Preface Martin Luther is the story of Martin Luther, not a history of the Protestant Reformation, though its subject was the most prominent figure in the combined religious and political stirrings of sixteenth-century Europe. While his name appeared near the top in the inevitable rankings of "most influential people" of the millennium past, not until a brief afterword does this book include a measure of his influence, examine his legacy, or visit the twenty-first century. Curiously, for all the academic and popular attention long given him, at the time of this writing only three or four biographies of Luther are in print in English. Librarians report that few historical figures have received more monographic scholarly attention than he. Such scholarship has informed its author, but this Penguin Life is not and cannot be an extended entry into the debates that it inspires. There are suggestions for further reading in the final pages. Nor is this the work of either a hanging judge or a flack. The flaws that blighted Luther's reputation, such as in his relation to peasants in 1524-25 or to Jews late in his life, are gross, obvious, and, in the latter case, even revolting. While it is tempting for us contemporary scholars to parade our moral credentials by competing to see who can most extravagantly condemn historical figures such as Luther, in this story wherever denunciation would be in order his words and actions will show him condemning himself without much help from this biographer interfering as a righteous scold. Conversely, as for possible efforts at biographical public relations on Luther's behalf: For his positive contributions to the development of human liberty, the free expression of conscience, support of music, development of literary style, and his role in reshaping religious life, he needs no advertiser, and readers will not find one here. This portrait of Martin Luther will not depict a modern person, because he was not one. Those devoted to periodizing in history might call him a late-medieval contributor to the early modern scene. He left tantalizing and often unsubtle clues that credibly evoke deep psychological assessments, and touching on them here will contribute to but cannot begin to exhaust efforts at accounting for some dimensions of his personality. He makes most sense as a wrestler with God, indeed, as a God-obsessed seeker of certainty and assurance in a time of social trauma and of personal anxiety, beginning with his own. Those who bring passion to what is a universal search for meaning in life may well identify with such a search, though of course by no means all will find Luther's resolution attractive or even accessible, because it appears in a Christian framework. People of other faiths or of no explicit religious commitment may find his specific solutions alien, but they can grasp what he was about by analogy to approaches that they already find familiar from other studies of literature and history or from their own experiences. This account consistently connects the story of Luther's inner experiences with that of his relations to the external surroundings. Biographers of controversial, spiritually profound figures regularly receive warnings that in a changed world, often described as secular, publics cannot identify with or find relevant inner struggles that reflect remote times and places. Yet moderns who cannot picture receiving direct messages from God, like those Joan of Arc claimed, have little difficulty discerning how her response to such messages changed French and English history and why it is urgent to pay attention to her own accounting. Few people have mystical experiences like those of Bernard of Clairvaux, but awareness of his informs the understanding of his preaching to support crusades. Stories of Francis of Assisi's stigmata, which looked like replications of the wounds of Christ on his body, sound incredible to most of us, but dealing with them is crucial for anyone who would come to terms with his impact on medieval life. In the present case, perhaps most contemporaries cannot identify with Luther's sense of guilt and dread in the face of an angry God, yet what he made of his struggles is integral to the story of modern Europe-indeed, the modern world. If it is true that fewer people today struggle with guilt before God while more have difficulty facing anomaly and absurdity, finding meaning in life in the face of an apparently indifferent universe, or embracing firm faith of any sort, many of them may find in Luther a classic case of one facing such difficulties, seeking meaning, often doubting, and even falling into despair until he grasped faith, or it grasped him. As for genre: A century ago historians of theology held a near monopoly among scholars dealing with religious figures like Luther. In his case, during the past half century social historians have impressively chronicled and analyzed the cultural context, though often at the expense of attention to his ideas and beliefs. Today, in a world where personal spiritual quests and global religious conflicts alike are familiar, we can expect that many readers will welcome the kind of cultural history or biography that pays attention both to those theological themes and to their settings in monastery, home, church, university, and empire. One sometime hears