For all of Luther’s personal and spiritual difficulties, the young Augustinian monk was nothing short of a prodigy in the discipline of the sacred sciences, and his Augustinian superior Johannes Staupitz exercised his authority to situate Luther in university placements where he might expand his scholarship and original thought. For two years (1513-1515) Luther lectured at the Wittenberg university about the Psalms, that part of sacred revelation most familiar to a monk, as monasteries prayed all 150 psalms in a perpetual cycle (as would anyone today who prays the full Liturgy of the Hours.)
In this timeframe Luther came to understand that, as Eric Metaxas puts it, “the only way to read the Word of God properly involved seeing beyond the mere words.” (p. 77) To approach the text without nuance, as some fundamental approaches tend to do, is to limit the power of Scripture to the level of any other written book. Again, Metaxas summarizes this well: “Therefore, one must not merely see what the devil could see, which is to say the words on a page, but see what only God could see and would reveal to those who desired it, which was in the words and around them, too.” Clearly Luther is drawing from his own experience, one that is common even today to any priest or religious bound to the daily recitation of the Hours. As a monk Luther had already recited or sung the Psalms in common with his monastic brothers for some years, but this recitation was obviously bringing him no religious peace of mind, most likely because the common prayer was a duty of monks and approached in routine fashion. As a duty, the recitation of the 150 Psalms that composed the Hours was viewed as an obligation to God, but no one expected to experience God or undergo anything resembling a profound religious experience except, perhaps, over the long run of a lifetime of fidelity. When I was in training and taking up the common praying of the Hours [or praying the “breviary” as it was called then], my superior told a story—most likely apocryphal—about a community of friars reciting the psalms in San Francisco when the great earthquake struck. The local superior supposedly halted the recitation and emotionally ordered the friars to start praying.] Luther was putting forward the reality of a dynamic encounter with the written Word of God. His principle here is the power of every Scriptural encounter. The Bible was given to be experienced, not used. He came to regard the thoughtless routine of monastic recitation, for example, as blasphemous in the sense that constant repetition without a profound encounter of the divine would, over time, harden the heart against any future possibilities of being touched by God. He cited how the devil had quoted Scripture flawlessly for his nefarious purposes and he placed much greater emphasis upon the reader of sacred texts to approach the Bible with purity of heart and, equally important, the hope and expectation of being filled with God’s life. Luther had history at his back. The medieval Church was not biblically oriented. In fact, history books will make the argument that most Christians were not aware that there was such a thing as the Bible at this juncture, at least until the invention of printing in the 1400’s when a peasant coming through town might actually see one, in the imperfect Latin translation of St. Jerome from 400 A.D. In the early thirteenth century, when Francis of Assisi wished to model his young community after the Gospel, he selected at random texts from the local church’s altar missal, which was as close to the Bible as anyone of that time could come. Luther, in his reflections on the Psalms, was unconsciously pursuing the same route as Francis three centuries earlier, another tortured soul looking for an intense experience of God in a time when the Church was underperforming and in need of renewal. Curiously, Francis’s conversion involved mystical experience, direct inspiration from God, [“Rebuild my House”] that in turn made the Gospel understandable in its command to give up all riches and “come follow me.” The most powerful stirrings of faith and renewal in medieval times came through the experiences of mystics and the communities they inspired. Luther’s true conversion moment came in his study and his class notes. Less dramatic than Francis’s, perhaps, but no less real and essential: salvation would come through a living encounter with the Word of God. It is hard to imagine how much hope Luther’s future preaching and writing would bring to a broad swath of Europe. I have posted on this stream at several points that Catholicism in 1500 was divided between those who despaired that any good works could save them, those who sought salvation by any means including monetary, and a growing class of cynics who turned to pagan classics and philosophers as more reliable source of discussion and speculation. Luther would say that there is no chaining of the Word of God. He had rediscovered the depth and meaning of Hebrews 4:12, the famous “two-edged sword” biblical analogy. A struggling believer would hear three reasons for newfound optimism: (1) There is no limit to the forgiving power of God’s Word; anyone of pure intention who approached the Word in humility would be justified or saved by faith; (2) The heart of the salvation process rested in conscience, the good intention to live as guided by constant communion with the Word of God, and (3) there was now a clear roadmap for Church reform, conformity of practice to God’s living word. I have simplified the Lutheran reformation here, and much discourse, contention, and bloodshed would follow from the implications of Luther’s thought as will be chronicled in future blog posts. But I can make this very personal, too. I read the bulk of Eric Metaxas’s biography of Luther [see home page] during the breaking scandals in the American Catholic Church and the anguishing division in our country during this recently concluded election campaign. When the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre took place, I was stunned that my own Church mumbled along in routine worship like the monks at choir in Luther’s monastery. I have many moments where I ask myself, “What kind of a game are we playing here?” I have to say that following Luther’s life story and reflecting on his work has brought me back to reflective sanity. I realized afresh that the Bible is alive, and God is present there to sustain me and give me hope. I believe it was the twentieth-century Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton who observed that for all of us there is the great temptation to go out into the woods and build a one-man chapel. I could never do that as a lifestyle because I cannot pretend to know the mind of God on my own. I remain a Catholic because in my formative years I had the good fortune to learn the Scripture from giants just as Luther’s students had five centuries ago. But yes, I can still take up the Bible and hold it close to my heart, in times of joy and times of pain, in the knowledge that the Promise of Israel and the Coming of the Christ wrap me up in a world that never ends. And I can move on constructively.
