Despite this social critique it would be wrong to equate the situation of the peasants in central Germany with that in the southwestern part of the empire, in Alsace, the Upper Rhine valley, or Wiirttemberg, where most peasants were serfs and exploitation virtually forced the impoverished tenants to take up arms. After all, the peasants in Mohra owned their farms, shared with the inhabitants of the surrounding villages a form of self-government and a community treasury, and enacted their own local laws. They observed the prudent prohibition against dividing up farms. It was always the youngest son of a peasant family who inherited the property; the other children either had to marry into another family or try to earn a living in other trades. And thus Martin's father Hans Luder had to move away from the farm. There was not much that a young man from the country could do. After all, it is unlikely that he could read and write, for Mohra had neither a parsonage nor a school. So he took his chances in the prospering copper industry in the county of Mansfeld.
Two corrections are called for in this success story of the frugal father who, without any outside help, worked his way up the social ladder from poor peasant's son to independent entrepreneur. In the first place, his success was neither immediate nor continuous. Entering the copper-mining industry involved substantial risks to which Hans Luder was not immune. For years he owed the sizable sum of several thousand gulden to the copperprocessing company, which not only financed the extraction and smelting of the copper but also set prices and did the actual selling. There were extended periods during which Luder was completely dependent on the company, and he remained in debt until one year before his death. Nonetheless, he proved to be good for his debts, and when he died in 1530 he left the not inconsiderable fortune of 1,250 gulden, a sum more than ten times the salary earned at that time by an average professor at the University of These changing fortunes in business make it likely that Martin heard at an early age about financing and interest on loans, and about problems with the trading company. In any case, Luther's later treatment of the far-reaching influence of large companies was knowledgeable, critical, and surprisingly unacademic. The Luder family experienced all the vicissitudes of a small business. Though they were not poor, thrift had to be a part of their way of life. Late in life Luther was still to remember that his early years had been anything but luxurious. His mother had had to struggle to feed her large family. How many brothers and sisters Martin had is not quite clear; all we know for certain is that of a total of probably eight other children, only his brother Jacob and three sisters reached adulthood.
THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION Portraits of Luther's parents, Hans and Margaret (Hanna) née Lindemann, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1527. Over Hans Luder's picture appear the words: "On the 29th day of June in the year 1530, Hans Luther, father of Dr. Martinus, died a Christian." (He actually died in May.) Over the painting of Margaret: "On the 30th day of June in the year 1531, Margareta Lutherin, mother of Dr. Martinus, died a Christian."
It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Martin could go to school, but finally the family did raise the money for his education in Magdeburg and Eisenach. We know that Luther felt deep gratitude toward his father for enabling him to attend school. In 1501, at the University of Erfurt, Luther was no longer regarded as the son of poor parents, since he had been able to pay his enrollment fees in full. The spelling of his name was now embellished with an "h" to suit the more elegant, academic usage: the student named Luder was entered in the university register as "Martinus Ludher ex
Mansfeld." From 1518 on he spelled his name "Luther," but in one of his last letters he again spoke of "my beloved Frau Ludherin."
In 1507, when Martin, who had by this time become an Augustinian monk, celebrated his first mass as a newly ordained priest, his father galloped into Erfurt with twenty riders and bestowed on the monastery the truly generous sum of twenty gulden: Father Hans was obviously a man of means.
Lucas Cranach's painting of Hans and Margaret Luder shows them in 1527 as self-confident burghers at the end of an industrious life. Both of them have the alert sparkling eyes that also mark their son's face. The young Reformer resembles his father to a striking degree; the mother's features will be found again in the old Luther.
Martin Luther was born into a modern world. At the family table he heard the story of the budding mining industry and became aware of the problems of the entrepreneur. Thus, early in life, he learned about the impact of early capitalism in practice and not just in theory.
Mother Hanna: Old Witch and Grand Lady The second correction in Hans Luder's traditional success story digs deeper.
It concerns the social status of Luther's mother Margaret, called Hanna by her family. Accurate information about Hans Luder has always been available: he was resolute, farsighted in his planning, ambitious, and he strove for independence, according to the motto "A free peasant is nobody's slave."
But what information do we have about Margaret Luder? In fact only the portrait painted of her in old age plus whatever may be taken for granted in connection with the mother of a large family. Work filled her days, and economizing was a necessity; she gathered the firewood for the kitchen herself, for there were no servants in the Luther household when Martin was a child.
Honesty was a matter of course, and when little Martin once filched a nut, he received a thrashing that "drew blood," as the adult Luther still remem- ~ bered.* Reminiscences of this kind were pieced together to create the story of a woman of humble circumstances, tough, bent with work, simple in her superstitions, and perhaps a bit stolid in manner. The verses that Martin so often heard from her do indeed sound rather somber:
None is well-disposed to us; that's the fault of both of us.* A mother who punishes her son so severely as to draw blood and burdens him with her own fears—what a perfect case history for an anxiety-ridden, depressive son! Yet this view has not gained acceptance. It was Luther's relationship to his father that has attracted all the attention. Margaret Luder disappeared in the shadow of a much more impressive husband who so thoroughly tyrannized his son that the Reformation came to be explained as an act of self-defense, a protest against merciless fathers, be they called Hans, the pope, or God. That the mother might also have had an influence on the boy seemed inconceivable or at least irrelevant. For this reason the features of Margaret Luder have remained pale and undefined: a simple woman, uneducated and superstitious, nothing more.
There is good reason, however, to be skeptical about this portrait of THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION Luther's background. Diagnoses of this kind are not only subject to changing scholarly trends but also owe part of their impact to the psychologizing mood of our times. In the sixteenth century, when the father fixation had not yet been invented, the mother played a decisive role. Even the Reformer's opponents bear witness to this fact, albeit in their own way. For them too Margaret was an impressive figure—but as a whore not a wife, for his father's name was not Hans but "Devil." No self-respecting psychohistorian would stoop so far as to treat seriously such scurrilous allegations as that Luther's mother had had intercourse with the Devil in the bathhouse of Eisleben and that Martin was thus not genuinely human but a child of Satan. But late in life Luther still mentioned this attempt to strike at his person: "If the Devil can do nothing against the teachings, he attacks the person, lying, slandering, cursing, and ranting at him. Just as the papists' Beelzebub did to me when he could not subdue my Gospel, he wrote that I was possessed by the Devil, was a changeling, my beloved mother a whore and bath attendant."
With the irony that was his preferred weapon against the Devil, Luther concluded: "As soon as he had written that, my Gospel was done for and the papists had won."°®
This is Luther's belated reaction to a tract written by Johannes Cochlaeus in 1533. The satanic defamation even found its way into diplomatic dispatches. When Pietro Paolo Vergerio was still curial nuncio and not yet a Protestant professor at the University of Tubingen, he informed Rome about his meeting with Luther at the Castle of Wittenberg on November 7, 1535.
The meeting had been arranged to discuss Protestant participation at a council recently announced by the pope and called to convene at Mantua.
Vergerio, too, believed he could explain the Reformer's disturbing personality with the theory that the Devil was his father: "On the basis of what I have found out about his birth, I am quite inclined to assume that he is possessed by a demon.""'
The rumor survived obstinately into the nineteenth century, when waning belief in the Devil robbed the legend of its impact and credibility—from Luther's perspective a process with a negative side as well, for as superstition fell victim to sophistication, so did the awareness of Satan's threat. The Devil's concern, Luther knew, was to overcome the Gospel, not the honor of a simple virgin. If Luther's sense of the Devil is at all related to anything he learned from his mother's superstitions, then it is precisely in reaction to any such underestimation of God's most powerful opponent.
But Margaret Luder is interesting even without scandalous bathhouse stories. She did not come from peasant stock, as has been assumed up to ee ee
Christ, Judge of the World. The Virgin Mary and St. John intercede for the imperiled faithful. To the just, the Judge is saying, "Come," and to the evil, "Go" —to Hell.
Woodcut from Der Antichrist, Strasbourg, ca. 1480.
THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION now. As in the case of his father, Heine, Hans Luder's career began with a good match, which explains a great deal about his rise from peasant's son to respected citizen and makes the efforts to give young Martin a good education easier to understand. Through the correction of a host of errors and misunderstandings, it is now safe to say that Hans Luder married a Lindemann, who, unlike her husband, did not come from a farm but was the daughter of an established burgher family in Eisenach.* A Hans Lindemann is recorded as a citizen there in 1406, and a Heinrich Lindemann enrolled at the University of Erfurt in 1444-45. Another Lindemann, also named
Heinrich and a student at the University of Erfurt as well, went on to be a member of the town council in Eisenach for twenty-three years, and was even elected mayor in 1497. In Luther's time we encounter two cousins, the sons of his mother's eldest brother, whose name we do not know. The elder cousin is Johann Lindemann from Eisleben (¢1519), doctor of law and electoral councilor in Saxony; his younger brother Kaspar (+1536) received his degree of doctor of medicine after studying in Leipzig, Frankfurt on the Oder, and Bologna. He became the personal physician to Elector Frederick and to his successor John and treated Luther occasionally. During the last four years of his life Kaspar Lindemann was professor of medicine in Now a whole series of events begins to make sense, or at least starts to appear in a new light. That Hans Luder settled in Eisleben was no coincidence, for Margaret's eldest brother lived there. The decision to give Martin an education was a well-established Lindemann family tradition. The abrupt move from Magdeburg, where Luther attended the cathedral school for a year, to Eisenach probably had family reasons as well. No, Martin was not a poor lonely boy being pushed from one strange town to another; he was
Margaret's son, who had uncles and aunts in Eisenach to look after him and who in fact went to stay there with Heinrich Schalbe, a friend of the family.
