LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546)

LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546), German theologian and author. Martin Luther came to be easily the most well-known public figure—and the most published author—of his time. He was born on 10 November 1483 to Hans and Margarethe Luther in the town of Eisleben and went to school in Mansfeld and Magdeburg and then in Eisenach. His father was in the copper mining business, and wanted Martin to become a lawyer. He entered the University of Erfurt in 1501 and completed the studies necessary for a master's degree four years later. By that time, however, he was suffering from doubts about the meaning of his life and from fears of death, and in the summer of 1505, against his father's wishes, he became a friar of the Observant Augustinians at Erfurt; he took monastic vows in 1506 and was ordained a priest in 1507. On a trip to Rome for the order in 1510–1511, he was disturbed by the corruption he found there, typified by the sale of indulgences to raise money for the rebuilding of St. Peter's. He returned to Saxony, earned his doctorate in 1512, and became professor of biblical exegesis at the University of Wittenberg, a post he held until 1546; he was also the preacher at the church in Wittenberg.

In his lectures on the Psalms and on Paul's Epistles, Luther began to preach the doctrine of salvation by faith rather than by works. Meanwhile, the popular Dominican preacher and papal fundraiser Johann Tetzel appeared in the area to proclaim that the pope had authorized the sale of St. Peter's indulgences; Luther was infuriated to the point of composing a letter of protest to the archbishop of Mainz and posting his Ninety-Five Theses on the Sale of Indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. By the end of the year, the theses had been printed and, a short while later, translated into German and spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The archbishop sent the theses to Pope Leo X, who summoned Luther to Rome to answer charges of heresy in 1518. Frederick III (Frederick the Wise; ruled 1486–1525) of Saxony intervened and arranged for Luther to have a formal hearing at Augsburg before the papal legate Cajetan rather than being sent to Rome. Luther refused to retract the views expressed in his theses, maintaining that there was no biblical justification for indulgences, and appealed to a papal council. There followed in 1519 a widely publicized debate at Leipzig between Luther and Johann Eck, a professor from Ingolstadt, on the subject of church authority. Luther's publication of three treatises in 1520 that called for revolutionary changes in late medieval German political, social, and religious life led to a papal bull excommunicating him in 1521; Luther publicly burnt the bull along with a copy of canon law and was called to the Diet of Worms for the purpose of recanting his teachings. He refused and was placed under the ban of the empire, which designated him an "outlaw" whom anyone could kill without legally committing murder.

His protector Frederick III of Saxony sent his soldiers to take Luther to the castle at Wartburg, where he spent a year writing pamphlets, preparing sermons on the Epistles and the Gospels, and translating the New Testament from Greek into German. He returned to Wittenberg in 1522 and resumed teaching and preaching. He urged the establishment of schools for all children (including girls), opposed the German Peasants' War, began the organization of the Saxon church, wrote hymns, a Small Catechism, and a Large Catechism, as well as numerous commentaries and treatises.

In 1525 Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former Cistercian nun who had fled her convent two years earlier under the influence of the Reformation. The couple moved into the former Augustinian monastery where Luther had lived as a monk; they had six children, three boys and three girls, and they also took in the six children of Luther's sister after her death; visitors reported that their home was always filled with students, guests, and boarders. Luther died at Eisleben on 18 February 1546 and was buried in the castle church at Wittenberg. In his funeral oration to faculty and students at Wittenberg, his long-time colleague and friend Philipp Melanchthon observed that in Luther "God gave this last age a sharp physician on account of its great sickness."

Luther was in his own time and remains now an object of passionate approval and disapproval, whom even supposedly scholarly accounts praised (and praise) for whatever their authors find praiseworthy in their own time while condemning him for all that they might judge as repugnant in their worlds. On the other hand, praising and condemning the reformer for all the "right" reasons and in just the "right" measures according to one's own time and culture amounts to thin porridge. The truest story is far more profound: Luther was at the same time quintessentially medieval and the single person who did most to put in motion the events that moved the clock of Western civilization into early modern times.

The notion that Luther was "medieval" refers to his motivating concerns rather than to any religious views that are no longer fashionable in polite circles, such as taking the figure of Satan or the Antichrist literally. Instead, Luther's life displays a consistent, driven search for assurance that he and those he taught and to whom he preached should be assured of their salvation both in the here and now and in the world to come. His fundamental concern was for the "care of souls," first his own and then the souls of those he served. In and of itself, this single-minded focus marks him as a pre-modern religious figure.

By the same token, the essential consequences of Luther's life and career are that, willy-nilly, the content of his personal spiritual quest, and the one he taught his students, changed dramatically. This change was so fundamental that, in combination with the circumstances of the early sixteenth century, it affected both the internal and public lives of many others. They too, unintentionally and perhaps even unconsciously, found themselves leaving the Middle Ages and moving into the early modern period.

The special indulgence sale of 1517, to which Luther objected in the Theses, has generally made indulgences the best known of the religious practices of the time. In fact, for the average believer, the sacrament of confession and penance was a far more common encounter with the medieval confrontation of sin, death, guilt, and wounded consciences. Above all, ever since the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) the faithful were obligated to go to confession at least annually, and most commonly during Lent or in preparation for partaking of Holy Communion at Easter. By contrast, going on a pilgrimage, venerating relics, and the like were all further and optional ways of strengthening and demonstrating one's faith.

