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There had been little time for deeply depressive agonising in the months since November of 1517; and there had been a good deal for Luther to be pleased with. Apart from progress with university reform, many people had reacted not only favourably but with enthusiasm to his Theses on Indulgences. But there were worries about this. The Theses had not been written for general consumption, and the support they had received tended to have something superficial about it — whether it was the arrogance of the humanists, or the prejudiced anti-clericalism of all who enjoyed any attack on the clergy. Added to this was the fact that Church authority seemed to be unwilling to respond to Luther’s protest. For weeks there was merely silence. This was followed by rumours, increasingly strong, that the letter to the Archbishop and the criticism of Tetzel were being treated as matters for discipline at Rome. However, these things did not bother Luther as much as the thought that the Theses might be misrepresenting his case, particularly to the general public. Yet there was the warming fact of encouraging signs locally. The Elector and his chaplain, Luther’s close friend, were taking a positive attitude. And his own local bishop, though forbidding publication of his long Explanations, had implied that perhaps they should be published eventually, treating with Luther through an eminent local abbot.

Luther left Wittenberg on foot in the second week in April on the 250-mile journey to the Rhineland, for the Augustinian Chapter meeting at the ancient university town of Heidelberg. due to open at the end of the month. Depressives have their ‘up’ periods, and the visit to Heidelberg led Luther into something like euphoria; the trip went well from the moment Luther and his friar companion, Leonard Beyer, he of the Theses, crossed the bridge out of Wittenberg into the springtime countryside. Five weeks later, Luther was bubbling over with happiness about it. As soon as he was back in his cell and had attended to immediate business, he sat down and wrote to Spalatin: ‘At last my Spalatin by the grace of Christ I have returned to our hearth [penates],’ — Luther was writing on the Tuesday after the Saturday of his return —‘I who left on foot, returned on wheels.’ He had come back as a minor hero, with a vehicle specially lent from a neighbouring friary, and the detail was to be relished: My superiors made me ride almost up to Wurzburg with the delegation from Nuremberg. From there I travelled with the Erfurt delegation, and from Erfurt on, with the party from Eisleben; and they finally brought me, both at their own expense and with their horses, to Wittenberg.’ Furthermore, security had been no worry after all: ‘I certainly have been quite safe during the whole trip.’ And his health had been better: ‘Food and drink agreed wonderfully with me, so much so that several people think I look less strained and have put on some weight.’ The whole thing had been a succession of minor, sometimes major, triumphs.

Their first port of call out of Wittenberg had been at the village of Judenbach, where they were well entertained by Pfeffinger, Frederick’s Chancellor of the Exchequer — Luther had by now received that cloth, so long promised for a new habit. A careful route and stopping places had been planned to provide the minimum of danger of attack or kidnap. They continued on down through the lovely Thuringian valleys, and then over the hill to Coburg and on to Wurzburg, where Frederick’s letters gave Luther the entree to the episcopal palace and lavish entertainment from Prince Bishop Lorenz in the Marienberg Castle above the city. On his arrival, Luther heard that the Erfurt party were still in the city, and from here on Luther and Beyer were able to ride in the Erfurt wagon instead of walking. Once he had arrived at Heidelberg, instead of possible reprimands there was nothing but good to report. The young local ruler, Count Palatinate Pfalzgraf Wolfgang, was a graduate of Wittenberg and was happy to ask Luther, along with the Observants’ Superior, Father Staupitz, and Luther’s old friend the Erfurt Prior, Johann Lang, to a grand meal: ‘We enjoyed ourselves in pleasant and delightful conversation while we dined and wined. We viewed all the treasures of the castle chapel, and saw the armoury, and just about every precious object with which his truly royal and extraordinary famous castle sparkles.’ The Count’s old tutor was present and gave Luther further ground to flush with pleasure: ‘Master James could not praise highly enough the letter our sovereign had written or my behalf; in his Necker dialect, he said "By God, you have excellent Credentials!" I was given every possible courtesy.’

Staupitz had decided to back his protege. He gave Luther the podium and invited him to give the lead lecture, to preside at the defence of a set of theses, propounded by Luther and defended by his companion. They were not on the controversial Indulgence issue, but on the fundamental underlying theology of sin, grace and justification. It all went well: ‘The doctors willingly allowed my disputation and debated with me in such a fair way that they have my highest esteem.’ The next sentence was a reference to the domination of the schools by philosophy:

‘Theology seemed to be some strange thing to them; nevertheless they debated keenly and with finesse.’ One of the opposition speakers received not support but laughter from the meeting by saying: ‘If the peasants were to hear you, they would certainly stone you to death.’ There was opposition from the elderly nominalists from Erfurt: ‘My theology is like twice deadly cabbage to the Erfurters.’ But that was to be expected. Luther’s theology of the cross went beyond the intellect to the heart and to the spirit: ‘The man who deserves to be called a theologian is not the one who seeks to understand the invisible things of God through the things that are made but the one who understands that the visible things of God are seen through suffering and the cross.

It was an open occasion, and among the local citizens and graduates who came in to hear the disputation was a young Dominican priest, destined to become Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge thirty-one years later. Fr Martin Bucer, OP, wrote a letter to a friend a few days after the meeting, to tell him about Luther and give him an idea of the magnetism of the friar’s presence. Something of this was caught in the earliest engraving of him by Cranach (two years later), showing Father Luther in his white habit. The mixture of intellect, spirituality and emotion in a body still thin, and visibly sculpted by asceticism came across to young Martin Bucer. Luther s quiet voice, sharp eyes, intense conviction and his powerful arguments were overwhelming — or to others deeply offensive. Bucer wrote to his friend: ‘His sweetness in answering is remarkable, his patience in listening is incomparable . . . his answers, so brief, so wise, and drawn from the Holy Scriptures, easily made admirers of everyone who heard him.’ He was not saying that Luther had it all his own way. ‘Our best men argued against him as hard as they could. However, they were unable to make him budge an inch from his propositions.’ The contrast struck Bucer very forcibly, between the conventional language of the schools and what Luther was putting across. Here was something quite new and yet apparently difficult to defeat in argument. ‘He had got so far away from the bonds of the sophists and the trifling of Aristotle, is so devoted to the Bible and so suspicious of antiquated theologians of our schools. . . that he appears to be diametrically opposed to our teachers.’ What was exciting him as much as what Luther was actually saying, was that it was challenging all the old assumptions, and that it was being said with great intellectual confidence and conviction, backed evidently by deep emotion.

The day after the great debate, Bucer managed to have a meal with Luther: ‘I had a close and friendly discussion with the man alone; it was a supper rich with doctrine rather than fancy food.’ Bucer, like everyone else, related Luther to Erasmus, as taking Erasmus to a logical conclusion — evidently Luther kept his disagreements secret. He agrees with Erasmus in all things, but with this difference in his favour — that where Erasmus only insinuates, he teaches openly.’ Bucer had not grasped that this difference in temperament was already part of a much more far-reaching difference in attitude to the Christian Gospel. Luther’s was a more deeply subjective commitment which led to a more impassioned and practical policy.

Luther learnt at Heidelberg from Staupitz that attempts had been made to turn the occasion into one at which he would be silenced. A quiet word from his Superior in Germany, with a reference to the wishes of the Order’s Superior General in Rome, and to criticism at the papal court, would, it had been thought, do the trick. Instead, Staupitz had treated Luther and his theology simply as theologians were used to treating professors with theological initiatives — these things were a matter for debate and argument, doubtless of the expression of strong and even very strong opinions about them, but still for the moment a matter for debate. The Indulgence matter was left aside — everyone agreed with Luther’s attitude and with many of his propositions on this topic in any case. But no one wanted to debate it because of the sheer danger associated with debating matters which involved the authority of the Pope. However, the whole matter of the way Church authority carried on was irritating Luther more and more. It was not just that he felt it all to be unseemly or even scandalous in the way that Erasmus and so many people of all classes did; he certainly felt that, but he was more deeply scandalised and hurt in his own inner being; his own nature was in some sort under attack. He had acted on his own conscience in the deepest interest of the Gospel and of the Church, and in tune, as he understood it, with the theology of St Paul and St John. Yet it was beginning to seem that Church authority had no interest in these things, or in himself as a member of the Church.

One matter on the agenda at Heidelberg was the post of local provincial superior, which Luther held. He had completed his three-year stint, and it was an obvious choice to replace him with the man whose name had often been coupled with his, the Erfurt Prior, Johann Lang. And it suited Staupitz to have Luther out of the official local job for the moment. In any case, Luther was overburdened. Although not the president of the University, he had become in effect the man principally responsible for the reorganisation of the syllabus and the new appointments. So Johann Lang was voted in to take over the office of local superior of the group of Saxon friaries.

Back in Wittenberg, Luther was due to preach in the parish church. His mind was still agonising over the matter of the exercise of authority, and in particular the matter of the ‘Ban’ on the sacraments so often exercised by Church authorities when they wanted an overdue debt paying — bans ‘flying about like bats’, as he had said in March — and in general the whole business of excommunication. Heidelberg had outraged him. Whenever he grappled with a topic, the opposition seemed to melt away. So up into the pulpit he went and began the kind of classic but easily intelligible exposition he was so good at: ‘The Latin word communio means ‘fellowship’, and this is what scholars call the holy sacrament. Its opposite is the word "excommunication" which means "exclusion" from this fellowship. He pointed out that at the deepest level the ban cannot reach into a man’s deepest relation with God, quoting St Paul: ‘Who shall separate us from the love of God. . .? I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor height, nor power, nor anything else on earth.’ The ban was about their visible fellowship in the Church, an essential element in Christian life. Luther expounded the orthodox view which he accepted. There had to be a structured community and discipline; the origins of the organised Church could be found in some of Christ’s own words.

This was all impeccably orthodox. But Luther soon got on to what so affronted him, and what had been an annoyance in the Church for centuries: misuse of ecclesiastical disciplines. He said they had to put up with it — unjust excommunication had to be borne like a sickness. Unfortunately, it seemed that, more often than not — and here he began to express the biting criticism and anger inside him — authority was put into the hands of the Pilates, Herods, Annases and Caiaphases of this world. But these authorities should realise, he said, as he got into his stride, that they stood in greater spiritual danger than the people they excommunicated. They used it to get a debt paid, when the debt ‘is so small that correspondence and costs amount to more than the sum concerned’. While real sinners, especially if they were the great of this earth, ‘big Johns’, were not touched, in spite of being fornicators, slanderers, usurers and the like. An unjust ban should be endured but its importance exploded, just the way you could pop a pig’s bladder filled with peas for rattling. Another vernacular reference came fast on the heels of that one: as soon as they picked up the spoon, they smashed the bowl — bringing the whole Church into disrepute by wielding their petty powers. Thus were the more or less inadequate, casual or corrupt officers of the European Myth exposed as functionaries of a social machine, rather than servants of men in their religious affairs. Luther knew the sermon was provocative, but was already becoming convinced that he must speak out. The force of his own inner storm was driving him on to say what others held back from. The atmosphere was becoming tense. Luther had only been back from Heidelberg two days and he was already attacking authority again. People wondered how long authority would hold back from touching him.

There were continuous exchanges with his old friends and masters in the Augustinian Order. At Heidelberg, Luther had failed to convince the old men from Erfurt; particularly saddening was the opposition of Fr Trutvetter, whom Luther loved and held in esteem, though he spoke sharply about him sometimes in letters to Spalatin. Luther tried and failed to convince Trutvetter on his way back through Erfurt. Back at Wittenberg he wrote a long, warm letter to his old Master, saying that nearly all the principal teachers at Wittenberg agreed with him, and even the prelates, when hearing the new theology, feel that someone is speaking to them of Christ and the Gospel. Allow me to share their judgment until the question is resolved by the Church . . . I pray daily to my Lord that the pure study of the Bible and the Fathers shall be restored to honour. You don’t consider me a logician, and perhaps I am not; but I fear no man’s logic in defending this position. . .Doesn’t it disturb you that Christ’s unfortunate people are tormented and fooled by indulgences? . . . If you can still tolerate the advice of him who was your most obedient and devoted disciple, I would say this; it was from you that I first learned to trust only the canonical books . . . I am ready to endure and to accept all your criticisms. However severe they are, they will appear very gentle to me.

There were deep ties both personal and communal with the old man, and Luther hated to be out of harmony with his onetime mentor.

At Heidelberg, Luther had heard some detail of what was being said against him at Rome. On his return to Wittenberg he decided to send his Explanations to the Pope. Into it he had put all his theological expertise. This text would show the Pope what was the real purpose of the 95 Theses. With it he sent a letter to the Pope himself, written with all the frankness, openness, intellectual integrity and respect for authority of which Luther was capable. He had it all ready by the end of May. ‘Most Holy Father . . . my reputation has been seriously maligned before you and your counsellors, as if I had undertaken to diminish the authority and power of the keys which belong to the sovereign pontiff. I am accused of being a heretic, an impostor and a traitor, which leaves me overwhelmed with astonishment and horror . . .’ Luther then described the preaching and Indulgence traffic in Saxony and said it stirred opposition, ‘malicious talk was much in evidence around their booths’, and only the threat of the stake prevented people speaking openly. ‘It was then that I became incensed with zeal for Christ, as it seemed to me (or, if you prefer, by a juvenile enthusiasm).’ He wrote to prelates about the matter, and ‘I published my theses, inviting learned men and them alone to discuss them with me . . . By a miracle which astounded me more than anyone, these theses were spread through almost the entire world’, even though, being academic theses, the text was dense and summary. So, he had written the Resolutions, and as a precaution was now ‘putting them under the protection of your name’. He reminded the Pope that his University and the local ruler, Elector Frederick, approved. However, ‘I offer myself with all that I am and possess. Make me live or die, say yes or no, approve or blame according to your pleasure. I recognise in your voice the voice of Christ who reigns in you and speaks through your voice. If I have deserved death, I will not refuse to die. "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereafter." May he be blessed for ever and ever, amen, and keep you unto him eternally, Amen.’ However calmly he started, there was always a great emotional outburst before the end.

The Roman authorities were used to the kind of fanaticism displayed in the somewhat desperate last sentences. For years they had been using Canon Law, and the traditional legal norms, essentially inherited from the Roman Empire, to deal with visionaries, mystics and prophets of all kinds. Such people had to obey the Curial authority, acting on behalf of the Pope, or indeed the Pope himself.

Fr Martin knew something of this attitude, but he had not met it at first hand before. He knew there were corrupt and politically minded ambitious men everywhere as his sermon on the Ban, and many previous sermons, had made clear. He knew that Canon Law was paramount. But he thought that among the corrupt were some men, and at the moment among them the Pope, who accepted the New Testament norms as the norms for the regulation of their lives.

The Resolutions and the letter to the Pope he sent off to his immediate superior, his only one great Master, Fr Staupitz, with the request to forward it on to Rome. And to Staupitz he wrote a covering letter, which provided for his Master’s benefit a potted religious autobiography showing how he had got where he was, a disarming expose, which also involved Staupitz himself, including the sequence about the love of God and metanoia. Then he told how the ‘new war trumpets of Indulgences and the bugles of pardon started to sound, even to blast’ around in the district, using all the old arguments of threat and fear. Luther felt he had to protest: ‘This is the reason, Reverend Father, why I now, unfortunately, step out into public view. I have always loved privacy and would much prefer to watch the splendid performance of the gifted people of our age. As to the threats, ‘I have no other answer. . . than the word of Reuchlin, "He who is poor has nothing to fear; he has nothing to lose." I have no property and desire none . . . There is only one thing left: my poor worn body which is exhausted by constant hardships. If they take this away by a trap or by force (in order to serve God), then they will deprive me of perhaps only two or three hours of life. . . My dearest Father, the Lord Jesus keep you unto eternity.’

Luther’s ‘worn out body’, however, was to last another twenty-eight years, though he was undoubtedly tired, and often on the edge of exhaustion. And now he had reached a situation where he was pouring out many thousand written words a day in letters and statements, much of it for publication. In a short time, he would be producing material which amounted to a publication a fortnight for the rest of his life. And he realised well that the ultimate price might easily be exacted from him by the authorities of Church and State.

Luther secured the whole package, a substantial parcel with the 70,000-word Explanations in it, and sent it off by messenger to Staupitz who was by now at Augsburg in southern Germany. where he had come for the Imperial Diet which Emperor Maximilian was about to open. Though worried, Luther was still fairly confident of a satisfactory outcome, His enemies were trying to bring him down, but so far his case had been given a good hearing whenever there was someone willing to listen to it; and the opposition seemed to melt away or remain ineffective.

Meanwhile, among the people making their way laboriously across Europe to the Imperial town of Augsburg was the Superior General of the Dominicans, Tetzel’s Order the famous theologian Cardinal de Vio or Cajetan. He was one of the minority of theologians who were ultra-papalist and regarded the papacy as a divine, rather than human and merely historical, institution. The Pope had made Cajetan his Legate to the Emperor’s assembly. But the Germans were not content with an Italian Legate and demanded a second German Legate, and Cardinal Matthaeus Lang of Gurk was named in addition — the same thing happened to Legate Campeggio in England and Cardinal Wolsey also became a legate there. Various official obstructions were made as Cajetan moved from Italian lands to German but eventually he reached Augsburg late in the summer. His arrival was ceremonial. On a white horse draped with Roman purple, the Cardinal processed through the stone gates of the little German town, making for the Fugger House, the mansion of the international bankers where the principal dignitaries attending the Diet were lodging and where the meetings would also take place. The Cardinal brought gifts with him; a great sword of honour for the Emperor; the announcement of a Cardinal’s hat for young Albrecht the Archbishop of Mainz, still in his middle twenties and the pluralist whose debts to Rome and the Fugger had made the recent Indulgence of particular importance; and finally the ‘Golden Rose of Virtue’, a scented golden artefact, a kind of degenerate Nobel Peace Prize. It might be usefully presented with ‘strings’, to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, Reichsvikar, number two to the Emperor, and a man of great importance on all matters, specially because he so seldom uttered and appeared to be less easily bought than most rulers, possibly not for hire at all. The Italian party surveyed their chambers and requested satin linings for Cardinal de Vio’s room, consciously exerting their sense of superiority in the rather barbarian surroundings north of the Alps.

The major item on Cajetan’s agenda (as on Campeggio’s in England) was the Turks, The Pope was worried about the threat to Christendom, with the Holy Land not only lost but the Turks far into Europe now, not far from Vienna. Indeed, the Pope would have liked to lead a new crusade himself. In a sermon in the Cathedral soon after his arrival, Cajetan presented the Diet with the need to defeat the infidel finally.

That meant only one thing to his German listeners: more taxes. The answer came very swiftly, in a meeting at the Diet; Rome was already taking far too much money, unjustly and dishonestly, out of Germany. The Bishop of Liege listed the complaints, the oft repeated Gravamina of the German nation. ‘These sons of Nimrod grab cloisters, abbeys, prebends, canonaries and parish churches, and they leave these churches without pastors, the people without shepherds. Annates and Indulgences increase. In cases before the ecclesiastical courts, the Roman Church smiles on both sides for a little palm grease. German money, in violation of nature, flies over the Alps. The pastors given to us are shepherds only in name. They care for nothing, but fleece and batten on the sins of the people. Endowed Masses are neglected, the pious founders cry for vengeance. Let the Holy Pope Leo stop these abuses.’ It was nearly as virulent as Luther himself — only it did not enquire into the doctrine behind it all, the dangerous world of ideology and ultimate commitment.

Cajetan had to stall, particularly because power politics had landed another and more serious matter on his plate. The Emperor was attempting to buy the votes of the Electors for the imperial election which must follow his death. Only fifty-nine, he was clearly sickening. His one wish was to ensure that his grandson, Charles Habsburg, already ruler of most of Spain and of Burgundy and the Netherlands, should succeed him. It was the one thing the Roman Curia and with him the Pope did not wish to happen; it would put half Europe into the hands of a single man and pose real threat to the political power of the Holy See, and of the Italian families so often associated with it. On 8 September, Cajetan wrote to the Pope that there was no alternative to shelving the Crusade plan. And, meanwhile, time was being taken on another matter, which had occupied a small place in the Cardinal’s files on leaving Rome, but which was becoming a material factor in the diplomatic manoeuvres relating to the future imperial election.

This was the matter of an Augustinian friar at Wittenberg who had been following the well-worn path of denunciation of Indulgences, but had taken the matter beyond them to theology and papal power. As an exceptionally able theologian and a man of intellectual integrity, Cajetan had read the theses of Dr Martin Luther and agreed with many of them. But the Pope’s authority should not be impugned, and the friar should respect previous papal statements which had established Indulgences as a permitted pastoral and financial instrument. The matter was perhaps not too difficult to deal with. The visit to Augsburg would afford opportunity to speak both with the man’s ecclesiastical superior, Fr Staupitz, and with his civil ruler. However, on arrival in Germany he found that the local Principal Superior had not in fact taken the steps which had been asked for, at the recent Chapter meeting of the Order in Heidelberg. And messages were coming from Rome requesting sharper action, including denunciation of Luther and a call to him to attend an examination in Rome. Following the arrival in August of this denunciation, the Emperor heard of the matter and his advisers suggested it could be used as a way of keeping the Holy See in good will towards him. He wrote to Rome requesting firm measures against the ‘heretic’ from Saxony. The Roman authorities were predictably pleased and sent a fresh command to Cajetan, formally denouncing Luther as a heretic and requesting Cajetan summarily to arrest him, with letters to the Emperor and Elector Frederick to assist the process. But a few days later, in the second week in September, the whole operation was being slowed down, qualified, and even put into reverse. The need of the Papacy to make close friends with Luther’s own ruler, Elector Frederick, in the matter of future Imperial election came to override all other matters. Frederick had expressed his opposition to the election of Charles Habsburg as Emperor. Everything must be done to support and encourage Frederick. And he became the Papacy’s own first choice, their candidate for Emperor. If Frederick was reluctant to have Luther arrested, then the Luther affair must be played down.

Giovanni de Medici, Pope Leo X, had treated the Luther affair as an administrative nuisance, something for the theologians and canon lawyers, when the first missive from the Archbishop of Mainz had arrived at the beginning of the year. Intelligent, deeply concerned for his famous Florentine family, both suave and genial, Pope Leo was destined for high office from the moment of his birth. Short-sighted and commonly using a gold monocle, but very fond of hunting and often able to give the coup de grace to some (fairly) wild beast held by the huntsmen, monocle in one hand, sword in the other, he used to get through business at a kind of morning levee in his private rooms, leaving the rest of the day free for the hunt, the banquet, family affairs, and all the glorious social life.

Further papers kept coming to the Pope about the affair in Wittenberg, including formal complaints from the Indulgence Commissioner, Fr Tetzel, OP, who was able to enlist Cardinal Cajetan. The failure to achieve anything at Heidelberg, and the failure to quieten Tetzel with a Doctorate of Theology presented to him by the University of Frankfort-am-Oder, founded in 1506 was irritating. The curial Office decided it was necessary to teach the bumptious young Saxon a lesson and raise a formal charge of suspicion of disseminating heresy. The auditor of the Sacred Palace drew up a summons requiring Fr Martin Luther to come to a personal hearing in Rome and requested the commissioner of the Palace, seventy-year-old Sylvester Prierias (the only man in the Curia to vote against Reuchlin), to draw up a text about the theological points. He did it, boasting it took him but three days to deal with the 95 Theses of Dr Martin Luther.

Sylvester Prierias left aside almost entirely the substance of the 95 Theses, concentrating instead on the authority of the Pope and on personal abuse of Luther. His description of papal authority would be disowned by Catholics today and was scorned by most serious theologians in the sixteenth century. But in the power battles which had been raging for some centuries, the contentions were common enough: ‘The Church’s authority is greater than the authority of Scripture . . . the decretals of the Roman Church have to be added to Scripture . . . in the New Law the Pope’s judgment is the oracle of God.’ The abuse was puerile. Luther was a ‘leper and a loathsome fellow . . . a false libeller and calumniator . . . a dog and the son of a bitch, born to snap and bite at the sky with his canine mouth . . . with a brain of brass and a nose of iron.’ This was as rich as anything Luther had yet said in a sermon, and far sharper than anything he had written as yet in the public press. Coming in an official papal text, it had a particularly degrading quality about it. Copies went off to Cajetan and Luther.

Polarisation was almost inevitable from now on. Luther had sited the crux of his case in theology. Christian truth was its own authority found in Scripture, the preaching Church and in the theology which arose from it. The papacy sited the crux in authority itself; theology was a tool, and Scripture a quarry of quotations to back up the decisions of a divinely backed organisation. The mantle of the Roman Emperors, absolute and not to be challenged, still lay ambivalently across the shoulders of the Pope, and indeed was to rest there in some sort for several centuries more. Luther accepted papal authority, but assumed that it was a service to the Church of a kind which would necessarily underwrite, or at least permit clearly expounded doctrine stemming from scripture.