that in a secular and religiously pluralist culture, theological language and ideas may sound arcane and forbidding, and one should play them down. That makes little sense when a biographer deals with the life of a theologian who had an immense bearing on the world around him, since such a figure drew on theological language and ideas. Biographies of, for example, an astronomer, a microbiologist, an athlete, or a politician must invite readers to the complex thought worlds, in turn, of astronomy, microbiology, athletics, and politics. Thanks to his gift for pithy and salty expression and his passion for transgressing linguistic and social boundaries, Martin Luther makes it possible for a biographer with some ease to invite into his world people who might, in the normal course of things, stand outside it. It is the biographer's task to make them feel sufficiently at home in that world that they can make judgments about the story and sufficiently ill at ease in it that the telling can provoke them into fresh thinking. Observers of the art of biography in recent years have regularly noted that beginning the story of a life with the birth and ending with the death of a subject, an approach dismissed by some in the not too distant past in favor of essays on theory, is coming to find renewed favor. I will begin with Luther's birth and end his story at his death, largely leaving to others the accounts of his posthumous influence and its global consequences. Chapter One The Hunger for Certainty 1483-1519 Shortly before midnight one November 10, probably in 1483, in the Saxon town of Eisleben, Margarethe Lindemann Luder gave birth to a son. When he was grown and had made enemies, some of them charged that this "beloved mother" had been a whore and bath attendant. Not at all. She was instead a hardworking woman of trading-class stock and middling means. When he did later write of her, Luther remembered Margarethe as someone who could punish him severely. Parents in her time and place routinely did that. But, he recalled, she had meant heartily well. His father, Hans Luder or Ludher-later Luther-was a leaseholder of mines and smelters. He was to become respectable enough to serve as one of four citizens who represented others before a town council. This ambitious and occasionally jovial father could likewise be a harsh disciplinarian, but-as Martin also said of him-Hans had meant heartily well. Eisleben, where the family lived for only a few months after the child's birth, straddled the edge of the Harz Mountains and the Thuringian forests. Haunting the dark heights above the town, many believed, were witches and poltergeists. In the town churches, peasants and villagers took refuge against both threatening supernatural beings and natural hazards. The Luthers, among these other Saxons, needed such refuge. Tales of the Black Death, which had killed perhaps one-third of Europe's people, kept later generations aware of the precariousness of living and terrified when plaguelike diseases struck. Peasant existence and, for men like Hans, the mining business brought daily hazards. Thus, while a mine could yield copper and produce prosperity, it also might collapse on the miners or drag leaseholders like Hans into debt. Pleading for all the help they could get, cowering believers prayed to saints. Miners invoked their popular protector St. Anne, known to them as the mother of the Virgin Mary. The pious, hoping such saints would shield them, feared a God who judged and punished them. To ward off the devil in such a setting, the Luther infant was brought just hours after his birth to Sts. Peter and Paul Church. There, after the saint of that day, they christened him Martin. The baptismal rite, though subdued, was momentous. The church taught that its waters cleansed the infant of sin as they drove out the devil and produced a new Christian. Seven years after his baptism, his prudent parents sent Martin to Latin schools, first in his hometown of Mansfield, then in Magdeburg, and finally in Eisenach, for an experience that he later recounted as being in purgatory and hell. Those three schools were literally "trivial," which meant devoted to the trivium, because teachers drilled three subjects into the heads of urchins: Grammar served Luther well as he produced writings that now fill about one hundred mammoth volumes. Rhetoric, the second discipline, helped him become the influential writer and speaker whose words affronted and charmed multitudes for decades. The boy made much less of the third, logic, though it did help him survive philosophy courses later at the university. In the Latin schools Martin also wrestled with Christian basics. If teachers taught also about the love of God, it was their warning that Jesus the Son of God would judge them after their death that fired their imaginations, especially Martin's. More alluring were Aesop's Fables and other stories that helped inform and prompt a mature Luther to salt his discourse with parables and narratives. In school Luther lived in terror of the "wolf," the classmate charged to tattle weekly on the children and finger them as candidates for physical punishment. But there were joys, as when young Martin savored the music that filled the chapel during Masses. Having learned to sing, the boys at Magdeburg and Eisenach performed during