Luther

Michael Mullett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134838073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Luther provides a clear exposition of the state of German politics on the eve of the Reformation. Dr Mullett concentrates particularly on the evolution of Luther's thought and its central preoccupation with re-aligning the church's theology with that of the New Testament.

Luther

Introduction

We need first to establish the importance of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Today the effects of the Reformation might not be thought very obvious. However, some historians have put forward the view that the Reformation set up new ways of thinking about man and God, new ways of thought that resulted eventually in modern capitalism and democracy. For the country in which the Protestant Reformation broke out – Germany – the Reformation brought religious disunity which helped to perpetuate the political divisions of the country until the nineteenth century. In Europe at large the Reformation contributed to three great conflicts in the early modern period: the French Wars of Religion from the 1560s to the 1590s; the Revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, lasting from the 1560s to the 1640s; and the Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648. As well as generating conflict among Europeans, the Reformation is thought by some to have encouraged scientific discovery in early modern Europe, while others claim that it helped to foster the ‘witch craze’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Clearly, the Protestant Reformation must be seen as one of the most momentous events in European history.

Part of a movement of religious reform that also took in a Catholic and a ‘Radical’ Reformation, the Protestant Reformation can itself be sub-divided into Lutheran, Zwinglian and Calvinist Reformations. The Lutheran Reformation erupted late in the second decade of the sixteenth century and from the mid-1520s onwards was officially adopted in many German cities and the more or less independent territories into which Germany was divided. Outside Germany, it was successfully transplanted into the Scandinavian lands making up modern Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Alongside the German Lutheran Reformation, Ulrich Zwingli of Zürich in Switzerland launched in the early 1520s a Reformation that helped to make large parts of the Swiss Confederation Protestant. In nearby Geneva, from around 1540, the Frenchman John Calvin pioneered a model of Reformation that was widely admired and imitated, for example in France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. The Zwinglian and Calvinist Reformations were allowed to take root partly because the Lutheran Reformation had already made a breakthrough, and had challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. We can say confidently that the Lutheran Reformation is first in importance and in time among the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century. The importance of Luther was particularly acknowledged by Calvin, who recognized Martin Luther as his foremost religious teacher. The Lutheran Reformation in Germany – the primary Protestant Reformation – is the concern of this pamphlet.

If we accept this primary importance of the Lutheran Reformation, we must next try to establish the importance of Martin Luther within the Reformation. Historians frequently ask questions about the precise role of individuals in historical processes. In the case of Martin Luther and the Lutheran Reformation, the position is confused by Luther’s own diffidence, his modesty about his role. He would not even have called his Reformation ‘Lutheran’, but rather ‘Evangelical’, based, that is, on the Gospels. ‘I did nothing … the Word did all’, Luther wrote of his own contribution. Here Luther was concerned to stress the role of divine providence in the great events of his day. An historian, however, would emphasize the following factors in generating support for the Lutheran Reformation: the state of the Catholic Church in Germany and Europe in the early sixteenth century; the social and political condition of Germany; the work of colleagues of Luther, such as Philip Melanchthon; and the recently invented printing press, which allowed the maximum circulation of Luther’s message. Taking all these factors into account, as we shall be doing, the historian would still have to acknowledge the extraordinary personal role of Martin Luther. In trying to minimize this role – ‘the Word did all’ – Luther added, ‘I simply taught, preached, wrote …’. He omitted to add that what he taught was a powerful and readily understood concept of man’s salvation; what he preached was preached with unique force, sincerity, simplicity and, often, vulgarity; what he wrote covers a substantial square footage of a modern library – over fifty sturdy volumes in the modern American edition of his works. It is right and proper to talk of the printing press, but the printing press came of age for the pen of Martin Luther. So we may conclude this introduction by saying that the term ‘Lutheran Reformation’ is a fitting recognition of the importance of the man to the movement. We shall turn next to look at the condition of religion and piety in late medieval Germany and Europe.