In the end, any theology worthy of the name would need to work out some accommodation between the structures of the Church, on the one hand, with its monarchical papal authority, its traditions and practice, and, on the other, Scripture, the written record of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, together with the records of the life and teachings of the group of His first followers. In the twentieth century this process of accommodation has proceeded, and has involved further questions on the one hand about ‘God’, and on the other about the religious and spiritual traditions of cultures other than the European. But for the moment, encounter was inevitable.

Accommodation was to become the policy of a few in the sixteenth century with little influence at their disposal, Erasmus the first among them. Meanwhile, a battle for power was going on at many levels, not only between the individual prophetic Christian and Church officials but between Rome and Saxony, between papacy and Emperor, between clerics and laity, educated and uneducated; between humanists and spirituals; between conservatives and radicals; and the perennial struggle between the owners of wealth and the illiterate poorest members of society. The rules of each contest did not coincide exactly with those of any other. But when the prophetic Christian’s case was voiced by the Saxon Augustinian friar, its tones obliterated for the moment many other lines and drew powerfully to itself the laity, the anti~clericals among the priests, all nationally minded Germans, the humanists, the spirituals, the poor and the ordinary people who heard him preach — in fact the great majority of the population.

In Wittenberg, as the year ran on, the mosquitoes multiplying alongside the slow moving Elbe, and Wittenberg smelling in the summer warmth, Luther’s daily life did not change greatly. He continued to feed on the great texts of scripture and on the Psalms as they were chanted in the choir, first one side then the other, when he was able to find time to attend rather than reciting them privately late at night in his room. Mass, choir, preaching in town and cloister, lecturing, planning university developments, teaching the best students — and the continued development of the affair of his Theses; it was a perpetual round with too little time for sleep.

Karlstadt continued to be a support, sometimes however overdoing it. He produced 405 Theses defending Luther, jumping in to attack Johann Eck just as Christoph Scheurl was organising a detente between Eck and Luther, following on a very sharp reply of Luther’s against Eck’s contention that man could please God by his own unaided actions. This glorification of man’s will was, Luther had said sarcastically, true indeed. The will was indeed master in its own house, just as a brothel mistress is mistress in the brothel, one of a string of abusive Lutheran epithets. Both academics were, however, prepared now to retire, but Karlstadt tiresomely maintained the feud for the honour of Wittenberg University and Martin Luther. Tetzel had published a reply to Martin’s ‘Sermon on Indulgences’, harping on papal authority and largely ignoring the substantial issue.

Luther’s fame was spreading. Johann Lang took him on a visit to Dresden, in Albertine Saxony, where Duke George, cousin of Frederick the Elector, wanted to hear Luther preach and was shocked when he did so, on 25 July. After the banquet Luther got into an argument with an old Erfurt man, Hieronymus Emser. Dominicans, loitering outside, jotted down some of the angry words, shouted apparently on the other side of the door, joined these with some sharp sentences from the Sermon on the Ban and published the resulting concoction. When Luther hurried back to Wittenberg to prepare for the arrival of the new, and first professor of Greek, late in August, Spalatin wrote to him that the concocted pamphlet was circulating and doing him harm. So Luther got Grunenburg to print the correct text of his Sermon on the Ban. From this time on it was difficult for Luther to control publication of his works, particularly of sermons which were taken down. Agricola, a student admirer, published Luther’s ‘Our Father’ at this time without permission.

The bombshell came on 7 August. Sylvester Prierias’s text arrived — and Luther laughed. Was this the best they could do? He was soon boasting of writing the reply to such stuff not in three days, but one. Then the horror began to grow. He had been summoned to Rome, and they were threatening his life. That did not matter too much — he had surrendered that a long time ago and had been working harder than was sensible for some years. The horror was that these men in Rome were not keeping the place Luther had assigned to them in his model. They had not looked at his texts, and it was clear they just wanted to shut him up, and any method open to them would do. It was a crucial moment. He had counted on the integrity of the Pope and his advisers.

Luther acted immediately, sending Spalatin a message on the day he had the text. He followed it with a letter on the 8th, to Augsburg where Spalatin was with the Elector at the Imperial Diet.

But, said Luther, all was well. ‘Do not be disturbed or sad on my behalf. The Lord will provide . . .’, and ended with a pun to prove it, saying he was replying to the ‘Dialogue of Sylvester, which is exactly like a wild sylvan jungle’. And a final shaft: ‘That "sweetest" man is simultaneously my accuser and my judge.’

It was very frustrating. Spalatin was far away in Augsburg. Luther had to continue with the daily round at Wittenberg, and all the attendant responsibilities of friary, university and town. The days ticked by with the Summons to Rome hanging over his head. If something was not done about it he had the obligation, as an Augustinian friar, to be in Rome by 7 October, two months after receiving the Summons. He would need to start out soon. By 28 August no reply had come from Augsburg, and further rumours had reached Luther of demands being brought to bear on Elector arid Emperor to have him arrested. Friends in Wittenberg suggested that the Elector should be asked to refuse Luther a safe conduct for the journey to Rome so that Luther would have a correct excuse for not going; and the refusal should be pre-dated. Luther suggested this in a letter to Spalatin and told him the Explanations was at last through Grunenberg’s press, though full of mistakes, and he was sending a copy on. His reply to Sylvester together with Sylvester’s original piece had gone to Leipzig to be printed — Grunenberg was not up to the current demands for print, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Luther had had to abandon his preference for the local man, for a better equipped firm in the big town. The letter to Spalatin ended: ‘All I stand for I have from God. . . If he takes it away, it is taken away; if he preserves it, it is preserved. Hallowed and praised be his name forever, Amen. Thus far I do not see how I can avoid those punishments intended for me unless the Sovereign extends his help. . .’.

A letter came from Spalatin requesting Luther not to publish his sermon on the Ban, the Sermon on Excommunication. But Grunenberg had already printed and sold the little pamphlet. Spalatin had also been worrying about a proper reception at Wittenberg for the new Professor of Greek, the first to occupy the chair, a young man of twenty-one, great nephew of the famous Reuchlin. By name Schwarzerd, he used a Grecianised form, Melancthon. He was a small, dark, elfin-looking man. Luther reassured Spalatin in a letter dated 31 August. The arrival of the young man had clearly brightened the last few days: ‘Concerning our Philip Melancthon all has been done . . . Do not doubt it. Four days after he had arrived, he delivered an extremely learned and absolutely faultless address. . .We very quickly turned our minds and eyes from his appearance and person to the man himself.’ Three days later Luther replied sympathetically to a further worried letter from Spalatin about the difficulties besetting the Elector. The purpose of Luther’s letter was to ask that some of the older University courses should be optional. The students had requested this. They were jamming the lecture hall of Melancthon, wanted the Bible and real theology, and not to be obliged to study so much Aristotle.

Luther’s case was beginning to attract attention from all over Europe. Fr Wolfgang Capito in Basle, working on the proofs of Froben’s edition of Luther’s writings, wrote begging Martin to be careful in dealing with the tyranny of the Church. Everyone became anxious as the news filtered out of the Summons to Rome. But then a calmer letter came from Spalatin, hinting that after all things were going to be all right, even a word that Luther might find himself in a specially good position for putting his message across — it must mean a bishopric, if only he would keep quiet at the moment. Luther was bewildered, knowing nothing of the political intrigues connected with the jockeying for the next imperial election. In Augsburg, early in September, Spalatin and the Elector paid a visit to Cajetan. The result was that Cajetan made a suggestion to Rome, and got the Pope’s assent to it, for a hearing for Luther in Germany, in which Cajetan would be ‘fatherly’ rather than threatening. Luther was sent a message to set out for Augsburg. He was not feeling well, but started soon after receiving the message.

Once more accompanied by Leonard Beyer, Fr Luther left Wittenberg again on the long walk south and west towards Erfurt. There were no joyful surprises this time. Indeed, apprehension increased as he journeyed and listened to the worried warnings of friends, some of whom tried to dissuade him from going at all to Augsburg. Anxiety could not be escaped and it had him exhausted and suffering from constipation by the time he arrived. Fifteen years later, what came to his mind as he described the journey was the worry he had had about his parents, what they would think if he was condemned and worse what they might suffer — for the property of a heretic’s relations could be seized. And he wondered whether he was looking at his beloved Thuringian landscape for the last time.

At Weimar he was surprised to find the Electoral party on their way home. They had left Augsburg the very day the Diet was over. Luther was asked to preach before the Elector, and gave him the usual denunciatory sermon on corruption in the Church. As usual, he did not see or speak to the Elector personally but was able to hear the latest news from Spalatin. Arriving a few days later at Nuremberg, he was supposed to pick up Christoph Scheurl whose legal experience would help him in Augsburg, the Elector believed — but Scheurl was not able to come. However, among those who did join him was Wenceslas Link, eventually to succeed Staupitz as Vicar General. Luther went on and a cart was found for him for the last few miles.

At Augsburg he went straight to the house of the Carmelite Friars — the Superior was another graduate of Wittenberg. The town was still half full of people who were clearing up the final business of the Diet. Johann Eck came to see Luther and they called a truce. Two Saxon lawyers provided by the Elector advised Luther not to go to visit Cajetan at the Fuggerhaus until an official safe conduct through the streets and back again had been obtained from the Emperor’s office. Emperor Maximilian had left, but there was a permanent staff in this imperial city. Staupitz arrived to be with Luther. One of Cajetan’s Italian courtiers, Serralonga, came round to see Luther, and to warn him that the meeting with Cajetan was not to be an occasion for discussion, but simply for Luther to say revoco, I recant. The Cardinal was not inviting him to have an academic disputation. Suave and superior, Luther found in him the same callous and patronising attitude which seemed to have inspired the texts from Rome. Cajetan undoubtedly thought he was being kind in sending an advance guard to warn Luther how he should deport himself. He was in sympathy both with the critics of the Church’s corruption and of much of the 95 Theses. But he held to the view that above all the Church’s authority must be upheld. He held a high sacramental view of the Church, which in practice often meant simply a dictatorial view.

The courtier outstayed his welcome and exasperated Luther. Eventually, he asked where Luther would go were the Elector to disown him. A slight shrug of the shoulders accompanied the reply ‘Oh — sub coelo’, a typically Lutheran, half-serious, half-amused Saxon ambivalence: ‘Under the heavens — God knows where — on the open road — under providence.’ The situation felt desperate to Luther, who wrote to Spalatin: ‘If I am disposed of by force, the door is open for an attack on Dr Karlstadt and the whole theological faculty—and, as I fear, the sudden ruin of our infant University.’

It has often been asked how it could be that two men of Luther’s and Cajetan’s intelligence could meet and fail to isolate at least that partial theological agreement which did in fact lie beneath their arguments and positions. To pose the question, however, is to remove the subject from the actual contestants and the historical situation. Cajetan was coming as the personal representative of the head of an organisation, the Church, which laid enormous emphasis precisely on authority. As the courtier had suggested, and as his master did subsequently, there was no way Cajetan could actually discuss with Luther. He had come solely to preside, to judge, to bind or release, albeit in as ‘fatherly’ a manner as possible. Luther, on the other hand, had released himself from the conventional view or at least practice of the Church as having in its Pope an authority practically equivalent to that of God. Further, his own personal neurosis about authority figures gave him both a strong tendency towards exaggerated obeisance, and in practice a compensating attitude of detachment and freedom. He was not prepared in anyway to go along with a view which automatically underwrote the Pope.

The safe conduct came, and Luther, accompanied by Staupitz and the lawyers, went along to the Fuggerhaus. Cajetan was all Italian welcome. Luther prostrated himself. It was not long before it became clear to Luther that Cajetan was only willing to use papal statements, not Scripture, to show that two of Luther’s Statements in the Theses were in error. Luther must recant. Luther wanted to discuss the truth of the matter, using the Bible as the norm, rather than merely to check the status of papal statements. Cajetan was hard pressed not to engage in debate, and eventually in the course of the three visits tempers were roused and Luther reached the truculent state. At the third meeting Luther tripped Cajetan up on a grammatical point, using the logical weapons he could still wield effectively. By 14 October, Luther was able to write his account of the meetings to Spalatin in a letter headed ‘Personal’, but the contents of which he asked him to pass on to the Elector:

The Legate is negotiating with me, or rather I should say, manoeuvring against me . . . He promises to handle everything leniently and in a fatherly way . . . in reality however he is handling everything with nothing but unbending force. He continually repeated one thing: recant, acknowledge that you are wrong; that is the way the Pope wants it and not otherwise whether you like it or not.

After much pleading by the officials who were with Luther, the Legate agreed to look at a written defence Luther wanted to hand him. ‘In the end the Legate disdainfully flung back my little sheet of paper and shouted again for me to recant. . .Almost ten times I started to say something and each time he thundered back and, took over the conversation. Finally, I started to shout too.’ Luther then described the challenge he put out, based on a strictly logical reading of a sentence in a recondite part of Canon Law. The Italians thought Luther had made a mistake: ‘O God, how much gesticulation and laughter that caused. Suddenly he grabbed the book and read hastily and feverishly until he came to the passage.’ Luther explained the mistake Cajetan had made and continued: ‘I was excited and interrupted (I am sure quite irreverently): "Most Reverend Father, you should not believe that we Germans are ignorant even in philology . . ." That crushed his self-confidence, although he still shouted for revocation. When I left he told me, "Go and do not return to me again unless you want to recant."’

It was a bad outcome for Cajetan. He would have to request the arrest of Luther if he could not obtain a recantation, and this would offend Elector Frederick, the one thing he had been told to avoid. So after lunch he called Staupitz round to try to get him to persuade Luther. But Staupitz told him Luther was his superior when it came to scripture and theology. There was no way out. And neither of the topics at the heart of the matter had been objectively considered. Luther had insisted on the necessity of faith, maintaining now, not only that faith alone saved man; but that, as a logical consequence, man ‘must’ believe if he was to receive grace in the sacrament of penance or any other sacrament. Interpreted mechanically this could mean, as Cajetan observed in a subsequent text, to burden the Christian with a further imperative. But Luther’s meaning did not refer to mechanical obligations but to the dynamic of a personal act. However, this substantial question was largely ignored, in favour of concern about what authority had already decided about it. The second question, about the nature of papal authority itself and the relation of the Papacy to Scripture was again taken as decided: the Pope had an absolute and final interpretative right.

It was a stalemate. Luther tried to keep some movement by addressing a letter to the Cardinal from his lodgings and by making a formal Appeal. The letter is dated is dated 18 October. He emphasised his wish to he obedient, and to be willing to be shown wherein he was wrong. He did not wish to offend. He said he would have to go home now; and the best thing seemed to be to appeal. He asked the Cardinal ‘that you interpret in a favourable way my departure and my appeal as being undertaken out of necessity on my part and under the influence of friends’. He said that the Sovereign would prefer him to appeal, rather than to leave matters as they were.

There was no reply. Staupitz and the others feared the worse. The Legate had told them he had the right to throw both Martin and his Superior into prison. The safe conduct might prove to be ineffective. Staupitz was frightened. He decided they had all better leave swiftly. First, he formally released Luther from his vows as an Augustinian friar, in case he needed to take a swift decision, for his own safety, to leave and go into hiding without referring to his superiors. There had been suggestions in the previous few weeks that Luther might do best to go to Paris, if he had to flee. Staupitz gave Luther a valedictory word of assurance that remained deeply rooted in his mind For the rest of his life: ‘Remember that you have begun this affair in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ In addition to the letter to the Cardinal, Luther decided to make a formal witnessed statement of his position and a formal Appeal from the ‘ill-informed’ Pope, to the ‘better-to-be-informed Pope’, a forbidden formula which had in fact been used before and quite recently by such an August body as the University of Paris when objecting to the recent Concordat of

Bologna between the King of France and the Pope about ecclesiastical appointments.

The Appeal along with Luther’s declared ill health, would explain his failure to obey the Summons to go to Rome, which might be thought to be in force now that the interview with Cajetan had come to nothing. The Appeal, which also contained once again a succinct history of the whole affair was to be sent with the letter to the Fuggerhaus and to be made public after Luther’s departure.

A horse was procured and Luther left in a hurry after dark in unsuitable clothes, to travel north to Nuremberg, a frightening and exhausting ride which he was never to forget. At Nuremberg another shock awaited him. There was a package from Spalatin. it contained a copy of the Papal Breve to Cajetan of 23 August, requesting Luther’s arrest, which Spalatin thought Luther ought to see. Martin’s reaction was to say it must be a forgery —they could not have put out such an inexcusable document. It was never clear whether he half believed his own statement about the forgery. But to refuse to accept the authenticity of the document was always one way to buy time; it was also one way to cushion his own shock at seeing the threatening text. Luther was back in Wittenberg before the end of October, hoping to meet up with Spalatin to discuss the situation, only to find the Electoral party had delayed elsewhere en route for other official business.

A letter to Spalatin dated 31 October began with a sharp statement of Luther’s personal dilemma. Any day he might he declared a heretic and the Elector might feel he should flee to another country: ‘I do not know how long I shall be able to remain here because my case is such that I both fear and hope. The suspicions of Luther’s advisers had not been wide of the mark. On 25 October, Cajetan sent a letter to the Elector demanding quite sharply that he surrender Luther: ‘Take counsel of your conscience and either send Brother Martin to Rome or exile him from your country.’ The Elector sent the letter straight on to Wittenberg for comment by Luther himself. Luther handed it onto the University to see, and then sent a full expose of the situation to the Elector. The University asked Luther himself to draft their request to the Elector not to give in to Cajetan. In spite of these promising signs of support, Luther remained in frightening doubt about the outcome. He decided in any case to put the facts on record.

Back at his desk, Luther set about making a detailed report on the Augsburg meetings. He included the text of the document he had handed Cajetan at the second or third meeting. In it he claimed that the Pope is not above Scripture, and commented on the conventional papal interpretation of the reported words of Jesus to Peter ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom. . .’. Luther found the interpretation tendentious. ‘Many such things, my reader, you will find in the sacred decretals, and also others which if you use the nose of the bride overlooking Damascus [Song of Songs 7.4], that is a nose of flesh and blood, you will often be offended by the smell.’ The reference to the biblical love poem The Song of Songs, was a sudden gratuitous, literary conceit — a reflection of the workings of Luther’s ironical and scripture soaked mind. The famous sequence reads:

How beautiful are your feet in their sandals,

O prince’s daughter!

The curve of your thighs is like the curve of a necklace,

work of a masterhand.

Your navel is a bowl well rounded

with no lack of wine,

your belly a heap of wheat

surrounded with lilies.

Your two breasts are two fauns,

twins of a gazelle.

your neck is an Ivory tower.

Your eyes, the pool of Heshbon,

by the gate of Bath-rabbim.

Your nose the tower of Lebanon,

sentinel facing Damascus.

Your head is held high like Carmel,

and its plaits are as dark as purple;

a king is held captive In its tresses.

It certainly sounds like a fine nose well able to detect the smells emitted by tendentious interpretations of Scripture. Luther included the text of the Papal Breve to Cajetan to arrest him together with his own analysis of it indicating his suspicion that some not too well-educated German had had some part in drafting it. The text was sent down to Grunenberg, and such was the public excitement that the printed sheets were taken up by the public one by one as they came off the press. (The profits which all printers made out of Luther were phenomenal; he exacted nothing in return — Erasmus used to get a robe or other gift occasionally from Froben.) When the Elector heard that the Acta Augustana, the account of the Augsburg meeting, was being circulated he sent a request to have it stopped especially as he was in the thick of negotiation with Cajetan. But it was too late, as it usually turned out to be when authority tried to hold up some publication of Luther’s. Luther was in any case desperate by now and decided that the Elector was wanting him out of the way. He sent his sovereign a letter saying he would leave Wittenberg — he did not know where he would go. He preached what amounted to a farewell sermon in the parish church.

Frederick managed to deal with most decisions simply by postponing them, asking for more information, handing them back down the line to the questioner or any of the other numerous ways of coping with governmental decisions. But, in the Luther affair, he was faced with the need to take a specific and definite decision, whether on the one hand to send Dr Luther to Rome or to request him to leave Saxony, or on the other to refuse the request of Cardinal Cajetan. He chose the latter course. He always kept options open if possible. To surrender Luther was something that could not be undone. He told Cajetan he had found Luther’s case as expressed by Luther himself and underwritten by the University, convincing. Luther was still waiting to be shown that his interpretation of the New Testament was unacceptable by the norms of the New Testament itself; and he was still maintaining that the Pope had no absolute and final right to tell the Church what the correct interpretation of any part of it was – the Church as a whole must play a part in any such decision.

The German Elector gave the Italian Cardinal the reply direct. No one in his lands had found Dr Luther’s teaching heretical, apart from those whose interest it was to do so. He sent along Martin’s own rebuttal and said that he waited for proof of Dr Luther’s heresy. In Martin’s public career this was one of the crucial moments. His sovereign, who seldom altered course, had decided to protect him from the insistent demands of Rome to surrender him in person.

The Elector Frederick had been ruling Ernestine Saxony for thirty years. He was able to look at some substantial achievements. Government itself was more efficient. More money was coming into the fisc. An important matter here was that he confined permission for the preaching of Indulgences to those sponsored locally; he would not grant permission for papal Indulgences issued from Rome to be preached in his lands. Money did not flow out. He was able to achieve a substantial surplus in the balance of payments in and out of his territory. From this he undertook public works, roads, bridges, buildings, among which, and most notable, were the University and new buildings at the castle at Wittenberg.

The University had become his favourite project. Frederick had been right to get Staupitz in. He in his turn had attracted some brilliant people. Some had moved on, like Christoph Scheurl and Albrecht Durer. Others had stayed, like Karlstadt; and a brilliant young painter, Lucas Cranach had stayed in his service to adorn the interior of the castle. Wittenberg was becoming an outpost of the whole avant garde movement. Frederick had also chosen well in his ‘chaplain and librarian’, Spalt, who kept him informed of all the details of what was going on at Wittenberg. For two years now he had been bringing his sovereign news about a brilliant young friar, Dr Martin Luther. Frederick’s policy was to keep himself away from direct personal contact with events, but to have a very efficient information service, and a few chosen servants, to bring him news not only of everything going on in his own lands, but everywhere in Europe. On the international scene, the Emperor Maximilian was getting iller and older and would die sometime. Elector Frederick, his Deputy, though old, might succeed him. Meanwhile, he continued with energy and care to govern his domains in Saxony and Thuringia.

He had no reason for any particular concern about a papal Indulgence being preached in 1517 in the Brandenburg territory to the north. As usual he had declined to invite the preachers into his domain. It was the Indulgence, previously referred to, which the young pluralist Archbishop of Mainz had promoted — half of all the money collected was going to his bankers, the Fugger, to whom he owed a very substantial sum on account of the fines paid by them to Rome on his behalf for his election to the Archbishopric, and for his pluralism. This arrangement was known or suspected by Frederick but was not public knowledge. The people knew, doubtless, that the preacher, Father Tetzel, OP, and his assistant, could draw their expenses from what was collected — they had to live after all, but assumed that the rest went towards the object for which they were told it was being collected, the erection of the great new Basilica of St Peter in Rome. In any case that was not really their concern. In return for their cash they got their Letter of Indulgence which assured them of relief from punishment after death for sins committed, for which they had repented and been to Confession. The Letter of Indulgence could alternatively be attributed to their deceased friends or relations, whom they feared might still be suffering in purgatory. When Fr Tetzel came to the town of Juterborg in the bordering territory he was within eighteen miles of Wittenberg. Many Wittenbergers felt it was worth the walk or the ride to attend his session. They would hear the sermons, frightening and then consoling. They would see the banners, get their script, and receive solid assurance from this confidently conducted occasion.

went the little jingle. And Tetzel thundered forth: ‘How many mortal sins are committed in a day, how many in a week, how many in a year, how many in a whole lifetime? They are all but infinite and they have to undergo an infinite penalty in the flaming punishment of purgatory. . . yet in virtue of these confessional letters, you shall be able to gain, once in a life, full pardon of the penalties .’ So ran one of his sample sermons. No reputable theologian could really defend the idea that a sincere Christian frequently committed numerous mortal sins, but a burden of personal guilt lay heavily in the sermons of the day, and people looked for an assurance, not just of absolution, but of release from the punishment that they feared they had incurred.

Although the attendance of Wittenbergers was sufficient to irritate Luther greatly, the relatively small loss of cash did not make Frederick think that he should take any action. On the argument about Indulgences as such, he had an open mind. They were for ever being denounced — Luther was only the last in a long line of denouncers. But Indulgences did seem to encourage devotion, and at the same time brought in so much money both to the civil and to the ecclesiastical governments that it was to be wondered how else such sums of money could be found. His own magnificent collection of relics with its attached Indulgence was one of the successes of his reign. But Frederick did not silence the critics. Such things ought not to be abused. He wanted his university to love the truth, both intellectually and religiously. So when Spalatin told him of the plans that were afoot for reform of the University studies, he was not displeased. And he was proud to have in his land a university that might some day rival the great University of Leipzig in the lands of his Cousin, Duke George, Albertine Saxony.