Luther owed a great deal to Schalbe, himself a town councilor and ultimately mayor of Eisenach. Later Luther was to speak warmly of the "Collegium
Schalbe," which had given him so much. In early 1520 Luther was accused of having Bohemian forefathers, with the implication of having Hussite roots. He replied by pointing out that his family was from Eisenach, and it was the Lindemann, not the Luder, family to whom he refers: "Practically my whole family lives in Eisenach, they can testify for me, they also know me personally as I attended school there for three years." °
The step from Latin school to the University of Erfurt and the decision to AN ELEMENTAL EVENT gI have Martin study law fits in with the Lindemann family tradition, for his
Eisleben cousin Johann had started as a lawyer and rose to the position of electoral councilor. Thus the educated world was not alien to Luther; he had encountered it early through his mother and her family.
His father's rapid rise from miner to lessee of a mine becomes more understandable as well. Margaret's family most likely guaranteed the otherwise inexplicable line of credit granted their sonand brother-in-law—astonishingly high credit, considering the risky nature of the copper industry. The Lindemanns were very much present in the life of both father and son;
Luther's youth was not purely a man's affair, as has hitherto been assumed.
Thus Luther's social environment paved the way for his education. In his day, eleven years of schooling were a privilege. His mother's family was well aware that education opened the door to advancement, and his father, though from a simpler background, possessed enough insight to encourage the plans for Luther's enrollment in a Latin school and above all in a university.
What can be said about the religious atmosphere in the Luder home? Out of the modern debate about the "Young Man Luther" a new and noticeable resistance has emerged against attempts to deduce psychological damage from Luther's religious upbringing. These reservations are well founded insofar as there is no evidence on which to base a diagnosis of Luther as a neurotic or psychotic. On the other hand earlier research so thoroughly shielded Luther's human failings that his life story threatened to become hagiographic legend: the man-of-God dedicated only to heeding the Gospel cannot be measured according to human categories.
Luther himself accommodates efforts to explain his development in psychological terms. We must take his own statements on the subject seriously, even if no reliable scientific method has yet evolved to penetrate the person of the Reformer behind the few psychologically revealing, autobiographical fragments he left.
To start with Luther made some extremely telling comments about his upbringing. But as he does not distinguish between his father and mother, there is no way to diagnose either a fatheror mother-fixation. Should one want to talk about a fixation at all, then a parents fixation; both his father's intimidating hand and his mother's thrashings lingered in his memory.
Luther's father seems once to have struck him so hard that it took the frightened boy some time to find his way back to a normal relationship with him.
But even that does not allow us to conclude that Hans Luder was a shortg2 THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION tempered, pitiless man, since it also becomes evident that he was at pains not to alienate the child. It is obvious that the rod alone did not rule the Luder household.
When Luther himself became a father, it is clear that he had learned a lesson from the punishments he had experienced as a child. This was not the way he wanted to bring up his son Hans; God does not treat mankind that way either.
One should not hit children too hard: my father once whipped me so that I ran away from him; I was upset till he was able to overcome the distance. I would not want to hit my Hans so hard, otherwise he would become timorous and estranged from me; I cannot imagine a grief worse than that. This is the way God does it: My children, I do not chastise you myself but through Satan and the world; if you come to me and invoke my help, I will rescue you and put you on your feet again!
For our Lord would not want us to become estranged from him."
Margaret and Hans Luder together educated their children—Luther left no doubt about this cooperation. Now it is of particular importance that in Luther's mind their style of education and upbringing—-strict but not unfeeling—sparked the decision that was to change his life: "The serious and austere life they led with me later caused me to enter a monastery and become a monk; but they meant it very well indeed." "'
Responsibility, experience with misbehavior, and subsequent punishment were all shaped into concepts which later became so central to the Reformer, and molded—or at least sharpened—young Martin's conscience. It was the way he was raised at home that brought him to the gates of the monastery— but not straightaway.
In the summer of 1505 Luther the law student started back to Erfurt after a visit with his parents. On July 2, with some four more miles to go, he was caught in a terrible thunderstorm near the village of Stotternheim. Hurled to the ground by lightning, he called out: "Help me, St. Anne; I will become a monk." ' There is no reason to doubt that the unsuspecting traveler became terrified when confronted with sudden death. The situation as such can indeed lay claim to rarity; the reaction, however, cannot. A vow of this kind was neither exceptional nor proof of psychological instability; on the contrary, it was perfectly in keeping with the times and not abnormal for any young, unmarried man of tender conscience. This is not to deny young
Luther's unmistakably individual decision; the vow to enter a monastery was not a necessary consequence of his upbringing and environment. All of the Luder children must have experienced their parents' strong hand, yet only
Martin took up monastic life. Environment is an explanation in retrospect, not the determining factor from the outset.
It is nevertheless important to realize that Luther's vow corresponded with the religious climate of the time and did fit in with the ideals he had been reared with at home, school, and church. St. Anne was the patron saint of people in distress in thunderstorms as well as the patroness of miners. The cult of St. Anne had spread across central Germany before Luther's time, so it was not necessarily only the religiosity of the father that caused the son to invoke Mother Anne when he was in distress. At the church of St. Mary in Eisenach, where Luther's friend Johannes Braun was vicar, a special liturgy was sung for St. Anne. Anne was the Virgin Mary's mother, but she was venerated for more than that because through the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception, according to which Mary herself had been conceived without the taint of original sin, her mother Anne, too, participated in the miracle of the incarnation of Christ. As a reformer Luther later rejected the "doctrine of Anne" completely: "It also applies to St. Anne, whose feast is being celebrated today, that I cannot find a word about her in the Bible. I believe that God left this unmentioned so that we would not seek out new holy places, as we are doing now, running to and fro and thus losing sight of the true Savior,
But on his way to Stotternheim Mother Anne was for him still the powerful patron saint. It was only after his reformation breakthrough that he discovered all believers to be saints. Though the cults of St. Anne and St. Mary were already popular in the Middle Ages, the theological concepts underlying them could not be accepted as dogma until centuries later because of their questionable biblical basis. Not until 1854 did Pope Pius IX confirm the doctrinal basis of the cult of St. Anne, insofar as from the very moment she was conceived by her mother, St. Mary was declared to have been without sin. It was only in 1950 that Pope Pius XII proclaimed the second major Marian dogma, the bodily assumption of the Mother of Christ into heavenly glory. Like the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin was already before Luther's time widely considered to be a revealed truth.
Luther's invocation of St. Anne and his vow to become a monk were deeply rooted in the religiosity of his age. The very normalcy of his reaction later made both his critical evaluation and his Evangelical solution intelliTHE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION gible, viable, and liberating to so many. If Luther clearly grasped the events and forces that led him to enter a monastery, he affords us not only an insight into his own soul but presents us with a psychogram of his time as well.
We must, of course, add that a considerable distance of age and experience lies between the actual occurrences and Luther's recollection of them.
All his memories, which recall not only his parents but also flogging by schoolmasters, date from a time when he had already made his biblical discoveries. Fundamental among these is distinction between the law, with its obligations and demands for proper behavior, and the Gospel, which bestows grace and righteousness. Once he realized that the constraints of the law and the spontaneity of faith are mutually exclusive, he found the vocabulary to interpret his own history: his early years had been lived under the law.
School Days, School Days We do not know when Martin entered school; probably he was six or seven.
At an advanced age Luther thanked Nikolaus Oember from Mansfeld for carrying him to school when he was a small boy—considering the condition of the streets in places like Mansfeld at the time, this must have been a crucial help on rainy days. Although Martin attended school in his hometown for some time, only leaving at the age of thirteen, we know little more about this period in his life than that the fundamentals of grammar, logic, and rhetoric were drummed into the children by means of strict, sometimes cruel discipline. Martin's teacher did not consider him a model pupil, so it could happen that he was struck as often as fifteen times in a single morning.
It was not, however, corporal punishment as such that Luther later condemned; but he felt that a teacher should be capable of distinguishing between laziness and insufficient ability.
Weekends were the worst times. One of the older pupils was appointed "lupus," wolf, and had to keep the "wolf book," registering all violations of school rules. Incorrect conjugation or declension resulted in immediate punishment; "wolf punishments," on the other hand, could wait till the end of the week. The approach of punishment day meant misery to all the younger children and all the sensitive ones.
This is not to say that Luther later believed in sparing the rod altogether.
He meted out punishment to his own children—his principles do not correspond to modern educational trends. But he rejected chastisement and flogging as a means of prodding, feeling they fostered children's obstinacy and Hans Holbein the Younger, drawing of a teacher chastising a pupil, in Laus Stultitiae
(In Praise of Folly) by Erasmus of Rotterdam were detrimental to their desire to learn. What he advocated from very early on was a teaching system tailored to children's needs, allowing pupils, both boys and girls, to learn "joyfully and playfully," preferably at half-day schools in the interests of working children, and ideally with female as well as male teachers.'*
THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION Luther thought he had learned deplorably little during those long years.
His experiences in Mansfeld provided a negative model that impelled him toward radical educational reform.
Can something more positive be said about Magdeburg, the next stage on his educational path? Luther remembered strikingly little about the period.
He was fourteen when Hans Reinecke, his friend in Mansfeld, took him along to the Nullbriider (probably called such because of the Nollen, or pointed hoods, they wore), the Brethren of the Common Life. Martin must have arrived in Magdeburg in 1497, just after the bishop had permitted them to enlarge their hostel. The Brethren of the Common Life belonged to the lay branch of the Devotio Moderna, a Dutch reform movement that in the fifteenth century had spread across large parts of Europe, westward to Paris and as far south as Wiirttemberg. The Brethren eagerly devoted themselves to housing and supervising schoolboys away from home.
A quarter of a century later, in 1522, Luther mentions to the mayor of Magdeburg that he had gone "to school with the Brethren of the Common
Life." '* The statement can easily be misunderstood. It does not mean that the Brethren maintained a school themselves, but that they lodged pupils away from home and supervised their schoolwork. This was a much more pedestrian role than, as the older thesis had it, the promotion by the Brethren of the Renaissance north of the Alps through their writing and teaching.'® The notion that Luther must have been deeply influenced by the reform ideals of the Brethren in Magdeburg is indeed no longer tenable. Yet there is a kernel of truth in this old myth, for the Brethren, originally smallcity artisans from Zwolle and Deventer, accomplished more in the way of educational renewal than is immediately apparent. The very idea of establishing hostels to enable children from outlying areas to attend good schools testifies to their concern with sound education and pedagogic reform. The Latin textbooks they wrote to replace obsolete medieval cramming methods circulated far beyond the Netherlands.