door-to-door rounds, welcoming "crumbs," or small gifts. Influences that shaped the child remain obscure. He had several brothers and sisters and was close to one of them, Jacob, with whom he remembered playing. But he was very young when the burden of influence moved from home and family to school. The pious Brothers of the Common Life ran the school at Magdeburg and no doubt shared their love of the Scripture and the life of simple prayer with him. Some thought his known sightings of one begging Franciscan friar, formerly Prince Wilhelm of Anhalt, and his friendship with a learned priest at Eisenach inspired this alert adolescent when he later chose his vocation. Whatever young Luther might have been planning to study, father Hans insisted he take up law. Having a son who was an attorney or a judge would one day enhance the status and serve the practical needs of the aged Luthers. He came to admire his teachers at Eisenach, so the Latin schools cannot have been such purgatories and hells as a scornful Luther later deemed them. So neither was his chosen university at Erfurt in Thuringia simply the whorehouse and beerhouse he would one day recall. In the summer of 1501, after taking his oath of loyalty to the dean, he launched a career that kept him in the university world all his life. Hans Luther's son was on track toward joining the Thuringian or Saxon elites through an academic career in a time when the fates of universities, the church, and civil governments were intertwined. Luther used the university as his base as he developed his decisive role in the portentous intellectual, spiritual, and political dramas of his day. He remarked that the market town of Erfurt was a fortified city, so he felt protected there in many ways. Among the walled-in population of about twenty thousand lived almost a thousand priests, monks, and nuns. Faith was a public matter; the churchgoing citizens took Christian images from the sanctuaries to the streets, where townspeople enjoyed sacred processions, festivals, and displays of piety. University authorities in Erfurt sternly regulated academic life. At four each morning the bell roused students for a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises. Starting low in class ranking, Luther studied hard and moved toward the top, usually enjoying his courses. He said he regarded the ceremonies that came with his master's degree-achieved in 1505-as incomparable among joys on earth, and he came to know enough joys to give weight to such a comparison. While he followed his father's wishes and enrolled that year in legal studies, he almost instantly dropped out of them, explaining that in his mind law represented nothing but uncertainty. At Erfurt the edgy law professors liked to call theologians asses. Luther returned the compliment ever after by showing his disdain for lawyers. In the academy he now began to ask himself whether theology might offer him the certainty he was seeking in life, the assurance his soul and mind demanded, and a boon he could provide to others. At Erfurt two living teachers and three dead philosophers especially caught his interest. Bartholom"us Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter were the professors who instructed Luther in the thought of the ancient thinker Aristotle and, from more recent centuries, William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel. Usingen and Trutfetter staged disputations, dead-serious debates, about their philosophies, ostensibly to seek truth. They taught students to be suspicious of even the greatest authors, men who might give the impression of being certain about assertions and claims when they were not or had no reason to be. Luther determined along the way that when the philosophers considered human reason to be a credible agent for knowing and pleasing God they could offer none of the assurance of the love of God that he craved. As he studied philosophy he developed a lasting love-hate-from some angles even a hate-hate-relation to Aristotle. The Greek sage was a legitimate guide on practical earthly subjects, Luther affirmed, but he charged that Christian universities employed Aristotle's approach to reason as a deceptive and finally unsatisfying means for coming to know God. Luther's professors, adapting what some called the modern way and others referred to as the nominalism of Ockham and Biel, stressed a commonsense counsel: Test theory by experience. For Luther, this meant questioning the writings of his teachers and then moving on to testing the absolute authority that the key institution, the church, claimed as the guardian of divine truth. Nominalists contended that only a particular, individual thing, not a general idea, was real. That meant humans could learn of a world beyond their everyday scene only through divine revelation, which is one reason why Scripture became so decisive for Luther and why he came to reject so much of the church's use of Aristotle's reason as a means of using ideas to find and please God. Interrupting his academic course on a July day in 1505, the twenty-two-year-old graduate surprised friends and perhaps to some extent himself when he decided to trade academic garb for the cowl. He held a farewell supper for friends who then led him with tears, he said, to the door of the town's Black Cloister. With more than a