben (Wittenberg: Johann Grünenberg, 1522), fol. Aiii recto-verso. 107 Literally ‘with peace and joy I travel thither’. The common English translation, ‘Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace’, does not hit the mark as clearly as the preferred German text. Luther preached on this text in 1526.

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g­ rated ‘unicorn’ horn in it. This costly substance, which had to be acquired from those distant lands where the narwhal lived, was probably seldom available outside the sickrooms of the wealthy. We could analyze its various potential meanings, including as a restorer of male potency, but in this case its donors are seeking the more general human potency.108 For Luther its purpose was simply to heal. Very expensive medications were applied to the weakening man’s person, including his wife’s own aquavit. All of this, too, was part of the good death. As his end neared, Luther’s attendants thought it imperative to ensure that never for a split second did he doubt the rectitude of what he had taught. They unwittingly carried out their forebears’ insistence on knowing the precise moment of expiration and as fully as possible ascertaining the dying one’s convictions at that instant, so that there remained not the slightest opportunity for Satan to insinuate himself. This is a visceral resort to a long-established theology of works. Jonas and Cölius shake Luther when he has nearly succumbed, and they shout (einschreien) into his ear their interrogation as to his persistent belief. They must hear a final ‘Ja’ whether it was uttered or not. They then observe that his snore was a ‘natural’ one, not the snorting of the beast of the netherworld. He turned at last onto his right side, not his left,109 and clasped his hands together as in prayer. Jonas and Cölius saw things this way; they were prepared to do so. They did not, I think, deliberately stage a favorable death that had in reality been otherwise. He slipped away ‘entirely cleanly’ (ganz seuberlich), gently (sanft), quietly (still), peacefully (friedlich), one often said like a candle going out.110 This simile was well used in the literature surrounding death in the fifteenth century, and it was drawn upon at least until the eighteenth century. Virtually every painting of the Dormition of the Virgin has her holding a candle that is just being caught by one of Jesus’s disciples as she breathes her last and can no longer grasp it.111 Luther had described Elector Johann’s death in just these terms: gentle and clean.112 In this tradition—which 108 I do not know whether elite women were ever given grated unicorn horn. 109 The left is always the negative, or at least the lesser, side. Cranach’s paintings of the dead Luther show him turned slightly toward his right side, which is in accord with Jonas’s and then Jonas’s, Cölius’s, and Aurifaber’s reports. 110 Luther used the term seuberlich in his first funeral sermon for Elector Johann in 1532: wa Schriften 35, p. 254. 111 Klaus Schreiner, ‘Der Tod Marias als Inbegriff christlichen Sterbens. Sterbekunst im Spiegel mittelalterlicher Legendenbildung’, in Arno Borst (ed.), Tod im Mittelalter, Konstanzer Bibliothek 20 (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1993), pp. 261–312. 112 WA Schriften 36, ‘Predigten 1532’, p. 254.

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will be taken up by the new genre of the funeral sermon throughout the remaining early modern period—Luther gives up the ghost, perfectly.113 As we have seen, they and others continue to try to rouse him, even ordering an enema, and after that had failed, when heaving him onto his remade bed. The mourning that ensues is indeed a continuation of Catholic precedent. We cannot probe each psyche in the throngs that pressed in one capacity or other past Luther’s corpse in the early hours or past his coffin in the later ones; we cannot know to what extent the weepers were genuinely moved by ­Luther’s death, and to what extent they followed an ingrained script of grieving. I would suggest that they were impelled by some of each. The people wept and wailed so much that they could not sing. Continuing on within Catholicism in this early Tridentine period, it was still appropriate to weep dramatically, or if such demonstrativeness was beneath you, you could hire the readily available ‘wailing women’ to moan and sob, and perhaps even tear their hair and rend their garments, on your behalf. Lutheranism and other forms of Protestantism disapproved of this and ruled it out. But the pattern lay near the cultural surface. Within early Lutheranism, the churches tolerated public grieving but attempted to limit it. An aspect of Luther’s letters of consolation and sermons on death was his emphasis upon the desirability of passing from this ‘vale of tears’ (Jammerthal) to another, better existence. When he delivered two funeral sermons for Elector Frederick the Wise in 1525, he urged the people not to emote ‘like heathens’ who ‘have no hope’.114 In 1532, when preaching at the burial services for Elector Johann, Frederick’s younger brother and successor, Luther stated pointedly that it was all right even for the men to weep for this Christian prince, but not to ‘howl and lament’.115 He and Katharina were, to be sure, hard-pressed to follow this instruction when they lost their beloved 13-year-old daughter Magdalena in 1542. Gradually, secular and ecclesiastical

113 Thus, I am disagreeing with Hans-Martin Barth, ‘Leben und sterben können. Berechnungen der spätmittelalterlichen “ars moriendi” in der Theologie Martin Luthers’, in Harald Wagner and Torsten Kruse (eds.), Ars moriendi. Erwägungen zur Kunst des Sterbens (Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1989), pp. 45–66. For a suspect death, see Bruce Gordon, ‘Malevolent ghosts and ministering angels. Apparitions and pastoral care in the Swiss Reformation’, in idem and Peter Marshall (eds.), The place of the dead. Death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 87–109; and especially relevant for Luther, the circulating story of his opponent Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt’s ‘bad’ death, pp. 88–89. 114 wa Schriften 17 / 1, pp. 196–227, here at p. 203. 115 wa Schriften 36, pp. 237–270, here at 256.

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leaders working together substituted black apparel, symbolic mourning, for open demonstration.116 The treatment of Luther’s earthly remains was highly honorable. The honor guard of dozens of armed horsemen signified recognition by the powerful men who provided the riders and their upkeep. The greeting by each city’s most honored citizens in ranked order bespoke the corpse of a personage of singular merit. Such rituals reached back hundreds of years and continued on through the early modern era. These were not an aspect of the good death. It is worthy of note, however, that during the very lifetime of Martin Luther, towns were outlawing the burial even of leading burghers within the churches. Indeed, the urban cemeteries were full, and new ones outside the city walls were imposed on a reluctant citizenry.117 Exceptions could be made only for individuals or families of extraordinary worth, and Luther was such a one. Luther was accorded the privilege of burial in the very castle of his prince, close to the pulpit from which he had often preached. Again, it is hard to tell whether the association of the location with the prince is the sole explanation of the grave’s favorability or whether somebody also bore in mind the medieval conviction that interment within a sanctuary conferred special grace upon a dead person’s soul. Too, within castle grounds, this monument could be better protected in time of war.118 Cultural assumptions do endure. The ars moriendi itself dies very slowly. The funeral sermons that will now arise as a literary genre and homiletic institution through the late seventeenth century testify to the long survival of recognizable features of the good death.119

116 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘“With Covered Faces.” An Emotion Ritual in Early Modern Germany’, in Mark Jurdjevic and Rolf Strøm-Olsen (eds.), Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Essays in Honour of Edward Muir (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2016), pp. 391–412. This studies the funeral procession of Elector ­August of Saxony (d. 1586). 117 Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead. Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 40–77; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 178–179. 118 After his victory at Mühlberg in 1547, it is alleged, Charles v was taken to see Luther’s grave but specified that his troops were not to disturb it. See Lewis Spitz, ‘The political Luther’, Christian History 34 (2004), p. 1. Scott H. Hendrix refers to this story in ‘The Kingdom of Promise’, Lutherjahrbuch 71 (2004), p. 38; Brecht, Martin Luther, 3: p. 172. This is a legend, however, that other media have fed. See Adolf Friedrich Teich’s painting, currently (31 ­October 2015) on display in the Reformation exhibition in the Luther House in Wittenberg, ‘Karl V. am Grabe Luthers’, 1845. 119 Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of ritual, pp. 148–150; 162–170.

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Nonetheless, Luther could moderate his adherence to tradition when theological conviction and the concrete need of consolation presented themselves. He wrote another of his moving letters of comfort in 1528 to a woman, known only as Margarethe N., whose husband had committed suicide. He assured the widow that Christ was more powerful than the devil and had very definitely died for her husband’s well-being. She should rely upon that.120 As Robert Scribner cleverly demonstrated, the dead Luther took on a life of his own. That life continues on down to today as we prepare to observe the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the German (Lutheran) Reformation. German President Roman Herzog declared in 1996, ‘You can trace a direct line from Luther’s teaching to today’s concepts of freedom of conscience, equality in law, and solidarity with society’s weakest members, which characterizes a state based on the rule of law’.121 Twenty-three theses drawn up by a subcommittee of the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat advising the German government in observing the quincentennary include similar claims.122 But Luther is dead; he died a good death, an excellent death, by the standard of his day. Our memory of him today bears the imprint of our own values as well as of our search for reasons why our society is as it is. The features of the modern world, both good and bad, that we ascribe to him are not traceable either to his thought or to his labors in sixteenth-century Germany.123 Luther preached for the last time in Wittenberg on 17 November 1545, the conclusion of his sermon-like lectures on the Book of Genesis. His last words to the congregation were these: ‘I cannot do this anymore! I am weak. Pray to God for me that he grant me a good, blessed hour of death’.124 Martin Luther got this particular wish. He did not get others. 120 wa br 4, no. 1366, 15 December 1528, pp. 624–625. Yet, whenever Luther reported on a person’s death, he noted whether it was gentle and quiet. An example of this widespread type is Luther’s letter to Nicholas von Amsdorf telling him of the demise of Johannes Longicampianus, wa br 5, no. 1396, 15 March 1529, p. 40: ‘Longicampianus defunctus est, post horrendam impatientiam mira Dei Misericordia suaviter mortuus’. 121 New York Times, 12 March 1996, n.p. 122 Perspektiven für das Reformationsjubiläum 2017 (Wittenberg: Geschäftsstelle der ekd in Wittenberg, n. d. but probably 2009). 123 Instead of taking on all of Ernst Troeltsch’s Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, vol. 2 on the Reformation (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994; reissue of orig. 1912), read Troeltsch’s 100-page essay, published in book form, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt, any edition, but I used 5th ed. (­Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1928). Troeltsch was, of course, an admirer of Max Weber. Troeltsch regards Luther and his successors as forever monastic in outlook, and Calvin and his followers as ever dealers, involved in the world. 124 wa Schriften 44, ‘Vorlesungen über das erste Buch Mose’, p. 825.