For his part, Luther confessed his sins to another person and frequently on a more than daily basis. It remains impossible, of course, to learn exactly what happened within the confines of the confessional. The late medieval manuals suggest a certain rigor. Frequently enough, for example, someone would come and be unable to think of any particular sin that he or she had committed. At this point, the confessor had recourse to a printed list of questions that might be asked, such as, "Have you ever had sexual relations with your spouse for reasons other than procreation?" "Did you or your spouse enjoy the encounter?" Answering yes to either of both questions produced two sins for which penance must be done. Being first a novice and then a friar of the Observant Augustinians in Erfurt, the questions that Luther was asked and was taught to ask himself naturally turned to the internal status of his soul and in particular to the strength and commitment of his personal faith. From the posting of the theses forward, he never ceased in fact to inveigh against this practice of "inquiring about secret sins."

In the preface to the Latin works, which he completed in 1545, one year before his death, Luther eloquently and accurately described the changes that overcame his thinking, indeed his personal faith. There, he detailed rejecting the theology he had been taught, that the righteousness of God was a divine quality with which God judged humanity, and how he realized that it was rather the gift that God bestowed for Christ's sake on unrighteous people, and to which they cleaved in this life by faith alone. The basics of his more developed position appeared publicly in the Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation (spring 1518), in his lecture hall at the University of Wittenberg (1515–1519), and definitively in Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (1520; On the freedom of a Christian). They lay beneath his insistence at Leipzig (1519) that "a simple layman armed with the Scriptures is mightier than pope and councils without them." Their consequences for Christianity and for Christendom became undeniable in An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (Address to the Christian nobility) and De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium (On the Babylonian captivity of the church), both of 1520.

Each struck fundamental and telling blows against the medieval ideal of Latin Christendom. Each had politically, institutionally, and religiously revolutionary consequences. Many at the time regarded the Address as a call to arms against everything Roman, a call that—to the likes of Ulrich von Hutten, for example—included the political arrangements of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther cast his treatise as an appeal to the "Christian nobility" (or "ruling class" as some prefer to translate), the Christlichen Adel, to proceed with the reforms that the papacy refused to consider. The problem he faced was that common opinion held overwhelmingly that actually reforming the church was far beyond the competence of secular rulers, no matter how very Christian and upstanding they might be. Only those who had been ordained as priests, at a minimum, had the right to intervene in the affairs of the church in favor of or against any of its practices. There were many places in which local practice decreed that, if there were a property dispute between a clerical and a civil foundation, the case would be heard in an ecclesiastical court, and its outcome would be in little doubt.

This public and sanctioned conviction Luther called "the first wall" behind which papal prerogative protected itself. It was also the first one that he attacked. He did it with his famous teaching on the "priesthood of all believers," which grew directly from the proclamation that all Christians lived by the same grace through faith in the same Christ without distinctions between them. The only differences turned on the principal office or calling that a particular person had, regardless of whether he or she served in the temporal or spiritual spheres. Any baptized Christian was eligible to be called by the believers to preach, to baptize, and to administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper on either a short- or long-term basis. With one stroke, Luther at least theoretically destroyed the very social class that helped constitute the social and political—as well as religious—reality of late medieval Christendom.

Luther's treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church performed much the same function with respect to specifically religious activities. Erasmus thought this the most radical of his treatises, for in a few pages, published initially in Latin, Luther attacked the medieval sacramental system at its core, reducing the number of sacraments from seven to first three and then (on the final pages) two. Two consequences followed. In the first place, if one accepted Luther's argument, then the Church of Rome no longer had anything to offer the laity that was essential to salvation. As then constituted, its raison d'être had ceased to exist. From pope to priest, they were all useless.

But there was an even more important aspect to what Luther had wrought. As he was working his way through one sacrament after another, he developed a consistent standard for what constituted a sacrament. It required biblical evidence that Christ had founded the practice and that it consisted of a promise added to a physical object. Thus, the central sacrament—confession and penance—disappeared and with it went any semblance of religious authority that the clergy might hold over the laity as a matter of principle.

Yet, Luther should not be called a "reformer" without qualification. He made no effort to replace what he tore down with a "better" edifice. Instead, he and his colleagues proceeded to construct a new institution chiefly through ad hoc measures such as visitations that had the sole objective of securing the preaching of the Word of forgiveness through Christ and in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. All else they relegated to the world in which Christians carried out their vocations. Thus, to understand Luther requires grasping the contradictory theses with which he began On the Freedom of a Christian, published in 1520: "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." As time passed and the cause fell to less perceptive figures, this distinction metamorphosed into what became the dichotomy between church and state. In this regard and with these changes, the transition from the medieval world of Latin Christendom into early modern Europe was complete, whereas by contrast the old tensions, polarities, and rivalries persisted in France, Italy, Spain, and Catholic portions of the Holy Roman Empire until the French Revolution.

LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546)

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