tinge of melodrama he turned to pronounce, "This day you see me, and then, not ever again." Friends had to ask why he made this sudden decision. One acquaintance blamed Luther's apparently abrupt move on the melancholy he displayed after the death of two friends. Another faulted the supernatural, musing that an apparition must have visited him. His father, who thought Martin was now going to waste his education, his life, and the prospects of his parents, was predictably furious. Luther later admitted that fear turned him to his new course. On the way back to the university after a journey home on July 2, as he neared the village of Stotternheim, he was jolted by a thunderbolt and lightning. "Help me, St. Anne," he prayed, and then vowed, "I will become a monk." He busied himself with interpreting this event all his life. Sixteen years later he wrote to his father that he had that summer day been called by terrors from heaven. Specifically, cowering in the agony of prospective sudden death and the dread of divine judgment, he made the monastic vow he thought he could never break. Soon he was called to prostrate himself before an altar at Erfurt, over the brass plate that covered a tomb. Buried there was an Augustinian leader who in 1415 at a church council in Constance had helped condemn to death the prophetic Bohemian preacher Jan Hus. Ironically, Luther and others came later to honor not the buried Augustinian but his victim Hus as a precedent for their own ventures, a martyr to true faith and a man who defied those spiritual rulers who turned him over to secular authorities for execution. The custodians of the cloister doors that closed behind Luther on July 17 belonged to the very strict Order of Augustinian Hermits. Luther selected his order well, since Augustinians prized scholarship, as did he. They honored and studied the fifth-century scholar and bishop St. Augustine, as would he. He was ready for self-punishing treatment, and they offered it. Monastery rules demanded that the novice master, the prior, and other chapter leaders must regiment the lives of monks. Luther dutifully obeyed, but though he had sought rigor, he came to chafe under the weight of the monotonous routines. Years later he disparaged the monastic disciplines as distractions from what he determined the fear-stricken and spiritually hungry people of God deserved. Beyond the walls of the university, the fortifications of Erfurt, and then the protective confines of the cloister, the world around Luther was in turmoil, and he was soon to find himself unexpectedly central to much of its drama. We know almost nothing about what he knew or thought about the political and religious conflict of the moment, but one of its features had to stand out: His was an entirely Catholic world. After Spain had defeated the Muslims and purged the Jews in 1492, Europe became almost solely Christian, and Christianity was the only faith recognized and supported by the governments. Christians did not live near the people they called the Turk, Muslims with whom they were in imperial conflict. Small Jewish communities mainly under force and sometimes partly by choice still huddled in Italian ghettos or clustered around synagogues in numerous towns of northern Europe. Mountain valleys hid a few dissenting Christian sectarians. While folk beliefs that the theologians of the day called pagan were very widespread, a Christian could roam through Europe and find familiar the main beliefs of almost anyone he met. By the time Luther died, however, even the surface unity of Western Christendom would be shattered. What he learned in the university and how he used that learning contributed decisively to the shattering. To help make sense of Luther's inner world, his thought, and the emphases in his subsequent career therefore requires some acts of imagination. I like to picture someone from any remote culture where people did not worship God stumbling onto the monastic scene and being utterly bewildered. Such a person from beyond Christendom in those years might well have comprehended the new sciences then developing in Europe, but the form that the search for meaning took and the theology used to interpret it would have been alien and forbidding. Luther, like the poets Chaucer and Dante before him and like the scholars Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More in his own time, inhabited a spiritual world in which people struggled in inventive ways with God and Satan, going on pilgrimages and fearing purgatories. Their religious ventures taught them to be consumed by the threat of damnation and the hope of being saved for eternity with God. Luther boasted that if ever a pious monk could have gotten to heaven through his monkery, it would have been he. He said he prayed, fasted, kept vigils, and almost froze to death in the unheated chambers. Though his colleagues evidently considered him a good friar, he confessed that he faced persistent temptations. These were not beguilingly sexual, and little in his record would attract those with prurient tastes. As he wrestled against the lures of the devil, he instead became increasingly convinced that no one could ever do what he fervently aspired to do, that is, please God through monastic efforts. Their hours spent in solitude gave Augustinians ample time to explore the