chapter 10

The Imprint of Personality upon the Reformation Having spent a career’s length of time preferring to regard the Reformation religious movement as a complex of objective developments owing comparatively little to the coincidental articulation and leadership of mere individuals, I now must adopt a perspective that notices the imprint of specific personalities upon the institutional forms that Martin Luther and John Calvin adopted when creating out of theologically modified ideas an actual church in real places—let us say, Wittenberg and Geneva. Needless to say, after the founders’ disappearance through death, respectively in 1546 and 1564, new ­circumstances, agendas, and adherents altered the Reformers’ original programs, until, today, one cannot recognize much indebtedness to Luther in modern Lutheran church services other than the occasional singing of ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, or any indebtedness to Calvin in Presbyterian and other Calvinist-derived denominations, either in North America or in Europe.1 (Catholicism would have to be treated entirely separately.) Whether or not theological seminaries still define it, the very concept of predestination is taboo among autonomy-claiming laity in the Western world today. Young people of the twenty-first century will not have been subjected to memorizing, reciting, and e­ xplaining—they may have one explained to them—either Wittenberg (shorter) or Genevan/ Heidelberg catechisms as a ritual of admission to the Communion table. In the beginning, however, with the help of secular governments, the formative generation, after thrashing about among alternatives for at least a decade, settled down to engage in a sort of hero-worship. There was concerted opposition in the arenas of both Saxony and Switzerland. The final permission for these great men’s self-assertions had to come from, respectively, the elector of Saxony and the city council of Geneva. This permission was not arrived at without a struggle—whether the Peasants’ War or the opposition posed to the French 1 In April 2016, I attended a recital in the village of Holten, The Netherlands, and noted that this early modern Calvinist church was laid out, however, in classic Calvinist style, with no altar, the pulpit high up along one side, and the seating arranged to facilitate watching and listening to the preacher. An organ was in place but no images, and there was little decoration of any kind. It would be interesting to know whether the congregation had ever been told why their place of worship—sanctuary would be a forbidden word—was laid out in this way. On Sunday morning, I went to services in another, twentieth-century church, which was less pointedly so organized and even had a tapestry on one wall. The church was officially Dutch Reformed but the order of worship broadly Protestant rather than historically Calvinist.

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‘foreigner’ by Genevan citizens before sympathetic immigrants outweighed them at mid-century. Historians in general have gravitated away from the view that a single individual can commandeer and dominate the human scene. Even though some have seized the opportunity to assert control of people and events around them, thoroughgoing dominance is a mirage. Not even Louis xiv of France succeeded in carrying out all his absolutist designs. The historian’s task has been to offer an account of the interactions of people—usually numerous people— and circumstances. Even the best biographies have expanded their purviews in an effort to encompass not just one life but all its significant interactions and the contemporary developments that bore upon it. Lives are writ increasingly large. Most highly factual and space-consuming of modern Luther biographies is Martin Brecht’s three-volume account, to which I frequently resort.2 We as individuals are less important than we imagine. At the same time, I have come to think that a powerful founder’s personality, with the cooperation of its embedding power structure, does, briefly, show itself in the features of thought and practice that it is able to give initial form to. When the founder passes away and the wielders of earthly authority themselves turn their governance over to a new generation whose personal traits are different, and whose interests shift away from those of their forebears; and in the face, too, of other external challenges, the features that initially prevailed undergo serious modification and with time recede beyond identification with any single person. I shall argue here that up to early 1546, when Martin Luther died, the Reformation that he presided over in Ernestine Saxony and Thuringia bore in substantial ways the imprint of his personality—not as much his intellect as his personality. At the time, both onlookers and participants conceived of Luther’s achievement as articulating theology that was closer to the truth (Scripture) and thus dealt a blow to Catholic ideological corruption, as in its theology of penance and salvation. This was what mattered and not whether Luther found an opportunity to express himself or to alleviate his besetting burden of guilt. But there is another side to the story, one that lay at Luther’s core. To sit with other Reformation scholars and attempt to agree on a configuration of characteristics that make Luther distinct from his equally famous contemporaries might prove frustrating. Perhaps my colleagues would reject my own apperceptions of this late-medieval man’s distinctive traits. Such a discussion must be postponed. I like to think that most would agree that ­Luther 2 Brecht, Martin Luther (3 vols., Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1981–1987), on his feelings, esp. 3: pp. 229–247. From a wholly other historical realm, consider the comprehensive detail of Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (4 vols., New York: Knopf, 1982–2012).

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accepted and often took pleasure in his bodily existence. The resolution of ­Luther’s youthful fears in the face of Catholic penitential teachings released his psyche to be at peace in his life on earth. Although he continued to label this world a vale of tears, a Jammerthal, far more than his Catholic brethren he was able to abandon the acute dualism that they continued to espouse as they struggled, at least outwardly, to suppress the demands of the flesh. Luther’s fabrication of the doctrine of justification by faith allowed him to live out his mortal days relatively content with his body. He was able to enjoy the pleasures of his tangible self as well as those afforded to his senses by the environment. As we all know, he liked German food and beer, sex with his wife, being with his young children, his friends’ company, music and joking, and birdsong—except the cawing of the persistent jackdaws around the Festung Coburg. Luther was happy to spend time on this earth, even though he suffered mightily when he was ill or when his daughters Elisabeth and Magdalena died. One’s of Luther’s greatest attainments, a significant shift away from the ideals of Catholicism pursued before, was to bring his reconciliation with the concreteness of life into harmonious relationship with faith and practice in the emerging evangelical churches. He rendered his appreciation an aspect of the official outlook of his followers. This may be seen in various ways in the shape that Lutheranism took in the first two generations of its existence.3 Luther’s formal pairing in 1525 reveals that even as he took the decision to marry Katharina von Bora, he was prepared to abandon both celibacy and the abstinence that accompanied it in favor of the intimacy that, he was convinced, God had ordained for humankind in the Garden of Eden. The Reformer took the public step of entering wedlock, thereby declaring that a consecrated (if technically civil) bond that included regular and purposeful intercourse was approved by the divinity. In 1522, he had rejected the monastic life in ‘De votis monasticis …’ and now he demonstrated with his flesh the convictions that he had formulated in words. In fact, he established a model within the ranks of his followers that affirmed the legitimacy of marital sexuality within the parsonage. He cannot have realized this at the time. His contentment as a husband and father spilled over into his correspondence, his pertinent formal writings, his preaching, and his behavior at table until the image of the Reformer as a paterfamilias was widely known. He joked with family and guests, and he 3 A paper from an earlier phase of my thought on this subject is ‘The goodness of creation. Luther’s reconciliation with the body’, given at conference on ‘Cultures of Lutheranism’, University of Oxford, England. It is unclear whether it will be published as ‘The mitigated fall of humankind. Luther’s reconciliation with the body’, in proceedings planned by Katherine Hill and Lyndal Roper, tentatively entitled ‘The cultures of Lutheranism’. In any case, this chapter is written entirely anew.

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played the lute and sang with friends on occasion after dinner. He reconciled Lutheran clergymen with women and would eventually—the people’s minds did not change easily—legitimate marital sex within the parsonage.4 Luther’s comfortableness in the world is manifest in his down-to-earth presentations, whether in sermons or lectures, of the lives of the patriarchs. He finds their sins—their incest, their brutality, their infidelity to God, their drunkenness—condemnable, and yet the Reformer believes that they will be saved. They are the human progenitors of Jesus. He vividly imagines their predicaments and pleasures. Luther can picture the awesome beauty of the Garden of Eden, the initial happiness of Adam and Eve, the persuasiveness of evil to the intellectually weak Eve, the power of the sex drive, and the psychic burden of perpetual divine punishment. These are concrete beings whom ­Luther can depict through identification with them. He knows how they felt. He relates his own life to his hearers and readers throughout his career. His quality of acceptance of the body showed itself in other aspects of the Reformation, including the seemingly more purely theological. Luther rigorously adhered to the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharistic elements. His rejection of fierce forms of dualism included his unwillingness to render Christ, even after his resurrection and ascent into heaven, as devoid of a physical nature. To his mind, this would not have made the Savior more holy. In his hypostasis as the incarnate son of God, Christ did not simply shed his second nature and live as a disembodied spirit. He came to the Communion table as fully Christ, as that one to whom Luther felt related because he had been physically born among people and dwelled among them. Christ was the visible, tangible manifestation of God’s fervent love of His people. His sojourn on earth was Luther’s guarantee of reconciliation with the Heavenly Father. The Wittenberger could not dispense with the ongoing incarnation. Nor could he give up God’s utter omnipotence, one sign of which lay in being ubiquitous, being able to appear on every Communion table all the while sitting ‘at the right hand of God the Father almighty’. At Marburg in 1529, Johannes Oecolampadius said to Luther, ‘Don’t cling so firmly to Christ’s humanity and flesh; lift your thoughts to Christ’s divinity!’ Luther responded, ‘I know God only as He became human, so I shall have Him in no other way’.5 The flesh was not somehow baser than the spirit, as Oecolampadius’s wording 4 Marjorie Beth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife. Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2012). 5 Walther Erich Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529. Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (Leipzig: n.p., 1929), p. 27; and lw 38, pp. 3–90. See http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3163&qp=16 Yale Divinity Digital Image and Text Library, the full