Through the months of 1517, Luther pondered on the paper he was drawing up about University studies, and its Aristotelean basis. He had also begun to lecture on the Letter to the Hebrews. His lecturing style was still changing. He was moving further away from the complicated conventional method, with its fourfold approach to the meaning of the text. He was moving gradually to a style that strikes a single prophetic note, a distinctively personal style, which he also shared with some of the other greatest commentators. This approach can lead to sheer banality. But with the great men it works. Augustine was a model. Luther could afford to break out in these lectures in this way, his own psychological and spiritual crisis enriching the tone: ‘Oh, it is a great thing to be a Christian man, and have a hidden life, hidden not in some cell, like the hermits, or even in the human heart, which is an unsearchable abyss, but in the invisible God himself, and thus to live in the things of the world, but to feed on him who never appears except in the one vehicle of the hearing of the Word.’ The religious dimensions of dependence and freedom had a personal stamp on them.

This was far removed from the dry theology of the logical ‘Moderns’. However, Luther was happy to use the clear and logical approach when he wished to show how unsuited the Modernist style was to an interpretation of the Gospel to religion as distinct from philosophy. He shared his working paper with a student, conveniently in need of a thesis for his next examination. On 4 September 1517, Franz Gunther, graduate of Erfurt and now proceeding to the Biblical Baccalaureate, defended, in the presence of Dr Luther, now himself Dean of the Faculty of Theology, theses entitled: Disputation against Scholastic Theology. In assisting with the preparation of these Theses, Luther got the bit between his teeth. Aristotle, whom he had disliked for so long, he was able at last to denounce in a full-scale attack, along with modern writers, including his own onetime beloved Biel whose book on the Mass had so inspired him. The Theses thunder out: ‘No syllogistic form is valid when applied to divine terms. This in opposition to the Cardinal [D’Ailly]’; ‘It is not true that God can accept man without his justifying grace. This in opposition to Ockham’; ‘It is dangerous to say that the law commands that an act of obeying the commandment be done in the grace of God. This in opposition to the Cardinal and Gabriel’; and so they go on, all ninety-seven of them. ‘Briefly, the whole of Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light. This in opposition to the scholastics.’ Underlying the text was an impassioned certainty and a religious fire that must have begun to stir those who heard it with a little fear or a little excitement, if, like Spalatin, they had not already begun to wonder where it was all leading.

The University problems were proving entirely tractable, Spalatin was in favour of the changes. The Elector was pleased with the good intake of students being achieved, and was placing no opposition in the way of the formation of a new policy which was generally accepted now that Karlstadt had come round to it, and a formal set of Theses on the subject had been successfully defended. Luther was glad for his students and for his fellow dons and friars. But his worries about the ordinary people, the congregation at St Mary’s, were increasing; it was quite another matter to try to change their programme. Luther had regrouped the emphases in theology so that the institutional played a much smaller part than the communitarian and the personal. He found more difficulty in preaching this in church than expounding it in the lecture hall. His congregation were caught up in a tissue of observances, of which while he did not absolutely disapprove, and which though in theory they were an acceptable expression of a deeply personal and communal faith, in practice seemed to be used more like insurance policies for the life after death. One of these observances, the Mass, he was himself deeply committed to, since it was rooted in the New Testament text; it was abuse of it that he opposed. But other devotional practices, and most notably the obtaining of Indulgences, seemed to have nothing, in principle, to do with the gospel. Every week in choir (or reciting to himself in his cell), Luther came on the verse in the Psalms — ‘I want no holocausts but the sacrifice of a broken heart.’ The repentant heart was what he had asked for in his sermons for the last year. The Indulgence sellers traded on people’s sense of guilt and offered them spurious ways of dissipating it. It is true, he thought, they helped to reassure nervous souls. Perhaps they were better than nothing; to some extent maybe they encouraged people to turn away from evil doing. But they were second or third best, and a whole dimension away from that ‘repentance’, that ‘change of heart’ which the gospel asked for. They encouraged a kind of bogus dependence which outlawed the very freedom it should have promoted.

It was second nature to Luther to begin to write down his thoughts, so he started on a Treatise on Indulgences which led in turn to a new set of Theses for debate. Yet another file took its place on his desk cluttered with reports from the Augustinian friaries, sermons, Wittenberg Friary matters, University reform plans, letters from the humanist wing in Nuremberg, and much else. He set the propositions down in short, dense, dialectical sentences, sometimes theological, sometimes practical, sometimes hortatory.

The opening words ring out sharply:

This was dialectic with a practical edge. The Theses roll ineluctably on, powered by a fundamentally spiritual but also practical understanding of man, an understanding which Luther had learnt in the first place from his parents, his schools and University and his fellow friars; and in preaching which he shared with many other preachers and most notably his ‘father-in-God’, Fr Staupitz. Most of the Theses are single sentences like the first three above.

After a series of distinctions, and theologically unexceptionable expositions of the limitations of Indulgences, put however, in the same dialectical and somewhat provocative form, Luther moves into a more affirmative and prophetic tone:

‘Christians are to be taught . . .’, Christiani docendi, rings out nine times. He has gone beyond argumentation — although in fact the Thesis form makes it clear that these demanding sentences are still intended as something to be debated. ‘Christians are to be taught that the Pope does not intend that the buying of Indulgences should in any way be compared with works of mercy. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys Indulgences. Christians are to be taught . . .’ They must support their families and not squander money on Indulgences, and the Pope should wish to sell the basilica of St Peter so that he can give alms to many of those whose money is wheedled out of them by Indulgence sellers — to build the Pope’s basilica.

Then the Theses become very spirited and specific ‘To say that the cross emblazoned with the papal coat of arms, and set up by the Indulgence preachers, is equal in worth to the cross of Christ, is blasphemy.’ The Theses wind up with Luther’s favourite finale from the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Peace, peace" and there is no peace. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Cross, Cross", and then there is no cross. Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death and hell; and thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace.’

Luther was not the first to be aroused by the anomaly of Indulgences. It was precisely the preaching of an Indulgence in Bohemia, in 1412 (an Indulgence issued by the pseudo-Pope John XXIII to raise money for a war he was fighting against Naples), that had encouraged Reverend Father John Hus to believe he must persevere in his reform movement. In a Swiss valley in 1517 another Catholic priest was agonising about the pilgrimages, relics and Indulgences which brought so much business and so much worldliness and apparent abuse of the Gospel, to the Benedictine monastery of Einsiedeln where he ministered. That was Ulrich Zwingli — who knew nothing of young Dr Luther. For more than a hundred years, European literature had been full of irony and sarcasm at the expense of the easy money ecclesiastic. Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’, whose relics turned out to be chicken bones, pre-dated Luther by nearly a hundred and fifty years. In early fourteenth-century Montaillou in south-west France, Indulgences had been thought of as a racket.

To try to tackle Indulgences was to start to tamper with the whole ecclesiastical economic structure, held together by financial, political and psychological ties. It needed some courage and some naivete to set about cutting them: courage because to cut some of them was defined, ultimately, as treason; naivete because many people had attempted the job before and had failed. In this circumstance, not to know too much about the whole interlocking scene was a help. Today’s historian knows more about it than anyone living at the time; Luther in particular was working from a very limited standpoint. He did not see himself as another Hus, another Savonarola, even less as a prophet come to turn the whole Church upside down. He was simply trying, out at Wittenberg, to get to the root of Christian theology and then to live by it, and encourage others to do so. While he was often very nervous, he seemed to be largely devoid of that paralysing fear which sometimes attacks people once they see the full dimensions of what they are attempting to change. Not fear, but anger was the emotion that attacked him when he was shown the Instruction being distributed to the preachers (Fr Tetzel, notably) of the new Indulgence being offered in Juterborg about twenty miles away, over the border in Albertine Saxony. Its authoritarian way of dealing out spiritual riches was the last straw; the phrases were all well known to Luther, but their formulation for the sub-commissioners of the Indulgence, in this Instructio Summaria seemed to him to reach a height of spiritual presumption and contradiction of the New Testament that he could stomach no longer: subscribers would receive plenary and perfect remission of all their sins; they would be relieved of all the pains of purgatory; Indulgences obtained on behalf of those who had died did not require confession of one’s sins as Indulgences for oneself did. It was all presented with the absolute assurance that man could dispose of the goods of God, and that man’s authority reached into the ultimate domains of the Almighty. Conditions were attached indeed, that the Indulgence seeker should go to Confession. But this was no way to handle spiritual responsibilities.

The man immediately responsible locally was young Albrecht, the Archbishop of Mainz. It flashed into Luther’s mind that the time had come when he should write a formal protest to him; and he would have his new Treatise on Indulgences and the set of Theses copied out, and send them too. They had been growing on his desk during the last two months. It was ‘Indulgence time’ again, with All Saints Day coming up; on 1 November a dozen or more priests would be hearing confessions in the castle church. It was on 31 October that Luther sent a letter to the Archbishop. It was a typically ‘Lutheran’ letter, starting with an exaggerated self-abasement but eventually reaching what was practically a studied denunciation of him.

The letter contained in discursive prose form the heart of what was in the Theses, and what was at greater length and far more moderately in the Treatise. Luther played the conventional line that of course the Archbishop himself did not know what was being done in his name. ‘Under your most distinguished name, papal Indulgences are offered all across the land for the construction of St Peter’s.’ He starts in immediately on the theological abuse: ‘The poor people believe that when they have bought Indulgence Letters they are then assured of their salvation.’ After elaborating on the detail of this, Luther burst forth in a manner hardly consonant with the opening self abasement: ‘Oh great God! The souls committed to your care, excellent Father, are thus directed to death. For all these souls you have the heaviest and a constantly increasing responsibility. . . No man can be assured of his salvation by an episcopal function.’

Luther then came to what really concerned him, the failure of the Church to present the Gospel and this led him to warn the Bishop with some severity of his own spiritual predicament: ‘The first and only duty of the bishops however, is to see that the people learn the Gospel and love of Christ. For on no occasion has Christ ordered that Indulgences should be preached but he forcefully commanded the Gospel to be preached. What a horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of Indulgences among his people which the Gospel is silenced.’ The words ‘Gospel is silenced’ was a reference to the prohibition put on all other sermons when an Indulgence was being preached in order to encourage maximum participation in it.

Then Luther refers to the Instruction which had so outraged him: ‘published under your Highness’s name. . . certainly without your full awareness and consent . . . What can I do, excellent Bishop and Most Illustrious Sovereign? I can only beg you. Most Reverend Father, through the Lord Jesus Christ, to deign to give this matter your fatherly attention and totally withdraw that little brief and command the preachers of Indulgences to preach in another way.’ The letter virtually becomes a threat at this point. Something must be allowed for a convention of a considerably greater freedom of speech between subjects and sovereigns, within a formal structure of great obeisance, than one would expect today. And it is to be remembered that Luther was in fact the Archbishop’s senior by a decade. Even so. the phrases must surprise. The writer has leapt from his angulum, and is behaving as the Old Testament prophets behaved when denouncing the evils of their times, though herein the quiet and clear, practical sentences of western man: ‘If this is not done, someone may rise, and, by means of publications, silence those preachers and refute the little book. This would be the greatest disgrace for your Most Illustrious Highness. I certainly shudder at this possibility, yet I am afraid it will happen if things are not quickly remedied.’

This was an accurate forecast of what was to happen apart from the ‘disgrace’ (if political or ecclesiastical disgrace was meant) of the Archbishop. Luther had no specific plan to be himself the one destined to fulfil the prophecy. But, like the papal nuncio Aleander, he understood the widespread disillusion and could imagine the events which had inevitably to follow. And he had a sharp eye for practicalities; it was the pamphlets, the Flugschriften, the ‘flying writings’ that would play the crucial role.

Like the young Henry VIII, Albrecht considered himself a sincere Christian, with a sense of responsibility for his people, and above all he was proud of his intellectual ability, of his acquaintance with the followers of good letters, very pleased to think that he knew Erasmus. He would be polite, considerate, circumspect. He had been brought up at court. Diplomacy was all — in a world of which, however, the distinctive thing was that he ruled it. He had not previously received anything like the missive which reached him in November from the University professor at Wittenberg, just coming up to his thirty-fourth year. He soon saw that it needed attention on various levels: pastoral (which covered financial), theological (which included legal) and disciplinary. Luther had asked for action to be taken about the inflated claims of the Indulgence preachers. That was easily attended to, and it certainly needed to be done, for financial reasons — the last thing Albrecht wanted was for the preachers to provoke a reaction which would reduce his takings and upset his arrangements with the Fugger and the Roman Curia. The matter was referred for pastoral attention to the Council of those North German churches which came under the Archbishop’s jurisdiction, and to the local Bishop of Brandenburg. Then the letter and theses were sent to the University of Mainz for the theologians and lawyers (most dangerous of combinations) to look at — these questions of theology were not Albrecht’s forte. Finally the important disciplinary matter: that was easily settled, upwards to Rome; the method was to send the letter, treatise and theses to Rome and request an inhibitory process, to send also Luther’s previous scholastic theology theses and mention ‘new doctrines’. The matter was soon off the Archbishop’s desk. The ‘impudent monk’, as the documents call him, was quickly dealt with. Little more happened. The University reported it was a matter for the Pope. The Council which looked after Albrecht’s various diocesan responsibilities sat tight, wishing not to offend other rulers, or anyone.

Luther had himself already sent a second copy of the Theses to his own local Bishop, Dr Schulz of Brandenburg. He delayed some days before showing one to anyone else, saying later that he wanted to avoid all possibility of involving the Elector in responsibility for his criticisms of the young Archbishop, whose elder brother in Brandenburg was another of the imperial electors. (Probably Luther did not nail the Theses on the door of the castle church.)

Seven days after dispatching the letters to Mainz and Brandenburg, Luther was in a depressed state. The inevitable silence was irking him, and three small things all connected with the Elector were also irritating him. He sent a note to Frederick marked ‘Personal’, and with the minimum of formal address. Luther’s thanks of a year previously for cloth for a new cowl had been premature; he tells the Elector he is still waiting for it; the Saxon treasurer Pfeffinger is ‘very good at spinning a mighty good yarn; but these do not produce good cloth’. The second matter is that the Elector was apparently annoyed with Staupitz over something and Luther feels bound to try to put matters right: ‘I plead on his behalf. . . that Your Grace continue to favour and be loyal to him . . . just as Your Grace has undoubtedly experienced his loyalty many times.’ Luther has not finished with the Elector but moves on to give advice about taxes — not to increase them; and he has the humour which might be thought impertinent to suggest that this gratuitous advice ‘may earn my courtly cowl’. It was a further tax on drink that the Elector was planning. ‘Even the last taxation has reduced your Grace’s reputation.’ The letter is soon ended, signed ‘Your Grace’s dedicated priest, Doctor Martin Luder at Wittenberg’, after a further apology and a suggestion that maybe ‘even great wisdom’ might sometimes need to ‘be guided by the lesser’. The Saxon vernacular form ‘Luder’ went appropriately with this personal note in German.

Frederick, swarthy, pragmatic, of vast experience, known as ‘the Wise’, was practically unflappable, and knew all about young dons liable to get themselves involved in politics. His reaction to the letter was covered in the usual silence.

Meanwhile, at the University on 11 November, Luther sent a copy of the new Theses to his closest friend, Johann Lang, still Prior at Erfurt. He also gave copies to friends at the Priory and University. But no formal steps were taken to set up a place and time for a formal defence of the Theses; instead of that Luther added a note at the beginning, saying that the Theses were to be publicly discussed’, inviting anyone who liked to do so to send him their views. Reactions from his friends were immediate and strong, favourable and unfavourable.

The Prior and Sub-Prior of the Friary were worried that Luther would bring some disgrace on the Order. Dr Schurf of the University Law Faculty was equally worried when Luther visited him at his home at Kemburg eight miles from Wittenberg; he warned Luther that he had better not attack the Pope. They all seemed to realise that the Theses had hit the nail on the head, decisively. Canon Ulrich von Dinstedt at the castle church sent a copy to Christoph Scheurl at Nuremberg — Luther had deliberately avoided sending copies to him, or to Spalatin at court since he was not out for publicity. When Spalatin protested at not having received a copy, Luther wrote to him saying that he did not want the Elector to see the Theses until those whom Luther had criticised had received copies. On receiving his copy, Scheurl acted immediately and got the Theses printed and translated into German. Within weeks, copies were flying about Europe; compliments began to reach Luther from a wide constituency. Albrecht Durer, resident in Nuremberg, sent Luther a set of prints of woodcuts, as thanks for expressing what everyone wanted said. One of the printers added numbers to the Theses and from then on they became the famous ‘95 Theses of Martin Luther’.

From Nuremberg, on 5 January, Scheurl acknowledged the Theses to Canon von Dinstedt: ‘I am most grateful to have received Martin’s theses. Friends here have translated them and we think highly of them.’ Three days later he wrote to an Augustinian friar in Eisleben: ‘I am gradually ensuring for Dr M. Luther the friendship of illustrious men. Pirkheimer, A. Tucher and Wenzeslaus are amazed and delighted with his Theses. C. Nutzel translated them into German, and I sent them on to Augsburg and Ingolstadt.’ By this time editions were also appearing in Magdeburg, Leipzig and Basle. In the latter town was Erasmus’s printer Froben, who began collecting Luther’s texts with a view to an edition of his writings. Erasmus sent Sir Thomas More a copy of the theses on 5 March. On the same day, Luther sent a letter to Christoph Scheurl who had written complaining that Luther had not seen fit to send him a copy direct with his letter, Scheurl sent copies of the Theses reprinted in Latin and German. Luther replied:

You are surprised that I did not send them to you. But I did not want to circulate them widely. I only intended to submit them to a few close friends for discussion, and if they disapproved of the Theses, to suppress them. I wanted to publish them, only if they met with approval. But now they are being printed and spread everywhere far beyond my expectation, a result that I regret. It is not that I am against telling the people the truth, in fact that is all that I want, but this is not the proper way to instruct the people. For I have doubts about some of the Theses, and others I would have put much differently and more cogently, and some I would have omitted, had I known what was to come. Still, the spread of my Theses shows what people everywhere really think of Indulgences, although they conceal their thoughts ‘out of fear of the Jews.’ Therefore, I had to write out proof for my Theses, but I do not yet have permission to publish these.

‘For fear of the Jews’ was a phrase from the New Testament, describing the fear which the first followers of Jesus had for the Jewish authorities. Luther was categorising the Church authorities as equivalent to the chief priests and heads of the Jewish groups who persecuted the first Christians; the rest of the Church, he suggested, priests and people, was afraid to face the truth for fear of the higher authorities. The ‘proofs’ to which he refers was a large seventy-thousand-word document he had worked on through January and early February, when he realised that the Theses had gone abroad and would need some more thorough, and carefully and quietly argued defence than was contained within their own sharp and sometimes paradoxical sentences.

The reaction of the preacher Fr Tetzel, a friar priest of the Dominican Order, to the Theses, which were in his hands before the turn of the year, was to turn the whole thing into a legal dogfight; he took the battle into the enemy’s country and denounced the author to Rome. At the Dominican Friary at Frankfort-am-Oder on 15 January, counter-theses drawn up by Dr Konrad Koch (or Wimpina as he was sometimes called) were defended by Fr Tetzel and a formal denunciation of Luther as a heretic was sent off to the powerful Cardinal protector of the Dominicans, Thomas de Vio, better known as Cajetan. Tetzel boasted that Luther would be in the flames within three weeks. The counter-theses upset Luther more than anything had done previously. In an argument which was becoming public, he was being offered a virtually magical doctrine, a sort of droit de papaute extending autocratically into life after death, and all of it backed with the threat of public violence, the violence of death by fire. His own Explanations were the more necessary and soon his desk was littered with page after page of Latin.

The argument was careful, assured, and impeccably laid out to keep it within orthodox bounds. It was prefaced by a statement insisting on his loyalty to Rome and making the common and theologically proper distinction between, on the one hand, Scripture and its interpretation in canonical statements from Rome and, on the other, the opinions, however venerable, of Aquinas and other Fathers of the Church. But while it was not doctrinally incorrect to do it, he continued dangerously to flaunt his independent attitude in regard to the papacy: ‘It makes no difference to me what pleases or displeases the Pope. He is a human being like the rest of us.’ It was only when the Pope spoke in accordance with the Canons and with a General Council that he was to be listened to as the Pope. This was a commonly received opinion: six years later Sir Thomas More was advising Henry VIII not to defend the papacy as though it was of divine origin, when Henry wrote his reply to Luther, the reply which earned him the papal title ‘Defender of the Faith’ still used by English sovereigns. Finally, Luther makes all clear, summing up in masterly fashion at the end of the Explanations what was in so many minds throughout Europe there must be a Reformation, and please God it should come from a general consensus: ‘The Church needs a reformation which is not the work of one man, namely the Pope, nor of many men, namely the Cardinals [such as the recent 5^th Lateran Council], . . . but the work of the whole world, indeed. . . the work of God alone. However, only God who has created time knows the time for this reformation’ — the sense of history sub specie aeternatitatis breaks in. These remarks are part of the comment on Theses 89 and 90. After that, he had said all he had to say. Leaving Theses 92, 93, 94 and 95 with their famous finale from Jeremiah, uncommented, Luther packed the whole thing up and sent it to his Bishop at Brandenburg. It was about the middle of February.

Meanwhile, Luther’s correspondence with Spalatin shows him going on much as before, with University reforms proceeding and much thought devoted to the proper basis for understanding the Christian Gospel. The Indulgence controversy did not occupy Luther’s mind to the exclusion of other things it was not mentioned in a letter to Spalatin of 18 January. Luther was worried by both the enthusiasm for, and the opposition to, the Theses, but he had experienced these things before and had found his own view eventually triumphing. The theological business of explaining his Theses was really less important than the underlying truth, concern for which still occupied the exchanges with his dear friend and confidant, the key man, standing outside University and Religious Order; and, as yet, Luther was still really reluctant to believe that the academic Theses, enigmatic, and dialectical, could stir opinion widely.

It was rewarding to sit down and write to his friend in his accustomed fashion: ‘To my honest friend Georg Spalatin, truly a disciple of Christ and a brother. Jesus. Greetings, excellent Spalatin: You have previously asked me questions that were within my power — or at least my temerity — to answer.’ Spalatin had asked about the best way of studying Scripture. Before replying to that Luther had to clear his mind once again of the extreme embarrassment of disagreeing with Erasmus, but at the same time not to underplay the disagreement; he still thinks Erasmus thoroughly misguided, if superior to most people: ‘In the face of all who either passionately hate or lazily neglect good learning . I always give Erasmus the highest praise and defend him as much as I can; I am very careful not to air my disagreements with him less by chance I too would confirm such people in their hatred of him. Yet, if I have to speak as a theologian rather than as a philologian, there are many things in Erasmus which seem to me to be completely incongruous with a knowledge of Christ.’ But that is confidential, Luther added in another five sentences. Then he comes to his own reply to Spalatin’s question: It is absolutely certain that one cannot enter into the meaning of Scripture by study or innate intelligence. Therefore your first task is to begin with prayer. You must ask that the Lord in his great mercy grant you a true understanding of his words . . .You must therefore completely despair of your own diligence and intelligence and rely solely on the infusion of the spirit. Believe me, for I have had experience in this matter.

Erasmus would no doubt have agreed that Scripture had to be approached with prayer and humility. Yet the difference lay here — and Luther made it the very heart of his approach: ‘prayer’ and ‘humility’ become a matter of self-despair, part of a complete existential complex, an early version perhaps of the special German Angst. For Erasmus, ‘prayer’ and humility’ would be understood as though said in limpid classical Latin, the only proper approach to Scripture indeed, but not the crucial key to it, and certainly not voiced with Luther’s succession of superlatives.

Luther continued his instructions: having ‘achieved this despairing humility, read the Bible in order from beginning to end, so that, first you get the simple story in your mind’. At this point, one should remember that the Bible contains little less than two million words, and that ‘simple story’ is a magnificent understatement of a description of the enormously varied history, poetry, law, prophecy and counsel. The advice rolls on with a reading list, a work of Karlstadt’s being strongly recommended. Then Luther is smitten with embarrassment again — ‘Forgive my temerity that in such a difficult subject I dare set forth my ideas over and above those of such famous men.’ Finally there was a word of obviously genuine sorrow that Erasmus was engaged in a quarrel with the scholar Lefevre d’Etaples, with the usual complicated mixture of judgements: ‘Erasmus is certainly by far the superior of the two, and he is a great master of language. However, he is also more violent, though he makes great effort to preserve friendship.’ Luther had not yet begun to display to the public in writing the extreme violence and anger of his own spirit. So far, his sermons of denunciation were only common form, whereas in his In Praise of Folly (1511) Erasmus had given public vent to a violent sarcasm, which some people had found offensive, denouncing the warlike Pope Julius II and referring in his correspondence to ‘the monopoly of the Roman High Priest’.