The Church and religion

At the head of the Catholic Church on earth, representing Christ to His flock, was the pope in Rome. The high point in the history of the papacy had come in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and especially in the pontificate (papal reign) of Innocent III (1198–1216), when the papacy had directed an impetus for reform and renewal in the Catholic Church. That Church in the middle ages was a vast organization, theoretically including all the peoples of western Europe. The moral character of the Church was that of the Christian people who made it up, both saints and sinners. It was, indeed, almost always in need of reform which, for medieval people, meant returning to its original state immediately after its foundation by Christ and the Apostles. As long as the papacy supervised reform, much was done to keep the Church up to the mark; in particular, a remarkably successful attempt was made to imitate the life of Christ and the Apostles, especially their total poverty, through the foundation of the Order of St Francis under the direct patronage of Pope Innocent. However, from at least the end of the thirteenth century, we begin to see a weakening of the moral fervour and reforming capacity of the popes. A long-term struggle between popes and lay rulers, always a theme in the history of the medieval papacy, continued along with an increasing obsession with Church law and with money.

Partly as a way out of the political problems of Rome and Italy, the papacy in 1309 moved its headquarters to Avignon, close to the influence of France. For much of the fourteenth century the popes lived there, in a French provincial town, not in the holy city of St Peter, Rome. An attempt in 1378 to return the popes to Rome simply resulted in a division – a Great Schism – in the papacy, with rival popes setting out to depose one another. This unedifying situation was tackled by a general council of the Catholic Church meeting at Constance in Germany in 1414. The council effectively dismissed the rival popes and in 1417 started a clean sheet with a new pope, Martin V. The prestige of the papacy, and with it of the whole Church, had suffered gravely in the scandal of the Schism. There had been bitter, but Catholic, criticism from the saintly Catherine of Siena; more dangerously, the crisis in the Church had created an audience for the damaging and heretical ideas of John Wyclif in England (d. 1384), and for the trenchant criticisms and reforming ideas of John Hus (d. 1415) in Bohemia (modern Czechoslovakia). With the ending of the Schism, the papacy regained some of its earlier prestige. However, a great deal of authority over the Church in the various national states had been stripped away from the Roman papacy and redistributed to national monarchs, especially those of France and England.

As the papacy lost some of its European influence, it tended to become more Italianized in its personnel and its interests. This meant that the popes of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were more and more taken up with Italy’s cultural and political concerns, at the expense of their pastoral care for the whole Church. The strongest strand in Italian cultural life of the fifteenth century was the movement of artistic and literary rediscovery that we know as the Renaissance. From the pontificate of Nicholas V (1447–55) onwards, popes became increasingly absorbed by their role as major sponsors of the artists and writers of the day. Since artistic patronage is expensive, popes increasingly used their command of the Church’s spiritual resources to raise funds for the promotion of the arts through the sale of spiritual commodities. One instance of this tendency is of particular importance. From 1450 onwards popes were engaged in a long-term building project to replace the old basilica of St Peter in Rome with a splendid creation in the latest architectural tastes. The enterprise gobbled up money, and Pope Leo X (1513–21) adopted a complicated scheme to raise money by selling spiritual benefits, known as Indulgences, in Germany. As we shall see, the doctrinal implications of this sale aroused Luther’s anger and set him on a collision course with the Church leadership, the outcome of which was the German Reformation. The spiritual exploitation and corruption which followed on the post-Schism papacy’s full acceptance of a role as sponsor for the arts were important factors in serving to discredit it.

The papacy was not just involved in the leadership of the Italian Renaissance but also in the politics of the various separate states into which Italy was then divided. Pope Leo, and his brother and successor after a brief interval, Pope Clement VII (1523–34), came from the leading family in Florence, the Medici. Indeed, popes in this period tended to come from, or have strong links with, Italian ruling and aristocratic families and, just as the Medici popes thought constantly of the politics of Florence and Italy, so other popes used the papacy to advance the interests of their families within the Italian political system. For example, the pope when Luther was born, Sixtus IV (1471–84) waged war in Italy to promote the interests of his kindred. At the same time, the papacy itself governed a sizeable Italian territorial state – the Papal State – in central Italy, a state whose defence or expansion sometimes dominated the thinking of popes, even if they were not obsessed with their own families. Such concern with the interests of the Papal State could even extend to personal military activity on the part of a pope. Pope Julius II (1503–13) was the ultimate realization of the pope as politician and warrior, and his most unChristlike military exploits, in armour, aroused scandal and scorn in Christendom.