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suggests. Luther revealed in his sermons at Christmastime how moved he was by the thought of Jesus being born in a stall and lying in a manger. On hearing the angel’s words, ‘I bring you glad tidings of great joy!’ Luther could envision a human heart overflowing with happiness, even exploding into one hundred thousand pieces! The necessity for Luther of this image of the mewling infant, and later on the suffering Christ on the cross, prevented him from elevating the son entirely beyond the realm of humanity. Christ had to retain his connection to the merest mortals as well as the greatest. He had to remain accessible, and he had to have direct knowledge of poverty, struggle, and physical suffering. For Luther, God the Father knew everything, of course; but the incarnate Christ was evidence of His supreme love. That love and the forgiveness that it testified to remained the Reformer’s compelling need. This telluric dimension of Luther’s personality shows itself again in his prescriptions for services of worship, decreasingly referred to as the Mass. Luther leaves much intact. The sanctuaries were gradually, peaceably cleansed of art works that in their content did not correspond to scriptural accounts. Luther urged removing equipage such as monstrances and pyxes, that incorporated a theology of priestly power and exclusivity that Luther would no longer tolerate. But if objects taught what was still considered as valid or did not implicitly contradict essential teaching, then they might remain in peace, whether candles, crosses including crucifixes, or decorative chalices. Baptismal fonts stayed in place, or, gradually, some were moved to the front of the sanctuaries to underscore the spiritual cleanliness of the newly born and the responsibility of the entire congregation in raising them. The same criterion of biblical validation was held up to pictorial and sculptural art as well. Much that alleged unattested powers of the Virgin Mary and other saints was removed in the course of the sixteenth century, and with Luther’s blessing. Organ-accompanied and, gradually, multi-part singing graced services with uplifting loveliness, and the lyrics, eventually intoned too by the unaccustomed laity, helped fundamental precepts to sink into their stores of knowledge.6 In the sanctuaries within the t­ ranslated transcript of the Marburg discussion of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, p. 19. Consulted 7 August 2015. 6 On the debate over the extent to which the congregations joined in the singing that was urged upon them: Christopher Boyd Brown in Singing the Gospel. Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005); Joseph Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism. Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict ­(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Brown’s argument is that the people of ­Joachimsthal during the pastorate of Johannes Mathesius (and the cantorate of N ­ icholas Hermann) were accustomed and enthusiastic singers. Herl’s argument is that, when one closely examines the record, overall in Germany the laity did not readily join in singing.

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domains of the Ernestine electors, both clerical and lay senses were engaged. This engagement bespoke Luther’s temperament even as it proved an astute means of converting laypeople. Congregations were not asked how they might find ceremonies or decoration more to their own liking; they remained on the receiving end of all that was instructional in the rituals. They were the objects of multiple sense-rooted media. Another enduring feature of Luther’s personality was his need of reassurance of God’s love and forgiveness. While it might seem as if the doctrinal breakthrough that travels under the label of ‘justification by faith’ lifted a thousand burdens from the Reformer’s psyche, in fact the devils that continued to torment him in the form of Anfechtung, that left him sweating in the night as he lay next to Katharina, most likely threatened him with an eternity of alienation from God.7 His emotional inclination remained … not unassuaged, but all too vulnerable to suggestions that God might not have elected him to salvation or might be led by the human’s persistent sinfulness to relegate him to the fiery pit. He would deserve that, he feared. He explicitly cited his own ordeal in his moving epistle to Barbara Lyβkirchen of Freiberg in 1531, who had been tormented by fears that God had not elected her to salvation: ‘I know this sickness well and have lain in the sick-room [Spital] with it up to the point of eternal death’.8 He is utterly sympathetic. He tells her that her fears, like his own, are the devil’s work. She must set aside what God does not desire people to inquire into, just as if she were spitting out a piece of excrement that had fallen into her mouth. ‘This is the way God helped me’. Christ has died for Frau Lyβkirchen, and she should be confident that God loves her and will save her. The emotional tone of Luther’s corpus and ministry is one of consolation.9 As an aspect of this divine’s personality, Luther never ceases to require reassurance, and he sees the need of it for all people in their human quandaries and conundra. As Ronald Rittgers, too, has well noted, a key concept for Luther is comfort (Trost); the word and principle endlessly recurs.10 God’s desire to comfort Christians is another proof of His love. He could not carry out His threat to 7

wa tr 3, no. 3558b, pp. 412–413, on the model of Job who was totally afflicted yet continued to love God. 8 wa br 12, no. 4244a, p. 135. 9 Ronald K. Rittgers is writing a book about consolation within early Lutheranism. His presidential address to the American Society of Church History on 7 January 2017 in Denver was entitled ‘The age of reform as an age of consolation’. 10 Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering. A Study of Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Rittgers’ essay, ‘Pastoral care as Protestant mission. Ministry to the sick and suffering in Evangelical church ordinances’, Archive for Reformation History 103 (2012), pp. 148–181.

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Adam and Eve that if they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ‘you shall surely die!’ They suffered severe repercussions, but they did not die. God himself tailored body-coverings for the pair, Luther said, after they saw that they were naked. They themselves did not know how to make them. He compensated Eve for her loss of innocence and being cast out of the beautiful, secure Garden of Eden by giving her the gift of progeny. God reached out to Leah. He did not cast David and other sinful patriarchs out of the Book of Life. He did, to be sure, destroy nearly all humanity in the flood. But above all, God the Father gave Christ the Son to the world so that believers might in the end be saved. This was a notable act of consolation. Luther recites this to his audiences again and again. Remember that God loves you! When you come to die, fix your eyes upon the cross and say to yourself, ‘Christ has died for my sins!’ Luther himself made every effort to adhere to this advice when his ‘little hour’ arrived. From the beginning, Luther did not simply discover Romans 1: 17, ‘the just shall live by faith’.11 His personal longing demanded that he fix upon it and build these few words into the cornerstone of his belief. Because of his attainment and his influence, this clause became a virtual slogan for an emerging church. Not every character trait of Martin Luther impacted the movement that took up his inspiration. He struggled with anger all his life, and he admitted it, even at the dinner table. Luther was furious with those confreres who did not accept across the board his definition of theological rectitude: Andreas ­Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Thomas Müntzer, Ulrich Zwingli, and the myriad Anabaptists, to name just a few.12 He ranted against the popes, both individually (Julius ii, Leo x, and Clement vii) and collectively in their office. He repeatedly held Erasmus up for harsh critique. He burst forth against Jews and against the Turks. Nevertheless, the oversightful and punitive aspects of the early modern era do not in any way derive from the Reformer. They can be observed virtually everywhere. On the other hand, when it became apparent that in various matters, not everyone would bend to his judgment, he was indignant. He told his guests, also at the table, that anger refreshed and energized him so that he could write. ‘… When I want to compose, write, pray, and preach well, I have to be angry. Then the flow of my blood refreshes itself, my understanding is sharper, and all unpleasant thoughts and temptations give way’.13 Perhaps his anger played a greater part in building early Lutheranism than we recognize. 11 12 13

‘Der Gerechte wird aus Glauben leben’. Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). wa tr 2, no. 2410, pp. 455–457.

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Gerhard Brendler has usefully pointed out that ‘Instructions of the Visitors to the Pastors in Electoral Saxony’ ordered clergy to hold out to ordinary people the threat of God’s wrath as much as they were to teach justification by faith. Too much emphasis on sola fide would not be useful for the common man, especially in light of the recent Peasants’ War.14 Luther was exceedingly fortunate to have found the ears of three successive electors inclined toward him. Luther immediately saw the rulers as ‘emergency bishops’ who would decide all manner of administrative matters, albeit to their own distinct advantage. All three sought theological direction from him, and they took his advice on many ecclesiastical matters. But their resort to his opinion was strictly their choice; they in succession were in charge of their territorial churches. Sometimes his relationship with the rulers was strained, as often was that with his seemingly indifferent lay audiences. Although, toward the end of his life, he was threatening again to leave Wittenberg, he did not have to; and he died before events would have provided him an even more compelling incentive to do so. One can look to Geneva for another setting within which the personality of a Reformer initially informed an incipient denomination. John Calvin railed against Lutheran (along with Catholic) ‘idolatry’ in leaving images, gestures, rituals, and artifacts in place. John Calvin was distinctly not at home in the material world. He did not indulge himself. Even though he saw in the natural world the irrefutable, universal evidence of God’s existence, whether or not a distant people had access to the Gospel, he denied himself pleasure. His personal asceticism may be viewed as his selection of Catholic dualism—the superiority of spirit over all that exists in the body—for the life of his Reformed church.15 Calvin was an erudite man, and his Institutes of the Christian religion and his commentaries possess, by common agreement then and now, intellectual depth. We see in them not only his learning and thought, but also his personal inclination toward the life of the mind. But his denial of the concrete comes through in his designs in various ways. In the sanctuaries under his direction, and later, as Reformed Christianity spread, his influence, the elimination of physical symbolism and decoration was the by-word. Not even a cross 14 Brendler, Martin Luther. Theologie und Revolution, eine marxistische Darstellung (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1983), pp. 384–385. wa Schriften 26, pp. 202–203; wa tr 3, no. 3094, p. 169. 15 Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘John Calvin’s sexuality’, paper presented 16 June 2016, at conference on ‘The cultural history of the Reformation’, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuettel, Germany, pp. 15–16 of manuscript. Forthcoming in proceedings, to be coedited by idem and Ute Lotz-Heumann and published in the series, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen.