inner life. Luther testified that from the first he struggled with himself and his God. The proper dealing with a God of wrath and love and the search for certitude in God's relation to humans became the grand themes of his life. Explain his life story as one will, it makes sense chiefly as one rooted in and focused by what has to be called an obsession with God: God present and God absent, God too near and God too far, the God of wrath and the God of love, God weak and God almighty, God real and God as illusion, God hidden and God revealed. On April 4, 1507, a bishop ordained Martin a priest. Then on May 2 twenty horses and twenty horsemen made up the guest party of father Hans Luther, who arrived at Erfurt carrying twenty gulden to donate on the day of Martin's first Mass. The cloister enclosure, the miles between old home and new monastery, and enduring bitter feelings had kept father and son apart. Now for Martin this day was to be the most portentous since his baptism. Since the presence of Hans threatened to turn celebration into trauma, it is natural to ask why the father appeared at all. Guilt and fear after the death of two friends in the plague prompted him, thought some. Maybe he held himself responsible for their deaths because he had long spurned his son's God-pleasing vocation. Or, moved by a puzzling if prudent change of mind, he could have come to show newly found pride in his priestly son. Then again, he could have been merely keeping a parental obligation. Perhaps he hoped against hope that the two would be reconciled. Whatever the reason, the father was ostentatiously present. When newly ordained priests celebrated Mass for the first time, they were made aware of the privilege they gained therewith to offer God the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine. Those who partook of the prescribed meal at the altar believed that they ingested not bread and wine but the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Such a ritual naturally inspired awe. Luther rehearsed the precise and complex motions of the rite as he learned them from a textbook. Still, mixed feelings about his unworthiness to hold Christ's body and to pour his blood came to overwhelm him. How dared he, sinful monk Martin, presume to talk directly to God, to represent the people, and to create the impression that he was worthy to participate in the change of bread to flesh, wine to blood? Though filled with dread, he survived the ordeal. At a celebration after Mass Hans Luther chose the moment to interrogate his cornered son: What if that thunderstorm at Stotternheim and your call to the monastery came from the devil? Hans then turned catechist and asked his son standard questions about the Fourth Commandment: Have you not heard that you are to honor father and mother? Had this son not disobeyed God when he dishonored his own parents by his choice to go against their strong wishes and enter the monastery? It is not known if Luther responded, though on occasion he later referred to the questions that had to sear his soul. Luther showed a need for a new figure to act as father, since his dealing with his own parent was strained and his life behind cloister walls kept the two remote from each other. He found one in his Augustinian superior, the blue-blooded Vicar General Johannes von Staupitz. Well positioned, Staupitz had significant influence on his longtime friend Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Frederick was titled Elector because he was one of seven secular and ecclesiastical princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. Staupitz showed himself to be an astute talent scout when in 1508 he sent young scholar Luther to be substitute professor of moral philosophy in the backwater Saxon burg of Wittenberg. While the local bishop was opposed to the idea and the church did not charter it, Frederick in 1502 had started a university there, a place that Luther described as existing at the edge of barbarism. The school originally had to settle for second-rate talent, so the elector and Staupitz wanted to upgrade it. Staupitz early recognized Luther's abilities. For example, he assigned the monk the task of helping reconcile two quarreling Augustinian factions. That duty meant a trek to headquarters in Rome. When in November of 1510 or 1511, after having crossed the Alps on foot, the impressionable young monk first saw the holy city, he gasped in awe but, curiously, thereafter recorded few observations about the grand sights. Unmoved when he glimpsed the ancient Pantheon, by then converted to a church, he commented not on classic examples of architecture but on the evils of paganism. After his four business-filled weeks in Rome, he even withheld comment on the splendor of the city's seven great churches. A crawl through the catacombs, described to him as burial places for thousands of early Christian martyrs, did lead him to be stirred. Like many other northern European visitors, he expressed shock at the chaos, the filth, and the practices of locals who urinated in public and openly patronized prostitutes. Priests appeared to him to be ignorant and corrupt functionaries who scorned the pious, profanely raced through their obligatory Masses, and blasphemously hurried Luther through those he celebrated. He dared not let the Roman days pass, however, without