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The phrase “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried,” dates to the Catholic author and man of letters G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the same G.K. Chesterton who inspired the delightful Father Brown mysteries currently available on Netflix. Chesterton’s maxim is probably correct, though he might have made an exception for Martin Luther, who “tried” Catholicism with his entire being and found it not just difficult, but impossible to fulfill. I noted in Reformation Post 30 that Luther was beyond scrupulous in his monastic observance, to the point of neuroticism.
There is no better example of the pressures of his fears of going to hell than the celebration of his first Mass as an ordained priest in 1506. This Mass, celebrated in his monastery, included in the congregation Luther’s father; the two had not spoken for several years since Luther had spurned his father’s wishes to become a lawyer by entering the Augustinian Order instead. All of Luther’s biographers concur that the monk priest experienced some powerful emotion that immobilized him at the moment of consecration, when he uttered the words that changed the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Given his overwhelming sense of his own unworthiness and his six-hour confessions, the realization of holding God in his own hands not surprisingly created a panic or dissociation, though with the help of his confessor, Staupitz, Luther was able to finish the Mass and enjoy the communal festivities of the day. Luther was doing everything that he believed the Church required of him to save his soul, to the point of going beyond even the austere standard life of monks to extreme works of deprivation, discipline, and exhaustive examination of conscience over his profound sense of guilt and unworthiness. He was not alone in his suffering, for the late middle ages and the early Renaissance was a time of confusion, fear, and even cynicism over the issue of salvation. A very rough division of Luther’s world would look something like this: (1) Catholics who believed that the rites of the faith were sufficient for salvation by way of the Church’s own authority; (2) Catholics who despaired that any good works of faith could save them; and (3) a growing class of cynics and men of letters who questioned the entire structure of a “saving authority” based upon the creation of man. For all his anguish, Luther dedicated himself to his monastic life of teaching and scholarship at his university in Erfurt and other assignments given to him by his order, including a visit to Rome in 1510 for administrative matters regarding his community. If you read anything of Luther in your lifetime, you will draw the conclusion that he was profoundly scandalized by life in the Eternal City and lost faith in the Church. It is true that Leo X, a Medici pope, was a very worldly man with little interests to addressing the need for reform that many Catholics, including Luther, and Leo’s excessive spending fueled the practice of sale of indulgences. But Luther’s experience went further than scandal over corrupt clerics. He was still able to draw a distinction between a saving Church and the corrupt hierarchy who might be disgracing it at any point in history. In fact, the Augustinian monk engaged in several religious activities on behalf of himself and his family while in Rome. While I was in Rome in 2013 I visited the mother Church of Christendom in Luther’s day, St. John Lateran. Then as now, the central relics of the majestic Church remain the [reputed] heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. I must admit to significant doubt about the veracity of this claim, but my faith has never rested upon relics. In Luther’s day, however, this Church of John the Apostle offered many blessings based upon such questionable traditions, particularly for priests. The legend arose that that a priest offering Mass under its roof could obtain his own mother’s salvation. Unfortunately, the church was so packed with tourists and pilgrims that it was impossible for him to do so. As Eric Metaxas writes, “The very idea of it must have been disturbing and confusing; that because of the gabbling crowds, Luther’s dear mother might suffer the horrors of purgatory, or worse. What sense did it all make? But the Church was full of such mysteries, and who was this Martin, a sinful monk, to question any of it?” (Martin Luther, 2017, p. 61) Luther then progressed to the Scala Sancta or “Holy Stairs” where pilgrims might gain relief for suffering souls in Purgatory by climbing the stairs on their knees and offering the prescribed prayers. Luther found himself lamenting that such divine intervention could not be applied to his parents because they were not dead. Years later Luther would recall that at the top of the steps “he suddenly wondered whether all he had just done so obediently would have the effect that the church so authoritatively and specifically and confidently said it would.” (Metaxas, p. 61) It was a moment of truth for the struggling monk, who observed, too, that the clerical life in Rome was in serious decline; a typical Mass could be offered in twelve minutes, and in some churches as little as nine minutes. Luther obviously had much to think about upon his return to Germany, and his position as a scholar gave him the opportunity to reflect upon the Church and the sources of its authority. Like any good humanist of the early Renaissance, he returned to earlier sources. Needless to say, he could find nothing in St. Augustine or any other Church father from the age of the great councils on matters such as indulgences, applications of merits, or the timespan of Masses. He did not deny the reality of the Church nor the need for it, but he came to understand that in its present form the Church was not capable of self-correction, given its unnuanced claim of authority. How did a believer live in a Church that was, in a sense, “overreaching?” If this was true, then by what measure could the Church be reformed? And perhaps more importantly, how could an individual baptized believer reach an assurance of salvation, a realization that God heard his prayers? Where could a believer turn for the ultimate truths of salvation? In post 32 on this stream we will look at Luther’s pastoral and theological breakthrough that would alter the religious experience of the Christian world. I will be away for about five more days. In the meantime, today I am leaving a book review of another Protestant Reformer who came to prominence as Luther grew older. Enjoy! Calvin By Bruce Gordon Reviewed by Thomas J. Burns (2011) A biography of John Calvin is of necessity a history of his time. The religious landscape