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without the body of Christ could be displayed. Calvin—he would be dismissive to hear this—shares the anti-sensual esthetic of the founding Cistercians. Nothing within a sanctuary should attract the eye except perhaps the speaking head of the presider, who in his function as preacher was the mouthpiece of God the Holy Spirit. All images were idols, whether biblically validated or not. People would come to attribute abilities to them that wood and plaster could not have. The populace was not capable of making a distinction between latria and dulia. Even altars, baptismal fonts, and candelabra attracted a respect as traditional embodiments of sanctity; these had to be removed. Organs were silenced, only to begin reappearing one and a half generations after Calvin’s death.16 The modern stereotype of the Protestant emphasis upon the ear—but not at first the musical ear—derives exclusively from Calvinism. Within Lutheranism, the other senses too were engaged, and the ears themselves heard more than just the spoken word, as central as it was.17 In Geneva and its environs, congregations might sing a cappella but not so much to hear themselves or one another as to learn the Psalms and to magnify the Heavenly Father in the way that certain of the Psalms prescribed. Theologically and ritually, the teachings enunciated by Calvin were spare. They were directed toward the cultivation of the spirit and the suppression of corporeal demands. These demands were, in any case, the result of the Fall, an aspect of the lapsarian ruination of humankind. Calvin places bodily needs along with the spiritual impairment of people under the rubric of the Fall. Calvin’s voluminous preaching, too, reflects his strictness with himself and with others.18 He taught the Bible, to be sure, but the tone of his presentations was not one of comfort but of reprimand. He shared many beliefs with Martin 16

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A recent example of a Reformed sanctuary may be seen in Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz (ed.), Streifzüge durch das Land Luthers: Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt und Thüringen (Bonn: Monumente-Publikationen, 2016), p. 109, albeit the organ has been restored to its place, and two chandeliers that please our eye hang down from the ceiling. A NewWorld, eighteenth-century example, sans organ and chandelier, is in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word. Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, mi: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999), fig. 44. Philip Hahn, ‘Sensing sacred space. Ulm Minster, the Reformation, and parishioners’ sensory perception, c. 1470–1640’, arg, 105 (2014), pp. 55–91. Hahn makes the valid point that senses need to be studied in interaction. At first sniff, one might think that Lutheranism no longer engaged the sense of smell. See Jacob M. Baum, ‘From Incense to Idolatry: The Reformation of Olfaction in Late Medieval German Ritual’, Sixteenth Century Journal 44, 2 (2013), pp. 323–344. Initially Erwin Mülhaupt (ed.), Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits (Neukirchen / Moers: Neukirchener Verlag, 1961-). This series is not yet complete.

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Luther, and yet his mood was one of judgment, even condemnation. One of his opponents in the city, Antoine Bertholet, is alleged to have said about his preaching, ‘Calvin’s sermons destroyed souls instead of edifying them, for he talked about nothing but the devil’.19 From the pulpit, Calvin addressed fallen humanity. God had elected very few among the undeserving for salvation through the device of the atonement of Christ. Christ, Calvin taught in contrast to Luther, died exclusively for the elect. Calvin looked out upon a majority who would suffer unending torment in the afterlife. He neither could nor would do anything to save them, for God’s eternal plan governed all matters. The preached Word provided an essential mechanism for awakening the souls of the elect. During the oral explication of the Word, the Holy Spirit aroused the spirits of the chosen few and worked within them so that they might begin to realize the divine mercy toward them and to labor to make themselves even somewhat virtuous. Calvin’s judgmental asceticism showed itself over and over again in the emphases of his preaching: to shake nominal Christians out of their spiritual doldrums, to make them aware of their blame, to arouse the repentance of the elect, and to make them appreciate what a rare reprieve God might have prepared for them. His vocabulary was filled with c­ ondemnation— if not every time in the texts of the sermons themselves (which were taken down verbatim), then in the ritual closings of each and every sermon. The Reformer desired each attendee to depart the church with a sense of his and her own worthlessness. The closings all convey the need of nominal Christians to prostrate themselves in abasement before an all-powerful God. Many of them express condemnation of the flesh.20 This was Calvin’s emotional mood; this is what he communicated to his hearers over decades of preaching. No consolation was to be found here. Calvin was inherently a stranger in the world, and he desired to render his contemporaries equally alien. Theodore Beza wrote in his Life of Calvin, ‘As to his habits [at the College of Montague], he was above all conscientious, an enemy of vice, and strongly given to the service of God …’.21 Calvin’s entire sojourn in Geneva, including his work on the Consistory, reveal the consistency of this sententious trait.

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Supplementa Calviniana, vol. 3: Francis M. Higman, Thomas H.L. Parker, and Lewis Thorpe (eds.), Sermons sur le Livre d’esaïe, Chapitres 30–41 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1995), p. vii. Karant-Nunn, ‘John Calvin’s Sexuality’, see n. 15 above. This analysis is also based on my findings as summarized in The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 101–131. L’Histoire de la vie & mort de fev m. Iean Caluin, fidele seruiteur de Iesvs Christ (Geneva: François Perrin, 1565), fol. Av recto.

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In settings removed from Saxony and Geneva, individual Reformers were unable to win the approval of civil powers for the establishment of their own preferences—which is to say, the implantation in the public sphere of choices that reflected their temperaments. In some places, a multiplicity of reformminded fathers prevented any one of them from acquiring preeminence. ­Ulrich Zwingli died too soon to bring about the full flowering of his designs and was supplanted, even surpassed, by Heinrich Bullinger. Thomas Cranmer was embedded in a complicated, multi-valent religious scene that relegated his monument to the ceremonial. The words of his Book of Common Prayer ring in Protestant ears to this day. Iñigo of Loyola founded a new order, one in which his personality was decisive. But the Catholic Church of the mid-sixteenth century was a mosaic of power centers that could be appropriated and consolidated by no one man. The interlude in which the Reformers’ own features imprinted themselves upon the fabric of those Reformations over which they presided was brief. Persons, events, and trends without number bore down upon the churches, even as, in the early modern era, the churches collectively exerted their own force upon their day. Each early Reformer drew upon an array of choices that latemedieval Catholicism set out for him—if we look down from a high mountain, we may see that the Reformation is continuous, if in select ways, with its papalist predecessor.22 Just so at mid-century (in Calvin’s case just beyond) Luther’s fellows, with greater acknowledgment of their debt, selected from among a range of possibilities in their founder’s example. They could not all agree on Luther’s legacy, however, and engaged in divisive debates over the Reformer’s teachings.23 The tenor of discussion was not attractive as each leader and group of adherents attempted to impose precisely their own interpretation on matters of works and free will, compromise with each other or with Catholicism, election, and for whom Christ died, to name but a few of the issues. Polemics flourished, and accusations of heresy flew. Subscription to The Book of Concord was not easily wrung out of a good number of them, and many 22

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The pioneer was Ernst Walter Zeeden, Katholische Überlieferungen in den lutherischen Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Münster / W.: Aschendorff, 1958), which laid the foundation for future analysis. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Postscript on the religious emotions in the late- and post-­ Reformation era. Path dependence and innovation’, in R. Ward Holder (ed.), Calvin and ­Luther. The Continuing Relationship (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. ­86–99. The sociological concept of ‘path dependence’ is useful in grasping the fact that there is no break between Protestantism and the range of precedents presented by the late-­ medieval Catholic faith. Similarly and in due course, the leading Protestant denominations altered the path and provided influence upon their followers of successive generations.

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refused to accept it.24 Lutheranism became increasingly diverse. As we well know, war would follow, both immediately and in the following century. Ironically, the ranks of belligerents did not coincide with confessional allegiances. Luther’s admonitions of Elector Johann not to involve himself in a ‘defensive’ alliance against the Holy Roman Emperor suggest that Luther would have been deeply afflicted by the belligerent outcomes.25 Within Reformed churches, all five senses would come to be engaged once again, however subtly.26 Studies of the past have stressed the Reformers’ public lives—their t­ heology, their interaction with other divines, their engagement with political figures around them, their intellectual development. Their private struggles have received far less attention, and often in an off-hand manner, as though a biographer were saying to a reader, ‘Well, let’s take a little human-oriented break from probing doctrine and outside threats’. Erik Erikson, of course, was an exception to this rule. He was viewed, however, as raising the question of how far one could employ psychoanalytic theory in understanding Luther; and scholars’ attention remained fixed on psychoanalysis per se and its uses in the study of the past. There are other routes to Luther’s interior, and the Reformer himself provided them. Erikson confined himself to Luther’s explicit utterances about his past. As I have already argued, and as I have used as the underlying premise of my work here, the Wittenberger left us all manner of other testimony, which, if pieced together, yields a rich composite image. Most ready to draw upon this more comprehensive witness has been Heiko A. Oberman in Luther: Man between God and the devil.27 In this prize-winning biography, Oberman finds a fundamental organizing principle in the mentality of the former friar. His contemporaries, including Lucas Cranach, saw it in his eyes, no matter how different the shape of his body would become after he abandoned the early effort to castigate it into monkly form.28 He percolated with both anger and joy, either of which could burst forth under stimulus. A late-medieval man in contest with the devil, he could impress his circle of admirers, at least in 24

25 26 27 28

See the definitive story of post-Concord wrangling in Irene Dingel, Concordia controversa. Die öffentlichen Diskussionen um das lutherische Konkordienwerk am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 63 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996). Eike Wolgast, Die Wittenberger Theologie und die Politik der evangelischen Stände, Studien zu Luthers Gutachten in politischen Fragen (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1977). Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word, is just filled with fascinating examples of decorating but ‘not decorating’. In the original German edition, Oberman, Luther. Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler, 1982; 2nd ed. 1987). Ibid., p. 338.