The Brethren's aim was to place learning in the service of piety. As Geert Groote (+1384), founder of the Brethren of the Common Life, saw it, the members were to practice simple piety in imitation of Christ, living in lay communities without taking vows. For this reason the movement came under suspicion of spreading anticlerical sentiments. At the Council of Constance
(1414-18) the Dominicans tried to drag the Brethren into a heresy trial, and it took Johannes Gerson (1429), chancellor of the University of Paris and a leading council theologian, to protect them from persecution. But by the time Luther attended school in Magdeburg these events had long since passed into history. Their anticlericalism, real or surmised, was a thing of the past, and when Luther criticized the elevated status of monks and priests, it was not because of the Brethren at Magdeburg.
The Brethren and their Devotio Moderna movement were important to the history of reform in the fifteenth century. Wherever they were permitted to settle, whether in monastery-type communities joined in the Windesheim
Congregation, or in quiet lay groups, they demanded from monasteries and communities a vivid sense of inner mission and reform. They copied theological treatises and themselves read patristic literature, especially St. Augustine and St. Bernard. Understandably, Johannes Gerson became popular among the Brethren after supporting their cause at the Council of Constance. His life also seemed an exemplification of their ideals: though learned, he eschewed the seductive stylishness of scholarly subtleties and was able to find words for the hopes and grievances of his contemporaries.
Gerson stood for gradual edification, not revolutionary reform; he was less concerned with the educated elite than with the ordinary Christian, thus embodying the Brethren's ideal of modern piety. Gerson's memory is perpetuated on the pulpit of the Church of the Brethren in Urach in Wiirttemberg, where he is shown as a doctor of the Church in the impressive company of Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, the four great Fathers of the Western Church.
Luther, too, valued the patron of the Devotio Moderna, calling him "Doctor Comforter." Like the Brethren, the Reformer saw him as a pastoral theologian concerned with the care of souls. As a young professor in Wittenberg Luther was already familiar with the writings of the devotional movement and quoted its most successful writer, Gerald Zerbolt van Zutphen, though confusing him with Geert Groote, the founder of the movement."
Luther was also acquainted with the Rosetum, a handbook for edification and meditation by Johannes Mauburnus, a member of the Windesheim Congregation at the monastery of St. Agnietenberg near Zwolle. Thus he had studied and appreciated several of the most widely read authors of the Devotio Moderna; but there is no indication that he took a serious interest in its program, and, if at all, then certainly not in Magdeburg, for during his one year there he was still in the middle of his primary education.
In Luther's time the Devotio Moderna was already so widespread as to have lost some of its distinctive edge. He came into contact with the movement in its final phase, a hundred years after its inception. Hence it was not the Reformation that was the cause for its decline. Around the turn of the century the Italian Renaissance was already beginning to influence Europe
THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION north of the Alps. No longer. was the reform movement being advanced by artisans and the petty bourgeoisie: now a higher social stratum, with other aims and claims, was taking the initiative in the renewal of Church and society. They gathered in sodalitates, learned societies, met at the homes of patrician families, engaged in stylistically refined correspondence, and regarded classical rhetoric as the quintessence of true culture.
The Devotio Moderna, too, had called for a return to the sources, but all it could offer were florilegia, anthologies of quotations to be used as guides for spiritual growth through the imitation of Christ. Now, a new and different world was being opened up, the world of classical and Christian antiquity. In Basel, Strasbourg, and Nuremberg unabridged editions of the Church Fathers were published, allowing "true" Christian erudition to be studied. The Brethren still concentrated on devotional Bible reading without the distractions of a scholarly apparatus of text variants and linguistic elucidations. But their collections of pious proverbs could no longer provide the key for a precise understanding of the Bible; they were replaced by Hebrew and Greek dictionaries and grammars.
The era of the Devotio Moderna was over—at least for the time being. It was to surface again in new forms to take a stand against the petrifaction of "orthodoxy" and to make a renewed appeal for genuine piety. But that chapter already belongs to the history of the beginnings of pietism.
The spirit that prevailed in the sixteenth century was different; scholarship was to be linked with wisdom, not subordinated to piety. Erasmus of Rotterdam, who as a schoolboy had boarded with the Brethren in Deventer—at the end under the supervision of Alexander Hegius, the most distinguished reform pedagogue of the time—should have had every reason to acknowledge his indebtedness with gratitude. Instead he often complained bitterly about their narrowmindedness and lack of sensitivity for scholarship and the arts. During the era of humanism and the Reformation, such a condemnation of one's own education, documenting the bitter struggle for emancipation, can be found again and again. It is part of the psychogram of Luther's time and certainly not unique to the Reformer's own childhood. Luther's break with his upbringing and education was not caused by Hans and Margaret, Magdeburg or Eisenach. A whole phalanx of humanists rejected their educational backgrounds, almost as if they had agreed in advance to do so. Modern Devotion was shaken off, just as scholastic scholarship was disparaged. As so often in the history of thought, intellectual prowess laid claim to progress by proudly discounting its own ancestry.
It should not be of surprise, therefore, that Desiderius Erasmus also rebelled against his schooling. In the case of Luther, however, the time spent
Eisenach. Wartburg Castle overlooks the town. Copperplate after Merian, 1650. among the Brethren was too short, and their influence has been vastly overestimated. The mere fact that both of them, as young boys, lived among the Brethren—the one spending nine years in Deventer, the other one year in Magdeburg—does not suffice to ascribe common roots to Erasmus and Luther. Even their origins failed to fashion them into joint champions of a Christian Renaissance.
Fourteen-year-old Martin spent the last four pre-university years in Eisenach, where he was surrounded by a large, widely respected family to help and advise him, and at least partly replace his parents. From this period in his life dates the story of Luther as a Partekenhengst, collector of "Parteken," or small gifts of food. Poor little Martin has been pitied as the hungry schoolboy far away from home, with neither parents nor protection! How moving it is to hear that a widow noticed the boy because of his clear voice and took him into her home. Such experiences in Eisenach could later grow into legend in a time when people no longer remembered that on high holidays schoolchildren traditionally trekked around town and country, singing songs and expecting—and as a rule receiving—reward in the form of sweets or THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION something more substantial. All the kind widow probably did, if she existed at all (the anecdote does not come from Luther himself), was to invite the boy in for a bite to eat.
Martin stayed at the home of Heinrich Schalbe, a friend of the family, influential town councilor, and later mayor of Eisenach. The boy received free board and accompanied Schalbe's son Kaspar to school.'* In Luther's correspondence to Johannes Braun we have concrete evidence for the importance of the circle around Heinrich Schalbe. Ten days before Luther read his first mass as an ordained priest, he invited his older friend, a priest from Eisenach, to share this momentous occasion in a priest's life and join him at the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt on May 2, 1507. In the postscript to his invitation Luther mentioned the "Schalbense Collegium," whom he would have liked to invite as well, but did not want to inconvenience.'? By collegium Luther could have meant the support group for the Franciscan monastery in Eisenach, with which the Schalbe family had been associated for a long while. But it is more likely that he was referring to a regular house-soirée, of which he still had fond memories years later. The school years in Eisenach were altogether more pleasant than those of "torture" in Mansfeld.
From this same period dates Luther's anecdote that, out of respect for the pupils, the school principal always took off his academic cap when he entered the classroom "because God may have destined some of you to be mayor, chancellor, doctor, or statesman." "° The principal of St. George's school can no longer be identified with certainty. If there is anything to the story, it underlines once more the contrast between the schools in Eisenach and Mansfeld. In any case, with the same educational farsightedness, Luther later reminded the authorities of their obligation to develop a school system as the best investment in the future.
What with the Collegium Schalbe, collecting "Parteken," and a fine school, Martin's Eisenach years were happy ones. It was also a time in which he came to experience the joys of an intense friendship. Although Johannes
Braun, vicar at the church of St. Mary, was considerably older—he had matriculated at the University of Erfurt in 1470—he meant a great deal to young Martin. In a second letter of invitation to his first mass, to an unidentified addressee, Luther again mentions Father Braun and calls him his
"very closest friend," who would most certainly be coming to celebrate the young priest's first mass with him."' Luther and Braun continued to stay in touch. When two years later Luther was unexpectedly transferred from Erfurt to Wittenberg to take on teaching duties at the Augustinian study house,
IOI he apologized to his "dear fatherly friend" for not having been able to inform him about this sudden move. The first letter surviving from Wittenberg went therefore to his friend in Eisenach:
To the most honorable Johann Braun, devoted to Christ and the Virgin Mary, priest in Eisenach.
My lord, dear Father!
Brother Martin Luther, Augustinian, wishes you salvation and the Savior Himself, Jesus Christ.
My lord and father, whom I esteem highly but love even more— Please stop wondering why I have left you clandestinely without saying good-bye, how I could bring myself to do such a thing, as if there were not the closest bonds between us, as if ungrateful forgetfulness had blotted all memory from my heart, as if a cold, withering storm had extinguished every spark of love in me. There is absolutely no truth in this. Things did not go according to my own plans. .
. It is true that I went away; but no, in actual fact the most and best part of me stayed behind with you and will always stay with you. I am absolutely convinced that I mean enough to you, since your faith in me did not arise from my merit but only from your goodness, so that you will not allow me to lose for no reason what I received without reason. For you were never like that.
Thus we are separated in space, but have come even closer spiritually. And you agree—if I am not totally mistaken."
Even these few lines from a larger, moving epistle reveal the intimacy and human warmth between the two. They stand in sharp contrast to the formal declarations of friendship that had become the rule in humanist correspondence. Luther had acquired a trusted friend while in Eisenach and retained close ties with him when he became a monk. And even more important, the language of friendship found here will become Luther's vocabulary of faith and trust in God.