of Europe during Calvin's lifetime [1509-1564] was most complex in terms of grassroots pastoral piety, theological exploration, and international relations. And then there is Calvin: his own religious journey, from French Catholic reformer to Protestant patriarch. There is the corpus of Calvin's theological thought and writing, enduring and controversial to this day. And finally, there is the matter of Calvin's ecclesiology: what structural and communal body of belief and practice did he leave his followers. Bruce Gordon has produced an eminently readable and highly manageable general study of these questions in producing a remarkable introduction to John Calvin for the informed reader with at least a basic grasp of Reformation dynamics. As Robert Bireley has narrated in his fine work, “The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450-1700,” [1999] the spirit of church reform was not the exclusive provenance of Luther. Grassroots outcroppings of lay spirituality emerged side-by-side with wholesale reform of many existing Catholic religious orders to improve the tenor of church life by 1500. It is not surprising, then, that the young Catholic Calvin would by his early adulthood identify himself as an apostle of reform. but as Gordon observes, reformist Catholics in France had nowhere to lay their heads in the face the crown’s opposition to Luther and seminal Protestant uprisings of independence on the continent. Calvin began his studies in theology but turned instead to law. A true humanist of the time, he immersed himself in the Roman philosopher Seneca. At some point in 1533 the Protestant conviction that the papacy was beyond repair was embraced by Calvin, though at this early time such French converts did not as yet have ecclesiastical bodies to align with. Like many of his mindset, Calvin remained a vocal and prolific voice of change within Catholicism until his writings and other agitations made his life in Catholic France intolerable. In 1534 he moved to a more affable setting in Switzerland. Switzerland’s Protestant reform was rich in zeal but poor in unity. Each of its major cities hosted major proponents of Protestant reformed theology. The major overarching conflict upon Calvin's arrival was the significant tension between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, with the latter advocating a much more radical abandoning of traditional church life than Luther. Gordon pays close attention to the various points of contestation elaborated by such theological masters as Bucer, Oecolampadius, Melanchthon, Erasmus, and others, and he rightly distinguishes Calvin as a theologian with a long view of the future, and the realization that if Protestant reform was to survive, it must be united. As Gordon chronicles Calvin's life, it becomes clear that Calvin cannot pull together the Christian church. But it is not for lack of trying. As is often the case with great thinkers of all disciplines, Calvin's most lasting contribution to Christianity was written in his relative youth, his "Institutes of Christian Religion." In this work, revised several times during his lifetime, Calvin outlines what might be called reformist ecclesiology for the first time. He weaves together doctrinal foundations, church structure, and personal piety. It is in this work that we come across his controversial definition of "predestination." Gordon's handling of the question is eminently clear and lucid. Calvin believed in what one might term "a double call." The Institutes sites Old Testament metaphor, noting that while Esau and Jacob are both of the chosen people, Jacob had been chosen before birth for special election. On its face Calvin's theory did not convince me, but it may have made more sense at the time of his writing when all warring Christian parties could claim the blessing of baptism but not all, at least in Calvin's eyes, were worthy of eternal election. Calvin, of course, is historically identified with the city of Geneva. As a young man with zeal and perhaps restless disregard, he took the pulpit as a layman in the company of close and equally outspoken fellow warriors. Theological and personal conflicts led to his discharge from ministerial duties, but he would be invited back by the city magistrates a few years later. Gordon notes that upon his return Calvin was charged with creating a church order that would satisfy divergent expectations in Geneva. Calvin never "mellowed" strictly speaking, but age brought him a greater sense of his personal charism in the pulpit and his organizational role as leader. Thus, Calvin's ministerial persona was centered on preaching. While he defended a modified sacramental system, it is very clear that the preaching of the Bible and its moral implications for personal and civil life was the fulcrum of ecclesiology and ministerial identity. Gordon describes Calvin as a highly respected preacher, whose sermons did not hesitate to address matters of public conduct and controversy. One gets the impression that he was greatly revered if not greatly loved in Geneva. It is equally clear from the text that Calvin, whatever he might say about Catholic orders, functioned as a bishop. He fully embraced a magisterial role for the reformed church throughout Europe. This is evident in his recruitment and support of reform missionaries for work in Catholic France, for example, where many of his missionaries came to ultimate cruel martyrdom. Calvin was criticized for not joining them in France, but he defended himself on the grounds that his life was too important for the life of the church as a whole. [“Strike the shepherd, and the sheep scatter.”] Clearly, Calvin was neither a Congregationalist nor a mystic. Gordon repeatedly underscores Calvin’s identification with St. Paul—theologian and definitely churchman. Gordon is not sentimental about Calvin, but the thought occurs that the reformed church’s first true shepherd resembles in many aspects the Catholic Ignatius of Loyola. By his straightforward rendering of the story, Gordon has made the case for the tragedy and cost of disunion. When I was attending my seminary’s reunion September 21-23 up in the Catskill Mountains of New York, one of my classmates, a regular at the Café, said to me: “Are we ever going to get back to Luther?” Over the past two months events in the American Church and elsewhere have stolen the Thursday Reformation stream from its regular focus, and poor Martin Luther has suffered the most neglect. This is most unfortunate, because the strengths and weaknesses of Luther’s vision for the Church throws considerable light on our predicaments in the twenty-first century. Again, my primary source is Martin Luther: The Man who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by Eric Metaxas.