We should not exaggerate this sense of shock at the conduct of popes. The goings-on of the great ones were not as widely known then as they are now, and much that might have been disquieting was not known to the faithful. There was much latent respect for the office of the pope. At the start of his protest against the Church, Luther took issue with Indulgences, not with Pope Leo, and continued for some time addressing the pope with almost exaggerated respect. However, there may have been disappointment that the popes – vicars of Christ – were so unlike Christ. Many people were influenced by the body of medieval prophetic writing that looked to an ‘angelic pope’ to lead the Church. Clearly, popes such as the blatantly immoral Alexander VI (1492–1502) and the militarist Julius II were far from ‘angelic’. Above all, the varied interest of most of the popes of Luther’s period – politics, the arts, their families, pleasure – prevented their giving any more than token attention to the many problems of the Church.

Catholic Church councils of the fifteenth century – those of Constance (1414–18) and Basel (1431–49) – had tried to clean up the corruption of the Church, by putting constitutional checks on the powers of the popes; in general they failed. In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the rising national monarchies of western Europe, papal powers were increasingly devolved upon kings. The most important of these powers were those of appointment, especially the appointment of bishops, who often functioned as state servants. As for Germany, the country’s formal relations with the papacy were regulated by the Concordat of Vienna of 1448, but, as we shall see, the country was politically fragmented, so the Concordat did little to limit papal abuses. Germans felt that their nation was drained of money in papal taxes and dues, that it was, as they put it, the ‘milch-cow’ of the papacy. Their grievances against the papacy were regularly set out in the lists of gravamina or complaints, presented by the country’s federal assembly, the Reichstag or Diet. The sense of grievance against Rome was also expressed in the rich literature of complaint and reform preceding the Reformation. Examples of this literature are the anonymous Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund (1439) and Vadiscus by the imperial knight, Ulrich von Hutten (1518). The national mood of protest against the papal Church, fuelled by intense but frustrated nationalism, explains much of the German response to Martin Luther.

Was the Church in Germany corrupt? There were certainly flagrant abuses, one of the most shocking of which was trading on the credulity or anxiety of pious people so as to make money out of the display and veneration of relics (holy objects, pieces of the clothing, bodies, etc., of Christ and the saints). Most of these relics were spurious, such as hay from the manger of the child Jesus, the foreskin from His circumcision, thorns from the Crown of Thorns, the girdle and the mother’s milk of Mary, and countless alleged pieces of the Cross of Christ. Martin Luther’s ruler, the Elector of Saxony, was a great collector of relics, the veneration of which was supposed to convey spiritual benefits, especially remission of guilt for sins, called Indulgences. The relic trade also catered for people’s sense of art, wonder and history: relics were kept in elaborately worked receptacles and the relic collections were museums and art galleries to visit, exhibiting such wonders as the rope Judas used to hang himself. The cult of relics shows the mingling of religion and a rich popular culture in pre-Reformation Germany. For purists, this fusion of piety and popular entertainment was itself corruption.

Corruption was also evident when the Catholic Church and its clergy set themselves superhuman standards and failed to live up to them. This was the case with the inability of many monks, friars and nuns to fulfil the demands of poverty, chastity and obedience to their rules and superiors. Despite, or because of, the ban on marriage for priests, many parish clergy lived with mistresses who were wives in all but name. It is significant that the Protestant Reformation, when it came, promptly called for a married clergy, Luther himself setting an example by his marriage to a former nun in 1525. The ban on clerical marriage, as it were creating a sin where none existed, gave rise to much guilt, concealment and hypocrisy; it also produced a regular income for some unscrupulous bishops who charged their priests dispensations for the ‘sin’ of keeping a consort. In addition, and also because of the ban on clerical marriage, many Germans thought the clergy uncommonly lustful. A popular verse proclaimed that a house could be pure only if priests and monks were kept out. Sexual suspicion of the clergy added to the currents of anti-clericalism, i.e. bitter hostility to the clergy, in pre-Reformation Germany.