seeking to satisfy his spiritual thirst. He heard that the merits he would accrue by venerating saintly relics or by saying Masses would shorten the number of years his own parents would have to spend suffering in purgatory. He later revealed that he had wished they were already dead, so their future sins would not nullify his efforts at getting all their transgressions purged. Climactically, on his knees at the Lateran Palace he climbed the Santa Scala, then believed to be the very stairs brought to Rome from Jerusalem, steps that Jesus had himself climbed in the court of Pontius Pilate fifteen centuries earlier. On each step Luther said a stipulated prayer. When he had finally made his way to the top, a question nagged at him: "Who knows whether this is really true?" This is the moment in Rome that he would speak and write about in a sermon more than thirty years later. Luther and a companion who made the round-trip by foot over the Alps in winter returned to Wittenberg to report on a failed mission, but his superiors did not lose confidence in him. In October of 1512 under a pear tree in the cloister garden, Staupitz astonished the still uncertain monk by ordering him to receive the doctorate and thence to serve the Augustinian congregation of monks in Wittenberg as a teacher of theology and by preaching. No, the twenty-six-year-old Luther at first protested, he had already spent so many energies that he did not expect to live long. Further, only those more gifted and older than he should preach and be doctoral teachers. One lure about the offer, however, did attract him. He would be teaching Scripture and would no longer have to take on the dreaded task of expounding Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. He obeyed orders, overcame his doubts about the assignment, and proudly accepted the doctorate on October 19 that year. He often said that he would not exchange his doctorate for all the world's gold, since he saw it as a call and commission to his work and because it gave him courage. Since some jealous colleagues at his alma mater in Erfurt, where he had taught briefly, sneered that his rapid rise in the academy resulted from favoritism, he was happy not to make Erfurt his permanent home. He found good reason to respond positively when Staupitz assigned him again to Wittenberg, where the vicar general cajoled Elector Frederick into underwriting his protÈgÈ's stipend. The young monk and Staupitz, who became his confessor, inhabited a universe in which they thought a threatening God kept a suspicious eye on every human act. While the confessor appeared to Luther to have figured out a way to live under this weight, uncertainty about God's will for him terrified Luther. He quickly became a virtuoso self-examiner, boring his mentor during six-hour confession sessions. A genius at probing reasons for his own hidden resistance to God, he grew dependent and later said that without the help of Staupitz, his venerable father in Christ, he would have remained a papal ass, doomed to be swallowed up in hell. His weary mentor berated Luther for making do at confession with what he called flummery and pseudo faults, as if calling every fart a sin. Luther in turn averred that he was confessing not the usual monkish transgressions about sexual temptations, but what he called knots, spiritually serious problems. Staupitz often was of help as his protÈgÈ wrestled with these knotty phobias and specters. He discerned that the dread of death or hell, the apparent ultimate challenges, indicated in Luther a still deeper torment, a fear of God, a failure to know the love of God in Luther's inmost heart, and an inability to be certain about the promises of God. Explicit rules for the rite of confession began with the demand that the sinner be contrite. That sounded like a simple idea-to be contrite meant to be sorry for sins, as Luther was-but he rendered it complex. Since the monk wanted a pure relation with God, it struck him that even being sorry could mean being self-centered. Through contrition a person could seek advantage by proving to God that he could cooperate in the steps he climbed to please God. Luther instead began a lifelong search for ways in which humans could experience the love of God without using God, without turning God into a convenience. Felicitously he borrowed from Augustine an image that helped him describe the central problem about humans. Even while being contrite, he noticed, they would be "curved in" upon themselves, cramped, protective, in no way open for God to break into their souls. Curved in upon himself, he lived with the terrors that marked his moves within the dreary cloister walls. Of his experience there he later said that he feared hell somewhat; death, more; failure to please God the judge who made drastic demands, most: "I trembled." Somehow he came to conceive that repenting, turning from sin, should begin with a focus on the love of God and not of the self. He next had to reject what his teachers in the modern way had taught him in their precise formula: "To those who do what lies within them, God does not deny grace." He faced a nagging issue: How c Excerpted from Martin Luther: A Penguin Life by Martin E. Marty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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