In February, alter getting to the end of his Explanations destined to be published later in the year, his first full-length work to be put into print, Luther was discussing Greek vocabulary in a letter to Lang, and was also in correspondence with Wolfgang Capito, a rising young priest in Basle working part-time for Froben, looking forward to reading the Utopia of More and Erasmus’s reply to Lefevre. Then he received a query from Spalatin who was getting increasingly worried, asking for a further briefing on the development of theology at the University. Karlstadt received a similar letter from Spalatin, and referred Spalatin to two forthcoming books, one by Karlstadt himself, another his editing of an Augustine text; and he took the opportunity to suggest that the Elector might manage a contribution of thirty florins for the cost of paper for the books he was about to produce. Luther’s reply, providing further theological detail, showed that he realised the seriousness with which he might have to take the controversy — subvention he never requested. He regretted the rumour that the Theses had been written under incitement from the Elector, as a political act, a shot against the Archbishop of Mainz. For the first time the possibility of canonical action was hinted at — Luther said he was willing to appear at a juridical investigation. However, a few days later, on 22 February, a further letter to Spalatin started with only a few words about the Theses, explaining that what Luther really regretted was not that his enemies were ‘speaking badly of me or that they stamp the Elector as the author of my Theses’, but that hostility might be created ‘between our great rulers’. The rest of the letter concerned Luther’s further representations to Trutvetter whom he was still trying to convert — the University reforms were still the things that really mattered. Luther signed the letter ‘Eleutherius’, the Greek version of his name which he had been using for a few months. He had come to feel accepted within the whole humanist circle and signified his sense of solidarity in this way. However, it was not long before he reverted permanently to plain ‘Luther’. His own special identity was being hammered out in the exchanges of these months, exchanges of an increasing intensity, on an increasing variety of levels.

Waiting for a reply from the Bishop of Brandenburg, to his request to be allowed to publish his substantial Explanations, Luther was overcome with frustration. All around him people were agitating pro and contra his Theses, which he had in any case only intended as exploratory and as a weapon to try to force the Archbishop of Mainz to tame the preachers of Indulgences in the middle of the growing controversy it was intolerable to remain silent. Luther wrote out in German what he called a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace, a straightforward account for ordinary people of his own opinions. This meant taking a further step into the open — his personal view was that Indulgences were simply permitted for the sake of imperfect Christians; as far as he was concerned, ‘no one should buy Indulgences.’ And he did not believe that they could free souls from purgatory. If people accused him of heresy, well, ‘I pay little attention to that kind of chatter, for no one does that but a few blockheads who never smelled the Bible or read a word of Christian doctrine’. He sent the text down to Grunenberg in the printing shop, who sold copies to the travelling merchants. Luther was using the public press for the first time to speak directly, in German, to everyone interested; and that was almost everyone. This brought the Bishop swiftly into play. Luther felt things had begun to move at last when, early in March, the Abbot of Lehnin, a Benedictine abbey in the Diocese, was announced at the Friary. He had come to see Fr Martin on behalf of the Bishop. The message he brought was a polite request from the Bishop not to publish anything more on the topic for the moment, and for the moment not to publish the Explanations either. The Abbot assured him that the Bishop was sympathetic to Luther’s concerns, but did not want to inflame public opinion any further. He would be in touch again. This was much better than the total silence from the Archbishop of Mainz.

Life went on as before, the lectures on the Letter to the Hebrews, work with Karlstadt and others on plans for the syllabus reform, and sermons in the parish church. Two sermons from mid-Lent, the time of preparation for Easter, have survived, and give an idea of the Luther whom the Wittenbergers encountered, a man like them, sincere and to the point. His words were rooted in the words of the New Testament:

There is here a first suggestion of the Lutheran twinkle in the eye, which later became such a typical part of his down-to-earth spirituality.

As the sermon went on, like so many Lutheran texts, it became more biting. It was acceptable, he said, to venerate relics, ‘to encase the bones of saints in silver’, yet ‘it is the inward relic we must seek . . . for what Jesus sends to his devout children is not the wood, stone or clothing which he touched but rather the suffering, the cross’. Then, suddenly, he broke out against the bishops: ‘They are unwilling to accept their "relic" of "suffering" when they get criticised! They flee from this relic. If you speak plainly to them they would rather tear the whole place down than give in; they start the game of excommunication and the banning letters begin to fly about like bats. They say it is their duty to defend the patrimony of Christ and St Peter. Oh, you poor Christ, Oh, you wretched Peter! If you have no inheritance but wood and stone and silver and gold, you are of all people the most needy.’

This was sharp criticism for a public sermon in a parish church. Luther drove his point home with quotations from the great Old Testament prophet, Isaiah:

Such speaking was no less provocative in Luther’s own day than it was in a previous millennium, some hundreds of years before the time of Jesus. The congregation left the Church uplifted. Outside in their market place they came on a messenger, with leaflets. He had a great bag full of Tetzel’s reply to Fr Martin’s famous Theses. The students began to rag and jostle him. Eventually there was something near to a riot. The man was pushed and pulled about and all his 800 copies of Tetzel’s sheets were thrown on to a fire. Luther, all undemanding, had become the man of the hour, the students’ man and the man of the people of the little town.

Two days later, Luther was preaching again, on his favourite theme that the saints were also ordinary men, sinners. At the end of the transcript are the words: ‘Luther was annoyed because the students burnt Tetzel’s theses in the market place.’ He wanted to calm things down, and had not yet grasped the extent to which religion and politics were totally mixed in, the one with the other. If he preached a radical Christian sermon, his listeners would apply it crudely. Political polarisation was inevitable. Within a couple of weeks the Elector himself would have to show his hand to some extent. Unknown to Luther himself, other wheels were turning. As early as February, Viterbo, Superior General of the Augustinians, had received a memorandum from the Pope requesting him to quieten a bumptious friar in Wittenberg before he created too much trouble. Staupitz was informed, and was writing to Luther about it, realising that some kind of crisis in the matter must come at the forthcoming chapter meeting of the Reformed Group of Augustinians due to be held at Heidelberg, at the end of April. Fr Luther would have to be present as a Provincial Superior in Saxony. Meanwhile, Luther worked away at the University reforms and sent Lang a triumphant letter on 21 March; the University curriculum reform was to receive formal consideration at the Elector’s Council. He said that people were advising him not to go to Heidelberg in case of attack en route; however, he was determined to go.

A famous theologian, Dr Johann Eck, had thought to promote himself by giving his local Bishop at Eichstadt an account of the worst that could be said against Luther and his Theses. A trouble-maker got hold of the document and sent it to Luther who was deeply shocked, since he and Johann were supposedly vowed in friendship. In a letter to a friend at Zwickau, Luther wrote about Eck’s text in desperate apocalyptic mood: ‘The book . . . is nothing less than the malice and envy of a maniac. . . Rejoice, Brother, rejoice, and be not terrified by these whirling leaves . . . The more they rage the more cause I give them. . .’

Staupitz wrote and told Luther of the bad impression his Theses had been making on high authority, sticking quietly to the facts in his usual way. In his reply on 31 March, Luther said he had simply been following Staupitz’s own teaching and that of Tauler and the other authorities Staupitz knew. He said he should be allowed to express his own opinion about doctrines not settled, just as scholastics were allowed to disagree among each other. Meanwhile, Staupitz had had a warning from the Elector to make sure Luther had adequate security at Heidelberg. With tempers rising high, there could be attempts to abduct him or worse. And at this point the Elector himself had to make adequate arrangements for Luther’s personal safety on his journey to Heidelberg. He gave Fr Martin a ‘safe conduct’ letter, which turned out to be something more than that. It was an introduction to political and ecclesiastical authority en route and at Heidelberg. The Elector was positively proud of his young Professor.

Luther finished his Lectures on the Letter to the Hebrews before leaving for Heidelberg. The surviving text ends a little before the end of the book. The author of the Letter was expounding the faith of an Old Testament figure, Moses; it was on account of his faith that Moses fled to Midian. Luther’s ending words go: ‘He chose the wisdom or rather the foolishness of the Cross . . . he was repudiated by the very brethren on account of whom he despised all these things. . .and so he was forced to flee unto Midian.

Luther always lived at a high pitch, his inner struggles visible to onlookers in his eyes, and audible in his words. Now, with a single companion, he set out on the long walk to Heidelberg, knowing that while he had an excellent recommendation from his political master, the Elector Frederick, and knowing that he had the perhaps dangerous support of many students and many avant garde university men, the big Church authorities, though for the most part silent, were possibly planning to silence him. Still no reply had come from the Archbishop. Staupitz hinted at displeasure in the highest places.

Staupitz had been right. Wittenberg was the making of Martin. It produced many different Luthers: the Religious Superior, the theology lecturer, the popular preacher, the spiritual guide, the University man, and Luther the man, universal friend and acquaintance and, soon now, author. In Wittenberg all his gifts gelled together into a mix which fitted what he was given to do. While his own inner life churned away, sometimes to his own utter misery, it commonly enhanced, rather than otherwise, all his numerous activities. Sometimes his exaggerated self-denigration or his compensating impetuosity could be a disadvantage, but it often proved attractive. Then he had good judgment about men, in an almost instinctive way; and along with it went rapid action and an intense sincerity born of the inner struggles.

Luther the District Vicar had to write and depose a Prior, and tell the Community to elect a new one, in a letter addressed to the Fathers and the Prior jointly at Neustadt/Oral (25 September 1516). It was not an easy thing to do. But Luther had attained a good measure of savoir faire by watching others at it. The opening paragraph is one of embarrassment. The community, he says, is not of one mind, or one heart or one soul, and this wretched way of living is partly the fault of the community and partly Luther’s own fault (in the sense of negligence); the latter can hardly have been true since Luther had been District Vicar for such a short time. However, it was a prudent thing to say and undoubtedly Luther felt responsibility for the state of affairs. He expressed the sense of spiritual failure which was becoming his diagnosis of the human condition: ‘We do not weep aloud to the Lord. . . nor pray that he make our way straight in his sight and lead us in his righteousness [a quotation from the Psalms]. He errs, he errs, who presumes to guide himself by his own wisdom — not to speak of guiding others.’ He makes it clear that he is not just waving a big stick — and then asks, ‘What now? Life without peace is dangerous because it is life without Christ, and it is death rather than life.’

He soon came to the point and put the matter clearly and finally: ‘I order you, Friar Michael Dressel, to resign from your office and surrender the seal. By the same authority I release you from the office of prior. . . I do not want you to complain that I have judged you without a hearing, or that I have not accepted your defence. . . You have done as much as you had grace to do . . .’ But ‘it is not enough that a man be good and pious by himself. Peace and harmony with those around him are also necessary.’ He went on with explicit directions about the new election, begging the friars not to go in for an, apparently common, foolish approach to such matters by trying to elect a friar not in fact eligible.

The word ‘peace’ in the letter is a key word. It was becoming an obsessive theme in Martin’s mind. The words of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah were forever echoing there: ‘"Peace! Peace!" they say, but there is no peace’ — they occur in a long lyrical denunciatory section of semitic poetry. The word for peace is Shalom, not just the absence of conflict, but the blessed harmony of those who lived by God’s Law, perhaps the peace of the coming age of the Messiah. Luther seldom does more than quote a word or two, but the Bible was his daily reading and he knew long sections by heart simply from frequent reading. The highly significant context from which Luther took his thoughts about peace runs:

. . . . . . .

For all, least no less than greatest,

all are out for dishonest gain;

prophet no less than priest,

all practise fraud.

They dress my people’s wound

without concern: "Peace! Peace!" they say,

but there is no peace.

They should be ashamed of their abominable deeds.

But not they! They feel no shame,

They have forgotten how to blush

And so as others fall, they too shall fall;

and they shall be thrown down when I come to

deal with them

— says Yahweh.

In his earlier letter to Michael Dressel, Luther had said to him, in a vein similar to that of his words quoted to Friar Spenlein: ‘God . . has placed his peace in the middle of no peace, that is in the middle of trial’ and the man who is disturbed by nothing is not a man who has real peace (Shalom), he has only the ‘peace of the world.’ On the other hand, the man who has true peace is the man ‘whom all men and all things harass and who yet bears it quietly with joy’. Instead of saying ‘Peace, peace’, where there is no peace, he says rather ‘Cross, cross’ and there is no cross — for as soon as you say joyfully: ‘Blessed cross, there is no tree like you,’ the cross ceases to be a cross. ‘Seek peace and you will find it, but seek only to bear trials with joy as if they were holy relics.’ ‘Relics’ was another word Luther built up into a whole metaphorical usage of his own. Veneration of relics (especially of the ‘True Cross’ — supposedly pieces of the cross of Jesus’s

crucifixion found in Israel) became suspect to him and objects of criticism by him as mere substitutes for true religion; Luther began to speak of personal ‘crosses’ as things to be welcomed like veritably ‘true’ relics.

Another letter from Luther the District Vicar earlier the same year was to his old friend Lang, just after the latter’s appointment as Superior at Erfurt. Luther had been there on an official visitation and on his return to Wittenberg wrote to Lang about the Guest House. It was being used too much as a convenient hotel. Luther suggested that Lang might keep a tally of exactly how much was eaten and drunk there each day.

People were beginning to respond to Fr Luther’s insights. The friars, the students, the townspeople listened to his sermons and came to his lectures. People began asking for copies of his lectures and addresses. Printers and merchants were always on the look-out for authors who would provide them with a product they could market. They liked pious material best; they could market it not only to the numerous laity who could read, but also to the less snobbish members of the clerical and academic world. More scholarly material obviously was limited to university circles, but there were funds, public and private to make sure of an adequate sale. Luther was able to provide the printer-publishers with both kinds of material. In the winter and spring, 1516-17 he brought out his first publication in each sphere.

His beloved Psalms provided the material for his more popular book. It was a translation, in the vigorous and accurate German he was beginning to enjoy writing, of the Seven Penitential Psalms, together with a commentary. It pleased him greatly. He sent a copy to his old mentor Staupitz but thought it best not to send copies off to his humanist friends, who would find this an old-fashioned kind of thing to publish. A German humanist, if he must produce something in his own language ought to look to native literary traditions. Spalatin complained that no copy had been sent to him, and Luther replied; ‘The fact is, I do not want you to have them. They have not been published for refined minds but for the roughest sort.’ Such thrice-chewed food was not for the humanist palate. And he had to write in similar vein to his friend Christoph Scheurl, once the Dean Of Law at Wittenberg and now a leading humanist at Nuremberg, to whom Staupitz had shown the book. ‘They were not put out for the Nurembergers, that is for highly sensitive and sharp-nosed souls, but for rough Saxons, the sort you know, the sort for whom Christian scholarship can never be chewed small enough.’

Martin had put something of himself into these Psalms as he did into everything he wrote. In his Preface, he spoke of reliance on the great Reuchlin in his attempt to render the Hebrew truthfully. He was thinking much about the world into which Jesus came. In his lectures on the Letter to the Hebrews he called the Jews, ‘the very Sacrament, that is, the kind Father’s beloved children in Christ.’ Publishing this Jewish poetry, used by Christians as prayer now for nearly fifteen hundred years, gave him both great literary pleasure and the enormous reassurance that the people to whom he preached in St Mary’s Church in Wittenberg wanted it. An English translation uses many ‘Saxon’ (rather than ‘Latin’) words and gives some idea of the flavour of Luther’s translation:

This came out in the spring of 1517. Into it had gone something of Luther’s new theological assurance but also of a new spirituality which was to be seen in his other ‘first’ book, in the more scholarly sphere. Although scholarly, it was also in German not Latin. In the autumn of 1516 he had come across the intellectual element in that seam of medieval culture usually called ‘Rhineland mysticism’. He read Tauler (d. 1361), a member of the Order of Dominican Friars, and another book in the same tradition called A German Theology. From their teaching on the Cross, on Verlassenheit (abandonment of all things for God) and Gelassenheit (a word Indicating the result of abandonment of self to God, that is serenity or sometimes resignation, he hammered out part of his theology of the Cross and strengthened further his sense of inner commitment. In an excited letter to Spalatin (on this occasion he was considered highly suitable for a discussion of the text), dated 14 December 1516, Luther wrote: ‘If reading a pure and solid theology, which is available in German and is of a quality closest to that of the Fathers, might please you, then get yourself the sermons of Johann Tauler, the Dominican . . . I have seen no theological work in Latin or German that is more sound and more in harmony with the gospel than this. . . Taste it and see how sweet the Lord is, [a quotation from the Psalms] after you have first tried and realised how bitter is whatever we are’. The enclosure was in fact the anonymous treatise A German Theology, which Luther thought to be by Tauler and had just had printed in Wittenberg, and to which he had contributed an Introduction. It was his first printed text, offered for sale by a printer-publisher, to the general public. These two German publications were significant coming from a man for whom Latin was the normal means of communication when it came to the written word.

In the University at Wittenberg by the autumn of 1516, Luther had become the unacknowledged leader of what amounted to a campaign to change syllabus. The students had been voting with their feet. Hardly any of them attended the lectures on Aristotle; they were to be found in the biggest numbers in the lecture hall of the Bible man. Dr Luther, however, was not as yet seen by his colleagues as any kind of unique phenomenon, but simply as part of the avant garde, one of the followers of Erasmus, Reuchlin and others who, throughout the European universities, were demanding new syllabuses in line with the ‘new learning.’ Johann Lang, in a letter to Spalatin in March 1516 (shortly before he was appointed to Erfurt) referring to the large numbers of students who were dropping out of the courses on scholastic philosophy and theology, and explaining the rebirth of biblical studies (he used the Renaissance type word reviviscere) and the new Strong interest in antiquae scriptores, identified the phenomenon by pointing to the international influence of Reuchlin and Erasmus, ‘men of great erudition and integrity’. That same month, Erasmus had published the epoch-making new version of the New Testament based on Greek manuscripts. It was printed in Greek, but also in Latin, translated for the benefit of the majority who could not read Greek; many ecclesiastics considered it almost sacrilegious to read the Bible in any version except that of Jerome’s fifth-century Latin Vulgate.

On 7 September 1516, Luther gave the final lecture in his course on the Letter to the Romans. He had time now to devote to one of the most able of the students who had gathered around him, Bartholomaeus Bernhardi, a mature student, graduate of Erfurt, only four years younger than Luther. He was about to proceed later in the month to the Degree of Sententiarius. For his thesis he had taken Fr Luther’s great central theme from Roman, on the uselessness of the powers and will of man without grace. It was an exciting occasion for the young professor. He had been getting support for his idea, but by no means all the faculty had been won over and that included Archdeacon Karlstadt, DD, previously and now once again Dean of Theology. The latter was just back from an eighteen-month absence in Italy, collecting some humanist scalps, notably (notoriously easily won) Doctorates of Canon and Civil Law in Siena and some lovely Italian clothes. He allowed Fr Luther to preside at the Disputation, but made his disagreement with the thesis abundantly clear. Karlstadt had been the light of theology at Wittenberg from the earliest days and had had works published there as early as 1507 and 1508, marking out the University’s first claims to a reputation. He was shocked to find this young candidate for Sententiarius being encouraged to question the scholastic method. But, once convinced of something, Luther took little account of opposition however much it upset him, and his student was given full rein to present Luther’s ideas.

The date of this Disputation, 25 September, is also the date of the letter deposing Prior Michael Dressel. It was the end of the following month that Luther wrote to Johann Lang about his need of two secretaries. The small friary was beginning to fill up with those who wanted to come and hear Luther. And he himself already had too much to do. He was thinking about the texts of his two books in German to be published in the coming seven months. He was reading with a raging excitement Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, with its new text of the New Testament, while preparing for his next lecture course on the Letter to the Galatians, due to start at the end of October; and he was preparing sermons to be preached in St Mary’s.

In this latter sphere he was more and more worried by the Indulgences which the parishioners were forever running after, a passion which reached its height each year on 1 November, All Saints Day, when they repaired to the Elector’s Museum to see and venerate the relics, the bones, the holy wood and the rest, and gain an Indulgence, paying for the privilege as they went in. On 31 October, Fr Martin preached in Wittenberg on the need for that true repentance, which does not try to evade punishment by buying an Indulgence, but on the contrary welcomes it. He followed this in subsequent weeks with a series of sermons warning against the abuse of prayer to the saints, and held up many practices to ridicule — ‘I am astonished that St Bartholomew is not pictured in yellow trousers and spurs’. All this brought a query from Spalatin as to whether Martin was not falling into the Hussite heresy. Martin replied truthfully that he was preaching only against abuse, not the practices themselves; he encouraged people to pray to the saints not just for material things, but for spiritual goods. Not much more than normal stock-in-trade of university intellectuals, this exchange, however, did signal the first note of alarm from a friend at the direction of Luther’s thought.

It was a matter of doctrine which had roused the query, what might today be called ideology. Spalatin, at court, was more conscious than Luther of lines beyond which it was advisable not to stray: Spalatin had not worried about Luther’s denunciations of corruption in the Church, occurring in his university lectures for more than a year now, so common were these throughout Europe. Though the Office of the Church was sublime, it was filled with corrupt officials, Luther had said. Pope and prelates were arraigned for enriching themselves on the income from Indulgences, and seducing Christians from the true worship of God; they branded people as heretics merely for opposing the purely temporal rights of the Church. That had been in the lecture hall, not the parish church. Not long after Spalatin’s enquiry, however, Luther returned to the attack in sermons in the parish church. On 24 February, at St Mary’s, he said: ‘People learn to fear and run away from the penalty of sins, but not the sins themselves. . .Indulgences are rightly so called, for to indulge means to permit . . . Not through Indulgences, but through gentleness and lowliness, says he [Jesus], is rest for your souls found. Oh the dangers of our times! Oh, you snoring priests! Oh, darkness deeper than Egyptian! How secure we are in the midst of the worst of all our evils!’ Many people had attacked Indulgences, and although some had been labelled heretics, many had not. Luther was thought of only as a young man fighting for desirable reforms.

The Elector remained remarkably unmoved by the explosions from the pulpit in the parish church, even though they were implicitly an attack on his income and his great museum of relics. At the moment, in Luther’s sermons, it was only a matter of emphasis; the principle of Indulgences was not attacked, only its obtrusion, and the greater importance given to it than to the life of faith through the Bible and the sacraments. But the sermons must have given the Elector some pause. Two years previously, he had had difficulty in raising the cash for rebuilding the bridge over the Elbe at Torgau; it was done by means of a local Indulgence allowing people to be dispensed from fasting during Lent — they called it the ‘Butter Tax’. He had had to beg the Bishop to tell his priests to emphasise the fact that the faithful must buy the Indulgence if they wished to avail themselves of the privilege of not listing.

Reform was the great cliche of the last hundred years. The Pope had a Council of the Church sitting at this very time, the Fifth Lateran Council, dedicated to that purpose. It had opened in 1512 with the glorious announcement that Reform had at last arrived, and a claim that the apocalyptic Third stage of Time, of Joachim, was in sight — an announcement by Giles Viterbo, Superior General of the Augustinians, Luther’s own Order. Emendatio was the Fabian-like word used. Espousal of reform was not in itself at all a ground for suspicion of heresy. On the other hand, as in every totalitarian polity, everyone and every action was implicitly under suspicion all the time. And the moment espousal of reform became strongly linked with criticism of doctrine, and particularly of practice linked with doctrine, and very particularly if it had financial implications, it was time to beware. Only Spalatin had noticed the possible congruence.

Luther himself was entirely unaware where his thought might take him. He and his colleagues in cloister and university were Christians, loyal members of the Church, living in the ancient framework of the Christian religion, the Mass, and Divine Office; sacrament, priest and Canon Law. Elsewhere in Europe, sometimes in considerable numbers, deviants were to be found, Waldensians, Hussites, Lollards, sometimes much harassed, sometimes relatively free; then, in Bohemia, not so far away in the land of the Czechs a whole church was in permanent schism from Rome.