Luther was to find among the Augustinian brethren a second and likewise paternal friend in Johannes von Staupitz, whom he even dared to address as most beloved father in Christ, "in Christo suavissimo Patri,"** and from whom, like Braun, he found himself painfully separated at a decisive time, in November 1518, when the curia was demanding that Luther be sent to Rome. This experience of separation caused him such intense suffering that he dreamt of Staupitz coming to him, comforting him and promising to return."* Staupitz's death on December 28, 1524, left a gap that could not be
THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION nnn filled. For seven years Luther was silent about him. Only when his own father died on May 29, 1530, did he start to talk about him again, both at the table and from the pulpit, to point out what the great Augustinian vicar had meant to him and to the cause of the Reformation.
The figure of Johannes Braun, on the other hand, was never to take on such lasting significance. Braun belonged to Luther's pre-Reformation— even his pre-academic—phase. In the years that lay between Hans Luder's parental and Father Johannes von Staupitz's spiritual care, the vicar at the church of St. George in Eisenach took over the role of fatherly companion during an important period of maturation. Should there have been an emotional rift in Luther's relationship to his' father—recent psychology is inclined to explain the course of Luther's career in this light—it never hindered him from developing very close relationships with other father figures.
Early in life Martin Luther proved himself to be a highly sensitive yet outgoing person, capable of genuine friendships.
"One need not paint the Devil above one's door"
There is hardly any authenticated information about those first eighteen years, which led Luther to the threshold of the University of Erfurt. What we do have are memories used to illustrate and evaluate later experiences. These memories are colorful and vivid, but they are not in a real sense biographical data. As testimonies to what the older Luther looked upon as being formative for his childhood and school years, they are precious and revealing.
Sometimes apparently too revealing! Some reminiscences are rarely mentioned today, and if touched at all, are glossed over or dismissed as insignificant medieval remnants. But the legacy of Luther's parental home entailed more than a proper respect for hard work and deep erudition; it included also the at once wondrous and scary world of spirits, Devil, and witchcraft, which the modern mind has come to call superstition. It is indeed not immediately clear what one should make of Luther's account of 1533 in which he so confidently takes for granted the existence of witches and witchcraft. Yet this too is part of the historical record:
Doctor Martinus said a great deal about witchcraft, about asthma and hobgoblins, how once his mother was pestered so terribly by her neighbor, a witch, that she had to be exceedingly friendly and kind to her in order to appease her. The witch had cast a spell over the children so Under the spell of sensuality. Urs Graf, The Witches' Sabbath, 1514. that they screamed as if they were close to death. And when a preacher merely admonished this neighbor in general words [without mentioning her by name], she bewitched him so as to make him die; there was no medicine that could help him. She had taken the soil on which he had walked, thrown it into the water, and bewitched him in this way, for without that soil he could not regain his health."
If this story were not virtually forgotten, it would be grist for the mills of both Luther-disparagers and admirers. The witch's tale fits perfectly into that tenacious tradition which continues to portray Luther's mother as a backward peasant woman. It is she who is purported to have introduced young Martin to a world full of demons and to have put fear of the devil into that soul already weighed down by his strong, willful father. The old bathhouse story of mother Margaret enjoying intercourse with the Devil would thus, in a new, psychological form, find its way into Luther's biography: If Martin was not begotten dy the Devil, he was at least raised with him.
But for Protestant partisans Hanna's witch and Luther's words serve to provide wonderful proof of the need for the Reformation, for progress along the drawn-out and thorny path from late medieval superstition to enlightened evangelical faith—a path courageously paved by Luther, even though not THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION followed by him to the end. In all modern classroom and textbook treatments of Luther, the Devil is reduced to an abstraction: be he a figment of mind or time. Thus the Evil One, as a medieval remnant, can be exorcized from the core of Luther's experience, life, and thought.
But the sources are as stubborn as Hanna and cannot be silenced. To begin with, Luther's mother cannot be held solely responsible for Luther's realistic perception of the Devil's machinations. Hans Luder thought exactly the same way, and so did the miners in Mansfeld, who, far away from the light of day, were even more exposed to the artifices of the infernal powers— spirits, demons, and hobgoblins—in the darkness of their mineshafts. Nor would Martin have learned anything different from the Brethren of the Common Life in Magdeburg or from Heinrich Schalbe or Johannes Braun in Eisenach.
Luther's world of thought is wholly distorted and apologetically misconstrued if his conception of the Devil is dismissed as a medieval phenomenon and only his faith in Christ retained as relevant or as the only decisive factor. Christ and the Devil were equally real to him: one was the perpetual intercessor for Christianity, the other a menace to mankind till the end. To argue that Luther never overcame the medieval belief in the Devil says far too little; he even intensified it and lent to it additional urgency: Christ and Satan wage a cosmic war for mastery over Church and world. No one can evade involvement in this struggle. Even for the believer there is no refuge— neither monastery nor the seclusion of the wilderness offer him a chance for — escape. The Devil is the omnipresent threat, and exactly for this reason the faithful need the proper weapons for survival.
There is no way to grasp Luther's milieu of experience and faith unless one has an acute sense of his view of Christian existence between God and the Devil: without a recognition of Satan's power, belief in Christ is reduced to an idea about Christ—and Luther's faith becomes a confused delusion in keeping with the tenor of his time.
Attempts are made to offer excuses for Luther by pointing out that he never doubted the omnipotence of God and thus determined only narrow limits for the Devil's activities. Luther himself would have been outraged at this view: the omnipotent God is indeed real, but as such hidden from us.
Faith reaches not for God hidden but for God revealed, who, incarnate in Christ, laid Himself open to the Devil's fury. At Christmas God divested
Himself of His omnipotence—the sign given the shepherds was a child "wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger" (Luke 2.12). To Luther
Christmas was the central feast: "God for us." But that directly implies "the Devil against us." This new belief in the Devil is such an integral part of the Reformation discovery that if the reality of the powers inimical to God is not grasped, the incarnation of Christ, as well as the justification and temptation of the sinner are reduced to ideas of the mind rather than experiences of faith. That is what Luther's battle against the Devil meant to convey. Centuries separate Luther from a modern world which has renounced and long since exorcised the Devil, thus finding it hard to see the difference between this kind of religion and medieval witchcraft. But Luther distinguished sharply between faith and superstition. He understood the hellish fears of his time, then discovered in the Scriptures the true thrust and threat of Satan and experienced himself the Devil's trials and temptations. Consequently he, unlike any theologian before or after him, was able to disperse the fog of witches' sabbath and sorcery and show the adversary for what he really was: violent toward God, man, and the world. To make light of the Devil is to distort faith. "The only way to drive away the Devil is through faith in Christ, by saying: 'I have been baptized, I am a Christian.'"
The following chronicle of his own encounter with the Devil as a poltergeist has a clearly medieval ring:
It is not a unique, unheard-of thing for the Devil to thump about and haunt houses. In our monastery in Wittenberg I heard him distinctly.
For when I began to lecture on the Book of Psalms. and I was sitting in the refectory after we had sung matins, studying znd writing my notes, the Devil came and thudded three times in the storage chamber [the area behind the stove] as if dragging a bushel away. Finally, as it did not want to stop, I collected my books and went to ved. I still regret to this hour that I did not sit him out, to discover what else the Devil wanted to do. I also heard him once over my chamber in the monastery.
The final passage, with its pointed formulation and its underlying expression of contempt for the Devil, was amazing at the time and is overlooked today: "But when I realized that it was Satan, I rolled over and went back to sleep again."
It is not as a poltergeist that the Devil discloses his true nature, but as the adversary who thwarts the Word of God; only then is he really to be feared. He seeks to capture the conscience, can quote the Scriptures without fault, and is more pious than God—that is satanical.
When I awoke last night, the Devil came and wanted to debate with me; he rebuked and reproached me, arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied: Tell me something new, Devil! I already know that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins—not fabricated and invented ones—for God to forTHE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION give for His beloved Son's sake, who took all my sins upon Him so that now the sins I have committed are no longer mine but belong to Christ.
This wonderful gift of God I am not-prepared to deny [in my response to the Devil], but want to acknowledge and confess."
Luther's purpose is not to spread fear but to strengthen the resistance of the faithful. Like Christ, the Devil is omnipresent. He acts and reacts, is drawn and challenged by anything that smacks of Christ and true faith. Here is found a radical deviation from the medieval concept of the Devil, according to which the evil one is drawn by the smell of sin, the sin of worldly concern. In Luther's view, it is not a life dedicated to secular tasks and worldly business that attracts and is targeted by the Devil. On the contrary, where
Christ is present, the adversary is never far away: "When the Devil harasses us, then we know ourselves to be in good shape!" *°
Many of these stories come from Luther's Table Talk, the collection of his conversations with dinner guests. At the table in the former Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, God and the world were debated, current affairs discussed, and memories exchanged. Luther's recollections do not have the function of self-glorification, nor do they look back to the "good old days" of a man who is getting on in years. As a rule they have a point to make: the reporting of battles past is to instruct and prepare the younger generations for the prospect of the fierce opposition which will always threaten the preaching of the Gospel.
The same applies to tales of the Devil. They are not meant as horror stories to keep the overly audacious in line but as consolation and strength to timid and tried souls. Luther responds to the concerns of his table companions and to the questions arising from their inveterate, medieval, common fear of the Devil, irrespective of education and origin. How curious that it should still be the gullible Hanna and her superstitions which are supposed to have had such a decisive influence on Luther.
God's Word in Filthy Language One delicate question—one that might even be unfitting for any respectable home—may lead back to Luther's upbringing. The problem cannot be ignored: if a man is so obviously preoccupied with ideas about and visions of the Devil, does he not require a psychiatrist, or might he not be at least subject to psychological inquiry? In this case it would not be a question of father or mother fixations but of his surprising response to the Devil, which enAN ELEMENTAL EVENT
I07 lightened people find incomprehensible as well as extremely dangerous. Belief in the reality of Satan certainly promoted the frenzy of the witch hunts that seized all denominations and delayed the Enlightenment.