[If you would like to meet Metaxas and hear him talk about how he came to write Luther’s biography, click here.] We left Luther at age 21 after he completed his bachelor’s and first master’s degree and preparing for the final leg of his matriculation, the completion of a degree in civil law. The general idea was his eventual assumption of his father’s mining business. Biographers over the centuries have reported at this juncture how Luther was caught in a violent lightning storm and made an immediate vow to St. Ann to enter a monastery were he to live through the storm. But one might ask how came to make such a dramatic vow in these circumstances, given that his future was pretty much laid out before him. If you look back to the August 2 Thursday posting on the blog, you can get a quick refresher on the various academic forces battling each other in 1500. Luther was naturally instructed in “scholasticism,” the philosophical worldview of the Western Catholic Church most famously advocated by St. Thomas Aquinas. Scholastic thinking brought logic and reason to the understanding of God’s saving plan, and Luther would have been taught the roadmap to Church life and salvation. The internal logic of scholasticism rested upon the authority invested in St. Peter by Christ himself, making the pope both the final arbiter of all that is true and the ultimate guardian of the purity and holiness of the Church. The Scholastic Method did not go unchallenged, however, and Luther would have encountered another school of Catholic thinking, humanism. Humanists found the logical assurances of the Church overreaching, claiming too much. Luther read Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel during his college years, and two of his humanist professors had profound influence upon his thinking in college and for many years thereafter. Humanists were not heretics; they understood that Church scholarship suffered deficiencies. Again, from an earlier post, some Catholic intellectuals introduced the method of Ressourcement, a return to original documents and Church practices. Inevitably the role of Sacred Scripture itself would come into play. Medieval Catholicism preferred a system of logic and reason against the complex and profoundly human narrative of the Bible. Catholicism’s most famous humanist of Luther’s time was Erasmus of Rotterdam [1469-1536], who discovered that even when the Church turned to the Bible in search of “proof texts,” the translations in use at the time were poor and at times faulty Latin translations. Erasmus would translate the Scripture into its original languages, primarily Greek and Hebrew. Luther, a highly sensitive man and deeply sensitive to the high stakes of salvation, found himself at age 21 in a profound quandary. He depended upon the certainties promised by the scholastic description of Church life and salvation—that a worthy confession would save him from hell fire, for example—and the humanist emphasis upon mystery and the untapped powers of the literal Word of God. Few people had access to Scripture, and monks, ironically, were forbidden regular study of Biblical texts except those assigned to the Divine Office of daily prayer. Luther’s growing preoccupation with theology and his own eternal destiny was taking him far afield from his father’s legal career plans. It is little wonder, then, that faced with the first true life and death circumstance of his life, a violent storm, he would spontaneously opt for the life of a monk, where he could pursue his questions further and save his soul in the process. There were four monasteries in Luther’s region, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Franciscans, and the Augustinians. No one knows exactly why Luther chose the Augustinians; the best theory is the reputation of that order for strictness and austerity. He could not bring himself to inform his father of his plans, the latter having spent a small fortune on his son’s education to date. On July 16, 1505, Martin Luther entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, Germany. Luther approached the challenge of monastic living determined to do anything required to achieve perfection and salvation. He would work his way into heaven, driven by a fear of hell fire and a desire to please God by his works. There is great irony that his attitude of salvation through works was condemned by his order’s fifth century icon, St. Augustine himself, in the great saint’s assault against the heresy of Pelagianism, the idea that man can earn grace and salvation by his own efforts. Humanists turned to the method of Ressourcement precisely to uncover such contradictions, but in his early monastic years Luther chose the safer path of guaranteed outcomes. The fly in the ointment, however, was the nagging fear on Luther’s part that despite his efforts, he did not sense a religious peace or tranquility, which led him to press further in his efforts. Along with physical symptoms, he developed a profound case of scrupulosity, spiritual OCD if you will. Metaxas devotes a chapter to Luther’s scrupulous confessions with his confessor Johannes Staupitz. Luther could not bring himself to believe he had made a worthy confession. On one occasion he confessed to Staupitz for six hours, searching for any psychological reluctance of intention that might render his confession ineffective, or worse, blasphemous. As Metaxas puts it, “His struggles usually had to do with his own doubts that he could ever be good, no matter how he tried, that he could ever be worthy of God’s mercy, grace, and salvation.” [p. 48] It was a sorry state to endure, and Luther might have lived in his scrupulous prison until death except for the momentous interventions about to come his way. For al least the next two weeks I am directing all posting to the Sunday Stream to discuss the recent Pennsylvania report on clerical child abuse, including its implications for catechetics and Church/parish life. You can jump over to Sunday's stream by clicking here.
It has been a month since we last looked in on Martin Luther’s educational and religious journey, as well as the question of his personal and psychological composition, at least to the degree that historical sources allow. In 1501, at 17, Luther was ready for college and he left home for the University of Erfurt. The city of Erfurt was situated in a section of Germany known as Thuringia. The university itself was founded in 1379, the first institution of university learning in Germany. It was closed when Prussia annexed this land in 1816. Remarkably, the university reopened in 1994 when East and West Germany were reunited, making it today the oldest and the youngest university in Germany. The city of Erfurt is currently celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and Luther’s decade there, as this tourist site indicates.