Luther sometimes preached against the Hussites; heresy should always be opposed. The life of the Friary, University and town experienced only a generalised sense of unease, the endemic irritation with ecclesiastical authority, common to so much of Europe. But this was always increasing. Everywhere it was liable to flare into crisis. In this year, 1516, tension in London reached extremes after the death in prison of a merchant tailor, Hunne, who had had a disagreement with the clergy about mortuary fees, was arrested by the Bishop of London, accused of heresy, and died, inexplicably, in prison. In Germany itself, among the more affluent, the growing sense of national identity was beginning to express itself in a new and stronger resentment against Rome. Aleander, the papal nuncio, reported perceptively to his Curial superior in Rome that the whole of Germany was only waiting for a leader to enable it to rise in revolt against Rome. But Wittenberg went on its way, as yet largely undisturbed except by the bubonic plague which was raging just now; two hundred students left Wittenberg temporarily late in 1516 for their homes, or to stay elsewhere for a while till the plague should move on. Johann Lang suggested to Luther that he ought to go as well. In his letter of 26 October, Luther wrote: ‘You . . . advise me to escape. Where should I go to? I hope the world will not fall to pieces when Friar Martin tumbles down. Of course I shall disperse the friars across the whole countryside if the plague increases. My place is here, due to obedience.’

In that busy October of 1516, Luther was preparing his lectures on Galatians. He had before him the perfect text to enable him to grapple with the consequences in Church life of his ideas about faith. This text concerns the relation between an inherited legal structure and a new community spirit, between Law and Love, between divine threats and divine approval. The first Christians, as Jews, continued to live by the old Judaic Law, the Torah, including circumcision of all males. But was the message of Jesus for Jews only, or for all men, asked Paul? Clearly it was intended for all men; clearly it was a teaching of love in a kind of freedom; new, non-Jewish Christians need not follow the Law and be circumcised. So the Jewish Christians who wished to insist on circumcision were wrong. This was not a worry about the physical or sexual nature of circumcision. In fact, Paul played up the physical side, contrasting the ritual circumcision with the beatings he had had: ‘The marks on my body are those of Jesus.’ The point was simply that ‘Christians are told by the Spirit to look to faith . . . whether you are circumcised or not makes no matter. But Paul reckoned that ‘everyone who accepts circumcision is obliged to keep the whole Law’ — ‘When Christ freed us he meant us to remain free’.

Luther found himself applying this by analogy to the legalism of the Church authorities on the one hand, with its Canon Law and its theological rationale for Indulgences, and, on the other, to the free life of faith as proclaimed by Paul. The Christian life was not the keeping of a Law, leading to a series of minute obligations, ‘works’ to obtain ‘grace’, but rather a service to one another, and a waiting on the Spirit, faithful to the simplicities and demands, normally beyond human capacity, of humility and love. This was the gospel of freedom in Christ, said Luther as preached by John (the Gospel and Epistles of St John in the New Testament) and by Paul.

The theme of Romans had spoken to Luther’s inner condition. The theme of Galatians spoke perfectly to his already burning sense of the evil involved in Christians treating their observances as the core of their religion. Later in his life he called this text his ‘Katie von Bora’, his favourite, after the name of his wife. Students jotted down their notes of what Luther was saying, interlineally on the great pages. Echoes of Tauler and of that passive sense of man in God’s world can be caught in one such note: ‘To know God — or rather to be known by God’ — ‘All our works are rather our sufferings and the works of God’. The text, to be published three years later, showed Luther reaching up to substantial heights of conviction and intellectual achievement:

Luther was using the new text of Erasmus and finding it invaluable. But not so with Erasmus’s commentary. It was superficial and missed the point, so Luther thought, sadly typical of the world of humanistic culture. He to Spalatin: ‘What disturbs me about Erasmus, the most learned man. . . in explaining Paul he understands the righteousness which originates in ‘‘works’’ or in the "law" or "our own righteousness" as referring to ceremonial observances.’ In a sense, this was correct, but Erasmus had missed the point that behind the observances was the Law which led to them, underestimating the real importance of the Law. Paul was contrasting the Law with Freedom in Christ. The Law was not just a matter of observances; it comprised, for instance, the Ten Commandments and a whole range of connected morals and conventions, necessary for human society, appropriate indeed for human nature, but which man in his weakness was in fact never able to obey fully. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not kill . . .’ — so often they were broken, so often, when kept they were broken in the heart, and when kept were the cause of hypocritical spiritual pride. All that was swept away by the life in Christ, where grace enabled a man to be fully human, and often to live up to this standard, and, when he failed, to be quickly reconciled in Christ who bears men’s sins. Such was Paul’s dynamic theology, and Erasmus had failed, so Luther judged, to understand on the one hand the relative dignity and goodness of the Law, on its own merits, and on the other the fact that in any case to keep it was useless, and indeed largely impossible for most men without Christ: ‘Fulfilment without faith in Christ, even if it creates men like Fabricius, Regulus and others [heroes of Roman history] who are wholly irreproachable in the sight of men — no more resembles righteousness than sorb apples resemble figs.’

Luther asked Spalatin to pass on his criticism to Erasmus, since he knew him. Luther did not want to tangle personally with the great scholar, seventeen years his senior, and the best known literary man in Europe; only this very year (1516), Erasmus the famous author of Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Manual of the Christian Knight, 1503) had published in addition to the Greek New Testament his edition of Jerome, and an original work commissioned for the likely future emperor, sixteen-year-old Charles Habsburg of Castile and the Netherlands, grandson of Emperor Maximilian, Institutio Principis Christiani (The Education of a Christian Price), a plea for international peace and the encouragement of learning. But Luther wanted to alert Erasmus to the proper understanding of New Testament theology. He said the French scholar Stapulensis was also guilty — although ‘a man otherwise spiritual and most sound’, he ‘lacks spiritual understanding in interpreting divine Scripture; yet he definitely shows so much of it in the conduct of his own life and the encouragement of others. You could call me rash for bringing such famous men under the whip of Aristarch.’ However, ‘I do this out of concern for theology and the salvation of the brethren.’ It was this letter that ended: ‘In great haste, from a corner in our monastery, 19 October 1516. Friar Martin Luder, Augustinian.’

Here Fr Martin sounded for the first time a note which will be increasingly repeated, ‘from a corner in our monastery’. The Latin word is angulum. Luther had a real feeling of inferiority — he was after all only the son of the mine owner from Mansfeld, a young Saxon in the reformed Augustinians. ‘Our little monastery’ was another oft-repeated identification. There was always a balancing phrase, often a reference to the fact that he was a Doctor of Theology, and had a duty. On this occasion, he emphasised: ‘I do this out of concern for theology and the salvation of the brethren.’ A man of the people, an intellectual, a man of pastoral care, a man of determination and an ability to ignore the fear which sent the adrenalin racing through his body so often, was becoming someone to be reckoned with. ‘Why then do you imagine you are among friends?’ he had asked the young man in April. He had taken the measure of life. It would always be a battle. Friends were only human. He felt he would be happier if he might be allowed to stay quiet in his little angulum in the Friary. But his demon would not let him. He kept seeing gaps in everyone’s case — and everyone tended to come under the whip of his tongue, already bitter. Somewhere deep in Luther was burning resentment. Fed by the early sense of guilt, it was always ready to surface in angry demonstration against the inadequacies around him. As yet, however, he was restrained. This was a confidential letter to Spalatin, not for the public.

Through the winter, daily life brought its unrelenting sequences of demands on Luther. A letter from Luther to Spalatin on 14 December provides a profile. There had been postal difficulties: ‘You were right to be worried and to tell me to forward my mail via the Wittenberg carrier if I want to send something to you or to Hirschfeld’ — Hirschfeld was one of the Elector’s Councillors. Snow was threatening, it was cold, Luther’s habit was in need of attention and the Cloister was short of money: ‘Thank the Sovereign on my behalf for so generously providing me with cloth . . . better quality perhaps than is fitting for a monk’s cowl were it not a sovereign’s gift.’ Then there was a piece of relic business to report on. The Elector had for a long time had his eye on the relics of the Eleven Thousand Virgins’ – allegedly driven from Britain in the fifth century, and led by a chieftain’s daughter Ursula to the Netherlands, where they were killed by Huns. These relics were in St Ursula’s Convent in Cologne, and Frederick had asked Staupitz to try to obtain them for him and the Wittenberg Museum. Luther had the task of reporting: ‘The Reverend Father Vicar has succeeded in getting permission from the Archbishop of Cologne to obtain the relics for the Sovereign’, but ‘the Mother Superior of St Ursula’s took refuge behind a papal prohibition . . . Although a copy of the papal permission to you to obtain the relics was shown to her, so far she has refused to surrender them on the grounds that the copy was not attested and sealed.’ Luther asked that the Elector should either send a properly authorised document or desist. He was acting scrupulously as the agent of his Superior, Fr Staupitz, and made no comment on the transaction, which was certainly a great bore, and distasteful to him.

Then Luther turned to a remark from Spalatin’s previous letter to the effect that the Elector often referred to him, Luther, with great respect. Luther replied, a little laboriously, and with some embarrassment, that it is better to praise God than man. However, he sent back a message of gratitude, though again qualified with ‘the praise of men is always vain’, a pious remark that had an energy about it rather beyond mere ‘piety’. Then Spalatin had been asking his advice about translating some writings into German. Again the comment is laboured: ‘This is beyond my competence. Who am I to judge?’ However, Spalatin was to go ahead, by all means, if it was God’s will. But he must not expect many people would thank him for his pains.

On the intellectual front, Luther continued to be concerned and worried about the formal presence of Aristotelean studies as the principal basis for the University syllabus in philosophy, with its further strong influence on theology; he began a serious study of the question. On 8 February 1517, he sent his old teacher, the one time Rector of Wittenberg University, now back at Erfurt, Jodocus Trutvetter, a letter filled with serious questions regarding logic, philosophy and theology. . . against the hopeless studies which characterise our age’. Such is the description Luther gives of it to Johann Lang in a covering letter in which he asks Lang to pass on his letter to Trutvetter.

Luther had good arguments with which to make his case, But, in addition behind them he put a strong emotional drive and presented the arguments in words that were sharp even in an age of strong speaking: ‘What will they not believe who have taken for granted everything which Aristotle, this chief of all charlatans, insinuates and imposes on others, things which are so absurd that not even a donkey or a stone could remain silent about them!’ The emotion was partly frustration at the sight of young men caught up in futile studies: ‘Part of my cross, indeed its heaviest portion, is that I have to see friars born with the highest gifts for fine studies spending their lives and wasting their energies in such play-acting. . .All my files are filled with material against these books which I consider absolutely useless. Everyone else could see that too, if only they would not be bound by that everlasting law of silence.’

Three weeks later, Luther’s mind was still full of his worries about Erasmus, running along the same lines as those in his letters to Spalatin a few months earlier. In a letter to Lang he said he was glad to see that Erasmus constantly yet learnedly exposed and condemned ‘monks and priests, snoring in their deep rooted ignorance’, but found him superficial; ‘human things weigh with him more than divine’. The communication, however, was confidential: ‘I definitely wish to keep this opinion a secret so that I do not strengthen the conspiracy of Erasmus’s enemies. Perhaps the Lord will give him, in his own good time, a true understanding.’ Luther’s confidences to Lang and Spalatin were not betrayed, but letters easily went astray, were in fact frequently quoted, even put into print without reference to the writer. Luther regarded himself, rightly, as not of great importance and so could not see any harm in writing the letter. But his fierce avowals carried with them a certain measure of naivete, as though the letter might have been written by someone out of touch with affairs. Possibly the idea entered Luther’s own head. On this occasion, he ended the letter with a reference to the official title of his Order as one of eremites or hermits: ‘From our hermitage in Wittenberg, 1 March 1517, Friar Martin Luther Augustinian Vicar.’ At this time Luther ceased to use the form ‘Luder’, and from now on normally used ‘Luther’.

Luther’s work as Superior called regularly for special measures. In March he had to send a tiresome friar, Gabriel Zwilling, over to Lang at Erfurt in need of discipline. Another letter to Lang, in May, was brief, written only because there was a friar travelling from Wittenberg to Erfurt — ‘I thought this father should not leave without a letter and greetings.’ But the truth was that Luther was on top form again. His views were more and more being underwritten by the rest of the University and he wanted to tell Lang about it: ‘No one can expect to have any students if he does not want to teach this theology, that is, lecture on the Bible or on Augustine . . . Aristotle is gradually falling from his throne.’

The clinching factor was that Dean Karlstadt had done an about-turn. Stung by the criticisms of the traditional course made by Luther and his pupil the previous autumn, he had been up to Leipzig in the winter and bought a complete set of St Augustine’s works, since it was primarily on St Augustine that the case against the traditional theology had been made. All his life Karlstadt was a great ‘student’. He finally found Luther’s arguments convincing. He felt indeed that Luther’s case needed his support, amazed to discover how cogent it was. A year later, in his rather pompous, rhetorical way he wrote that he had been quite overcome at this time: obstupui, obmutui, succensui —stupefied, silenced, excited, in turns. Karlstadt drew up 151 Theses of his own, opposing medieval theology and championing Augustinian theology, which in a general way was what Luther had been propounding. He presented these 151 Theses at the University in April. Luther, delighted, sent a copy to Christoph Scheurl in Nuremberg with whom he was having an intense correspondence: ‘Not the paradoxes of Cicero, but of our own Karlstadt, nay rather, of Augustine. . . Blessed be God who once again bids the light shine out of darkness.’ Scheurl, who had been Dean of Law in the early days at Wittenberg, had written to Luther in January formally requesting his friendship on the basis of their common admiration for Staupitz. In Nuremberg a conversazione group had been founded, the Sodalitas Staupitziana. It was one of a number of important contacts for Luther and was sealed towards the end of the summer, when Scheurl was visiting the Elector as an official envoy from Nuremberg. Luther invited Spalatin to a party and hoped he would bring Scheurl with him: ‘See to it that you also get some wine for us, because as you know you will come from the castle to the monastery and not from the monastery to the castle. . . if his honour Counsellor Christoph is with you, please let him come along.’

Luther was becoming one of the leading men in the University now. It was time for a formal attack on the traditional syllabus.

There was unrest in the air at Wittenberg. It had not led to anything like the open revolt at Erfurt; the new university, financially underwritten by the Elector, brought a definite increase in prosperity to almost everyone in the town. But the Wittenbergers shared in the same sense of unease to be found everywhere. The Myth by which they lived was only half understood, only a quarter truly known. Even those who could read had not read more than a small part of the full story as it was found in the New Testament. Martin Luther himself had only handled a Bible for the first time when he entered the Friary. The castle church at Wittenberg had sixty-four priests attached to it, to celebrate the daily Requiem Masses, intended to ensure the everlasting salvation of those who had died, funded by the dead or their relatives. They stood as a kind of protective barrier between people and the power centres of society. Even in their own parish church, with sermons in German, for many people religion had the sense of the frightening ‘unknown’ of the old pagan myths. At Mass there was communion, but they only went to communion a few times a year, some only at Easter; and then they took only the consecrated bread.

In the past fifty years as many as eighteen separate editions of German translations of the complete Bible had been circulating, neither forbidden nor approved by Church authority, in some cases printed without a printer’s name for fear of ecclesiastical reprisals. They were expensive and were not seen often, outside of universities and the houses of priests and wealthy laymen. But excerpts were common enough, the Seven Penitential Psalms, or the story of Tobias, St John’s Gospel, the Book of Revelation. Travelling merchants often brought printed matter with them for sale, usually decorated with woodcuts. Sometimes they were chronicles, histories of the world, poems, romances, but the majority were religious, booklets about Saints, or on the Art of Dying, instructing one how not to despair when faced by the tally of a lifetime’s sinning; one should remember the repentant sinners in the Bible. Despair was the one unforgivable final sin which might damn a person.

In church the gospel passages gave hope and reassurance: ‘Come to me all you who are burdened and I will give you rest. . .My yoke is light’; ‘I was thirsty and you gave me drink. . .In so far as you did this to one of the least of these my brothers you did it to me . . . Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world.’ But to be sure of being in this category, and not among those who heard ‘Depart from me, with your curse upon you . . .’, one had to be a well-paid-up member of the Elect; and there were many ways of improving one’s position. Indulgences was one way, Requiem Masses another. And yet somehow these did not tie in quite harmoniously with the gospel at all points: ‘He who would save his life, must lose it’ — the glorious insouciance of the gospel: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you. . .’

Meanwhile, life went on, woven through with the threads of all the delights of life, the glory of love and its sexual expression, the celebration of food and drink, song and dance, sometimes to make a divine harmony of family life, blessed by a mutual charity, welcoming alike suffering and happiness on the journey to heaven. But too often the anomalies came to the fore. And the artists seemed to delight in them — terrible pictures of the devil stoking his fires with the bodies of the damned, tempted for all eternity and never satisfied by the things on which they had made themselves happy, and unhappy, in life; likewise the delineation of the crucifixion of the man-God, Jesus looking out from a realistic scene of terrible torture. The resurrection seemed to play a secondary part, or had only the function of indicating the terrors of the Last Judgement. But then again the sky would clear and they would be dancing in the streets on Easter Day, or on the feast of the Birthday of St John the Baptist, midsummer’s day. It was the usual complex human picture. But the feeling was of some instability, some underground disturbance. There was spare capacity in terms of time, energy, ability in many people’s lives. The printing presses were beginning to provide opportunities for using it.

Luther was no more than dimly and subjectively aware of these giant stirs. He had never known anything else but a society both stable and yet somehow dissatisfied, Information from afar about the old Emperor Maximilian, ‘the last of the knights’ as he was sometimes called; about the anti-clericalism which stretched right across Europe, and of the attempts in London by the young King Henry VIII to keep it under control; about the pseudo-Council of Pisa, called by King Louis XII of France, denounced by the warlike Pope Julius II, was of little significance to him. Even the world of international biblical scholarship only began to impinge forcefully on his world about 1514. He had more than enough to cope with in Wittenberg. And the pressure kept building up through the years for himself to understand, to grasp more fully, to embrace more totally that which lay at the centre of all things, Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, who could be found again, multiform through His words, in the sacraments of the church, and deep in one’s own heart — and yet somehow just there was where He disappeared, chased away by the fear of damnation, the knowledge of one’s utter failure. Depression, indeed utter despair would set in, the terrible Anfechtung, which brought him alone in his cell into absolute negation. In the end, that which he would work out in his own inner citadel was to become the heart of his lectures and his sermons, and that which would bring students and populace flocking to hear him. >From his suddenly grateful and relaxed heart would pour forth a fierce stream of witness, advice, theology, powered by the sheer intellectual validity of the witness, and finally by its religious authenticity and coherence. This was the achievement of the six years between 1512 and 1518. They were also the years of a general consolidation of his life of further promotion, and then of the beginning of fame.

In the winter of 1512, The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther, twenty-nine years old, Sub-Prior of the Friary at Wittenberg, Professor of Bible in the University, had to start preparation for his professorial lectures which would begin the following year. He had also to start preaching to his brethren. Something like a settled existence was at last beginning. After a year at Wittenberg, instead of being moved elsewhere, as he had been, roughly at the end of each year for the last four years, Luther had been allowed to stay. The months passed swiftly. He was a success as sub-prior, and had begun lecturing in the University at 6a.m., twice a week on the Psalms. Early in 1515, his lecture course on The Psalms was at last drawing to a close, and another was scheduled to follow it. And now came substantial promotion within his Order. He was appointed Vicar Provincial, with responsibilities for the administrative and spiritual oversight of eleven communities across Saxony and Thuringia, including his own mother house at Erfurt. He had to make regular visits of inspection, and intervene whenever there was trouble. It was a vote of confidence from his brethren, confidence both in his practical judgement and in his high spiritual standards. It was a new burden of considerable substance.

The appointment had been made at a meeting of the Augustinians at Gotha which opened on 29 April 1515. Fr Luther preached at the gathering and gave his brethren a forceful harangue about that prime sin of the cloister, backbiting and slander. In a stream of crapulous analogies, breaking into German, he let the Fathers have it in no uncertain terms, which they apparently approved. ‘The detractor, like a dog, digs up and eats a man’s rotting and wormy corpse . . . He lives in manure . . . sets about plastering anyone who is clean. . .indeed uses the stuff for food.’ The humanist Canon Mudt, who lived at Gotha, enquired from Johann Lang about the identity of this ‘sharp preacher’, and was delighted with the text Lang sent to him. Martin was thoroughly in his stride now as far as preaching went, because in the previous year he had begun to preach to the populace at the parish church of St Mary in Wittenberg, three or four minutes’ walk from the Cloister. At first he had been asked to stand in when the regular preacher was ill; he was so much liked that the City Council invited him to be the regular assistant.

In the parish church, as in the University lecture halls and the Friary study rooms, the ascetic face, the evident sincerity, the sometimes almost frightening intensity of his quiet though easily audible voice, his glinting eyes, and his ability to speak to the condition of those he was addressing, won people to him. In the church he spoke in German, and enjoyed the Saxon idiom, often quoting from an Aesop fable, or from some well-known saying; always there was the quality of speaking to people’s own needs, seeing into their deepest felt concerns. In an early sermon he put the high ideals before them from a text of the New Testament, quoting the words of Jesus: ‘Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.’ Luther commented: ‘It is possible that one may think to himself: Would it be sufficient if I wish the other person well in my heart, especially if I have been injured and offended by him?’ and he goes on with other excuses which people make to themselves for not going all the way in charity and answers them forthrightly, telling them the gospel means what it says. On the matter of property, he said: ‘All the goods we have are from God and they are not given to us to retain and abuse, but rather to dispense.’ He drew a picture from daily life: When a pig is slaughtered or taken hold of and other pigs see this, we see that the other pigs set up a clamour and grunting as if in compassion. Chickens and geese and all wild animals do the same thing . . .Only man, who after all is rational, does not spring to the aid of his suffering neighbour in time of need and has no pity on him.’

These sermons were a popularisation of Latin sermons he gave to the brethren in the cloister chapel and, more distantly, of the Latin lecture commentaries and expositions he gave in the University halls — though there too he would occasionally add some German phrase or word to give a particular emphasis or shade of meaning. Luther was bilingual, as many were. The use of German was no concession or mere trimming; it was a wish to use the more expressive and experienced vocabulary of the native language. He tended to turn to it when in need of vituperative words: pig-theologians or sow-theologians was a favourite description of conventional teachers who just repeated the same old lectures, snoring and grunting.

These years were a time of the deepening of friendships which remained for life. When he came back to Wittenberg Fr Martin already had a normal range of acquaintances and friends. But during these six years in Wittenberg he began to put down roots and to get specially close to colleagues and friends in the cloister and the town. Most notable was Georg Spalt an old student acquaintance from the Erfurt days. Spalatin, as he was always called had been ordained priest, an ordinary massing priest not a religious; he became University Librarian and Counsellor to the Elector in the year that Luther gained his doctorate. Originally he had been appointed to educate the Elector’s son, Prince John Frederick, and resided at court at Torgau, about twenty miles up the river. After the appointment as University Librarian, with a good budget from the Elector, he was often at Wittenberg, working with the assistance from Manutius in Gotha who put him in touch with the great Aldus in Venice, to build up the library. He became Martin’s most frequent correspondent, most reliable friend, and the crucial go-between with the Elector. Already by 1513, Spalatin was finding Luther the one really important man in the University and had begun to consult him about the University on Frederick’s behalf. In that year Spalatin wrote that Dr Martin was ‘an excellent man and scholar, whose judgement I value very highly’ and even said, the following year, that he would like to ‘become wholly his’. The confidence was reciprocated. Even when Spalatin was in Wittenberg at the castle, Luther could not always wait to see him but would dispatch a messenger up the road with a letter. The earliest chance survival of a letter from Luther in his own handwriting was one to Spalatin in 1514, and the tone of the letter shows that Fr Martin was enjoying his life. It was about a matter of great interest and concern to all the intelligentsia in the Church in Germany during the previous year or two, the Reuchlin Affair.

Reuchlin, the great Hebrew scholar (Luther had studied his Grammar for some years) had recently led a campaign against the burning of valuable Hebrew manuscripts and against a regular anti-semitic programme of the Dominican friars at Cologne, in the name of what they saw to be doctrinal orthodoxy. The affair was destined to produce a famous book in 1515, the Book of Obscure Man, a satire representing the Cologne theologians as dry as dust academics, ‘scholastics’, busied about the most ludicrous subjects and discussing their own foolish and decadent lives. In 1514 the matter was still in its early stages. Luther’s letter conveys the atmosphere, half chatty, half serious in this matter of deep concern to University men. It is addressed: ‘To the most learned and highly esteemed priest in Christ, Georg Spalatin, my dearest friend. Greetings . . .’ The usual ‘Jesus’ does not appear at the head of the letter — Luther sometimes omitted it in these relatively casual personal missives. Luther indulges in some classical punning about the asininity of a Cologne priest, Ortwin who had written a poem against Reuchlin: ‘In corresponding with you, I could laugh at many details if it were not that one should rather weep over than laugh at such great depravity.’ But he found comfort in the fact that the case had gone to Rome, where justice was sure to be done. ‘Since Rome has the most learned people among the cardinals, Reuchlin’s case will at least be considered more favourably than those jealous people of Cologne — those beginners in grammar! — would ever allow.’ Fr Luther was still the provincial cleric with little idea of the human factors that could dominate procedures of the most elevated, as well as of the most humble bodies.