Now we must listen carefully to Luther and not turn away in embarrassment. Not torture and flames but professions of faith and of scorn for the Devil are the proper weapons to use against Hell. Luther adds a coarse expression of his contempt for the satanic fiend to his avowal of Christ as the defender of Christianity: "But if that is not enough for you, you Devil, I have also shit and pissed; wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite."*' Is a man who still thinks and talks like this as an adult caught in the stage of development modern psychology terms the anal stage because of mistakes made in his early upbringing? Or is it perhaps just the drastic literal expression of the proverbial call: Devil, get thee behind me? Or is Luther's age showing through; is he a boor who, in his anger and agitation no longer capable of self-control, casts off the academic whitewash and falls back into the language of his origins? That would be an explanation that could be based on his own words, for he knows: "What someone is used to and has been raised to, that he cannot conceal." * He often speaks of his peasant ancestors—they
"were good peasants" **—so there might be good reason to suspect that childhood experiences broke through in the old Luther, experiences with manure and open cesspools. If this had been the case, in his old age Luther's bent toward crude expressions would have grown into pathological wallowing in scatological language.
As reasonable as all this may sound, his parents' mistakes, his primitive background, and psychological quirks do not constitute a sufficient explanation. Overlooked has been the fact that even as a young professor and monk,
Luther, discussing the Devil at length for the first time, did not hesitate to use explicitly scatological language—and at a highly official affair at that.
Luther had been designated to preach the ceremonial sermon before members of his order on May 1, 1515. This illustrious occasion was the assembly of the chapter, the decision-making body of the Augustinian Observants in Gotha. Luther had chosen a theme with which the Brethren were familiar, since it was treated in the constitutions of the order (chapter 44). The sin of slander, in this case called back-biting, was described in the handbook as a work of the Devil:
A slanderer does nothing but ruminate the filth of others with his own teeth and wallow like a pig with his nose in the dirt. That is also why his droppings stink most, surpassed only by the Devil's. ..
. And though man drops his excrements in private, the slanderer does not respect this THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION privacy. He gluts on the pleasure of wallowing in it, and he does not deserve better according to God's righteous judgment.** When the slanderer whispers: Look how he has shit on himself, the best answer is:
It cannot be established whether Luther held his sermon before or after the election which put him in charge of ten monasteries in Thuringia and Saxony. But even if he had expressed himself this way before being elected district vicar, it would hardly have jeopardized the outcome. After all, the monks knew all about the Devil's affinity to cesspool and toilet. Though the means a Freudian slip by an old man with childish complexes. Considered in _the light of his times, Luther's choice of words is neither striking nor offensive; such was the language used for the subject, and not only inside the monasteries. In 1521, in Luther's presence, the cardinal of Mainz and chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire acknowledged that he himself was "shit":
"TI know very well that without God's grace there is nothing good in me, and that I am as much a piece of useless, stinking shit as anyone else, if not more." ** The cardinal may have been alluding to St. Paul (Phil. 3.8), but he was being more Pauline than the Apostle.
The leading humanist from Gotha, Konrad Mutian, inquired about this "harsh preacher"; the scholar appears not to have been particularly edified by Luther's cruder passages. For him the preacher was a typical monk, and his language therefore unrefined and coarse, not the height of educated respectability. Such ranting monastic preachers—soon they were to be called the Obscure Men—were all too well known and were the last people from whom a man like Mutian would have expected a renewal of the Church.
Luther, on the other hand, was so pleased with his sermon that he personally arranged for its distribution and sent a copy to both his former teacher at St.
George's school in Eisenach and to his friend Johannes Braun.*'
Luther's ravings should not be suppressed out of embarrassed respect, and certainly not because they might no longer be considered proper today.
Dealing so gingerly with him means not taking him at his word. Luther's language is so physical and earthy that in his wrathful scorn he can give the Devil "a fart for a staff": ** You, Satan, Antichrist, or pope, can lean on it, a stinking nothing. When the therapist hears that Luther was already suffering from painful constipation in his monastery years, he is tempted to diagnose a psychological complex. In the total historical context, however, Luther's scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of I0g the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary, who threatens both flesh and spirit.
Sociohistorical research clarifies a further aspect of Luther's idiom, or at least of its impact. The filthy vocabulary of Reformation propaganda was aimed at inciting the common man. A figure of respect, be he Devil or pope, is effectively unmasked if he can be shown with his pants down.°? Luther was certainly more than just a spokesman for a social class which hitherto had no voice. The "ass the Devil pinches" is more than a drastic phrase serving agitational ends. He was not merely trying to appeal to "the people" but the Devil himself when calling his words a "pack of stinking lies." *°
Luther used a great deal of invective, but there was method in it. As he explained in his election sermon of 1515, the Devil drags God's name and His works of justification through the mud. Here lies the otherwise incomprehensible link between Devil, "Great Swine," "Papal Ass," and "Antichrist." It is with the shocking and provocative passion of youth, not the impotent rage of old age, that Luther advocated the only appropriate retort to the Devil's dung: "You go eat it!"
We find here far more than upbringing and environment. Inclination and conviction unite to form a mighty alliance, fashioning a new language of filth which is more than filthy language. Precisely in all its repulsiveness and perversion it verbalizes the unspeakable: the diabolic profanation of God and man. Luther's lifelong barrage of crude words hurled at the opponents of the Gospel is robbed of significance if attributed to bad breeding. When taken seriously, it reveals the task Luther saw before him: to do battle against the greatest slanderer of all times!
IN THE course of our account of Luther's early years neither individual persons nor particular events have emerged that would qualify as paramount influences on his development. Our possibilities of getting to know Martin
Luder, the child and schoolboy, are severely restricted. The modern, psychologically probing reader who wants to discover the man behind the work will have to wait patiently until Luther discloses himself in his later actions and writings. The same dearth of sources thwarts all serious efforts to close in on young Martin via his father Hans or his mother Margaret. Of course some convictions that were later fundamental must have been rooted in experiences at home and in school, but only while he was at university and after he had entered the monastery would they take on a more definite shape when, with his "second baptism"—his monastic vows—his "second infancy" began.
THE LONGED-FOR REFORMATION a What developed at home, school, university, and monastery broke through only much later, under the manifold pressures of his post as professor of biblical theology at the University of Wittenberg. Martin Luder, the descendant of peasants and burghers, was undoubtedly a sensitive child, raised with God, Devil, saints, and demons. Having a deep respect for both his father and mother, he was open to the influence of his parents and was early prepared to make good friends among peers and elders alike. Luther the man could give of himself fully in his encounter with others and could respond with intense fervor in friendship as well as in hostile clashes. There is nothing in his youth to suggest that critical independence with which he would one day scrutinize traditions, or how hard he would strike at all authority not anchored in truth. But the time came when he was forced to concede that the spiritual heritage from his home and early years proved to be too shaky and had to be left behind.
The difference a personal encounter can make in one's assessment of another person is concisely suggested in a letter Sigmund Freud wrote to Stefan Zweig. Despite the centuries between them and Luther, its contents apply to the Reformer too:
Dear Doctor [Stefan Zweig], I almost wish that I had never met Dr. St. Zweig personally and that he had never behaved so kindly and respectfully to me, for I am now suffering under the doubt of whether my judgment [about the new book] may not be affected by personal sympathy."
Such encounters change one, awaken doubts, and undermine established judgments, as is demonstrated by the life of the Reformer. When Martin
Luder became first a student, then Friar Martinus Ludher, and finally the Luther of Wittenberg, he encountered on every page of Scripture a God of whom he had hitherto known nothing and a Devil whom he had hitherto not feared. These were encounters that shaped his future by drawing him away from the past. These same encounters deeply agitated him and took him outside of and beyond himself, so that he speaks with passionate immediacy to anyone willing to listen to him—and prepared to hear him out.
Freud's letter can also be read as advice to the psychohistorian. Meeting an author personally may not always be sheer gain. It may as easily obstruct access to his works and make it more difficult to hear what is actually being said.
The Unexpected Reformation The Road to Wittenberg Decisions before the Reformation Gateway to Modern Times hat splendor when bachelors received their degree of Master: torches flamed and the celebrations were great. In my view no temporal, earthly joy can be compared to it"'—so intense were
Luther's feelings upon receiving his reddishbrown magisterial beret. The event took place in January 1505, probably shortly after Epiphany, but the joy still lingered years later: "That is how we should still be able to celebrate." '
After four years of university studies, he had become magister artium, master of the liberal arts, in Erfurt, ranking second among seventeen candidates. The excellent education he had received at the Latin school in Eisenach had evidently not quite made up for his poor schooling in Mansfeld. This can explain why Luther was only thircieth of fifty-seven candidates in his first academic examination, the ba-calaureate, in the autumn of 1502.
The years leading up to the baccalaureate were dedicated chiefly to the principles of logic, the foundations of dialectics, and the rules of rhetoric and grammar. At the University of Erfurt, as at all European universities, the Greek philosopher Aristotle—Plato's student and the teacher of young
Alexander the Great—was the principal scholarly authority from the first day of lectures onward. After the bachelor's degree the students' program became even more comprehensive: now the students were introduced to Aristotle's works on metaphysics, ethics, politics, and economics.
According to the traditional curriculum the last two years were to be spent in special seminars and disputations, interpreting and debating important works of Aristotle and dealing with the quadrivium—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Demands on the students during these final years were extremely high. They lived together in what might be compared to uniTHE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION versity residence halls, under rigorous supervision, and found little time for relaxation during the short breaks in their nearly monastic daily rhythm. At the age of twenty-one, one year earlier than prescribed by the university statutes, Luther passed his master of arts examination and had now acquired a comprehensive view of the scholarly disciplines.
The disparaging judgment—and humanist catchphrase—that all this was no more than "games of logic" is hardly apposite to the university education of that time. Logic and dialectics were taught to familiarize students with logical thinking and systematic discussion. Luther profited throughout his life from the oral debate and written argumentation required during his scholastic training.