An immediate question for a student of Luther is the identity of the University of Erfurt, i.e., was it a Catholic school? During the years of Luther’s studies (1501-1505) the question would not have made sense as there were no independent state schools nor schools of other religions in Western Christendom. Luther’s course of study tells us a lot: at the bachelor’s level he was required to master the seven liberal arts, enumerated and clearly explained at the Brigham Young University School of Humanities website (2014). “Liberal arts” is an umbrella term for what we might call philosophy and anthropology, and as the BYU site points out, it is the philosopher Aristotle in the pre-Christian era who provided this template for organized learning. Bachelor students lived like monks in many respects. They rose at 4 AM for devotions and retired at 8 PM. There were six residences or bursa around the university, each with its own atmosphere and temperament. Luther settled into the Heaven’s Gate bursa, where all 150 Psalms were prayed over a two-week cycle and spiritual texts and classics were read during the meals. According to Eric Metaxas [see home page], both the texts, particularly the biblical commentaries, and the religious atmosphere in general were critical in arousing an intense intellectual and religious devotion in the young collegian. [p. 24] Although the University of Erfurt was a Catholic institution of learning, it was not immune to the philosophies and trends of Catholic intellectuals and men of letters. Metaxas devotes a section of Luther’s biography to humanism, the emerging alternative to the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas which had dominated university education since the 1250’s. Metaxas refers to the scholasticism of Luther’s time as “a fussy, over-formalized way of instruction that was fatally removed from life’s issues.” [p. 25] In Luther’s day critics already poked fun at scholastics who would argue “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Luther’s formal instruction in theology would have consisted of dry propositions, most likely the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Systematic study of the Bible was not generally offered. Events outside of Luther’s college classroom would have significant impact on his intellectual and theological development. About fifty years before Luther graduated with his bachelor’s degree, the great city of Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. Eastern Orthodox Catholic scholars fled to Western Europe bringing with them a new method of theological study, the return to original sources, popularly known as the ad fontes movement [“return to the original source of the waters”]. This era is not called the Renaissance for nothing; it is a rebirth or rediscovery of what the earliest sources might tell us, without the obfuscating and confusing layers of scholastic addition. The ad fontes method, officially termed Ressourcement in our time, was a critical tool during Vatican II and beyond, particularly as historical theologians revisited the earliest forms and rites of the sacraments. In Luther’s time Ressourcement led to a demand for access to the full Bible and in its most accurate translation. Scholasticism used select portions of the Bible as proof texts for decrees and texts, but the consideration of the Scripture as a whole, and in its original languages, was never undertaken as a scholastic project, at least until the Renaissance era. Thus Luther, as an inquiring young scholar, naturally embraced the humanist quest to “go back” to what he understood as the sources of the Catholic faith. The Catholic humanist Erasmus, eventually a friend of Luther’s, mastered both Hebrew and Greek to read Biblical texts in their original languages, and in doing so discovered errors in the official Church text of the time, the Latin language Vulgate translation of St. Jerome in the fifth century. Years later, when Luther translated the New Testament into German, he used Erasmus’ Greek text, and not the Latin Vulgate, as his starting point. As a collegian in a humanist age, Luther did not approach the more radical conclusions he would later reach, but he did find an intellectual atmosphere which left him to question whether there might be more historical-spiritual data from the past that might open new paths of spirituality and church practice. This is certainly true in his approach to scripture. The enthusiasms of the time seemed to jump start his academic intensity; he achieved his bachelors’ degree in three semesters. But Luther was determined to earn a master’s degree in theology, which he did in December 1504, a remarkable achievement for that time. That he undertook theological studies at all is surprising, since his father had shouldered the financial burden of preparing him for a law degree. Luther prepared to begin his law studies, essentially a second master’s degree, and had purchased his Corpus Juris, the expensive text for all future lawyers. The common story of this juncture tells us that Luther, during an intensive lightning storm, made a vow to St. Anne that he would become a monk. Metaxas provides a more comprehensive hypothesis, suggesting that Luther, at this stage of his life, was impacted by a fear of the afterlife that modern day historians like Kevin Madigan have come to appreciate about late medieval and early Renaissance life. Luther may have been excited by humanist possibilities, but a deepened consciousness of the possibilities of damnation were never far from his mind, either. In his later writings Luther would speak of his Anfechtungen, the closest translation being “to duel with.” Metaxas puts it this way: “So Luther’s Anfechtungen meant to do battle with one’s own thoughts and with the devil. But for him this was something so horrible that it’s difficult for us to fully comprehend.” [p. 28] Kevin Madigan writes that this morbid state of fear of hell was common in the northern reaches of Europe. In any event, Luther’s future battles would not be conducted in common court rooms. We left off a month ago with Luther entering college, a period where his life began to diverge from that of his colleagues and the lines of his intriguing story begin to take shape. Given the antagonism of Catholicism to Luther in many quarters, and the admittedly unusual circumstances in his life, the question has been debated over Luther’s identity as a narcissistic rebellious monk, a sexually frustrated monk, or a deeply neurotic one. As recently as 1958 the famous psychoanalyst Erik Erikson compiled a best-selling diagnostic of Luther’s developmental years (through his 35th year). Today such a work would be considered unethical—diagnosing a patient one has never seen. Aside from the ethics, the pool of data about Luther since the 1950’s, has grown exponentially, which would render any psychological determinations woefully out of date.