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the short term, with a sense of God’s abiding love no matter that a person remained a sinner. These are the two poles of his outlook, the one inherited and unavoidable, the other embraced in relief. Without explicit reference to either Luther’s psychic makeup or his emotions—the latter having since become a general subject of study—Oberman nonetheless writes about Luther’s persistent frame of mind. He remarks in the preface to the first edition, ‘The crucial point is to grasp the man in his totality—with head and heart, in and out of tune with the temper of his time’.29 Further on, Oberman remarks concerning the Reformer’s diabolical temptations, that they ‘plagued Luther throughout his life. They are so integral a part of his nature, of his personality structure, that we must go beyond Luther the author to come face to face with Luther the man’.30 Oberman’s probing of Luther’s features does not lend itself readily to my own thesis concerning the impact of the founder’s personality upon key aspects of evangelical church teaching and implementation as originally shaped. It stands, rather, as an example of the indispensability of seeking the mental world, too, of persons of the past, and certainly those to whom people attribute watershed attainments. We want to know not only what they thought and did but also how they saw. We want to ascribe to their very temperaments an appropriate degree of influence upon their immediate surroundings, which in turn may have provided models for territories beyond that sphere. Shortly after the appearance of Oberman’s portrait, William J. Bouwsma published an equally engaging depiction of John Calvin.31 Although not received with the same applause as Oberman’s study, Bouwsma offered a penetrating thesis concerning the mind-set of the Genevan Reformer. He regards Calvin as struggling between the ‘abyss’ and the ‘labyrinth’, between anxiety caused by the rampant disorder within the world, and wandering in a maze of uncertainty concerning one’s relation to God. Bouwsma sums these up as ‘the anxiety of the void and the anxiety of constriction’.32 The historian regards Calvin as bolstering society’s safeguards against the abyss ‘by means of cultural constructions, boundary systems, and patterns of control …’. Bouwsma sees these as defenses the Reformer erects within himself. I would argue that he also employs them within that Genevan society over which he had been given a good deal of (but not complete) structural and disciplinary authority. Even 29 Ibid., p. xix. 30 Ibid., but English edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 175. 31 Bouwsma, John Calvin. A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 32 Ibid., p. 47.

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the lack of decoration in the churches is an expression of that effort to maintain strict control by preventing flights of fancy. It does not derive exclusively from a doctrine concerning religious icons. The Christian must never indulge libertine impulses. The attempt brings with it, however, an implicit reemphasis upon the lesser status of all that is physical in comparison to verbalized doctrine (the sermon) and belief (faith). The metaphor of the pilgrim is easier to apply to Calvin, who merely transits the debased world, than to Luther, who enters with enthusiasm into life on earth. Luther purports to be eager for the relief that death will bring him, but in the meantime, he can joke and sing. He stands to this day as a model to his followers of joking and singing, eating and cuddling his children. When he looked at the nature of people and events in real life, however, he could not avoid perceiving much evil. ‘In sum, truth and life don’t pertain to the world’, he concluded one day, ‘but rather mendacity and homicide …’. John Martin has written a brilliant article on the discovery of the individual in early modern Europe in which he very much implicates the Reformation.33 The essay is highly historiographical and cannot be laid out here. But he comes to the conclusion, using Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of self-fashioning, that a qualitative shift away from the late medieval Catholic emphasis upon prudence toward personal sincerity is visible in the Renaissance, a term he uses less to designate a cultural movement among elites than an era with all its diverse currents.34 It takes on greater significance among the Reformers, for whom the growing commitment to expressing what one really thinks brings the interior life and its external presentation into better synchronization. It deals hypocrisy a blow. The person becomes authentic. The heart is restored at least to parity with the intellect, for true Christianity was not only rooted in a rational adherence to certain doctrines, but in the deepest recesses of the affections. One has to feel one’s faith. Martin finds in this release of affect the genuine stuff of individuality. One heart’s ‘particular desires and a­ ffections …  set it apart 33 34

‘Inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence. The discovery of the individual in Renaissance Europe’, American Historical Review 102, 5 (1997), pp. 1309–1342. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Universityy of Chicago Press, 1980). Despite Martin’s resignation on this score, p. 1310, throughout my own career, in teaching courses on the Renaissance I have adhered to the view that the Renaissance was a cultural movement, based on the revival of classical languages and literature, that appealed especially to some learned men and ultimately, through their students, to a wider number of writers and educators throughout Europe. It has been difficult, I admit, to acquire textbooks that reflected this point of view. Nonetheless, I would object to the statement that the Reformation occurred during the Renaissance.

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from other persons’.35 With reference to Thomas More and William Tyndale, he ­concludes, ‘… even in the absence of direct evidence—their views of the self and its relative autonomy must have emerged through their exposure—in their education, their reading, their conversation—to new vocabularies that had, in the Renaissance period, begun to invest the self with a new sense of subjectivity and … with a heightened sense of individualism’.36 Are we social and cultural historians not entitled to ask to what extent a known writer’s statements on a particular matter relate or do not relate to his directly pertinent actions? Must we rely on utterances alone? In the cases of Luther and Calvin, we have masses of direct evidence on these gentlemen’s most concerted efforts to put into practice, to realize on earth, the ideals to which they held. Both of these men made energetic attempts to prevent sincere self-expression in their contemporaries. This was not considered outrageous by their peers, if only because, had any of these had the upper hand, they might equally as enthusiastically have attempted to impose their own right belief and behavior on all their neighbors. The element lacking from Martin’s discussion is compulsion. Can an era in which every wielder of power includes within his definition of propriety, indeed of duty, the right to replicate the inner convictions of his heart in each other person of his time and place? Martin Luther was altogether sincere at the Diet of Worms and elsewhere. He was, in fact, not prudent. He is a fine example of someone who has abandoned prudence in favor of his innermost personal convictions. We could even reach back to what John Martin describes as the earlier monastic ideal of Concordia, of achieving agreement between the internal and external selves. Luther does reflect quite a perfect consonance between his innermost beliefs and his outer behavior in regard to them. To some he may have seemed foolhardy in risking life and limb for the sake of this (unarticulated) harmony. The ecclesiastical structures that Luther joined in founding, and for which purpose he was pleased to call his princes ‘emergency bishops’, do not allocate to any other person the privilege of constructing a unique self and of being sincere—provided the result failed to conform to Luther’s own stances. I have said in my chapter on Luther’s conscience above that only Luther’s scripturally based conscience is valid for anyone else, whether the pope or an Anabaptist. No one has the right to dissent. This is a capacious theoretical limitation on the development of individualism. Calvin, too, was altogether persuaded of his own rectitude. Solely his convictions had to serve as the standard by which every other person’s were ­measured. 35 36

Martin, ‘Inventing Sincerity’, esp. pp. 1332–1333, here at 1333. Ibid., pp. 1338–1339.

The Imprint of Personality upon the Reformation

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In so believing, he inherently denied self-formation to every non-submitting contemporary. In proximity to him or any other disciplinary figure of the age, surely prudence was the superior principle. Only within the compact, manageable district of Geneva was he able to wield his disciplinary authority. Had she lived in Geneva, even Katharina von Bora Lutheryn would have had to appear before the Consistory for invoking the Virgin Mary one day when she was frightened. As it was, her husband mildly reprimanded her.37 In lending their strength to the disciplinary institutions that were modified or launched within the sixteenth century, Luther and Calvin both reflected and reinforced the tenor of their age. To require compliance was surely not an inherited trait within the personality of either of them, but they seized upon the authoritarian mood of their times and with their fame lent it additional strength. It conveniently coincided with their desire to convert their contemporaries. Luther exclaimed at the dinner table, revealing both temperament and his distrust of humanity: The people would [like to] have it that there were no wise, knowledgeable, learned people and preachers so that they could do whatever they wanted. If that were to happen, the world would go under. For without understanding, wisdom, and laws, neither Turks nor Tartars can live and maintain themselves. Where there are human beings, they have got to have laws, statutes, and order. If they don’t, then bears, wolves, lions, and beasts [will prevail] without households or policies, where there is no domestic or secular government or upright life.38 These Reformers’ exercise of sincerity lay in their utter conviction (Anfechtung aside) that they spoke with God’s approval. In modern, New Historicist terms, Luther and Calvin were able to express their genuine selves. We could even see the beginnings of their respective religious movements as authentic selfformation. In its societal outcomes, it can have made little difference whether the distal causes of the institutions that they helped erect were the result, respectively, of Luther’s deep need of God’s love or Calvin’s anxiety over disorder. Many people were content to submit, for they were used to doing so. Others, however, bore the brunt of these men’s sincerity: as a consequence of it, they could neither name their children Claude nor insist that infant baptism was non-scriptural. Some were put to death. 37 38

wa tr 2, no. 1449, p. 103. Luther asks her whether Jesus Christ would not be even more consoling. wa tr 3, no. 2832b, p. 11.

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In time, after these men had passed from the scene, the towering peaks of their personalities were eroded by a multiplicity of successive temperaments, political goals, economic opportunities, and cultural shifts. The early Reformation provided a rare environment within which a determined, intellectually creative man could temporarily impress his own facial features upon the soft wax of the weakened paradigm of late-medieval Christianity. There is no record of Luther’s death-mask having actually been made upon his demise (­albeit that somebody produced a probable fake), but for a time his life-mask was recognizable within Saxony, Thuringia, and beyond. Calvin’s image may have eroded more quickly in the more distant lands where his followers concentrated, including England, Scotland, France, and Massachusetts.