But quick-wittedness and rhetorical skills were not enough. Academic training strove to equip students with the general ability to test the proofs and conclusions presented in various areas of scholarship and subject them to systematic scrutiny. Reason, experience, and, in theological questions, revelation formed the basis of true knowledge, and all findings were to be ordered intelligibly with the help of logical methods. Thus later work in specialized fields was built on a common educational foundation. The master of arts examination was required for all students except the monks. Then came the next step—preparation for one's future profession as a theologian, lawyer, or physician.
The leading lights at the University of Erfurt were members of the. arts faculty: Jodokus Trutfetter from Eisenach and Bartholomaeus Arnoldi von
Usingen were recognized authorities who were anxious to introduce their students directly to Aristotle's texts instead of relying on the existing commentaries. They interpreted "the philosopher," as Aristotle was called in the Middle Ages, with greater critical distance and more understanding than could be found elsewhere in Germany. Luther was fortunate to be able to complete his liberal arts studies in one of the most dynamic faculties in Though Leipzig was nearer his parents' home in Mansfeld, Luther probably decided to study in Erfurt, some sixty miles away, because it was closer to his beloved Eisenach, where he had last attended school. Already a number of members of the Lindemann family had studied in Erfurt, and so had his close friend Johannes Braun. Wittenberg, which was to play such a central role in Luther's life, was not merely far away; its university was only in the planning stage, and teaching did not commence there until 1502. Thus
Erfurt was an obvious choice as well as an exceedingly lucky one.
THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG Luther's alma mater already had a proud past. It had been established in 1392, during the period when the first German universities were being founded, and was one of the oldest universities in the empire, along with Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Cologne. As the "Academy of Thuringia" it soon attained high repute in the whole of Germany and rose to become one of the great universities. Around 1400 there were already more than three hundred and fifty students enrolled; a century later, when Luther began his studies, the number of students matriculated had grown to five hundred, despite competition from the large universities in Cologne, with eight hundred students, and Leipzig, with six hundred. Thus Erfurt possessed the third-largest university in Germany, an extraordinary civic achievement considering that the university was a municipal institution—and received no princely support. Erfurt was not even a free imperial city, and without political strength or legal guarantees, it was greedily eyed by Saxon electors and jealously guarded by its distant sovereign, in Luther's day the bishop of Mainz. Yet more than 15 percent of all German students were educated in Why would anyone be interested in a university education in the late
Middle Ages? It had certainly never been scholarship alone that drove young men into the lecture halls. And indeed the philosophical training all students had to undergo, at this time, was generally not identical with their academic goals. Universities were founded, supported, and attended because of the three "professional schools," the higher faculties of theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. Princes and town councilors were always interested in lawyers, who were needed as civil servants for the rapidly growing administrative machinery of the emerging territorial states and for the thriving imperial cities. In the field of medicine Germany was still far behind Italy and England, though attempts were being made to write more up-to-date handbooks, with the result that by the latter half of the sixteenth century perceptible progress was being made.
The theological faculties profited from this academic boom. Although a university education was not required for ordination, there was a demand, especially in towns, for academically trained theologians who were equal to the intellectual standard of the time. The mendicant orders—which in the years prior to and during the Reformation were derided as bastions of arrogant stupidity—made an enormous contribution to the cause of theological scholarship. They set up studia generalia with their own teaching staffs, and the various orders founded theological professorships at the universities.
THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION This was no different in Erfurt, where the three major orders—the Dominicans (O.P.), Franciscans (O.F.M.), and Augustinian Hermits (O.E.S.A.)— had established their own chairs. Thus, theological faculties were as a rule extremely well staffed. Nonetheless, the "queen of disciplines" had to accept the predominance of the jurists and, with particular reluctance, of the leading canon lawyers. With this, however, the university merely reflected the priorities of.society. Many years later, Luther—never an admirer of lawyers—still remembered the privileges they had had in Erfurt and their arrogance toward the theologians:? "A successful jurist is a woeful Christian." *
The higher faculties were not Erfurt's particular strength; one could study law very well in Tubingen or Cologne, and medicine in Vienna or Leipzig.
Likewise, the theology faculty lacked a distinctive academic profile in the late fifteenth century because it was oriented chiefly to the traditions of the religious orders. The shock waves resulting from the condemnation of Johannes of Wesel, Erfurt's most renowned theologian, could still be felt. In 1479, when he was cathedral preacher in Worms and no longer professor in Erfurt, he had been hauled before the Inquisition and condemned to lifelong imprisonment for having dared to declare indulgences a pious fraud, demand that the laity, too, should receive the chalice at Communion, and insist that not pope and council but Scripture alone was the final authority of faith.
All this had cast a dark shadow on the theological faculty of Erfurt—the shadow of Hussite heresy.
In the German academic world around 1500 Erfurt had only one basic academic advantage—but it was one that could not be overlooked. The philosophy training offered there provided far more than a mere foundation for more advanced studies; the arts faculty itself had a clear program and profile of its own. Although the statutes did not commit the university to a particular school of thought, Erfurt was nonetheless considered a stronghold of the via moderna.' The Amplonian College (also called, impressively, "Heaven's
Gate"), which may have been Luther's residence hall for several years, was expressly instructed to teach according to the modern way, "secundum modernos."
From our modern vantage point medieval scholasticism may seem to have been a rigid, inflexible, backward-looking, monolithic system that came to an end with the Middle Ages and has had no effect on the development of modern thought. But in fact, scholasticism in its prime did encompass alternatives that have never lost their historical importance. The fourteenth century, with its systematic inquiry into the nature of truth and reality, established decisive precedents. There were two schools: the one was later
THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG II7 designated via antiqua (the old way) and the other via moderna (the modern way). The representatives of the via antiqua, followers of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, were realists. They held that universal concepts (universalia) are more than just human tools to inventory the extramaterial world, but are the expressions of reality itself, indeed that final, higher reality behind all individuality. Men as individuals can exist only because "mankind" exists as a universal reality.
In contrast the followers of the via moderna dared to tread a new, uncertain, and controversial path: sensory perception of reality does not lead to the cognition of universal realities but to abstract thought. Universals are the result of such abstractions and are devoid of independent reality. What is real is the individual, the human person as a unique entity perceived by the senses. It is the human intellect that assembles the many perceptions of individual persons into the universal concept of "mankind." "Mankind" as a universal concept is not a real entity existing outside the human mind; it is a "name" (nomen) conceived by the mind and based on convention. Such names or concepts provide the scientist or philosopher with comprehensible systems for ordering the wealth of particular phenomena. Since these systems are constructs of reason and based on experience, they possess no independent reality; and being models, they always require verification—by means of the sensually perceivable reality of the particular. If abstract concepts are allowed to develop lives of their own, the link between thought and reality becomes either speculative or dangerously ideological—and usually both at once.
The nominalists, as the representatives of the via moderna came to be called, were soon decried as skeptics who dared to term universal realities mere words (nomina). The phrase "logical games"—so readily used to discredit late medieval philosophy—stems from the polemic arsenal of the via antiqua. Exponents of the old way reproached the nominalists for being interested in conceptual terms and not in the reality they stood for. The nominalists did, in fact, question traditional concepts in order to determine their factual validity. On the other hand, the sweeping generalization propagated by humanists, reformers, and later by representatives of the Enlightenment—that scholasticism wasted time with idle speculation—originated with the adherents of the via moderna, who accused the realists of creating mental constructs far removed from reality. These are caricatures produced in the heat of a crucial debate about a fundamental problem.
Nominalism had been firmly established in Erfurt since the mid-fifteenth century, but at first its program had no distinctive identity. The via antiqua
THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION had the advantage of clearly designated authorities: Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The via moderna, on the other hand, shunned such commitments.
The Englishman William of Occam (who died in 1349 in exile in Munich) was the famous—to his opponents infamous—founding father of nominalism. But despite all recognition of his impressive achievements, he was never able to attain the prominence in his own school that the leading doctors of the via antiqua enjoyed in theirs. The via moderna had a number of spokesmen with equal claims, each of whom put forward his own solutions to innumerable specific problems. Considerable influence had been gained among the exponents of the modern way by the Italian Gregory of Rimini and the Frenchman Pieire d'Ailly, as well as by the Germans Marsilius von
Inghen in Heidelberg and Gabriel Biel in Tiibingen, who might be considered a second Occam. But each of them had his own mind, of which their school of thought taught them to be proud. It was not only in theological matters that their positions diverged. In the realm of philosophy, too, they laid stress on such differing aspects and opposed each other and their founding father Occam with such critical intensity that what they had in common could easily seem blurred. The nominalists had always been concerned with academic freedom, but their kind of heterogeneity was counterproductive when it came to firmly establishing their own school at any of the new universities.
Four years prior to Luther's enrollment at the University of Erfurt, two professors from the arts faculty, Jodokus Trutfetter and Bartholomaeus
Arnoldi, had held.a solemn disputation (1497) before the whole university, in which they had succeeded in formulating the common core of nominalism and of developing its fundamental principles into a cohesive program.' This can be considered a real breakthrough® because it consolidated nominalistic trends into one academic school. Even more important in the long run than the successful disputation was the fact that both of the Erfurt professors set about integrating their principles into their academic teaching. They wrote handbooks to introduce students to the application of nominalistic criteria.
Only two years after the disputation Arnoldi published his introduction to natural philosophy (Leipzig, 1499), and Trutfetter followed suit in 1501 with his handbook of logic, which saw a large number of editions.
Again and again both of them cited one basic notion as the decisive principle and characteristic of the via moderna: all philosophical speculation about the world must be tested by means of experience and reality-based reason, regardless of what even the most respected authorities might say to the contrary. Arnoldi emphasized that this was to be no different in the case
THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG IIg of theology: all theological speculation is to be tested by the authority of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Church.
Hence experience and Scripture were the only valid norms in the realms of philosophy and theology. Addressing the nominalist Johannes von Wesel, who, though condemned, was still quoted often in Erfurt, Usingen demonstrated how even authorities in one's own school have to be treated: "However important you are, my answer must be: Even great men are sometimes careless and negligent enough to make assertions and statements of which they are not certain."'