Two years later there was a rushed note sent up the street to the library by hand in great haste:

That was August 1516 . Three weeks later a similar missive was sent, A travelling book merchant had enquired through Spalatin whether he could have something to sell from Luther’s pen: ‘To the most learned George Spalatin, a priest of Christ, whom I venerate in the Lord. Jesus. Greetings. When I finally returned yesterday late in the day I found your letter, best Spalatin. Please answer Martin Mercator in my behalf that he cannot expect to have my lecture notes on The Psalms.’ Luther explains that the Liberal Arts Faculty wanted the lectures to be printed by ‘our printer’, the University Press, and that in any case Luther will have to supervise it. This was a reference to printer Johan Grunenberg who had been in Wittenberg for some years now. ‘This would please me too — if they must be published at all — primarily because they would then be printed in a rough type face. I am not impressed with publications printed in elegant type by famous printers. Usually they are trifles, worthy only of the eraser. Farewell. Written in haste from the monastery, at noon, the day after the Nativity, 1516. Friar Martin Luder, Augustinian.’

The ‘Nativity’ was the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 8 September. For a few years Fr Martin used the form ‘Luder’ occasionally, perhaps some kind of identity sign for him, tying him into his Saxon roots. The reference to his preference for the local printer seems to be in the same vein. He was continuing to emphasise that he was no humanist, no mere follower of bonae litterae. While valuing highly the scholarship of humanists, he detested the snobbish aesthetic posturing of some of them. However, within a year or two he would be complaining about the inefficiency, the sheer inaccuracy of Grunenberg, and resorting to various more modern printers.

The note of haste in the last two letters is something which began with Luther’s appointment as District Vicar and virtually never again disappeared. From then on, he always had more to do than he could manage. The following month he wrote to his old friend Fr Johann Lang, who had recently been elected Prior of the Friary at Erfurt. The letter is long but extracts suggest, together with those from the two letters to Spalatin, something of the atmosphere of Luther’s life as Vicar and Professor of Bible. He was writing to his old friend of the Erfurt days, with whom he had formed the pro-Staupitz minority in 1511. Now the tables were turned; they were both in positions of authority:

Then there is a paragraph serious but sardonic, about the placing of various friars who seem to have been welcome at neither friary: ‘How do you think I can house your Sardanapales and Sybarites? If you have trained them poorly then you must put up with those poorly trained people. I have enough useless friars around here — if anyone is useless to a suffering soul . . I have become convinced that those who are no good at all are more useful than the most useful ones; therefore for the time being, keep them.’ Luther manages to fend off the possible arrival of more drones at the little Wittenberg Friary — and ironically implies it will be a spiritual benefit to Lang to keep them. He says he is just starting to lecture on St Paul’s lecture to the Galatians, but ‘I fear the plague may not allow the course to continue. . .Today a son of a craftsman (a neighbour living across from us) was buried; yesterday he was still healthy. . .The plague attacks quite cruelly and suddenly.’ Should he leave Wittenberg? Should he disperse the friars? ‘It would not be proper for me to leave until the Reverend Father orders me for the second time to leave.’

Beneath the voluble busy exterior, enormous concerns were working away in Martin’s spirit. And his fellow friars knew something of what his life was costing him. On more than one occasion he took his duties so seriously getting very badly behind with the recitation of the Office — not just a day, but weeks — that he decided to shut himself up in his cell and read the required texts over and over until he got to the end of the complete tally. So strongly did he feel the obligation imposed by Canon Law — and indeed it was an obligation felt equally strongly by many Roman Catholic priests until very recently — that he could not hold himself excused for any reason. The consecrated man felt he could not face his superiors or his God if he had not fulfilled the rules, which seemed to flow so ineluctably from the Church and its Canon Law.

Both Luther’s own writings and those of others record that he made himself ill, shutting himself up with neither food nor drink, to complete the Office until it was done; one account said he was finally insensible. Luther himself, possibly exaggerating, but undoubtedly remembering a frightening experience, wrote in 1533:

And it was in this period that Fr Luther had the terrible experience quoted earlier, when he felt totally annihilated. The attacks, the acute depressions, became even more acute, while the times of fulfilment also grew greater. The excitement and penetration of his lecture and sermon texts fed on these tensions and on the beginnings of light at the end of Luther’s personal tunnel. He recommended the emerging solution to a fellow friar in a letter of advice, written in April 1516. ‘To the godly and sincere Friar Georg Spenlein, Augustinian Eremite in the monastery at Memmingen, my dear friend in the Lord . . . I should like to know whether your soul, tired of its own righteousness, is learning to be revived by and to trust in the righteousness of Christ.’ There follow five paragraphs of his new understanding of what eventually became the fully fledged doctrine of justification by faith alone. The essential elements are here in this letter — that man can gain nothing by actions intended to earn him merit. On the contrary it is only by abandoning all hope of achievement by oneself or others, throwing oneself entirely into the hands of God, and recognising oneself as a sinner like other sinners, that hope can be found. It permits a profoundly realistic and apparently cynical view of life: ‘Why, then, do you imagine that you are among friends?’ On the contrary, ‘The rule of Christ is in the midst of His enemies, as the Psalm puts it.’ There is a strong personal attachment to Jesus on the Cross — the theologia crucis. But it is active and comnunitarian: ‘You will find peace only in Him and only when you despair of yourself and your own works . . . just as He has received you, so He has made your sins His own and has made His righteousness yours . Receive your untaught and until now misled brothers, patiently help them, make their sins yours, and, if you have any goodness, let it be theirs.’ He quotes Paul: ‘Receive one another as Christ also received you to the glory of God’ and ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God emptied himself’. Luther says he, too, was once one of those who try ‘to do good of themselves in order that they might stand God clothed in their own virtues and merits. . .I am still fighting against the error without having conquered it as yet.’

In the lectures between 1512 and 1518, the growth of the transformed doctrine can be traced. It is already partially there half way through the first lectures on his beloved Psalms. Sometime in this period there was a moment, or moments of sudden insight, marking a definitive stage in the growth of this new understanding. Luther referred to this insight as coming to him in ‘the tower room.’ The precise room has never been certainly identified. At one time it was thought to be the lavatory, to the delight of some and the dismay of others. But the matter remains open. At any rate it was a sudden clinching of the emerging solution of his emotional worries and intellectual problems. There was a prolonged process going on for several years before the final insight came.

The inner terror of Martin’s life first came to a head over the matter of confession. The ‘sacrament of penance’ was part of the range of formal procedures which revolved round the Christian religion. Men sinned — they failed whether in their relations with each other, or with themselves; when the failure had an element of deliberation in it, it was in some sense an attack on the Church, on society and on the inner life of grace in a person. Reconciliation and some righting of the wrong were needed. The Church evolved a system by which a person confessed his sins, expressed his sorrow and determination to do better, and was then formally absolved by a priest. Not only lay people, but priests, bishops and the Pope himself were human beings and required this ‘sacrament’ like anyone else. Martin’s trouble was that, though he found the system made some sense, and believed in it intellectually, it nevertheless did not seem to work. He would confess his sins, be absolved by a priest and within moments he was grumbling against God again in his thoughts, and despairing. He took Staupitz into his confidence. He simply could not get away from his obsession with his vision of the angry God, Christ looming over him, the hopelessness of the whole human situation.

Staupitz was not taken by surprise. He had often come across what seemed to him to be the scruples of young idealists who had been determined to do everything perfectly and then worried at their failure. It had been his own experience too. It was just to try to take his mind off all this that he had put the brilliant young man to getting a doctorate and preaching and giving the senior Bible lectures. He was ready for Martin and told him kindly and with authority that he must abandon the idea of God as judge and look to the ‘man’ who is called Christ, on the cross, contemplate Him and His wounds. He let Martin into his own secret: ‘I, too, once confessed daily and daily resolved to be devout and remain devout. But every day I utterly failed. Then I decided that I could deceive God no longer; I could not have done it anyhow.’ Instead he spoke of waiting on God, waiting ‘for an opportune hour that God may come to me with his grace’. It was a vast relief to Martin to know that someone else, and Staupitz of all people, had had the same experience and emerged from it intact.

The next step in Staupitz’s attempt to provide therapy for the young priest was again important. Repentance, he said in his simple, old-fashioned way, begins with the love of God. The subtle and sophisticated Biel had said it begins with the love of self, an intellectual cliche that left Martin struggling with the idea of trying to improve himself. Staupitz turned Luther’s mind away from himself with his simple words about the love of God. A man may gaze at a highly formalised icon and gradually see through it to the world of spiritual truth which it symbolises; the ‘love of God’ can act as an iconic form of words able to be understood actively or passively; the genitive can be understood in either the ablative or the dative sense. Luther told Staupitz in a letter a few years later, how the simple formula that repentance begins with the love of God suddenly opened his mind:

Luther continued in the same letter to show how this understanding linked in with the new understanding of the original Greek word of the gospel text, translated wrongly in the Vulgate Latin by Jerome as ‘Do Penance’, but correctly by Erasmus as ‘change your heart’. Luther explained how he saw so well that the Greek word metanoiete could not possibly have meant what it conjured up to the sixteenth-century reader; the priest and the penitent. On the contrary, it meant that joyful movement of the heart which goes along with faith, forgiveness and God’s love for man.

Whatever may be the correct psychological analysis of Luther’s condition, it would not be too much to say that Staupitz saved him from a complete nervous breakdown. It is also true that he enabled him, through the work he gave him, to find his way to an intellectual formulation of the theology that was being hammered out in his mind. All his life Luther recognised the sovereign part Staupitz played in his life: ‘If Dr Staupitz had not helped me out. . .I should have been swallowed up in hell’; ‘I cannot forget or be ungrateful, for it was through you that the light of the Gospel began first to shine out of the darkness of my heart’; ‘He was my very first father in this teaching, and bore me in Christ’.

The worst of the terror was exorcised, and Luther was pointed towards solutions, but the fundamental psychological tensions and the spiritual struggle were not brought to an end, nor the theological problems solved. Luther was relieved of his own terrible guilt. But though it was now of less importance, he was still failing to gain that merit towards which so much of the Church’s official procedures seemed to be directed. Spiritual therapies could not bridge the gap which yawned between what the Bible text seemed to say and the implications of much of the received teaching and procedures of the Church. Staupitz himself eventually confessed that he was beaten. After he had applied all the cures he knew, and had in fact brought much relief to Luther, the patient continued to belly-ache. ‘I do not understand you,’ said Staupitz. ‘Then,’ Luther wrote later, ‘I thought I was the only one who had ever experienced these "spiritual temptations" and I felt like a dead man.’ In Luther were pinpointed, in one man experiencing them in the isolated intimacy of his own self-reflection things which he found it impossible to share. He was like a dead man. His unique ‘death’ would eventually enable him to propound a unique solution with exceptional force. Luther was thrown back on his own resources. If Staupitz who had helped him so much could go no further with him then he was truly alone and had somehow to fight the battle out on his own. He returned to the Bible to his anguish, to St Augustine, and to Christ — sufficiently relaxed by the reassurances of Staupitz not to be totally inhibited by the impasse of the man/God relationship, and finding some comfort in the Cross, in the crucified.

The eventual theological outcome was described by Luther in the last year of his life in 1545, in a Preface which he wrote at the request of Spalatin for an edition of his collected Latin works. The Introduction was primarily a piece of autobiography; early on he begged the reader to ‘be mindful of the fact that I was once a monk and a most enthusiastic papist. . . I pursued the matter with all seriousness as one, who in dread of the last day, nevertheless from the depth of my heart wanted to be saved’. Then towards the end of the Preface he turned to the heart of the matter and the famous text from the Letter to the Romans on which he had been lecturing 1515-16:

It was a second and definitive breakthrough, a confirmation of the first psychological breakthrough when the ‘Lawgiver’, the dreadful super-ego had been exorcised. It was something more than a matter of being able now to sit loosely to Canon Law, to the Church’s rules. Indeed, Luther continued to live with great care and integrity the life that he had avowed himself to. What it meant was that ‘everything was all right’, that when he failed in some way, the failure no longer meant that he was destroyed. Jesus saved him, Faith justified. To use the words of the New Testament, his ‘faith made him whole.’ A change of this sort cannot destroy habits of mind, temperament, emotional tendencies, genetic and acquired behavioural patterns. The terrible depressions still came; the devil still laughed at him. But now he could find a way out, and eventually laugh back at the devil.

Semper percator, semper justus. Man was always a sinner, but always justified — if he only turned to Christ. It was the way of sola fides, faith alone, which he found through Scriptura sola, only through the words of Scripture, and not through Canon Law or conventions. Sola gratia, grace alone, and not any action of man’s part, enabled him to be a Christian, and to do the good works which flowed freely and strongly from a faithful Christian. This now provided the substance, the heart, of all Luther’s lecturing and preaching. It provided a solution to the problem of free will and grace which had bothered theologians for centuries. It was a profoundly simple solution, and at first no one saw heresy or unorthodoxy in it. Gradually it was recognised as a transformation of current teaching.

Luther had worked out the solution in his lectures on the Letter to the Romans. His notes and commentary for the lectures show the vivid mixture of personal experience of an almost mystical kind, and the sharply intellectual solution to the theological problems. In his use of the single Latin word ‘nudus’, bare, is summed up what he was saying. Man can hope in God alone [Deus nudus]. ‘He who depends on the true God has put aside all tangible things and lives by naked hope [nuda spe vivit]. Hope stands beside Faith and Love in the man whom God can now never desert. All fear was banished in the certainty of grace. No longer was it a matter of an assent to certain doctrines, but a simple personal act of surrender, a total trust in God known in the Word, his Son, Jesus of Nazareth.

This summary of the conclusions to which Luther gradually came, and which can be seen evolving throughout the long texts of his early lectures in the University on the Psalms, the Letter to the Romans, the Galatians, the Hebrews (1515-18) is only a summary. Luther never systematised in the abstract sense. He read the texts of the Bible, he stood before the ‘Word’ of God increasingly admiring and revering it all his life, ever wishing to hear more clearly what it had to say. Thus the method he had learnt, and the great intellectual expertise he would at times deploy, was always at the service of expounding a prophecy or a teaching, whose inner meaning he was trying to penetrate. Of the images he turned to most frequently, one was the image of Jesus as the Good Samaritan in the famous New Testament parable in which a wounded man left beside the road was ignored by representatives of the Establishment while only a despised foreigner stopped to tend him, took him to an inn and paid for his care. Jesus, said Luther, was the kind foreigner, ‘the Good Samaritan’ and the Church was the inn. Then again he often turned his mind and the hearts of his listeners to the yearning phrase of Jesus looking across at Jerusalem on the hill, and saying, ‘Oh, how I have longed to gather thee, as a hen gathers the chicks under its wings.’ He loved this domestic scene of the mother hen and her chicks. It was completely familiar. It was scriptural. ‘The hen is the saviour under whose covering wings the chicks may gather together and be protected.’ Here was the gentle, poetic, affirmative side of a mind which when rejecting the systems that had nearly destroyed it, and still seemed to threaten him and all men, turned to vituperation extreme. The reverse side of ultra-sensitivity was anger. Anger always lurked among his emotions. It had been expressed in those early marginal denunciations of Aristotle; it had been used against intellectual enemies, and against the spiritual backsliders denounced in the sermon that had perhaps helped to bring him promotion to Vicar Provincial at Gotha. Now, with his own base secure, Martin’s critical mind turned increasingly outwards, and beyond the bounds of his immediate academic and religious world, and it would get more angry and more combative.

Even on a wet day in winter Erfurt had something rather fine about it. Even though the brooks were overflowing on to the streets, and the sewage was stinking in the gutters there was something to celebrate. The two great churches on the little hill, and behind them, higher again the centuries-old Benedictine abbey on the Petersburg dominated the town. The University, with its ancient traditions was seldom without some public event. The students were all around with their energy, their disputations, their singing and their beer drinking. Even when the Archbishop of Mainz’s officials were at their most tiresome in demanding taxes, and the day workers at their most aggressive in resenting the situation, still there was something to be proud of, something with which to identify a long tradition symbolised by the many fine buildings. And out in the near countryside there was a burgeoning peasant life.

Wittenberg offered less. Set beside a sluggish stretch of the Elbe in flat country often the outlook in this small market town of little more than 2000 inhabitants was simply dull. And the town itself as a result of its flat site had the reputation of being even smellier than most towns. However, small and at first sight unprepossessing as it was, the town had a history of hundreds of years and something to bring the visitors to it. Furthermore, when the Elector Frederick succeeded in 1486 to the title of Ruler (and Imperial Elector) of this Ernestine portion of the Wettin lands, in Saxony, he set about raising its reputation with great determination. He wanted to show that he could produce something to rival Leipzig in the other Albertine part of the Wettin lands ruled first by his uncle and then from 1500 by his cousin Duke George. He started with disadvantages. Wittenberg was a frontier town between the German and the Slav peoples.

The Slavs, known here as the Wends, were the successors of the invading barbarians from many centuries previously, and were now there farming on the east side of the Elbe — and a surviving Wend community still holds together in twentieth-century East Germany. There was a general impression that Wittenberg was out on a limb. Its internal arrangements were much the same as those for Mansfeld and Eisenach, towns of about the same size. Citizens were responsible for keeping the streets clean and were fined if they failed. But paving was confined to the one long main street and one or two short stretches off it. However, it did have the privilege of marketing salt to the rest of the region. And it did have an incomparable collection of relics, to revere which many pilgrims came from afar. Frederick started on this.

He went to the Holy Land and picked up a great quantity more. He got the Pope to issue a letter encouraging ecclesiastical authorities, bishops, abbots and others to hand over relics to his safe-keeping. By the early years of the sixteenth century he was able to have a vast illustrated catalogue drawn up showing 5005 items, including pieces of the bodies of the ‘Holy Innocents’ (babies murdered by King Herod as described in the New Testament), a thorn from the crown of thorns worn by Jesus before his crucifixion, milk from the Blessed Virgin Mary the mother of Jesus, teeth from various saints, and so on. It seems people wanted to believe in these things and had a passion for the ‘very thing itself’, even though these were often enough ridiculed by intellectuals, who, however, themselves could not resist the sheer curiosity aroused. Valuable Indulgences were attached to pious reverencing of these relics. And all was good for business. The brewing of beer was a major part of the economy of Wittenberg, and from time to time an important part of it must have been drunk by visitors. The new Elector built a good bridge over the Elbe to make the final approach to the town more easy.

Father Martin perhaps knew little more, or perhaps even less, than all this about Wittenberg when he was suddenly told, to his astonishment, that he had been appointed to go to the little Augustinian Friary at Wittenberg. The purpose was that he should lecture in philosophy at the University. For a new university had been the very ambitious second part of the Elector’s plan virtually to refound Wittenberg. In the last years of the fifteenth century he began talks with the Augustinians about founding a university there. Elector Frederick would himself provide the buildings if the Augustinians would provide the core of professors. They agreed to do this and to increase their community in Wittenberg, eventually arranging that Father Staupitz, a member of a noble Saxon family and thus suited to working with the Elector, should be invited to come over from their Munich house and take on the chair of Bible Study . Frederick set about building the University lecture halls and provided money both for new buildings for the friars and for his own property at the other end of the main street, the Castle (for his occasional visits from his permanent residence at Torgau) and the Castle Church, together with a worthy building where the relics could be kept and displayed.

All was agreed, and after the normal negotiations with the Emperor Maximilian, a charter was granted which founded the University of Wittenberg, its patrons to be St Augustine and the Blessed Virgin. This was in 1502, and the University now had the right to grant degrees. Its graduates would have the right to teach in all other universities throughout the Christian world. The building began. Straw roofed wooden houses down the main street began to give way to stone and brick. The town Council played its part by providing the desks and benches required. Doors of temporary lecture halls were opened; prospectuses sent out. The first rush of students came, either those rejected by other universities, or residents not far away, or those attracted by a new foundation where the teaching was not so rigid. The Elector and Staupitz went out of their way to organise a modern university. There were lectures in Greek from the start. The modernist school of Occamites was not to dominate; representatives of other schools were there, notably Andreas Bodenstein, known as Karlstadt a follower of Aquinas, and later Scotus. There were the usual Medical and Law Schools; the latter with young Christoph Scheurl as its Dean, was housed in the castle buildings which also had the University library within its walls. As the buildings went up painters were invited to decorate the interiors. Albrecht Durer was there for a few months; Cranach, later to be a leading citizen and a close friend of Luther’s, was already in residence and at work on the castle rooms when Father Martin arrived in the autumn of 1508.

It had been a big shock to Luther when the news of the appointment was first given to him at Erfurt. He had conflicting emotions – fear, excitement, pride, and pleasure at the challenge as the outline of the job began to emerge. He would have to continue with his own studies in theology, while lecturing to the students in philosophy. And clearly he would be someone much more important in the little community at Wittenberg than he had been, a mere post-graduate student, in the great friary at Erfurt. On arriving at Wittenberg he found it still in the hands of the builders. The friars were still in the little chapel they had had for numberless years, holding only about twenty people. But there was bustle and promise in the air everywhere. Luther was one of a batch of seven friars recruited from various friaries to improve the performance at Wittenberg.

As the weeks went by, it became clear that Father Staupitz was wanting the brilliant young priest to hasten on with his studies so that he could begin to lecture eventually in Staupitz’s own discipline. Some six years previously, Father Staupitz had been elected Superior of the whole big group of Reformed or Observant Friaries. He was not able to carry out properly the duties involved at the same time as lecturing regularly at Wittenberg. Luther’s sudden appointment, it began to be clear, was related to this fact. He had shown himself to be exactly the kind of man Staupitz favoured. He had not gone along with the more sophisticated humanists, or followers of bonae litterae as they referred to themselves. On the other hand, his penetrating and lively mind had been in evidence from the days of his Master’s degree before he entered the Augustinians. He was meticulous in his monastic observance and always specially loyal to Church authority. The sometimes overwrought expression on his face might mean that what he needed was more demanding work, and more responsibility. The Rector of the new University already knew Martin well; Staupitz had persuaded Dr Trutvetter a reliable man who had had enough, after twenty-five years, of the difficulties always generated in such a Complex ancient foundation as Erfurt was, to come over to teach at Wittenberg. Soon after his arrival he had been elected Rector.

When Father Luther arrived, the first rush of enthusiasm for the new University was well over, and the hard business of making it work had begun. In 1502 between 600 and 700 students had matriculated. In most subsequent years the new students numbered between one and two hundred, though in 1508 dropping to only sixty-eight. Large numbers fell by the way each year in all universities, but there were not less than 500 students in Wittenberg. The little place was swamped by them. Luther found himself with too much to do and began the habit of overwork that ruined his health in later life. He was determined to keep up his own studies, as well as doing the lectures required, on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and keeping up strict monastic observance; and theology continued to excite him. The hard work and the excitement both come through in a letter to Father Braun. He wrote it in March 1511, and had to apologise that only now was he telling his old patron and friend that he had left Erfurt and was now in Wittenberg, alas teaching philosophy, though he so much preferred theology: ‘The study is tough, especially in philosophy which from the beginning I would gladly have exchanged for theology. I mean that theology which searches out the nut from the shell, the grain from the husk, the marrow from the bone.’ This letter also gives a strong hint of Luther’s growing, aggressive, antipathy to philosophy, a merely human way of trying to understand the Christian message as distinguished from theology which gets to the heart of the matter through an assent to Christ, through faith. ‘But God is God; man often, no rather always, fails in his judgement. This is where God comes in, who rules us in sweetness and for all time.’

The young lecturer was beginning to express himself confidently. The Wittenberg University authorities in that month of March told him he could qualify for the Baccalaureus Biblicum. The only difficulty was that he was still formally a member of the Erfurt community and they would have to pay the degree fees. This took some time to be done; there was resentment at his somewhat precipitate promotion. But worse was to come from that point of view. Father Luther began to work for his final theological degree as Sententiarius, and to lecture on the Bible. In the autumn, the Wittenberg authorities suddenly gave him permission to apply for the degree, several years ahead of the normal schedule at Erfurt. Staupitz was anxious that Father Luther should be able to take over his work at Wittenberg. But the realisation of his hopes were to be postponed.

Only a year had gone by when, in this autumn of 1509, the summons came from Erfurt that Father Martin should return to his mother community. He was required for teaching in the cloister. Now that he was well qualified and had continued to work so hard, they were glad to be able to use his services. However, on his return, the University authorities were understandably cool about the young man who had left Erfurt only thirteen months previously, with no theology degree, and came back not only with his Bible ‘Baca’, but with his application already well advanced for the final degree of Sententiarius; they refused to proceed with it. In fact they were out of order, and were obliged in the end to proceed with granting a degree already inaugurated by Wittenberg. However, some kind of contretemps occurred at the ceremony itself.