The suggestions that Luther had unresolved “father issues” which poisoned his ability to respect authority, or PTSD from a brush with lightning, or a neurotic scrupulosity which led him to despair of salvation are all enhanced by frequent repetition and, admittedly, because they make for interesting story-telling. My guess is that even the most casual follower of Luther has heard the tale that the monk had his most significant psycho-religious-digestive breakthrough while seated on the throne of the outhouse in the library tower of his monastery. For those who subscribe to family theory, what are we to make of Luther’s family? As I have posted earlier, Luther’s parents were devout Catholics. Martin’s father directed mining operations in his town and had achieved enough upward mobility to long for the day when he would have a son who graduated from college. Martin’s success in college fed his father’s hope that as an accomplished gentleman his son would assume and expand the family operations, not to mention continue and enhance the family name. For reasons I will explain in a moment, Martin made a volte face and entered the Augustinian monastery, embracing the studious cloistered life of a monk. Knowing that his vocation would deeply upset his father, the younger Luther entered the monastery surreptitiously. It would be several years before they spoke again, and the occasion was Martin Luther’s ordination to the priesthood. His father agreed to attend and even spent a fair amount of money on the celebration with the Augustinians. In his 2017 biography of Luther, Eric Metaxas does make note of the exchange of toasts between the new priest and his father, citing a certain edginess which laced the humor. That said, when the name of Martin Luther achieved fame and notoriety throughout Europe, his parents did change their last names from Ludher to Luther. [In the custom of the day among Renaissance intellectuals, Martin Ludher had changed his last name to the ancient Eleutherius, which he then shortened to Luther.] Historians note that during the consecration of the bread and wine during his first Mass, the new priest froze and could not immediately recite the words. Metaxas attributes this to a spirituality and belief system which bordered on the neurotic. I tend to agree in part, but this “neurosis of religion” was quite common at the time. In the closing paragraph of his treatment of Medieval Christianity (2015), Kevin Madigan writes that “Luther spoke for many northerners in his anxiety of not knowing how many masses, how many confessions, how many prayers, novenas, pilgrimages, and pious actions were sufficient for salvation? How could one know?” (p. 434) As a young monk, Luther confessed to his spiritual director, Johann von Staupitz, so frequently and at great length—up to six hours—that Staupitz finally had to address the entire penitential situation with Luther. It does not appear that Luther was a particularly ruthless sinner; on the contrary, he applied himself arduously to monastic responsibilities and study, as his body of academic work would attest to later. The problem appears to be more of a pressing insecurity that his contrition was inadequate, that a failure to mention even the smallest failure would render his sacramental encounter a “bad confession” and make matters even worse. In my own training I learned to recognize the “scrupulous” penitent and encountering the sufferings of a scrupulous penitent in the confessional even today is painful to behold. But Luther was also engaged in another internal wrestling match which Metaxas describes vividly in his biography. As a young monk-priest Luther was assigned a journey to Rome to tend to bureaucratic matters for his order. Like all first-time visitors to Rome, he strove to take advantage of the blessings and indulgences available to pilgrims. He sought to offer Mass at St. John Lateran, where common practice had it that he could gain full or plenary indulgences for his parents if he said Mass in that church. Much as he tried, the press of crowds and the large number of priests made it impossible for him to do so. After several such experiences in the Eternal City, he began to reflect upon the unfairness of ecclesiastical arrangement, and then to question whether the good work under consideration actually “worked.” Cynicism of Church law and practice was common in the Renaissance era, but Luther was no typical cynic. That there might be cleavage between the laws of God and the laws of man—or more specifically, that the Vicar of Christ might not be a man of unadulterated virtue—was a thought too fearful to contemplate. For a man who confessed as often as he ate, such a realization would have been devastating. What saved his life—and ultimately began the Reformation—was his inspiration from St. Paul that salvation and grace from God was a gift exclusive of human effort. Luther undertook his Pauline studies in a library tower with a privy at its base, and hence the legend that the inspiration came to him while seated there and released him from chronic stress-induced constipation. But it is true that Luther, psychologically speaking, became a changed man when he untangled himself from the excessive legalisms of redemption which had attached themselves to the Church and “placed burdens upon men too great to bear.” Luther was not an excessively angry man for his times. This does not mean he was consistently above the fray, and scatological insult and humor were not unknown to him. The excessive rage and violence of his followers and enemies alike would become a great worry to him over the years. In some ways he could be naïve and shocked at the venality of churchmen who derided his theological concerns about indulgences with the simple retort that Luther was disobedient to the pope. I read his 95 Theses, his statements of theological debate on the matter of indulgences and salvation issued in 1517. They are, essentially, an invitation to conversation addressed to theologians and, most respectfully to his bishop. The 95 Theses were not nailed to the Cathedral door; they were mailed to his bishop. While critical of certain practices and attitudes, there is no indication here of a man blinded by anger or set upon destruction of his Church. Luther’s mental state of mind throughout his life was “hyper” in the sense that he devoted his being to high stakes in this world and the next. But were his theological concerns distorted by mental impairment? Not a chance. I was not happy with the limited posting I was able to do in June, and I feel like I left a lot of you hanging. One reason for the limited posts is several changes in my circumstances. Back in May I opened a free mental health service in the local Catholic Church here in my town. It is open Fridays all day, and in less than a month the available time slots were full. I am enjoying it very much, but I cannot do anything else on Friday, which eliminates another day I can devote to the Café. I continue to work Mondays at the Catholic Charities Clinic in Eustis, Florida; in fact, I will be driving over in an hour or two.