Index Abraham 74–75, 78, 92–93, 92n, 117n100 Abstinence 99–100, 99n12, 106, 119, 126–127, 206 Adam and Eve Calvin on 212 The Fall and gender 124–125, 125n15, 127–128, 127n34, 133, 138–139 The Fall and sexuality 96, 98–99, 102–103, 105 God as loving father and 72–75, 209–210 Holy Spirit and 77–78 ‘Against the robbing, murdering hordes of peasants’ (Luther) 44, 61 Agricola, Johannes 42, 93 Albrecht (count of Mansfeld) 55, 180–181, 184–185 Anabaptists 34, 38 Anality 109–110, 110n70 Angels 10, 78–80, 80n66, 174–176, 188 Anna (electress of Saxony) 186n56 Anna of Honstein-Klettenberg (wife of Count Albrecht of Mansfeld) 182, 184–187 Apocrypha translation, preface 12–15 Apologia (Melanchthon) 20–21 Apostles’ Creed 28, 67, 196 Aquinas, Thomas 3, 5, 26 Arndt, Johann Paradiß Gärtlein, voller christlicher Tugenden … (Little Garden of Eden, Full of Christian Virtues …) 170–171 Vom wahren Christenthumb heilsamer Busse, wahren Glauben, heyligem Leben und Wandel der rechten wahren Christen (Concerning True Christianity, Salutary Repentance, [and the] Holy Life and Conduct of Proper [and] True Christians) 170 Ars moriendi 174, 186, 188, 202 Atonement 42–43, 197–198 Augustine 29, 51, 103 Augustinian Eremites 4, 11, 27, 48 Aurifaber, Johannes 179, 179n28, 185, 185n53, 187, 191, 189nn68–69, 195 Baptism 33, 85, 86n94, 91, 152, 191, 191n80 Baum, Jacob 212n17

Bernard of Clairvaux 164–166 Bertholet, Antoine 213 Beza, Theodore Life of Calvin 213 Bible Genesis, Luther’s lectures on 35, 68, 69–78, 81–82, 85, 117n100, 123–125, 148–149, 188, 203 Luther’s main source 11, 25, 28–40, 43, 45, 48, 55, 65–66, 161–162 Luther’s translation 12–15, 56 New Testament 34, 45, 82–88, 102 Old Testament 74, 75 n. 35, 192 Old Testament, patriarchs of 74–76, 78, 92–94, 92n, 105, 117n100, 207 Psalms, commentary on the 81, 105, 196–197, 212 Birkenmeier, Jochen 189 Bizer, Ernst 32–33 Body Calvin and the 211–212 Christ, physical presence of 34–37, 84–86, 91, 94, 152, 158, 207–208 Dualism 27, 104, 113, 118–119, 206–207, 211, 217 Gender and the 123–124 Heart and 159 Luther’s 41, 41–42n71, 55–56, 117n101, 198n102, 199, 206–207, 215–216 Luther’s corporal remains 187–188, 190–195 See also sexuality Book burning 53–54, 54n73 Book of Common Prayer, The (Cranmer) 214 Book of Concord, The 167–168, 171, 214–215 Bora, Katharina von Household of 130, 134–140, 142, 148 Luther’s correspondence to 17, 112, 116–117, 131, 135–136, 144, 181 Luther’s death 187–188, 188n64, 195, 195–196n96 Marriage and marital sex 105, 109–117, 110n73 Motherhood and 150, 197 Table Talk, noted during 17–20, 135–137, 142

222 Bora, Magdalena von (‘Muhme Lehne’) 133, 191n79 Bouwsma, William J. John Calvin: A sixteenth-century portrait 216 Brecht, Martin 46, 83n80, 170, 196, 205 Brück, Gregor 177, 189–190, 194 ‘Büchlein von der Nachfolgung des willigen Sterbens Christi’ (Staupitz) 174 Bugenhagen, Johannes 41, 116n98, 129, 194 Cain 72–73, 75 Cajetan, Thomas (cardinal of Palermo) 4, 51–52 Calvinism 204n, 211–212, 212n16, 215, 217 Calvin, John On death 191n79, 213 Double predestination 176–177 Fides ex auditu 166n35 Individual effect on the Reformation 204, 211–213, 216–220 Institutes of the Christian religion  163n28, 211 Luther, in comparison to 156, 163, 169, 203n123, 212–213, 217 Sin and 43n Catholic Church All Saints’ Chapter 32, 59–60 Celibacy 99–102, 106–107, 112, 119, 126, 130, 153, 206 Church-state relations and the 44, 49, 55 Late medieval emphasis 26, 67, 217 Death, good 179n26, 198–199, 201 Diet of Worms (1521) 4, 19, 25, 46–47, 53–54, 56–58 Dualism 206, 211 Individualism and 214 Mass 32, 39, 59–60, 208 Protestantism compared to 43, 158, 181, 201, 214n23 Reformation and the 190, 205 Sex, preoccupation with 108, 116 Women and 139–140 See also confession Celibacy 11–12, 99–102, 106–107, 112, 119, 126, 130, 153, 206 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 38–39, 47, 202n118

Index Children 40, 108, 141–154, 147n39, 188n66, 197, 199 Christ Calvin’s concept of 213 Incarnate 84–86, 91, 94, 152, 207–208 At the Last Judgment xi, 191, 191n79 Luther’s concept of 83–88, 90–91, 93–95, 152, 160–163, 176–177, 196, 207–208, 210 Christmas Day sermons 152, 155n1, 160, 208 Church space 47, 171–172, 195, 204n, 208, 212, 212n16–17, 215 Class Nobility 47–48, 56–57, 59, 64, 186 Non-elite 3 Clement vii, 108 Clergy 3–4, 69n8, 153–154, 161, 168–172, 185, 199, 211 Coburg, Festung 20, 39, 65, 146 Cölius, Michael 89, 178–186, 180–181n32, 185n53, 189n69, 190–192, 195, 198, 200 Comfort. See consolation Concordia 218 Concubinage 118–119, 140, 153 Confession Auricular 40–41, 40n68, 108 Catholic 67 Deathbed 174–175, 185–186, 198–199 Lutheran 40–42 Confessionalization 44n77 Conscience (Gewissen, conscientia) 25–45, 55, 58, 218 Consolation Death and 183, 203, 209–210 Heart and 86, 160, 163, 166–167, 169–170, 177 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder 13, 44, 117, 176–177, 189, 189n70, 200n109 Cranach, Lucas, the Younger 133, 138 Cranmer, Thomas Book of Common Prayer 214 Crodel, Markus 150 Cronberg, Hartmut von 59 Crucifixes 8, 85 Cruciger, Caspar 72, 187n61, 194 Cultural history xiii, 21, 218 Death Ars moriendi 174, 186, 188, 202 Calvin on 191n79, 213

Index Children and 147n39, 197 Consolation and 183, 203, 209–210 Funeral sermons 61–62, 64, 194–195, 200n110, 201–202 Good death 176–179, 189, 192, 197–202, 203n120 Last rites 184, 186, 199 Luther on 191n79, 196–197, 203, 203n120 Of Luther’s children 146–147, 199 Luther’s death and burial 89, 131, 174, 175–177, 175n7, 178–188, 179n26, 182n41, 184n48, 185nn52–53, 189–195, 189n70, 190n76, 192nn86–87, 198–202, 200n109 Mourning 61–62, 191–193, 201–202 Sin and 177, 199 Denifle, Heinrich 99 Deutsche Bibel 12–14 Devils General 10, 162–163, 174–176, 183, 188, 209, 215–216 Satan 37, 79–80, 94–95, 103, 124, 200 De votis monasticis Martini Lutheri iudicium. 1521. (Luther) 10–11, 102, 206 Diet of Augsburg (1530) 39 Diet of Worms (1521) 4, 19, 25, 46–47, 53–54, 56–58 Dietrich, Veit 70, 123n5, 157 Divination. See Vergottung Drechsel, Thomas 33n31, 34 Dualism 27, 104, 113, 118–19, 206–207, 211, 217 Education 3, 5, 40, 48, 143–146 Ego Defined 1n1 Luther’s personality and xi-xiii, 3–17, 19–24, 59, 92, 150, 204–210, 215–220 See also emotions; self Ego-documents Apocrypha translation, preface 12–14 Table Talk (Tischreden) 2, 17–20 Texts as 2, 2n5 Weimarer Ausgabe 6, 15–16, 22–24, 156 Writings (Schriften) 7–11 ‘Eine einfältige Weise zu beten … 1535’ (Luther) 176 Eisleben 89, 179–185, 198 Emasculinity 126, 131 Emotions Calvin and 213

223 Death and 199 God’s 75–76 Luther’s 81, 89n111, 90–91, 98, 149, 151–153, 155–156, 173, 180–182, 215–217 Emser, Hieronymus 45, 45n80 Erasmus, Disiderius 157, 162 Erfurt 51, 67, 109 Erikson, Erik Young Man Luther 97–98, 110n72, 150, 215 Eucharist Christ in, physical presence of 34–37, 84–85, 91, 158, 207 Deathbed 175, 185–186, 199 Frederick the Wise and 60 Faith Conscience and 43 Death and 176, 198 And the heart 168 Justification by xi, 55, 75, 82, 113–114, 171, 175, 206, 209–211 Luther and the centrality of 11, 30 Noah’s 73 Fides ex auditu 166n35 Foucault, Michel History of Sexuality, The 118 Franck, Sebastian 132 Frederick (elector of Saxony) (“the Wise”) Anna Weller von Molsdorf, mistress of 47, 50, 100, 100n15 Decision-making of 66n95 Funeral of 61–62, 64, 201 Johann and 50–51n17, 54–55n43 Luther and 10, 33, 46–62, 51n23, 54–55n43, 63–66, 175 Luther’s correspondence with 17, 56–59, 78–79n58 As pious 49–50, 60–61 Spalatin and 16, 46–47, 50–52, 59, 64 Freedom 11, 117–118, 157 ‘Freedom of a Christian’ (Luther) 11 Friedrich (“Fritz”) (son of Frederick the Wise) 100, 100n15 Funeral sermons 61–62, 64, 194–195, 200n110, 201–202 Furtenagel, Lucas 189, 189n70