Early on in the proceedings for the formal recognition of Father Luther as Sententiarius, Father Nathin, the Augustinian theologian, came forward and started to read from a large sheet all the requirements to be filled by a candidate evidently implying that he was doubtful whether Luther had fulfilled them all. Furthermore, Luther was apparently not asked to take the usual oath nor to take higher degrees (and this could only be the Doctorate) at no other university. But Father Nathin represented only one, authoritarian, element of the Erfurt establishment. The ceremony was duly completed. Luther entered into his theology teaching with enormous zest, and the evidence can be seen today in the margins of several vast tomes he used in his cell. They were designed and printed to leave room for interlinear gloss, and for long comment in the margin. One lecturer would inherit the markings of a previous lecturer and treasure them and still find plenty of room for his own comment. Father Luther’s careful handwriting, small and precise, gives both his own personal thoughts and the notes he made to remind him what he wanted to say in his lectures when he had the great tome in front of him on a lectern, and the young men, not so very much younger than he, looking up expectantly from the benches. The writer of any such notes was also aware of himself as author of words which his successors would read; in Luther’s case these notes have been reprinted and are now pored over by twentieth-century theologians, as part of the Weimar edition of Luther’s Collected Works.

The books concerned were Augustine’s on The Trinity, on God as threefold, and on The City of God , written in the early years of the fifth century when the city of man, notably Rome, was looking to be shaky, texts still of great interest to historians and theologians in the twentieth century. And, primarily, there was Lombard’s Collection of Sentences in four volumes. The young lecturer’s words show that from these early days Luther began to prefer the dynamic and personal, even biographical, approach to theology, rather than an intellectual structure, and ‘summas’ based essentially on a philosophical outlook, reaching back to Aristotle for their assumptions. He quickly began to feel that a philosophical approach was even a betrayal of the message of the New Testament. Aristotle earned in these margins the title ‘rancid philosopher’ and was often designated ‘pagan’ with some special force, and a betrayer too of the Augustinian tradition of his own Order. Life, far from being a settled planned matter, was a fluxus, a flow of events, and in those events, man met his God. At that point Luther found it easy to be what he was, an orthodox Catholic, and to point the way to the normal medieval pieties.

In a number of ways Luther’s approach was a return to an older style, dating back to a time before Ockham and indeed before Thomas Aquinas who was primarily responsible for the systematisation that made such wide use of Aristotle — although when it came to theology Aquinas also treated the non-systematic and much more personal Augustine as a — often the — primary authority after the New Testament. Luther’s style of theology was deeply attuned to Augustine’s; ‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ he wrote in the margin of Augustine’s text. He preferred to do without the support of philosophy when it came to theology; here, ironically he linked directly if superficially with his modernist nominalist teachers, who always insisted that philosophy and theology were entirely distinct disciplines and that theology was coherent within itself, based on revelation. At the deeper level, however, Luther’s approach was entirely new and distinct, for his dynamic theology was in effect flowing back to cover the whole of life. So when he came to analyse the psychology of a Christian he did not like to speak in terms of the ‘habit’ (an Aristotelean and Thomist category) of charity, inspired by the Holy Spirit, but preferred to speak directly of the Holy Spirit of God, working in man, immediately, not mediately. This may seem complex. But it is fundamental to any understanding of what was going on in the young don’s mind. He was trying to present in intellectual fashion, in a style appropriate to the high discipline of the schools, a description of theology which was dynamic, ‘divine’ and, in the end, one strictly ‘indescribable’ on account of its nature as the working of the ‘holy spirit’. As yet he was only struggling towards it. And he was tremendously conscious of the censors, and of his own wish to be strictly loyal to the Church which he understood as itself the infallible oracle. So after he had propounded in these notes, partly for his own private guidance, and partly as actual lecture material, the idea of charity being not a ‘habit’ but directly the ‘Holy Spirit’, he added: ‘unless perhaps there be a decision of the Church in favour of the opposite view’. Although his own view chimed with Lombard and traditional piety, yet perhaps (he thought) the nominalists had persuaded authority to accept their categorical analysis as correct and he did not know about it. But in fact Father Luther was on safe ground. There was no such formal definition.

Many commentators have read the notes Luther wrote in these years when he was an unknown, reliable, respected young lecturer at Erfurt and tried to discern the seeds of the future reformer. The thing which really stands out is that he disliked the abstract statement and preferred to see life as a flux, rather than as a status. From Augustine’s De Vera Religione he dug out a reference to prime matter, which enabled him to propound a dynamic theory of the nature of all things. We live moment by moment, in a continuum, in God’s presence. The second thing is the intense personal and vibrant piety; coram deo, in God’s presence, is the note continually restruck in this unorganised array of themes, ideas and comments.

As Luther worked away, the streets of Erfurt were ceasing to be so safe. The tensions were beginning to burst into action. In 1510 the journeymen went into open revolt against the low level of their rewards, and chose the administration of the city as their target. There was rioting in the streets outside the Cloister and the University, and a local civil war broke out of a serious nature. The town was being ruined by excessive taxation, and it reflected on everybody in it. At first the students and the Cloister were on the side of the journeymen. But eventually the mayor was taken prisoner and beheaded, and the Augustinians took his four-year-old son into protective custody, as a hostage in case of the situation worsening with reprisals to be taken by the family of the murdered man. Meanwhile, a fire started by the rioters had burnt down some of the University buildings, including the Old College and the Library. Eventually the revolt was put down. No reforms were made. It was a scenario to be repeated more widely in fifteen years time. The friars played an important part in trying to hold a just balance between the claims of the ill-paid and the requirements of law and order. Such trouble had occurred before; the younger members oi the community were not involved, and went on with their daily life largely undisturbed by Erfurt’s ‘mad year’, as it was called.

By the autumn of 1510, twenty-seven-year-old Luther was getting into his stride. He had taught philosophy for a year at Wittenberg, theology for a year at Erfurt, As Sententiarius he was among the youngest in Germany. The margins of the text books witness to a mind intensely involved with its material, Every question was thought through afresh. In some cases this would lead only to acceptance of the conventional line. But on many issues there was in any case a pluralist approach: he was free to follow any of a number of options and take the open-ended discussion forward. The question of ‘freedom’ drew him. Today, the question is posited in the context of inherited and acquired influences, and of social psychology, asking how free we are to make decisions, showing that we are free only within a maybe very small area of inherited genetic data and acquired social and psychological habits. Luther was interested rather in the quality of free human activity, the moral category. His notes show him moving away from Biel’s (and many others’) complicated scheme which, while saving God’s prerogative, maintains that the ‘natural’ man has a chance of doing something worthwhile by ‘doing what is in him’, back to an idea that God’s ‘prevenient Grace’ is always available and always necessary for a life worthy of man and God. But only to the man who believes. Faith is the key, faith bracketed with the other two virtues, traditionally named as ‘theological’, those of hope and love, the latter also in a further sense under-girding faith. It requires a personal act, an assent, already being solicited from within him for a man to reach to his spiritual destiny, to live as a godly man. There is a divinity beckoning within man’s own life, promising a new freedom.

Luther’s studies were becoming more exciting than ever, because he had time to start Greek, the original language of the Christian source texts and was dabbling in Hebrew the language of the Old Testament, getting to know at least the alphabet, and a few words, from Reuchlin’s Rudiments which he already possessed. More importantly, from his long hours of recitation of the Psalms and from his growing intimate knowledge of the Old Testament, he was getting an intuitive grasp of the Hebrew mind and its language. He had a Greek dictionary, and was convinced that there was no way to penetrate the meaning of the Christian texts except by mastering the original language. In 1509 the French scholar Faber Stapulensis, or Lefevre, had published his version of the Psalms in no fewer than five different Latin versions. Luther possibly had that in his cell already, certainly a year or two later. But already he was learning to make sharp distinctions between one humanist scholar and another. He was moved to fierce expostulations against an Alsatian priest, Jakob Wimpfeling, who had written a Little Book on Purity attacking the worldliness and self-indulgence of clergy, both those in the monasteries and the ordinary massing priests, and had specially attacked the Augustinians for accepting the well-known Sermon to the Eremites as written by St Augustine himself. It was normal to attack one’s adversary with real animus. But there was already a special penchant for abuse in Martin. His notes say of Wimpfeling that he was an ‘aged and distracted scarecrow’, a ‘chattering bleater and critic of the fame of the Augustinians’, and had better ‘recall his reason’ and put some spectacles on his ‘mole’s eyes’. Sixteenth-century readers, used to this kind of colourful swordplay, took it as a matter of course, looking to the heart of the argument, awarding only a mark or two for any particularly appropriate and telling invective. The young Sententiarius wanted to display his ability to his close and valued humanist friends.

Luther’s reputation and his career were growing. But his depressions were also growing. His obligations were no longer Sufficient to distract him. At Wittenberg, Staupitz had been there to help, at least some of the time, and his advice must have tied in with Luther’s own attraction to an earlier spirituality. In the annotations is a significant quote from St Bernard that in the Christian life to stand still is to go backwards, the Christian must always be moving forward. And the repeated emphasis on humility, while traditional and genuine, has a special note of dissatisfaction with himself. In the end, however, none of this touched the depressions, the attacks, the temptations to despair and the conviction of guilt. But then, again, out of the blue came another distraction to put off the day of reckoning.

Luther was sent, under obedience, on a journey to Rome as the companion of an older brother friar, on business to the Procurator of the Augustinian Order. Friars always travelled in twos for company and protection. His superiors thought of this journey as an ideal opportunity to give more breadth to the mind of this so promising but rather precocious theologian, promoted too young by hasty Wittenberg.

The business of the journey was essentially an attempt to prevent twenty-five other Saxon Augustinian friaries from joining the group of Reformed Augustinians to which Erfurt belonged. A great deal of heat had been generated when Staupitz had got Rome to issue a Bull putting this juncture into effect. And it was not in fact envisaged that a community could be allowed to appeal against such a Bull, once issued; there had been plenty of discussion in the preceding years. But Erfurt went ahead anyhow. Whether Martin thought Erfurt was right in not wanting the risk of having the reform diluted by this big new influx of undesirables, we do not know. Excitement was all that remained in Martin’s memory in later years, the excitement of going to the centre of Christendom, the place of the first martyrs, and the place where special spiritual gifts could be obtained. And then there was the journey itself.

The lush north Italian countryside and the bare Alps remained imprinted on his mind. At first he was very impressed by the Italians as rather better at many of life’s tasks than the Germans — they seemed to get drunk less often and less obviously, they cut their clothes better, they were more polite and their hospitals were more efficient, cleaner and more obviously Christian. The warmer climate and the large grapes and pomegranates topped the picture off. From religious house to religious house, walking twenty miles or more a day they covered the thousand miles or so within two months. At last in sight of Rome, Luther prostrated himself on the ground. ‘Blessed art thou, Rome, Holy Rome.’ Once in the city, however, lodged at the Augustinian house near the Piazza del Popolo, half an hour’s walk from the Vatican, it was another story. Luther was not the first German and certainly not the last to be shocked by the city. If he had found a lot to admire in the Italian way of life there was plenty to criticise in the Christian life-style here: casual priests, wheeling and dealing for preferment on a scale which beggared the German scene, prostitutes, a general lack of seriousness. It was only in later years that the negative aspects came to have real significance in Luther’s mind. For the moment, while they impressed him, it was all discounted against Rome’s great status, the Indulgences to be gained by visiting the basilicas, the sheer fact of being at the heart of Christendom, and the usual Christian tourist reaction of the time — he admired the Pantheon, its size and its symbolism, once the place of the classical gods, now a Christian church. But of Bramante, of the new building and painting and what we now call Renaissance art and architecture, nothing really impressed him.

In all his later writings in which the visit to Rome is sometimes referred to either directly or indirectly, no reference is made by Luther to the purpose of the visit. It was the responsibility of the senior brother. The records of the Augustinian Order show that the request to be allowed to appeal to the Pope against the Bull amalgamating other Saxon friaries to Erfurt and the other reformed communities was not allowed by the Procurator General of the Order. So after what was in fact a month of wet and cold weather in Rome, when the city was certainly at its least inviting as far as climate goes, the two priests started the trek home.

Back in Erfurt, the travellers delivered their disappointing message of refusal. In the best tradition of those with everything to gain and nothing to lose by fighting, if necessary against the rules for what they want, the friaries of Erfurt and the six other Communities who had joined together to send the deputation immediately sent another two friars off to Rome, with a further objection and request. Tensions and tempers were high in the Friary at Erfurt. As the office was recited, minds revolved with angry thoughts, and determination still to resist the threatened Incursion. Other minds wondered whether this was fair on their much loved Provincial Superior, Father Staupitz. Others again looked at Canon Law, or at their obligations to be humble amid concluded that it was neither just nor right to resist the Bull of amalgamation any further. The latter were few, but Father Martin Luther and Father Johann Lang remained determined in their assertion of this position. The result was difficult for Martin as a still very young member of the Order. Cut off for several months from his lecture course, which was now being given by someone else, he was already in less of a central position, an ex-member of a deputation that had failed in its object, and now in a small minority on a matter of policy. Staupitz solved the difficulty very easily, and for him, satisfactorily. Father Luther was soon back in Wittenberg, on the teaching staff at the Friary and at the University. Luther’s move back to Wittenberg in the summer or early autumn of 1511 turned out to be both final and crucial for the whole of his future life.

Staupitz is sometimes thought of as somewhat gentle and almost easy-going; and his portrait shows a friendly face. But he had a streak of sharp determination in him. He had a further shock in store for Martin, though not quite immediately. Luther returned to the usual round of study and lecture, office and Mass and monastic rule, in the University and in the Cloister at Wittenberg. The buildings were coming on now. The libraries were improving. The movement of thought was that of a young university. About to become Dean of the Faculty of Theology in 1512, and Archdeacon of the castle church was Andreas Karlstadt, who had been promoted to the Doctorate in 1510, the year after Martin had returned to Erfurt. A year went by. In the autumn of 1512 the Order held a meeting at Cologne, to elect priors and sub-priors among other things. Father Staupitz took Father Luther in his party, and in later years Luther remembered the wine they had. When the Wittenberg Friar elections came up, the vote for sub-prior was for Luther. It was a vote of confidence in the young man and a genuine step up. Shortly after their return to Wittenberg, came the real shock.

After the main meal each day the friars would walk up and down outside in good weather, or they would gather in the calefactory, the only warm room in bad weather, taking their conventional ‘recreation’. It was pleasant to pass the time of day, to take a little rest, to hear the latest news about Cranach’s painting at the castle, or the international political news, what Emperor Maximilian was doing, or even the new young King of England, or the latest church gossip. One such midday, Father Staupitz was sitting outside silently under the pear tree. At last he made Father Martin sit down and said to him that he was to arrange to take a Doctorate. Martin nearly fainted. At twenty-eight? That was something for a man of forty or more. At Erfurt they were nearer fifty. And how could he possibly add the work entailed to all his other tasks, now that he was sub-prior? ‘It will kill me.’ ‘Ah well,’ said Staupitz, ‘the Lord has need of people in heaven, and if it kills you tant pis, tant mieux. He has great need of assistants up there,’ He found it quite easy to deal with Father Luther’s slightly hysterical reaction. Admittedly the suggestion was a challenge. Though Staupitz had also got Karlstadt a Wittenberg doctorate early in life, and young Father Wenceslaus Link in 1511, it was unusual for a man to aim at a doctorate so early, and after such a short and narrow experience, unless destined for high position.

The conversation with Staupitz stuck in Martin’s mind for the rest of his life. Bracketed with the honour of the doctorate and the requirement to lecture on the Bible, went a requirement to preach to his brethren, his own brother friars, some twice his age, and more.

Martin soon recovered his balance. Staupitz had asked him. In the fluxus of life one must respond to what God sent through one’s neighbour and above all through one’s superior. Arrangements were set on foot. And in no time Father Luther was penning the inevitable letter of invitation to Erfurt. He knew how irritated some of them must have been by this further promotion. There was no point in going through a lot of apologies, and talk of humility. And by now he had in any case learnt to cut down a little on the circumlocutions The letter, dated 22 September 1512, was addressed to: ‘The reverend, venerable and godly fathers, to the Prior, the Master, and the seniors of the monastery of the Order of the Eremites of Bishop St Augustine in Erfurt, my fathers, honoured in the Lord. Then came the Word ‘Jesus’ set down on a new line in the middle of the page, a medieval pious custom, and one that has in fact survived into the twentieth century among some Christians but mostly among monks and nuns.

Greeting in the Lord. Reverend, venerable and beloved fathers: Attention! St Luke’s day is approaching. On that day in obedience to the fathers and the Reverend Father Vicar, I shall be solemnly graduated as a Doctor of Theology. I assume that you, my fathers, are already very well aware of this due to a letter from our Reverend Father Prior here at Wittenberg. I omit all self-accusations, and do not mention unworthiness, lest I seem to seek honour and praise by means of humility. God knows, and my conscience also knows, to what extent I am worthy and grateful for such a bestowal of glory and honour.

He asked for their prayers and to ‘honour me with your presence, if it can be managed, and to take part in this my solemn "parade’ (I am honest) for the sake of decorum and the honour of the Order, and especially of our district’. He continued with a carefully worded section, saying he would not ‘presume to bother you with the inconveniences and expenses involved in such a journey, had the Most Reverend Father Vicar not ordered it’. He was clearly worried lest the tension between Erfurt and himself might come out in public: ‘. . . It would seem shameful, disgraceful and even scandalous that I should ascend to such dignity without you in Erfurt knowing of it, or being invited to it.

On 4 October, Luther swore the usual oath of fidelity to the University and the Church of Rome. This event set everything in motion, giving the candidate the ‘licence.’ But a large fee was now due. The Elector came to the rescue of the Cloister and its inmates in such a matter. But the cash itself had to be handed over to the University authorities; and first had to be collected from the Elector’s agent. Luther went himself to Leipzig to collect it. His receipt can still be seen: ‘I, Martin, brother of the monastic order at Wittenberg, do acknowledge with this my hand on behalf of the Prior at Wittenberg that I have received from the Honourable Degenhart Pfeffinger and Johann Doltzer, chamberlains of my gracious Lord, fifty guldens, Sunday after St Francis’ Day, 9 October 1512.’ On 18 October was the ceremony itself, the solemn presentation of the Doctor’s ring, which Luther ever after wore and regarded as giving him a brief that he was obliged to fulfil. There were debates after Vespers on the evening before, and then the next morning the ceremony itself up in All Saints, the castle church, with further oaths to obey the dean and faculty and the Church, and then the presentation of the symbolical open Bible and the shut Bible, and the silver ring. Then there was a sermon from the new doctor, and after that a Disputation. Martin’s two ‘seconds’ at this were his Prior, Dr Wenceslaus Link, and Nikolaus Grunberg, parish priest of Wittenberg. There were the usual medieval fringe events, with a fool taking off the principal. Martin enjoyed it, in spite of the sweating and the fearful anxiety of it all. He had made it to the top quicker than anyone had ever heard of. Now he must teach, and preach, and express what he had so far been able only to set down in the margins of his textbooks, or give to his students, or express informally to his brethren, who were not always either interested or in agreement, though never less than aware of his gifts. Father Luther already had many friends, and had already been Sub-Prior for a year. Now he was Professor of the Bible at the University. It meant much work, but many opportunities.

In the early evenings the friars chanted Vespers in the great church, leaning back on the misericords in the choir stalls; as each psalm came to an end they stood up and bowed in praise of the trinitarian God, Glory be to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit — through all ages of ages; per omnia saecula saeculorum.’ There was a sense timelessness further enhanced on Sundays when the Psalms were sung in one or other of the eight plain chant modes. Towards the end came the Magnficat (the song Luke put into the mouth of Mary the mother of Jesus in his version of the Gospel), with its inspiring poetry, Magnficat anima mea Dominum, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord. . . He that is mighty hath done great things for me: and holy is his name. . .He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. . .He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. . . He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ Brother Martin’s spirit soared and remained high as the friars processed out of the church to the refectory along the other side of the cloister garth, for supper.

Later, before bed, came the final choir office, Compline completion with its brief and beautiful little ‘anthem’ to Mary at the end; it changed with the seasons, but for much of the year from late May till December it was the Salve Regina ‘Hail, Holy Queen’. And so to the communal dormitory under the roof, hot in the middle of summer, cold in winter, but at all times providing the security of the common life.

Early in the morning, before first light during most of the year, the friars went with lanterns or candles into the church for the first office of the day, Matins, a lengthy text, followed by Lauds, an office of praise and rejoicing. Then the friars who were priests would disperse to individual altars to say their own daily Mass, those who were not away preaching in another town or village, or who were not required for some public Mass in Erfurt. The day went on with shaking up the mattresses, other duties and more offices, eventually a meal. In Brother Martin’s mind the poetry of the Psalms jostled with Vergil’s Georgics and other classical Latin texts. Already he was becoming sharply aware of the crucial semitic dimension of the Psalms, wanting to study the Old Testament text in its original Hebrew. Again when the text of the New Testament itself was intoned, in readings from the New Testament, from John, from Paul and other writers, he began to sense the bite of the original and more intellectual Greek, standing behind the fourth-century Latin text of Jerome’s translation (the Vulgate), Latin which was now part of Luther’s natural and normal way of expressing himself.

The seasons changed: the short but hot summer, with its sultry days, the vines ripening on the lower hillsides along with nuts and other fruits, the haymaking and cattle fattening in the valleys, fields of corn for bread and beer, and all around the great rolling forests. In Erfurt itself there was a sense of civilisation over-ripe, with the tenseness which goes with too many people knowing too much about the unresolved problems, an increasing number of intellectuals opting out into the burgeoning renaissance of human studies, the arts; others moving as ever into the law, or into banking and commerce. And everywhere were the priests to forgive the sinfulness of it all, and make amends with their frequent sacrifices in church. Finally, back behind it all was a sense of ‘the other,’ for many not much more than a fear of what they deserved, for others a deep yearning for the spiritual life. And soon Brother Martin would himself have the burden of all this on his own priestly shoulders.

Monastic communities were divided into the educated and the uneducated. The latter, lay brothers, did most of the menial tasks, assisted by the novices; in a big community like that of the Augustinian house, these tasks might include such things as brewing beer — the Erfurt cloister was substantial, and sometimes they would be putting on a meal for as many as two hundred. The educated members of the community were priests, or aspiring priests; normally they were ordained within two or three years of joining. When the major reforms of the Catholic Church eventually came, late in the century, they included new regulations for a six-year preparation of men for the priesthood; in Luther’s time preparation was brief. Brother Martin studied an exposition of the Mass by Gabriel Biel – a well-written book, intellectual and inspiring; the author died only twelve years previously. Apart from that, major emphasis was laid on learning the precise detail of the actions of the priest when celebrating Mass, as well as on memorising the text. Then there was some training for preaching, and later for hearing confessions. But the Mass was the heart of a priest’s life. In a few months’ time Martin would be saying Mass at twenty-three years old, still so close to his contemporaries, and yet now so definitely different.

The rite of Mass arose sometime in the first years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth in Israel. It was intended as a reenactment of the supper which Jesus had with his disciple on the night before he was crucified, a supper in the context of the annual Jewish Passover. The New Testament has several descriptions of it, and records that Jesus told his disciples to do again what he then did. Almost certainly the earliest description of the ‘Last Supper’, as it came to be known, is that which reads as follows: The Lord Jesus, on the night of his arrest, took some bread, and, after giving thanks to God, broke it and said: ‘This is my body which is for you; do this in remembrance of me. In the same way he took the cup after supper and said "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.’" The followers of Jesus, soon to be called Christians (after ‘Christ’, meaning the Anointed, a name given early on, to Jesus), began to meet together in the earliest days, to celebrate this remembrance, which they called also thanksgiving, eucharist. And from early days they set men aside to conduct the rite. They spoke of it as a sacrament and believed Jesus, crucified, risen and ascended to his Father in heaven, to be especially present in the bread and wine, which they consumed. Gradually the assemblies became more formalised. At their best these ritual meetings seem to have become great liturgical occasions, a public expression of the generically religious experience, the sense both of ultimate dependence and of spiritual freedom. At their worst they became very like the pagan rituals which the Bible text holds not to be pleasing to God or appropriate to men, occasions for offering sacrifices in order to bribe God and buy off his anger. Even at their worst there was something authentic about them, some recognition of man’s dependence on ‘something else’, something genuinely exciting and inspiring. But there was a grave tension between the mechanical, indeed financial approach to the divine, and authentic religion – a tension already sensed by Martin.