"Not certain" —that is the basic tenor, the refrain repeated over and over, the chief weapon used against Occam as against Aristotle. Such relativizing of authorities by appealing to scientific method and solid proof spelled the demise of scholasticism. But such freedom from tradition is never attained once and for all. Later academic history shows how tempting it is to accept the convictions of great scholars, enabling new "schoolmen" and new "scholastic" thinking to establish itself again and again. The discovery of the uncertainty of knowledge must be made ever anew.
Nominalism was a major factor in the advance of both the natural sciences and theology. Subordinating speculation to experience freed physics from the confining grip of metaphysical systems that transcended experience.
Once experience became experiments, modern science was born, and it was nominalism—not humanism—that had paved the way. In the realm of theology the full implications were not immediately seen. Only Luther's quest for God's reliable and certain word in the Scriptures put an end to the supremacy of speculative philosophy.
The conclusion is clear: at the turn of the sixteenth century the "modern" professors of the arts faculty in Erfurt pushed open the gates to the modern age. Yet only some gates, and only somewhat modern.
Luther Becomes a Nominalist In the spring of 1501 Luther was introduced to this challenging climate of intellectual innovation. Using the new textbooks, he learned to subject the conclusions of medieval scholarship to critical examination. Much of what he learned in Erfurt could not be applied until later, in a new context, when he himself had broken away from the philosophical theology of scholasticism and was compelled to defend his view of a scripturally based theology against highly reputed scholastic authorities. But the philosophers in Erfurt's arts oe eS
THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION faculty had done more than arm him with weapons to defend himself; they had also provided him with concepts that were to become essential to the First there was the nominalistic subordination of reason to experience, whereby, against all ideological speculation, experienced reality itself becomes the focus for the perception of the world. Furthermore, nominalists sought to distinguish between God's Word and human reason. In the realm of revelation, in all matters concerning man's salvation, God's Word is the sole foundation—here reason and experience do not prescribe but confirm; here they do not precede but follow.
These nominalist principles attained great significance in the context of Reformation theology: God's world, reason, and experience belong together the same way as do God's salvation, Scripture, and faith.
Modern scholars have only now begun to cast off their prejudices against the via moderna, which was superseded by the seventeenth-century scientific revolution it had prepared. There is no question that Luther was trained as a nominalist in Erfurt; but the implications of his academic training are still contested and under debate.
Luther proudly referred to himself as a member of the school of Occam:
"My master Occam was the greatest dialectician." * But he also showed himself to be a child of new times by adding: "But it must be admitted that he could not formulate elegantly."° In February 1520 the universities of Cologne and Louvain condemned Luther's theology as heretical. In March he defended himself with an argument derived in both form and content from the nominalistic tradition: "I demand arguments not authorities. That is why
I contradict even my own school of Occamists, which I have absorbed completely." '° Since the end of 1515 Luther had been criticizing his "master's" teachings on grace and justification with increasing acerbity. Though this fundamental criticism should not be underestimated or ignored, Luther's sharp attacks on his school do not imply that he now totally rejected it and distanced himself from everything he had learned in Erfurt. Such an interpretation would contradict Luther's own statements and ignore the distinction he himself made, along nominalistic lines, between the realms of reason and revelation: a poor, even a dangerous, theologian can nonetheless be an outstanding dialectician, logician, or scientist, as was the case with Occam.
With respect to his teachers in Erfurt Luther was both pupil and critic. He had no illusions about the enormity of the theological gulf between them.
And yet, as Trutfetter's "deeply devoted" student he had learned to take THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG Scripture at its word and to subject even the most revered scholastic theologians to close scrutiny.'' Luther formulated the idea of loyal opposition and committed it to paper in Erfurt on May 9, 1518, immediately after an unsuccessful attempt to visit Trutfetter at home. Luther had wanted to talk with Trutfetter to explain his critique of scholastic theology, but the professor had had his servant convey the message that he was ill, and Luther left disappointed. Not for us but for Trutfetter this departure must have symbolized Luther's farewell to the via moderna. It is not difficult to understand the motives for Trutfetter's rebuff. It was not Trutfetter the "Church loyalist" seeking to avoid Luther the "heretic"; in May 1518 things had not yet gone that far, although the Dominicans were already about to take up the chase and open the case against Luther. Trutfetter was not dismayed by the first confused accusations of appointed and self-appointed Inquisitors alike. He must have been dismayed by Luther's harsh attack on the very basis of his whole life's work, the significance of Aristotle.
The break between them, that point when loyalty grows into loathing, was as inevitable as it was fair and in the open. Before his programmatic attack in the Disputation against Scholastic Theology of September 1517, which was to cause a great stir in academic circles, Luther wrote to his former professor to inform him of the impending public confrontation. Luther asked his
Erfurt friend Lang to pass the theses of the disputation on to Trutfetter, with the message: "Should Aristotle not have been a man of flesh and blood, I would not hesitate to assert that he was the Devil himself. My wish would be for Usingen [Bartholomaeus Arnoldi] and Trutfetter to give up their teaching, indeed stop publishing altogether. I have a full arsenal of arguments against their writings, which I now recognize as a waste of time." '* With this one sentence the scholarly achievement of a whole life spent in the service of the university was swept aside. "A waste of time": this break was irreparable.
Luther's attack on Aristotle concerned both the via moderna and the via antiqua insofar as neither of them allowed their doctrines to be dictated by the Word of God. But it was the via moderna that had insisted on distinguishing the realms of God's Word and human reason; Trutfetter and Usingen themselves had furnished Luther with the means of opposing the via moderna's violations of this boundary. In his very attack, Luther showed himself to be a splendid pupil.
The reaction of Wendelin Steinbach, a senior colleague and successor of Gabriel Biel in Tiibingen, demonstrates how easy it is for us to draw erroneous conclusions from Luther's attack on scholasticism during the early
Wittenberg years. Though he had no sympathy with the positions of the type THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION Luther defended, he did not understand the attacks from Wittenberg as a basic break with the via moderna but rather as a revival of the radical theses of the Augustinian Gregory of Rimini.'? Gregory was generally considered one of the most significant leaders of the via moderna, and not for a moment did anyone assume that his radical theology of grace implied a break with the moderns. This Tiibingen perspective helps us to discern the Erfurt hook in Luther's Wittenberg stance of 1517. Jodokus Trutfetter and Bartholomaeus
Arnoldi—who also never became a follower of Luther—had particularly highlighted Gregory of Rimini as a loyal interpreter of nominalistic principles. Trutfetter was not scant with his praise: Gregory of Rimini is an important guide both in theology and philosophy."*
In 1507 the still insignificant University of Wittenberg, which had been founded only five years earlier, had the audacity to offer Jodokus Trutfetter a professorship in their arts faculty—and he actually accepted. But, as might be expected, he did not stay long; only one year later he was back in Erfurt.
Thus his teaching in Wittenberg remained an episode, but not an inconsequential one. In 1508 the via moderna was introduced at the arts faculty in Wittenberg, and, significantly enough, it was to be taught explicitly in line with the via Gregorii. This innovation can probably be ascribed to Trutfetter.
Gregory was a fortunate choice because the Augustinian professors teaching according to the via moderna could now fall back on an authority from their own order. Luther later honored Gregory as the only scholastic who did not deviate from Augustine's theology of grace. Though this praise of Gregory does not correspond with the opinions of his teachers, it must nonetheless be noted that his years in Erfurt had familiarized him with the scholarly achievements of an era that he could never spurn as the "Dark Ages."
It is true that after he obtained his doctoral degree in 1512, tension developed between Luther and the University of Erfurt, which was not prepared to accept his move to Wittenberg. But these differences did little to diminish his love for Erfurt. The ensuing problems were finally settled and Luther was able to establish himself as a professor in Wittenberg. There was nothing to indicate the breach that would come in later years. His relationship with Bartholomaeus Arnoldi remained so close that at the age of fifty Arnoldi decided to enter the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt at Luther's advice.
Martin Luther was a nominalist, there is no doubt about that. The suspicion does arise, however, that there was a link between Luther's university training and his decision for monastic life, that it was because of Erfurt nominalism that he found his way to the Augustinians so quickly and perhaps at all. Roman Catholic Luther scholars have seen a connection here.
THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG According to their view, the nominalists had distorted the image of God into that of an arbitrary god who vengefully, mercilessly pursued anything that incited His wrath, so that one could do nothing but flee from such a god— flee to a monastery. But if we examine the via moderna more closely, we find no trace of this arbitrary God. The fact is that proponents of the "modern way" stressed not God as the "highest being," but as "the personal God" who had revealed and displayed His will to redeem mankind.
There is nothing to indicate that if the young magister had been trained according to the teachings of the via antiqua—for example, in Cologne or Leipzig—he would have taken up the legal career his father had planned for him. Nor can the Erfurt humanists be made responsible for Luther's decision. Yet as we will see, Luther owed a lot to his encounter with them."
But nothing in the program of nominalism itself directed his steps away from the world and to the monastery.
The Impact of Humanism In Luther's time there was no conflict at all between humanism and nominalism in Erfurt. Just as in Tiibingen, where the humanist Heinrich Bebel could adorn scholastic books with his poetry, so Nikolaus Marschalk, a recognized humanist and Erfurt's administrative director, recommended
Trutfetter's textbooks in eulogistic verse. The success and confidence of the - arts faculty, which knew itself to be in the academic forefront of the time, prevented its students from rejecting scholasticism as obsolete and welcoming the humanists as the sole heralds of a new era.