A second issue is the increasing demand for more reading prior to posting. There are several streams going at the same time which call for more research. Certainly, the Thursday stream on Luther and the Reformation is one; the nature of evil in the Monday Morality stream is another. This year I began commenting on the First Readings on the Sunday Mass, which meant a return to Old Testament studies, a discipline which is not one of my greatest strengths. When I started the Café four years ago, one of my goals was to introduce busy professionals to the best of new religious, catechetical, and theological works. This assumes reading the books first! A third issue is retirement itself. Having turned 70 this year, I am finding that increasingly friends and family need contact and attention. Again, I am very pleased to become more involved in their lives, but this too devours the hours of the day. On the other hand, all the medical advice for seniors speaks of exercise and interpersonal interactions as means of maintaining a sound mind and a good spirit. This is a time of life to cultivate and enrich the relationships I already have, and perhaps engage in new ones. I know a fair amount of people who have outlived their friends and face their final years in an undesired solitude. And, I am beginning to feel older. While I continue to be blessed with good health, I am no longer the young buck who could read till 2 AM. If I stay up that late, I will feel it the next day, like a hangover. When I was on retreat with the Trappists two weeks ago, I talked about all of this with a wise monk who reminded me that the senior population brings an example of transition and serenity, and he gently challenged me to stop running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I have no intention of discontinuing the Café, because aside from the pressures of brewing up new flavors frequently, it is one of the more pleasurable enterprises in my life. Realistically it is probably best to say that the weekly grind of each stream will be tapered back to two weeks instead of weekly. On days when I am on the road, like family reunions, I may post with more spontaneity and less pedantic. Old bloggers don’t die, they just reign it in a bit. For all his success in his mining ventures, the father of Martin Luther was unable to rise above the social status of “local citizen makes good.” Johannes or Hans Luther was not considered a social “nobleman,” but he recognized that his adolescent son, whose academic abilities were already noted, could take the family’s financial and social status to new heights. Then, as now, a college education was de rigueur for advanced ambitions. Thus, at age 13, the Luthers sent their son to a boarding school in Magdeburg, about forty miles from the family home in Mansfield, in the region of Saxony. The senior Luther wished his son to study among the offspring of nobility and to master the language of Latin, the coinage of all advanced learning.
Students in similar financial circumstances to Luther, those with high hopes and limited capital, found local boarding with the Brethren of the Common Life. Founded in the Netherlands, the Brethren was a fraternity or brotherhood of men who lived simply and piously. Their mission was the copying and printing of books in the service of educating adults in the direction of meditation and the inner life, critical of the highly speculative spirituality of the 13th and 14th centuries. Metaxas observes that Luther’s year with the Brethren was probably his first intimate exposure to an intensely spiritual, simple, structured way of religious life. The following year Lather transferred to the city of Eisenach, 74 miles from his family but closer to many relatives, where he would set roots for the next four years. Eisenach was something of a religious hub, containing three monasteries [Dominican, Carthusian, Franciscan] and three parishes. The Church of St. Mary—with twenty altars--claimed to possess a bone fragment of the forearm of the Virgin Mary, a relic of the arms that held the infant Savior. Eisenach was a town of 4000 inhabitants; years later Luther referred to it as a “nest of priests and an emporium of clergy.” [Metaxas, p. 18] If Calvin Coolidge could say centuries later that “the business of America is business,” a Renaissance observer might claim that “the religion of Eisenach was religion. Whatever Luther was learning in the classroom in his high school years, which was probably some variant of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, he could not have been immune from the general unrest in the Church which inevitably found supporters and detractors in the compacted church world of Eisenach. For starters, Luther lived with the mayor of the town and his family, through some distant family connection. The Mayor, Heinrich Schalbe, and his family were pious Catholics and leading patrons of the Franciscan monastery there. The Franciscans had been born three centuries earlier when Francis received a vision from Christ commanding him to “rebuild my house.” Franciscan spirit throughout the middle ages always carried some feature of “loyal critic” to Church lethargy and corruption; some Franciscans [notably the Spiritual Franciscans] actually did rebel and break from the Church; their apocalyptic forecasts of the coming of a “pure Church” became part of Reformation thinking years later. Luther would probably have heard something of John Wycliffe [England] and Jan Hus [Bohemia], reformers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively who ran afoul of the Church on the matter of corruption and reform. But perhaps closest to home was the advice of his host, Schalbe, who introduced him to the ideas that the love of God was more powerful than anything Luther had experienced at his churches at home, and that “there might be some daylight between God’s idea of the Church and the institution of the Church itself.” [Metaxas, p. 19] Schalbe probably introduced Luther to the plight of one elderly Franciscan monk, Johannes Hilten, who at that very moment was wasting away in an Eisenach prison cell for his pronounced criticisms of the Church. Hilten is an interesting character in Luther’s life, for in his condemned writings he predicts that in 1516 a man would arise to fight the corruption of the Church and would succeed. Luther would write his first formal theses on the need for reform of the practices of selling indulgences in 1517, and the 95 theses are points of academic discussion, not calls for a crusade. Later in life Luther would identify with such apocalyptic predictions, but not in his high school years. At the age of 17 Luther entered the University of Erfurt, to the delight of his father, who expected his son to obtain a law degree and assume the management of the family business among his other future ventures. At Erfurt Luther would pursued a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, after which graduates branched off into master’s programs to prepare themselves for a clerical career or a legal one. Erfurt’s schedule was not without resemblance to a monastic life; students rose at 4 AM and retired at 8 PM after a day that included periods of prayer and devotion. [All universities in Western Europe were Catholic at this juncture.] Meals were taken in silence as passages from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible were read. Metaxas believes that Luther may have received his first inclinations to study for the priesthood during this phase. [p. 24] Luther entered college at a time when the old order was indeed passing away and a new one was gaining momentum. Scholasticism had enjoyed its glory days in the times of St. Thomas Aquinas three centuries earlier, but by Luther’s day this system of logical thought and premises no longer inspired very many students or their professors. The adage of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” originated in the context of late medieval scholasticism. Two new forces were in play in Catholic Renaissance European universities. The first is the trend to return to the original sources of antiquity, to recover the riches of antiquity [in the history of the Church and among pagan classics] in the original languages. Scholars of Luther’s time included Christianity’s greatest philologist, Desiderius Erasmus, known as “The Father of Humanism,” who among his other contributions to the times came to discover significant errors in Biblical texts then in use in the liturgy and academics. Which brings us to the second major academic trend of the time, a return to the Bible. As I posted earlier this week, what we would call “Biblical study” today was, in the middle ages, a study of systematic commentaries such as those of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. The freedom to examine books of the Bible as free-standing works of literature composed by inspired thinkers for specific purposes under the umbrella of Divine Inspiration was coming into Renaissance thought and practice as Luther entered college. Given that some years later Luther would proclaim that we are saved sola scriptura, “by Scripture alone,” one can imagine that Luther did not burn his college notes. I am pleased to tell you that Eric Metaxas’ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) is proving to be an excellent read and is worth your time and money if you are interested in examining Luther’s life more intensely than I can do in the weekly post. I will be consulting Metaxas frequently along with Reformations (2016) by Carlos M.N. Eire. Both Metaxas and Eire bring forth the issues, philosophies, and persons I have tried to cover over the past six months—and much more—so if you take up one of these works you will not be out of your league, at least where Luther’s own life is concerned.