The corruption of the Church should not be made too much of in our analysis of Luther and his protest. The corruption was there, certainly. But it was not at the centre of Luther’s concern. He attacked a corruptly advertised Indulgence in 1517, one that was shamefully hawked around, preying on people’s religious fears and making completely bogus claims. But in launching this attack, Luther was seizing the opportunity presented by the indefensible abuse of a particular practice to express his accumulating doubts about the theology of the Catholic Church on how a man could achieve salvation. As far as the Catholic Church was concerned, Indulgences – pardons for guilt still attaching to sins already forgiven (see pp. 27–8) – were part of an extensive apparatus by which the Church was commissioned to help souls heavenward. Pilgrimages, masses, sacraments such as Holy Communion and good deeds were some other parts of the interlinked equipment by which the Church helped the baptized, believing Christian, through using his limited freedom of choice, to co-operate with God in saving his soul from hell. Luther, on the other hand, probably between 1513 and the protest of 1517, had come to believe that Christians are saved by a much simpler route, bypassing many of the facilities of the Church and trusting only in the death of Christ to wash away their sins. By 1517 Luther was coming increasingly to disagree with his Church over the means of redemption. ‘Corruption’ for Luther was a secondary issue.

When the Catholic Church reformed itself in the sixteenth century it retained Indulgences, though purged of commercialism, as part of its salvationary armoury, because they fitted in with a basic Catholic philosophy of how Christians might be saved; but when Luther set out to create a new and purified church, he never for a moment considered retaining even reformed Indulgences: the just were saved by faith alone. Indeed, it is noteworthy that those contemporary reformists, such as the Dutch scholar Erasmus, who put abuses and corruption at the head of their agenda remained Catholic in the end, while Luther, who put doctrine before practice, broke away from a Church to whose practice he could not accommodate his theory. The reformists stayed Catholic, the reformers became Protestants. Yet, having put ‘corruption’ in its place, we must also recognize its role in giving Luther a following. Millions of Germans saw in him a uniquely eloquent and courageous critic of a diseased Church. In other words many, somewhat mistakenly, took Luther to be primarily a critic and reformer of existing abuses.

If, then, we were to dwell too much on the corruption of the Catholic Church at the end of the middle ages, we would miss the point of Luther and see him simply as a second Erasmus, no more than a critic of everyday abuses. In addition, too much concentration on these abuses will shut our eyes to the living springs of reform and renewal in the pre-Reformation German Church. After all, in his early years as a monk Luther clearly did not belong to a ‘corrupt’ monastery, nor was he a corrupt monk – far from it. His superior and spiritual adviser, Johann von Staupitz (1468/9–1525) was an active reformer of Luther’s order, the Augustinians, as was also the fifteenth-century German Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa (c. 1400–64) a reformer of monks and monasteries. The most successful monastic reforms in pre-Reformation Germany were those associated with the Augustinian Canons Regular at Windesheim and the Benedictines at Bursfeld.

Pious clergy shared with pious German lay folk a desire for the spiritual life. In the fourteenth century Germany had given to Christianity a school of mystics of whom the most brilliant was Meister Eckhart, writing in German for nuns and for lay people living in the world. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the ‘new devotion’ (devotio moderna) was promoted by the Brethren of the Common Life, groups of pious individuals working in the world and specializing in Christian school-teaching: their pupils included Erasmus. The devotio moderna originated in the Netherlands and its influence spread to nearby Germany, where the relatively high levels of literacy in cities like Nürnberg and Strassburg encouraged the reading of such religious classics as the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471), an exponent of the devotio moderna. Above all, pious Germans before the Reformation were reading, or having read to them, the Bible, in German, in numerous editions, and in print.

The particular emphases of German, and indeed of late medieval European piety can be seen in some of the German artistic masterpieces of the period. One example is Matthäus Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece(1503?), with its almost unbearably anguished portrayal of the Crucifixion. In this work the artist dwelt on the human agony of the Crucified, part of an appreciation of Jesus the man which emphasized the suffering, as well as the triumph, of His passion and death. Grünewald’s Altarpiece had a musical parallel in a late medieval German hymn-sequence focusing on the parts of the suffering body of Christ, a sequence later developed by Bach in his Passion Chorale. This preoccupation with the passion and cross of Christ was fully reflected in Martin Luther’s theologia crucis, his theology of the cross, a theology that insisted that Christians were saved only through Christ’s Crucifixion.

This dwelling on Christ the sufferer indicated a deep interest in His humanity, an interest also catered for in a cult of His human family life. In the first place, there was the mother of God, Mary, whose emotional agony, as great as her son’s physical torment, was captured in the Isenheim Altarpiece. For all his stress on Christ as sole saviour, Martin Luther neve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Bibliography