224 Gender And the body 123–124 Children, and treatment of 141–147 Comparison of 122–129, 124n10, 130, 139, 142, 144–151, 153–154 Emasculinity 126, 131 See also masculinity; women Geneva 204–205, 211–213, 216, 219 George (duke of Saxony) (“the Bearded”) 6, 45, 57, 59, 66 Gerhardt, Paul 168–169, 171–172 German language 70, 102–103, 137 Germany, small towns of 92, 98 Gerson, Jean 26, 28 God Death and 176–177 Heart of 162, 165–166 As hidden God 70–71, 76n44 Luther’s model of, as loving Father xiii, 68–69, 69–73, 75–78, 81–88, 90–95, 196, 207 Of New Testament 83–86 Of Old Testament 77, 81–82, 92–94 Omnipotence of 207–208 Göde, Henning 175 Grace, divine 76, 162, 167 Greyerz, Kaspar von 2n5, 23 Gritsch, Eric 18, 131n45 Hagar 74, 76 Hägglund, Bengt 165 Halle 192–193 Hans (count of Mansfeld) 191–192 Hausmann, Nicolaus 107, 109, 146 Hauspostille (Luther) 83n81, 152–153, 155n1, 156–157, 156–157n7, 163, 164n30 Health and healing 116, 177–178, 185–187, 197, 199–200 Heart Consolation and 86, 160, 163, 166–167, 169–170, 177 Of God 73, 162, 165–166 Holy Spirit and 67–68, 77–79 Intellect and 217 Luther’s concept of the 77–79, 89, 158–165, 164n30, 168–169, 172–173 Prayer and 89 Sacred Heart 159n15

Index Henry viii (king of England) 100n14 Herzog, Roman 203 Historians, church and secular 22 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 118 Hoffman, Bengt 164 Holy Spirit 68, 73, 75, 77–79, 92–94, 152, 213 Household 130, 132–139, 142, 148 Hoyer, Hans (count of Mansfeld) 191–192 Images, religious 85, 208–209, 211–212, 217 Impotency 104, 116–117, 131 Individualism 37, 55, 204–220 Indulgences 30 Institutes of the Christian religion (Calvin) 163n28, 211 ‘Instructions of the visitors to the pastors in electoral Saxony’ (Luther) 211 Isaac 74–75, 92–93 Ismael 76 Jacob 75–76 Jancke, Gabriele 6, 49n8 Jesus Sirach, Book of (Ecclesiasticus) 12, 14–15 Jews 10, 22–23, 97n6 Johann (duke of Saxony) (“the Constant”) Death and funeral 47–48, 200, 200n110, 201 Frederick the Wise and 50, 50–51n17, 54–55n43 Luther and 6, 15–17, 37–39, 61, 66, 70n11, 173, 215 Johann Friedrich (elector of Saxony) (“the Magnanimous”) 6, 16–17, 52–53, 53n30, 61, 64, 173, 189–190, 195 John Calvin: A sixteenth-century portrait (Bouwsma) 216 Joking relationship 19, 134–137 Jonas, Justus 89, 178–186, 180–181n32, 185n53, 189n69, 190–195, 197–198, 197n101, 200 Jonas, Katharina 197 Joseph 76, 105 Judith, Book of 13 Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von 28, 31, 33, 201n113 Köstlin, Julius 46

Index Krämer, Heinrich 126n22 Kroker, Ernst 17–18 Landau, Johann 187, 195–196n96 Last Judgment xi, 191, 191n79 Last rites 184, 186, 199 Latin language 3, 10, 70, 122, 124n11 Lau, Franz 32–33 Law, and the Gospel 42–43, 93 Leipzig 48 Leo X 107 Leppin, Volker 164, 173 Letters 1–3, 2n5, 50–51n17, 51, 51n21, 135 Personal 1, 50–51n17 Salutations 51, 51n21, 135 See also Luther’s writings, correspondence Life of Calvin (Beza) 213 Little Prayer Book (Luther) 107 Lord’s Prayer 88–89, 88n107, 176 Lot 78 Love of neighbor 161–162, 166–167, 171 Loyola, Saint Ignatius 76n44, 214 Luder, Hans (Luther’s father) 3, 6–7, 10–11, 48, 133, 148, 150, 154, 176 Luder, Heinrich (Luther’s grandfather) 27–28 Luder, Margarethe (Luther’s mother) 7, 133 Ludwig, Doctor (physician in Eisleben) 185–187 Lutheranism Beginnings 206, 214–215 Book of Concord and 167–168, 171 Calvinism, comparison to 204n, 211–212, 212nn16–17, 215, 217 Confession 40–42 See also Reformation Luther, Elisabeth 146 Luther, Hans 144–146, 145n19, 147n39, 148–151, 153, 179n29, 188n66 Luther, Magdalena 62, 136, 145–147, 149–150, 188n66 Luther: Man between God and the devil (Oberman) 215 Luther, Margarete 143, 145, 150, 195 Luther, Martin Death and burial of 89, 131, 174–177, 175n7, 178–188, 179n26, 182n41, 184n48, 185nn52–53, 189–195, 189n70, 190n76, 192nn86–87, 198–202, 200n109

225 As God’s special agent xi-xiii, 57–59, 57n53, 64, 74, 78–79, 78–79n58 Legacy of 167–168, 173, 203, 214–215 Monastic order, leaving 10–11 Ordination of clergy by 185, 199 Praying before dying 196–197, 199 Wild growth, time of (Wildwuchs) (1520–1525) 32–33 Youth of 3–4, 6–7, 11, 26–29, 41–42, 48, 67–68, 92, 96–98, 109, 166–167 Luther, Martin, writings of ‘Against the robbing, murdering hordes of peasants’ 44, 61 Apocrypha translation, preface to 12–15 Corinthians I, treatise on 102 Audience for the 8–9, 69–70, 70n9, 71–74, 122, 124n11, 156–157, 166–167 Catechism 41, 88n107, 93 Christmas Day sermons 152, 155n1, 160, 208 Correspondence, collection of 2, 15–17 Correspondence to electors 17, 56–59, 78–79n58 Correspondence to Hans Luther 144, 150–151 Correspondence to Katherina 17, 112, 116–117, 131, 135–136, 144, 181 Correspondence to Lysskirchen 37, 177, 198, 209 Correspondence to Melanchthon 51n21, 90n116, Correspondence to miscellaneous 31 (city of Herzberg), 38–39 (Justus Menius, Friedrich Myconius), 61 (Johann Rühel), 100n14 (Robert Barnes), 107n57 (nuns), 173 (Lazarus Spengler), 176 (Benedict Pauli), 203 (Margarethe N.) Correspondence to Spalatin 16, 18, 50, 53–56, 60, 62–64, 115, 131, 131n45 Correspondence to Electress Sybille 65, 182n36 Deutsche Bibel translation 12–14, 56 De votis monasticis Martini Lutheri iudicium. 1521. 10–11, 102, 206 ‘Eine einfältige Weise zu beten … 1535’ 176 ‘Freedom of a Christian’ 11 Funeral sermons for electors 61–62, 64, 200n110, 201

226 Luther Martin, writings of (Cont.) Genesis, lectures on 35, 68, 69–78, 81–82, 85, 117n100, 123–125, 148–149, 188, 203 Hauspostille 83n81, 152–153, 155n1, 156–157, 156–157n7, 163, 164n30 ‘Instructions of the Visitors to the Pastors in Electoral Saxony’ 211 Little Prayer Book (1522) 107 Matthew 3, commentary on 86–87 Ninety-five Theses against Indulgences 49 ‘On Married Life’ (1522) 110, 113 ‘Pamphlet on Baptism’ 93 Patriarchs, on lives of the 74–76, 78, 92–94, 92n, 105, 117n100, 207 Psalms, commentary on the 81, 105, 196–197, 212 Scatological language 109–110 ‘Sermon on the Estate of Matrimony, 1519’ 102, 111 ‘Sermon on Preparing to Die’ 175, 183 Sermons 31 (Palm Sunday, 1521), 58 (Wittenberg, March 9, 1522), 74 (1527 edition, preface), 85–86 (on John 3), 114 (1545 wedding), 157 (Kirchenpostille), 159 (Easter Monday, 1534) Theologia Germanica, introduction (1518) 165 ‘To the city councillors of all cities in Germany, that they should found and maintain Christian schools’ 40 Weimarer Ausgabe as ego-document 6, 15–16, 22–24, 156 Writings (Schriften) 7–11 See also Table Talk Luther, Martin, Jr. 143, 179, 183, 185, 188 Luther, Paul 143, 179, 183, 185, 185n52, 188 Luther (play) (Osborne) 4 Lysskirchen, Barbara, Luther’s letter to 37, 177, 198, 209 Malleus maleficarum 15n41, 101 Mansfeld counts of, mediation among (1546)  178–180, 178n22, 190 Luther funeral procession 192n86 Marburg Marburg Colloquy (1529) 34–35, 84, 207 Margarethe N. (widow acquaintance of Luther) 203