That Marschalk encouraged students to learn Greek and Hebrew did not have any immediate effect. In Wittenberg Luther began learning Hebrew systematically, using Reuchlin's grammar; and only in early 1519 did
Melanchthon teach him to read and draw Greek letters. In view of the usual resentment humanist language studies evoked among theologians Luther's lack of bias is striking. In his very first lecture he went so far as to question the Latin translation of the Bible, which for centuries had been hallowed by tradition. This was probably a legacy of Erfurt: neither the name Reuchlin, the grand master of Hebrew, nor the name of Erasmus, Europe's most famous Greek scholar, were for him new, or suspect. When he entered the monastery he left almost all his books behind, but insisted on taking along his copies of Plautus and Virgil, authors he would quote all his life.'°
It is unlikely that Luther belonged to a definite circle of humanists. He did THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION not meet Mutianus Rufus, the central figure in Erfurt humanism, until
1515, when he had already been a professor for three years and, as district vicar of the Augustinian Observants, had already advanced to the higher rungs of a monastic career. But his friendships with Georg Spalatin, spiritual counselor to Elector Frederick the Wise, and Johannes Lang, a fellow
Augustinian, offered him close contact with humanism. Both were later to become reliable allies in the Reformation movement.
Crotus Rubeanus, who collaborated with Ulrich von Hutten on the satirical, anti-scholastic Letters of Obscure Men, remembered his fellow student
Martinus Ludher as a budding humanist in the Erfurt days. Alluding to Luther's love of classical literature, which was accessible to him only in Latin,
Rubeanus justifiably draws attention to Luther's humanist tendencies.
Yet Luther always knew that he could not equal the elegant humanist artists of the written and spoken word, though this did not particularly disturb him. But in his interpretation of theological sources, the Scriptures and works of the Church Fathers, he did not have to defer to anyone, and he trod a path many of his contemporaries—whether humanists or avowed scholastics—could not follow.
From Magister to Monk Before Luther had turned twenty-two his life underwent a radical change.
On July 17, 1505, he knocked at the gate of the monastery of the Augustinian Hermits in Erfurt and bade the prior to accept him into the order. With this step he relinquished all plans for the future and hopes for a career. After his master of arts examination Martin had received money from his father, which he spent in Gotha, buying the most essential books for his law studies, among them a costly folio edition of the Corpus Juris, the legal code of the Roman emperor Justinian. Just a few weeks later he returned his brandnew legal collection to the bookseller.' He no longer needed it because in the meantime a decision had been made that neither his father nor his friends could reverse: the decision for the monastery and against the world.
Hans Luder had gone to considerable expense to offer his eldest son a university education in preparation for a career that might take Martin as high as the post of "learned counselor" and thus to a level of influence in politics, like his cousin Hans Lindemann. But now the father had to watch his authority being disregarded and his carefully conceived plans thwarted.
Martin cited a higher authority: hurled to the ground by lightning and close to death, he had pledged himself to the monastery. Even a father, who was
THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG entitled—and had a God-given right—to demand obedience from his children, had to respect a vow of this kind. Luther the Reformer would later come to view his earlier decision as a flagrant sin—"not worth a farthing"
— because it had been made against his father and out of fear. "But how much good the merciful Lord has allowed to come of it!"
According to a much later report, Martin had been confronted with death once before, on his way home to Mansfeld in 1503, at the end of the winter semester. Hardly had he left the city walls when his dagger pierced his leg, cutting an artery. Only because he was in the company of a friend, who could fetch a doctor, was his life saved. Lying at the edge of the road, he tried to apply pressure to his artery to stop the bleeding till the doctor came.
In his distress he implored the Mother of God to help him: "Oh, Mary, help." He was close to dying "with my trust in Mary",'* as he later told the circle of Wittenberg friends. The critical tone is unmistakable: he should have placed his trust in Christ the Savior, not in Mother Mary!
Whether this accident happened at the beginning or toward the end of his studies cannot be ascertained. The event that took him inside the monastic walls, on the other hand, can be dated with precision. On July 2, 1505, a thunderstorm near Stotternheim brought him close to death once more, and in terror he called out, "Help, St. Anne, I will become a monk!" "
Many years later Luther could still recall how appalled his father had been at his vow, and how his friends had tried to change his mind. Occasionally he himself had wondered whether this vow, which had been forced out of him by fear and had thus not been made voluntarily, truly bound him to fulfill his pledge. But all remonstration was in vain, and even his own doubts did not suffice to reverse his decision. On the evening of July 16, two weeks after the incident near Stotternheim, he gave his friends a farewell party, and on the following morning they accompanied him to the Augustinian monastery.
The moment of parting had arrived: "You see me today and never again." .
He was convinced that he was leaving the world behind him forever, as he had promised St. Anne. But things were to turn out differently: "To the world I had died till God thought it was time." "
There was a widely held suspicion that monastic vows were nothing more than an excuse for monks to secure a pleasant, comfortable life without having to work or to worry about where their next meal was coming from.
Luther was aware of these caricatures, and for this reason he had to point out repeatedly that it was not poverty that had driven him into the monastery.
His decision to become a monk had created quite a sensation because the situation in which he received his calling—thunder and lightning near Stotternheim—evoked wide-ranging associations. His friend Crotus Rubeanus
THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION Hans Baldung Grien, The Conversion of St. Paul, ca. 1505-07: "Suddenly there shone round him a light from heaven" (Acts 9.3). Luther's conversion sometimes was interpreted thus by Augustinians. as well as his monastic teacher Johannes Nathin compared Luther's experience with the conversion of the Apostle Paul. The parallel is indeed suggested by the Acts of the Apostles: "And as he journeyed he approached
Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And he fell to the ground .
Luther himself did not see his choice of the monastic life in the same light as St. Paul's conversion. In keeping with the 1504 Constitutions of the German Augustinian Observants, he was first subjected to thorough questioning by the chapter, the decision-making monastic assembly, in order to determine whether his wish to become a monk truly came "from God"."' Only when the answers of a candidate were deemed satisfactory was he admitted
THE ROAD TO WITTENBERG to the novitiate, a trial period of one year. When Luther was questioned he must have given an account of the incident near Stotternheim, and the parallel with Damascus is bound to have struck the brothers in the chapter. But the term conversion, which was appropriate for Paul, did not apply to Luther; nor was he wrenched out of a life of luxury like St. Francis. He had been raised strictly and "decently." There was no question of turning from unbelief to belief. Luther was not tormented by doubts about God's existence and he was an obedient son of the Church. It was fear for his salvation that had driven him. He wanted to achieve eternal life and was filled with "fear and trembling." He was not converted from Saul to Paul but from the world to the monastery. And this was, in fact, demanded in the admission liturgy.
Over Luther, the aspiring monk who lay at his feet, the prior prayed: "Oh, God, who kindles the hearts of those who have been converted from the "vanity of the world to the victorious prize of the heavenly calling. .
. May they recognize that the grace of their conversion has been granted gratuitously. .
Thus conversion meant turning away from the world and turning ascetically toward God; that was the medieval monastic tradition. What conversion meant in practice was explained very clearly to the candidate during his first questioning by the prior: killing off one's own will, meager meals, coarse clothing, hard work during the day, keeping vigil during the night, chastising the flesh, self-mortification by begging, extensive fasting, and an uneventful monastic life in one place. Only when the aspirant said yes to all this was he admitted to the novitiate. The admission liturgy as spelled out in the Constitutions concluded with the novice being entrusted to the care of the master of novices, among whose first tasks was acquainting the novice with the Rule of St. Augustine and the Constitutions of the order.
Luther engraved these regulations and precepts so deeply in his mind that his later recollections of the monastery years were still replete with monastic formulations.
Luther did not seek the monastery as a place of meditation and study to exercise a faith he had once lacked. Nor was' he looking for a sanctuary of strict morals to protect him from the immorality of the world outside. He was driven by his desire to find the merciful God. And that was precisely what the order demanded of the candidate for admission, as the liturgical formula makes clear. Searching for the merciful God was a crucial part of the monastic life and was by no means a unique expression of Luther's hunger for salvation, out of step with the Community of Brethren.
Before a candidate's first questioning in the chapter house began, he was always apprised of the central condition for acceptance: his search for the THE UNEXPECTED REFORMATION gracious God. The prior asked: "What do you seek here?" The reply had to be "The gracious God and your mercy." When the aspirant's own clothing was finally taken from him and exchanged for the habit of a novice, the prior prayed: "Lord, save Thy servant ..
. and grant him Thy mercy. . .
. Acknowledge this Thy servant, whom we have given the spiritual habit in Thy holy name, of Thy blessing so that he shall deserve to achieve eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ." The prior's last words to the novice at the end of the acceptance ceremony was the exhortation: "Not he who begins but he who perseveres to the end will be saved."** Then the novice was turned over to the novice master.
Thinking back on his time at the monastery, Luther emphasized that it was this search for the gracious God, with its attendant "trembling and fidgeting" which had driven him: "In the monastery I did not think about women, money, or possessions; instead my heart trembled and fidgeted about whether God would bestow His grace on me." The criticism is directed at himself as well as at the monastic tradition when he adds: "For I had strayed from faith and could not but imagine that I had angered God, whom I in turn had to appease by doing good works." *
This reproach against the monastic sanctification by works came after Luther's break with Rome, which is not to say that monastic life posed no problems for Brother Martin the Augustinian prior to that critical juncture in his life. With its impressive scope, the initiation liturgy entailed goals and demands that directly concerned the friars' everyday exercise of faith and also proved to be crucial topics to the young professor of theology. On the one hand, the monks confessed that their monastic calling was an act of God's grace, and on the other, they acknowledged their obligation to "fight" under the banner and rule of Christ to attain one day the "victorious prize."
When the novice became a full member of the monastic community after his trial year, the prior once again prayed for this reward in the service of Christ:
"Oh, God, may our brother sit at Thy right hand at the Last Judgment and be glad that he fulfilled his monastic vows completely." > These last words spelled out the mighty tension between grace as gift and as duty.
Yet a monk could count on mighty helpers both in life and later at the Last Judgment. He was as sure of the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of St. Augustine as he was of the comfort of the Holy Ghost in his battle with the Devil, the evil Adversary, in distress and temptation. Everything needed was available to him, both grace and help; now it was a matter of whether he was capable of making use of the offer and directing all his strength to the ultimate goal.