One of the stranger bits of history is that there is no certainty about when Luther was born. Luther himself said 1484, but documentary examination puts the year of his birth as either 1482 or more likely 1483. His baptism certificate indicates that Martin was his given name, after St. Martin of Tours, the third century Roman soldier and pacifist who defied a command to engage in active combat. Nearly executed, the third century Martin went on to engage in monastic life. There is no little irony in the fact that the saint made his solemn declaration of Christian pacifism in a Germanic town which in Martin Luther’s day was called Worms. In 1521, over a millennium hence at the famous Diet [or Assembly] of Worms, Luther would one day declare “Here I stand; I can do no other.” Luther’s family name was Luder or Ludher. At some point in his college years Martin changed his last name to Luther. The best guess is that like many young Renaissance intellectuals engrossed in the ancient classics, Luther took for himself a classical last name, Eleutherius, and shortened it. Given that his friends would include Desiderius Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, and Johann Oecolampadius (who probably should have shortened his name), this explanation may have some merit. When Ludher/Luther became famous, his parents took the same last name for themselves. Luther was not born into poverty. His father, Johannes or Hans, owned mining and smelting interests and developed rich veins of copper in the family’s residence, Eisleben, in the German region of Saxony. The family took its Catholicism seriously, including intense devotion to St. Anne, the mother of Mary, and the patron saint of miners; in late medieval thinking, both Anne’s and Mary’s wombs had borne jewels of eternal treasures, which made them fitting protectoresses of men who mined the riches of the earth. Speaking of mining, archaeologists have discovered that the diet of the Ludher family was rich in the better meats of the time, such as pork. In 2008 more household items were found, including cooking ware of such high value that it was often mentioned in wills. Luther and his family lived during a serious decline of the papacy. The six popes of Luther’s youth and early adulthood were of such poor character that the twentieth century author Barbara Tuchman discusses them as a group in her 1984 work, The March of Folly. In truth, the identity of the reigning pontiff was not known, or of little interest, to Catholics of Luther’s time, as church life was highly localized with many variations of devotion and rite. Later, as a traveling young monk/priest, Luther was unable to offer Mass in Milan because he was unfamiliar with the Ambrosian rite of the Mass. Much has been made of Luther’s relationship with his father, particularly after the 1958 work Young Man Luther, an attempt by the noted psychoanalyst Erik Erikson to pry into Luther’s inner motivations. Erikson maintained that Luther conflated a grim, judging God with his own father, resulting in an “Oedipal spasm” that tore the Church apart. (Metaxas, pp. 13-14) Historical analyses of discovered documentation since 1958 provides much evidence that Luther loved his father, to the degree that their relationship survived Martin’s later entry into monastic life, much against his father’s wishes that he enter the legal profession and assume the family’s copper mining interests. One needs to look elsewhere for Luther’s psychological crisis with religion, which more accurately accounts for Luther’s thinking and preaching after 1517. For a window on Luther’s school day experiences we are indebted to several volumes of his story telling to students and boarders in his home, an unedited collection written by his young admirers in the 1530’s and 1540’s when Luther was getting on in years. Metaxas summarizes Luther’s recollections: “One gets the general impression that childhood for an exceedingly sensitive and intelligent boy such as the young Martin Luther must have been an endless, fear-filled trial from which he could hardly wait to escape.” (p. 15) In the Renaissance era the Latin language was promoted in the homes of the rich and cultured. Luther’s father never learned the language, and thus Martin went to school—where Latin was the only permitted language—with a pronounced disadvantage. Luther would recall later that his fear of authority would become chronic throughout his life. In his teen years he came to suspect that that the physical and psychological punishments of his school might be a cause for the irrational fear of a good God, which in turn poisoned both the academic and pastoral dimensions of the Church. Scholars do underscore the difficulties of sorting out Luther’s old man remembrances from his actual thoughts at, say, age 16. But it is certain that in his college years at Eisenach Luther learned of an elderly Franciscan monk named Johannes Hilten, at that time imprisoned in the Eisenach monastery for his pronounced criticisms of the Church. Hilten died imprisoned in 1500 when Luther was 16. Hilten was something of a mystery to Luther as a Franciscan advocating reform; it is not certain if Luther recognized him as a successor to medieval reformers John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, both of whom came to bad ends in official Church conclaves. [Later Luther would read Hus’s work in a monastery library, even though the Czechoslovakian’s works were officially banned.] Luther’s father continued to prosper, and by the time Martin Luther was ready for college at age 17, his father was able to afford to send his son to the University of Erfurt, to major in law. But now Luther found himself submerged in Renaissance Humanism, with the opportunity to study both classical pagan authors and the earliest Christian writings. He must have found this environment stimulating and fascinating, for at Erfurt his own considerable scholarly talents began to break their bonds. |
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February 2024
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