Index Marriage Of clergy 153 Luther on 11, 13–14, 99, 102–104, 110–117, 122–123, 126–129, 136–140, 150 Luthers’ 110–111, 110n73, 111–112n79, 115–117, 130–139, 140, 187–188 Marital sex 103–108, 108–118, 126, 139, 206–207 Martin, John 5, 217–218 Mary, the Virgin 79, 83n83, 101, 200 Masculinity Emasculinity 126, 131 Luther on 20n64, 123–129, 129–130, 133, 139–140, 153 Of Luther 121–122, 135–136, 140 Mathesius, Johannes 6–7, 67, 132 Melanchthon, Philipp Apologia 20–21 On conscience 38–39 Funeral sermon for Frederick the Wise 61 Luther and 41–42n71, 51n21, 54, 60, 65, 68, 90n116, 131, 132, 196, 198n102 And the death of Luther 177–178, 187n61, 194–195 At University of Wittenberg 49 Zwickau Prophets and 33 Midelfort, Erik 21 Misogyny 19, 100–101, 113, 122, 125–126, 132, 149 Moeller, Martin 168–169, 171, 172 Mohr, Hans 37 Molsdorf, Anna Weller von 47, 50, 100, 100n15 Monasticism Celibacy, vow of 10–12, 99–102, 106–107, 112, 119, 126, 130, 153, 206 Concordia, ideal of 218 Self-suppression and 3, 27 Motherhood 108, 143, 150, 197 Mourning 61–62, 191–193, 201–202 Müller, Kasper 48n7 Müntzer, Thomas 33, 36, 61 Mysticism 164–167, 164n30, 169 Ninety-five Theses against Indulgences (Luther) 49 Noah 73–75, 76n44, 78, 93 Nudity 105–106, 115

Index Oberman, Heiko A. On Luther’s mysticism 64 Luther: Man between God and the devil 215 Oecolampadius, Johannes 34, 36, 84, 207–208 ‘On married life’ (Luther) 110, 113 ‘Opusculum de arte moriendi’ (handbook) 174 Osborne, John Luther (play) 4 Oswald, Johann 56 ‘Pamphlet on baptism’ (Luther) 93 Papal authority 107–108, 190 Paradiß Gärtlein, voller christlicher Tugenden … (Little Garden of Eden, Full of Christian Virtues …) (Arndt) 170–171 Path dependence, concept of 214n23 Patronage Of Luther by Frederick the Wise 10, 33, 46–62, 51n23, 54–55n43, 63–66, 175, 211 Of Luther by Johann 6, 15–17, 37–39, 61, 66, 70n11, 173, 211, 215 Of Luther by Johann Friedrich 6, 16–17, 173, 189–190, 195, 211 Patronage relationships 49n83 Paul, Saint 103, 145 Pauli, Benedict 176 Peasants’ Revolt (1525) 36–38, 49, 61 Personality. See ego Peter, Saint 128 Philipp (landgrave of Hesse) 36, 38–39, 100 Pietism 157, 168, 168–169n40, 171–172 Plague 197 Prayer 87–90, 90n115, 171, 196–197, 199 Predestination 37, 76n44, 176–177, 204 Pregnancy 127, 127n34 Protestantism Catholicism compared to 43, 158, 181, 201, 214n23 Church space 195, 212 Church-state relations 44 Clergy 153–154 Protestant princes 38 Sexuality and 113 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald 134 Reason 157–159, 158n11, 164, 164n30, 217

227 Reformation Death, and the concept of 196–197 Five-hundredth anniversary (2017) 22, 25, 203 And the individual personality 204–205, 211–220 Renaissance and 217n34 Sexual paradigm shift during the 96, 98–99, 108, 113, 118–119 Reformation history 97 Reformed church. See Calvinism Relics 49–50, 190 Remedium ad peccatum (‘remedy for sin’) 103, 113, 126 Renaissance 5, 217–218, 217n34 Rome 27–29 Roper, Lyndal 15, 50, 50–51n17, 117n101, 164n30, 184n48 Roth, Stephan 70, 129, 157 Roth, Wolfgang 178n22, 180, 180n30, 180n32 Rörer, Georg xiin3, 70, 83n81, 156, 156– 157n7, 164n30 Rudtfeldt, Ambrosius 179, 180, 182–183, 186 Rühel, Johann 61 Sacramentarians 35–37 Sacraments, reform 91 Saint Andreas parish church 192 Sara 75–76, 117n100 Satan 37, 79–80, 94–95, 103, 124, 200 Saxony 30, 49, 69n8, 204–205 Schnell, Rüdiger 122 Schulze, Winfried 1n1, 2 Schurf, Hieronymus 57–58, 60 Scripture alone (sola scriptura) xi–xiii, 29, 31–34, 39–40, 45, 45n80, 55, 65–66 Sebastian (“Bastel”) (illegitimate son of Frederick the Wise) 64, 100, 100n15 Self Early modern 1, 49n8 Historical 1n1, 6 Selbstzeugnis (self-witness) 97 Self-formation 20–21, 55, 217–219 Suppression of 3–5 Senses 212n17, 215 ‘Sermon on the Estate of Matrimony, 1519’ (Luther) 102, 111 ‘Sermon on Preparing to Die’ (Luther)  175, 183

228 Sexuality Abstinence 99–100, 99n12, 106, 119, 126–127, 206 Anality 109–110, 110n70 Children and 108 The Fall and 96, 98–99, 102–103, 105, 125 Luther as a sexual person 96, 98–99, 108–112, 114–117, 116n98, 130–131, 140 Luther on sexuality 100, 103–108, 108–118, 126, 127n34, 131–132, 139, 206–207 Nudity and 105–106, 115 Paradigm shifts in 96, 98–99, 108, 113, 118–119 Sin and 113–114, 139 Women and 101–102, 101n21, 104, 107n57, 116, 125–126, 126n22, 148 Sin Calvin on 43n Death and 177, 199 Luther and 43, 43n, 67–68, 90, 92, 98, 109, 196, 198, 209 Original sin 125, 128 Remedium ad peccatum (‘remedy for sin’) 103, 113, 126 Sex and 113–114, 139 ‘Silent sins’ 107 Sincerity 5, 8, 20, 217–219 Social rank. See class Sodom and Gomorrah 74, 75, 78 Song 171–172, 208, 212 Spalatin, Georg Correspondence from Luther 16, 18, 50, 53–56, 60, 62–64, 115, 131, 131n45 Frederick the Wise, relationship with 64 As intermediary between Luther and Frederick the Wise 46–47, 50–52, 59, 66n95 Johann Friedrich and 52 Luther, relationship with 16, 46–47, 50–52, 59, 65, 66n95, 108–109, 190n75 Sprenger, Jakob 126n22 Staupitz, Johann ‘Büchlein von der Nachfolgung des willigen Sterbens Christi’ 174 As Luther’s mentor 166–167 Sturm, Hans 38 Suicide 27, 175, 199, 203 Superstition Angels 10, 78–80, 80n66, 174–176, 188

Index Devils 10, 162–163, 174–176, 183, 188, 209, 215–216 Portents 61, 189 Satan 4, 37, 79–80, 94–95, 103, 124, 200 Witchcraft 15n41, 44, 101, 120–121n2, 126n22 Susannah (Book of Daniel) 13 Swanson, R.N. 126 Sybille (electress of Saxony) 64–65, 182n36 Table Talk (Tischreden) On conscience 32, 35, 41 On death 175 As ego-document for Luther 2, 17–20, 132, 137–139, 210, 219 On Frederick the Wise 61 Genesis, gender in 123–125 God, Luther’s model of xiii, 71, 77, 82, 84, 88, 95 Luther family addressed 10n29, 116, 135–137, 142–145, 152 On predestination 76n44, 177 Satan, Luther’s battles with 80 On sexuality 100, 106, 107, 116, 126 On women 149 Tauler, Johann 164, 168–169n40, 172 Teutonic Knights 112 Theologica Germanica (anonymous) 164– 165, 172 Thuringia 30, 49, 205 Tobias, Book of 12–14 ‘To the city councillors of all cities in Germany, that they should found and maintain Christian schools’ (Luther) 40 Trent, Council of 180–81, 180–181n32 Trinity 75, 77, 90 Troeltsch, Ernst 203n123 Unicorn horn 182, 200, 200n108 Vergottung (divination) 165 Vom wahren Christenthumb heilsamer Busse, wahren Glauben, heyligem Leben und Wandel der rechten wahren Christen (Concerning True Christianity, Salutary Repentance, [and the] Holy Life and Conduct of Proper [and] True Christians) (Arndt) 170

229

Index Wartburg Castle, Eisenach 55–56 Weimarer Ausgabe As ego-document 6, 15–16, 22–24, 156 Wild, Simon 185–187 Wissenschaftlicher Beirat 22, 203 Witchcraft 15n41, 44, 101, 120–121n2, 126n22 Wittenberg All Saints’ Chapter House 32, 59–60 Book burning 53 Castle church 47, 57, 83n81, 190, 193–196, 202 De votis monasticis Martini Lutheri iudicium publication 10 Luther’ funeral in 188, 193–194 Luther’s return to (1522) 56–59 Plagues in 197 Reformation in 204 Saint Mary’s City Church 8, 36, 83n81, 155n1, 156–158, 160, 164n30, 176–177, 203 University of Wittenberg 30, 48–49, 54 Witch burning 44 Wolfgang (prince of Anhalt) 147, 181, 185 Wolframsdorf, Curt (Churht) von 182 Women Catholic Church and 139–140 Death rates 197

And dominance 129–130, 130n41, 133–134 Evil, as cause of 14–15, 15n41 Gender, comparison of 122–129, 124n10, 130, 139, 142, 144–151, 153–154 As healers 186, 186n56 Luther on 101–102, 107n57, 108, 111–113, 124, 124n10, 132–134, 136–138, 149 Misogyny 19, 100–101, 113, 122, 125–126, 132, 149 Motherhood 108, 143, 150, 197 Pregnancy 127, 127n34 Sex drive of 101–102, 101n21, 104, 107n57, 116, 125–126, 126n22, 148 Sixteenth-century concept of 120–21 Upbringing of 144–145, 147, 150 Witchcraft 15n41, 44, 101, 120–121n2, 126n22 Works, good 43, 82, 167, 179, 200, 214 Young Man Luther (Erikson) 97–98, 110n72, 150, 215 Zwickau 109 Zwickau Prophets 33–34, 33n31 Zwilling, Gabriel 59 Zwingli, Ulrich 34, 36, 163, 175, 214