The best theologians were aware of the danger that ordinary folk would treat the Mass as the equivalent of a pagan sacrifice, and all the more so on account of the use made of Indulgences. It all looked like a routine, and like magic. Their explanations of the Mass often tended to sound only like super-magic. Biel taught a mysticism which said that the soul of a worthy participant was changed into the body of Christ through a most intimate union, when he or she consumed the consecrated bread (only priests took the wine as well). Three centuries earlier the western love of definition had led scholars to say that the bread and wine used at Mass were changed during the rite in a way they defined as ‘transubstantiation’. The Mass itself was a sacrificial prayer which could be applied to those for whom it was specially celebrated, even if not present. It was, however, specially for those who were present — at this point, Biel added: ‘I mean those who really participate, not those loafing around (circumgirantium).’ Biel is not entirely happy, as a theologian, with transubstantiation as a description of what happens to the bread and wine though he entirely accepted it, and often waxed lyrical about the Mass: ‘What super-excellent glory of the priest to hold and dispense his God, distributing Him to others.’ Looking back on these months of study in later years, Luther commented, ‘My heart would bleed when I read Biel’s text.’

One thing Biel emphasised, like all expositors of the Mass, was the need for purity of heart in the priest, in him who dispensed this sacrament of the divine life. And this took him straight to the question that theologians had discussed for more than a thousand years, about the extent to which man could do something about purifying himself, and about whether he could do anything good without God’s help. ‘Grace’, gratia, was the word used for the help God gave, the divine life in each Christian. This grace, available through baptism and the other sacraments, was it not available in any way to those who had not been baptised through no fault of their own? How did grace work? Was it necessary even before man could take any steps towards the good, even for preparing the heart for full grace to take root there? Logically and psychologically they felt they must allow for an initiative in man’s self; for what they came to call facere quod in se est’, to do what one could. (Some have labelled this as semi-Pelagianism — Pelagius was the fifth century British heretic of free will.) So Biel reached the point where he could say that absolute love of God for God’s sake, or above everything, even though a tough assignment, is within reach of natural man; grace is not the root but the fruit of the preparatory good works which a Christian can do by himself.

This measuring up to God was already an anxiety to Martin. He wondered how he could be fit to perform the priestly acts. His depressive side began to express itself theologically; how could he ever succeed in living up to the Christian ideals? Sex seems not to have been a major problem, at first anyway, in these moral worries. ‘In the monastery I felt little sexual desire. I had nocturnal pollutions in answer to nature,’ he said in later years. It was not women, but really knotty problems that worried him. Even after the emptying of the friaries, Luther did not, like many others, marry within months. Conscious sexual drives were not dominant. In the first two years it was rather a growing concern about his relationship with God, a feeling that he was always doing something wrong, was never as good as he ought to be, a failure to love God. It was common among dedicated monks and friars. Canon Law provided for numerous Big Brothers. Law and love provided a special tension in the Mass itself.

The first Mass was an ordeal. Although his brethren would be entirely sympathetic, Luther knew they would all be watching out for slips; and any mistake at Mass was a serious sin. The enormous importance attached to the precise fulfilment of a very large number of rubrics about how the text should be read and what gestures should be made, threatened one. There were sharp contradictions here. The priesthood was concerned with people’s ‘souls’, and nothing could be of a higher or more wonderful stature than the priest. At the same time all the emphasis, in the day-to-day life, was put on the detail of how to earn merit, how to do right all the things which Canon Law said needed to be done, including the sacred ritual to be meticulously observed. As yet, however, for Martin the tension remained largely unformulated at any theological level. Worry about achievement was dominant.

First came the ordination itself. On 3 April Brother Martin ascended the steps out of Erfurt’s central Platz up to the recently built great late Gothic Cathedral of St Mary, next to its older sister church of St Severus. It was another occasion like that of the clothing and of the vows. Martin was prostrate again before the altar. The local Bishop, Johann Bonemilch von Lasphe, put the symbolic stole, a long thin scarf, and the chasuble, the vestment, on him and said, ‘Receive the power of consecrating and sacrificing for the living and the dead.’ Back in the Friary the brethren congratulated him, and there was a little celebration.

Now he had to start serious preparation for his first Mass in a few weeks’ time. Martin was half glad and half disconcerted to hear that his father was going to make a special occasion of this event and ride over to Erfurt with some friends. A date had to be found which would suit him, as well as the Friary. Sunday, 2 May, was decided on.

Martin wanted his friends and patrons to be there — one had remained strongly supporting him and specially close since the Eisenach days, Father Johann Braun, of the Franciscan house there. Martin wrote and invited him. The letter is the earliest surviving example of Luther’s words. Though not of outstanding importance, it introduces the ipsissima verba for the first time; one can see what sort of an impact the young man makes on paper. It was a rather florid sort of letter, in the obsequious style considered right to be adopted by a junior to a Senior with, however, a certain personal and affectionate character to it, typical of Luther. Written in Latin it was addressed: ‘To the pious and venerable Johann Braun, a priest of Christ and Mary, Superior at Eisenach, my dearest friend in Christ.’ The text then starts:

Written at our cloister in Erfurt on 22 April, the year of our Lord, 1507.

Then Martin suddenly remembers the Schalbes. Until then, apparently, it had not occurred to him that these superior people might like to come; but of course they might hear about the event from Father Braun, so he added after the signature a further note which speaks volumes about the social stratification in little Eisenach:

I do not dare to importune or burden those excellent people of the Schalbe Foundation, who certainly have done so much for me. I am sure that it would not befit their social position and prestige to be invited to such an unimportant and humble affair, or to be bothered by the wishes of a monk who is now dead to the world. In addition I am uncertain and somewhat dubious whether an invitation would please or annoy them. Therefore I have decided to be silent; but if there should be an opportunity, I wish you would express my gratitude to them. Farewell.

The messages went off, and above all arrangements were made for Martin’s father’s party to come. Big Hans was bringing a cash gift of about £200, and coming with twenty friends on horseback. Martin toiled away at the rite, the gestures and the text; and kept up his prayers, and tried ever to be in that good disposition in which a monk or friar is supposed to be.

Martin’s nervousness did not abate as the day drew nearer. The day of the first Mass shared some of the tensions of a wedding. being the intensely public celebration of something which in some ways was a matter that made one wish to withdraw from the public eye. The new priest wanted to keep himself very collected in his mind, detached, ‘ recollected’ as the jargon goes in church circles. Yet it was impossibly difficult to keep out the ‘distractions’ of the world. Friends and relations and all Martin’s brethren would be present for the first public liturgy that he would conduct. There would be torches, again. Possibly his mother would be present for him to bless after the Mass, and she would kiss his newly appointed hands.

The day itself proved to be, if not exactly a disaster, a day which Luther could not remember without quaking, and he often returned to the topic in later years. The ‘Table Talk’ has a number of references to it. Taken down by different hands and differing in detail, they witness to two things which remained burnt into Martin’s mind.

First was the celebration of the Mass itself. He made no mistakes. But his state of spiritual and theological seriousness triggered off a moment of paralysis and horror. It occurred at the beginning of the ‘Canon’ of the Mass, the long central prayer which recalls the ‘Last Supper’ and includes the consecration of the bread and the wine. Martin was standing at the high altar, and began the prayer: ‘Te igitur, clementissime Pater. . .Therefore, oh most merciful Father.’ Suddenly, he was overtaken in a flash by an instant identity crisis. How dare he, how could he actually speak to God? The whole thing was unthinkable. He felt obliterated in the face of the assumption that he was to address God. For a moment he made as if to leave the altar, and said something to the Prior who was standing by him, to assist him at his first Mass, as was the custom, precisely in case the new celebrant experienced any difficulty. The Prior smiled and turned him back to his task. In a moment it was over. From the body of the church, nothing strange would have been noticed — the celebrant with his back to the congregation had to move about from time to time in any case. Martin returned to the text and continued the Mass, sweating and shaken, but safely couched again in the routine.

Writing in later years Luther said of this moment: ‘At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-struck. I thought to myself, "With what tongue shall I address such Majesty. . .Who am I that I should lift up my eyes . . ? At his nod the earth trembles. . . And shall I, a miserable pygmy, say I want this, I ask for that? For I am dust and ashes and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God"!’ The interesting thing is that the prayer, like almost every Christian liturgical prayer, does not in fact presume to address God directly. God is always addressed through his ‘Son’, Jesus. The prayer in question goes: ‘Therefore oh most merciful Father, through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord we come to thee. . .’, and Luther had known this for some time, probably many years. But, Jesus tended to be thought of as ‘God’ rather than ‘man’; and Luther’s mind was already tending towards a crisis; the paralysing four Latin words with which the prayer began had their effect regardless of what the rational mind knew would follow them; the moment of horror ensued. If linked to a psychosis about authority through his father, it would have been all the stronger and the more unbearable — the words addressed God precisely as ‘Father’.

Luther’s existential psychosis about addressing God had a respectable pedigree. The Jews had always refused to address Him directly—they had a name for him Jehovah, Yahweh, or ‘the Lord’. God himself was the unnameable the unmentionable, the one before whom one must veil one’s face. Here was Luther putting it to the test, psychologically, and nearly succumbing. His anguished internal cry, only marginally visible externally, was the first note of a theme which he was to orchestrate vastly in later years. The revolution he started was precisely about the matter of how man is to manage his relationship with that which men call God.

The Mass over, there followed the relaxation of the Rule usual on such occasions, with a celebratory meal in the Guest House, Father Braun and Martin’s other friends in attendance. But dominating the scene were the burghers of Mansfeld. They felt they could enjoy themselves now that the purpose of the visit had been fulfilled and they had witnessed the first Mass of Hans Luder’s son — Hans Luder who had further justified his visit with a substantial gift to the monastery. But now the second crucial event of this crucial day occurred. The whole business of his son’s vocation still rankled in Hans Luther’s mind. Martin had acted against his wishes, and resentment still glowed. Excited by the Prior’s best wine and beer he ragged Martin when the conversation turned to his decision to become a friar and priest, the thunderstorm, the vow. ‘Ha, so long as it wasn’t all some illusion of the devil,’ he said, with typical German badinage of the rather crude kind. Martin tried to explain, but his father was more than half serious and in no mood to be answered back:

‘Haven’t you heard the commandment Thou shalt honour thy Father and Mother"?’ This produced silence in the room, for a moment, Luther’s glands were working and his whole person was deeply embarrassed and upset, to judge by the frequency with which he returned to the event later in life. His father was suggesting on the basis of those authoritative Ten Commandments of the Old Testament that he should never have become a monk at all.

The day came to an end and Martin, chastened, could fall back into his place in the community as the junior priest. He was told to resume his University studies. It was, in its way, a comforting feeling, to be back at the beginning again of a lengthy journey, this time through the post-graduate stages. Father Martin was already earmarked as a future teacher. Study, especially study of the Bible, was a pleasure to him: ‘At first, in the monastery, I devoured the Bible.’ His theology tutor in the Friary, Father Nathin (Father Paltz had moved to be Prior in a Rhineland friary after a disagreement with his brethren at Erfurt), had known Biel and been one of his pupils.

Luther’s path was well marked out. First he would study for the Baccalaureus Biblicus, a five-year course which was often shortened in the case of good students from Religious Orders. This degree qualified a man to lecture on the Bible – at the moment Father Luther could lecture only in philosophy, on the strength of his Master’s degree, though he had not been called on to do so. After the biblical degree came another, two-year course leading to the crown of the Theology programme; by this final degree a man was designated Sententiarius, qualified to lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the key theology text in all theology schools, a great compilation of texts made in the twelfth century, and very widely commentated since then. After that there remained only a Doctorate in Theology, something which a man might or might not hope to obtain later in life.

After ordination, the young priest soon found celebration of Mass to be a rewarding experience. The worry about getting the rubrics perfectly right gradually resolved itself into the pleasure of achieving a satisfactory celebration of the rite. Luther took great delight in making the rite as nearly as possible adequate to that which it signified. Sometimes this would be out in the town, or in one of the villages, and Martin felt he was playing his part in the divine economy. ‘I was a great archpapist and a really valiant knight of the Mass’ in those days, so he said later. Social status went hand in hand with spiritual and pastoral duty. From the day of this ordination, in spite of accusations of failure to honour him, Luther’s father addressed his son no longer in the familiar second person singular, but with respect in the second person plural. He was ‘Father Martin’ now.

The university programme supplemented by a theology programme in the cloister itself (often the same teacher), was heavy. When attendance in choir had to be missed on account of a lecture, the office missed had to be made up by a private recital later. The days were full, Martin’s deepening response to the round of psalm and prayer, to the study of how man was meant to live, set his emotions ever more stingingly alight, sometimes affirmatively, often negatively. His tendency to depression led him to despair of ever being able to measure up to the set standard, of ever being able to love God. Christ’s arms outstretched seemed to promise a threat rather than an embrace. In later days he said he often imagined Christ sitting in judgement on him at the Last Day. He took up the common practice of prayer to Mary to hold back the arm of her son, justly threatening. He had a round of twenty-one saints to whom he prayed, three at each Mass, for the seven days of the week. ‘The communion of saints’, which in one sense was understood as a sign of present glory, a realisation here and now of a share in the glory of God and his saints in ‘the last times’, became a kind of last hope, a rescue operation. As the despair mounted, Martin saw it as a terrible temptation of the devil. What from a clinical point of view was an attack of acute depression, to him was indeed an attack, but an attack of the devil, an almost physical attack on the inner citadel of his soul. ‘Anfechtung’ was the word Luther came to use for this which was at the same time an ‘attack’ and a ‘temptation’, and something which, at last, he declared to be the only way to find out what theology was really about. Only after an experience of this kind does one fully understand one’s need, fully grasp man’s essential destitution when acting on his own.

Martin took to going to confession frequently. From now on for the next six or eight years his disquiet grew and grew, until he found an answer which at the same time satisfied his intellect and gave him some sense of relief in a wider sense. At times the disquiet became extreme, bordering on some kind of breakdown. In 1518, he wrote of what he had felt not many years before. He was explaining what he took to be the pain of someone, after death., suffering in ‘purgatory’ before admission to heaven, and then went on, quite clearly referring to himself:

I myself ‘knew a man’ [he quotes from St Paul’s famous description of himself being taken up in ecstasy which begins ‘I knew a man’] who claimed that he had often suffered these punishments in fact, over a brief period of time. Yet they were so great and so much like hell that no tongue could adequately express them, no pen could describe them, and one who had not himself experienced them could not believe them. And so great were they that, if they had been sustained or had lasted for half an hour, even for one tenth of an hour, he would have ceased to exist completely and all of his bones would have been reduced to ashes. At such a time God seems terribly angry, and with him the whole creation.

The passage leads onto a description of a kind of mystical suffering with Christ: ‘. . . All that remains is the stark naked desire for help and a terrible groaning, but it does not know where to turn for help . . . In this instance the person is stretched out with Christ so that all his bones may be counted, and every corner of the soul is filled with the greatest bitterness, dread, trembling and sorrow of a kind that is everlasting.’ Allowing for all the natural forcefulness of Luther’s style and for the customary emphasis of contemporary language, this remains a witness to a psychological experience of a devastating kind.

A case could be made for saying that Luther became hysterical at times. One of his greatest detractors, later in the century, mounted a case of this kind. Cochlaeus records that he was told by one of Luther’s brethren that on one occasion he shouted out in choir, ‘It’s not I, it’s not I’ when the passage was being read from the gospel which describes the cure of the deaf mute, and that he fell over in a swoon. Not too much credence can be put on this; at the same time the supposed event is something that one can imagine happening to Luther in his early days as friar. But to make this a prime symbol of a portrait of an hysteric or someone mentally unreliable, is not possible. Martin was to make and keep friends of a notably able kind. Promotion was to come quickly, and frequently, both in responsibility within the Order and within the University. He was not ‘unbalanced’. Yet already it is clear that Martin had something unusual about him. His own writings witness to this. Later in life he would relish the memory of a remark to him from someone finally out of patience with his endless complaints about God’s anger. ‘You are a fool! God is not angry with you. You are angry with God.’ And in retelling this Pastor Luther commented, ‘That was very well said, although it was before the light of the gospel.’ Although this was said from within the Church of the old days, he recognised it as true and something which had helped him, a distraught young man on his way, with its down-to-earth humour and insight into his temperament, aggressive and depressive.

The Psalms with their frequent agonising calls of man to God became a favourite source of expression. Later in life, when Luther was composing words and music for Saxon hymns from the Latin Psalms, the first one he did was ‘Out of the depths I have cried to Thee oh Lord. . .’, a Psalm used in the old Roman liturgy for requiems, and used, in Luther’s Saxon version, at his own funeral. With its words of sombre suffering it always appealed to Luther: ‘If you take note of our sin, Lord; Lord who can survive? . . From the morning watch even to the night let Israel hope in the Lord.’

But Luther’s troubles were not such as to strike his superiors as markedly different from those of other dedicated young religious with their scruples, their enthusiasm for study, and their surfeit of energy. On the contrary his application to study and his observance of the Rule were noted; and he had developed a satisfactory speaking voice, in conformity with the specific requirements of clear enunciation. It was just these things which led to an unexpected change in his life.

One characteristic has still to be added to the picture of the young graduate at Erfurt. Martin suffered from depression. The first time there is some hint of this is a reference to a mood in the period after his finals, a time of anti-climax when, having attained ones goal, there seems to be nothing so well defined left. It seemed to be so for Luther, and other things conspired to depress him. A close friend had died. And there was a month before his post-graduate course started. The course itself excited little enthusiasm in Luther’s mind. The future indicated to him by his tutors and his father was study of the Law. Hans Luther looked to his son to become a successful man in the local community, a good lawyer, well married. Perhaps even service to the Elector, or the Emperor, might be envisaged.

Conventional society was closing in. But Martin’s discontent was not just a matter of the perennial discomfiture of the young man viewing society with a jaundiced eye, realising with dismay the actual limits of the options available to him. There was something deeper seated. Sensitive, fond of music, rather afraid of his father, and of all authorities, religiously inclined, very intelligent, unfulfilled emotionally, perhaps no more than half awakened sexually — some of the characteristics of the pedigree western intellectual seemed to be emerging. However, these characteristics went along with the vigour of the Saxon peasant stock, the blunt and realistic honesty of a man who faces the facts and acts on them. It was a strange and explosive mixture, this capacity for appraisal, judgement, action, together with great nervousness, an almost neurotic dimension to the capacity for effective action.

Just now a pall of uncertainty, and a sense of inadequacy and apathy inappropriate to, but not untypical of, gifted young men, hung over him. In Luther’s case it was a built-in physical and psychological syndrome, already beginning to be entrenched in a series of experiences. Physically there were the symptoms which became so marked later on in his life, sweating, constipation and general nervousness. Constipation became so much trouble that later the letters often have a reference. At thirty-seven he would complain in a letter to a friend: ‘. . . Defecation is so hard that I am forced to press with all my strength, even to the point of sweating, and the longer I delay the worse it gets.’ Psychologically, he could get very merry but also very sad. Later in life he would say of melancholy: ‘Those who are troubled with melancholy ought to be very careful not to be alone. . .’ and again ‘Watch out for melancholy. . . it is so destructive to one’s health.’ It was certainly the voice of experience speaking. At that time, aged fifty, he had taken the measure of the affliction, and had even used the attacks to enhance his theology; it was almost his most familiar experience. But in his twenty-second year he was only just beginning to wonder what was hitting him when he was suddenly overwhelmed with this sadness and heartless misery. It was undoubtedly the dreaded modern plague, depression.

The medievals knew about it and had also identified and categorised it, in their own terminology, as deadly. Despair, the abandonment of hope, was the ultimate theological category for it. The depressive is precisely in the grip of despair. The medievals saw it as a sin, indeed the final sin. The argument was simple, hardly needing to be made explicit. Life came from God; to despair of a good outcome for that life was then a kind of blasphemy. On the surface the argument looks brutal to the twentieth-century clinician, because the depressive, it seems, cannot help himself. Nevertheless, as theory, the judgement is logical — the abandonment of hope, despair, is the final ‘sin’ whether or not the subject is really responsible for it. Dante reflected society’s assessment conversely in his famous motto set over the gates of hell: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’

The way to this despair was the emotion of sadness, tristia. Luther, in his later years, warned severely against indulging in this emotion. Even accedie, boredom, apathy, dry indifference, was known as a deadly danger on the way down the slope. Melancholia was a growing obsession in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, symbolised by its apostheosis in Burton’s sixteenth-century English text, The Anatomy of Melancholy. The sophisticated Spanish court was a long way from Saxony, but the knight of the mournful countenance, Don Quixote, one can imagine in some kind of Thuringian¹ transposition. Throughout Europe the cathedrals offered opportunity for sculptors to provoke somewhat hollow laughter with their skin and bone effigies of ‘death’, set beside or over the memorial of a deceased prelate represented in all his earthly glory. Here the melancholy is laughed off the stage. But it was always ready to creep back with the musician’s lute, and the verses of a poet, or with the sheer horror of the mortality rate. At the first arrival of the Black Death, forty per cent of the population died.

Martin’s depressions were not so severe as to immobilise him, but they provided an important dimension for what followed. Graduation over, after a visit home, he settled in again, bought his law books, including the great Corpus Juris, the book of Canon Law, and registered for the course. It was May 1505. Martin had allowed things to take their course till now, and still did so. But at the back of his mind for years had been burgeoning an ideal — aim for the highest. There was only one highest in that world, in terms of ideas, and that was to become a monk or friar, to be a ‘religious’, someone utterly dedicated to God. It was a safe way, too. We do not know and probably It was largely unconscious, but it would have been like him to have smouldering in the back of his mind the attraction of this life. Probably it had been given no formal voice. Something was needed to fan the flame, and set it blazing. In this case a moment of terror did the trick. Lightning.

Martin was perhaps already in some state of disarray by late June. He had undertaken one of his walks home to Mansfeld. There was a five days’ break at this time running from Feast of SS Peter and Paul on 28 June to The Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin on 2 July. Martin was not much more than half a mile from the gates of Erfurt, in the afternoon of 2 Ju1y, returning to be ready for work the next day. He was at a little place called Stotternheim. Thunder clouds had built up, and suddenly the lightning flashed, a bolt striking right beside Martin who was knocked to the ground, though unhurt. In terror he shouted out: ‘Beloved St Anne! I will become a monk.’ St Anne was the patron saint of miners; Martin had heard prayers to her throughout his childhood perhaps more than to any other saint. He turned instinctively to her when in real trouble. The unconscious had spoken, in the language of current religious coin. In later years he described himself at the moment when the lightning struck as ‘walled around with the terror and horror of sudden death’ judgement loomed.

Back in Erfurt, Martin told his friends what had happened. Was he bound? Must he keep a vow, unpremeditated, spoken under such stress and with no witnesses? Most said no. A few said yes. His friend Crotus Rubeanus said, fourteen years later, that Luther’s final affirmative decision was a surprise, even a disappointment to his friends. Luther himself spoke of it as a sudden decision. But the historian has to add that, psychologically, it could not have been entirely unexpected. The decision gave Martin his first major act of independence. It was a way out and a way forward, and one which would be approved by religious authority. It would also solve any emerging emotional and sexual troubles. Any such incipient involvement or expectation had to be firmly abandoned. Above all Martin was taking his own life in hand, swiftly.

Within a fortnight he was having his last party, and saying goodbye to his fellow students, before going the next morning to the great gates of the Augustinian Friary which he had walked past so often as a student. No time had been lost. The Prior and the Novice Master needed a few days to consider the young man’s application to be admitted. Martin had himself to cancel his registration for the law course, sell his books, and settle his affairs. Of the books, Vergil and Plautus alone he took with him.

It was a classic picture, one of the best of the final small batch of graduates at one of the best universities deciding to opt for the most demanding sector of the local religious life. (The Carthusians indeed led a stricter life, but they were in fact hermits, never leaving the monastery, and in another category; vocations to their way of life were rare.) The Augustinians regarded the application from the successful young graduate as very satisfactory, part of the proper order of things. Martin himself was overawed at the thought of the tradition to which he was binding himself in a friary lately reformed under its own volition. The Order of Augustinian Eremites, to give them their full name, had the best reputation in Erfurt; and there would be every likelihood of further university work to come,

Yet somewhere at the very heart of all this reputation and status lay a contradiction of the original drive of the religious order. No one fully understood the contradiction. Spreading like an unobserved dry rot it would lead to the widespread and spectacular collapse of much of this way of life in less than two decades’ time. There were scandals of course; and even the very way the friars sometimes maintained themselves, by collecting cash gifts from the faithful when preaching, and encouraging them to gain an Indulgence (see Appendix) had for a long time been criticised. But there was something more fundamental.

The virtues of the ‘religious’ life — poverty, chastity and obedience — were the formal signs of the special life of prayer and dedication, but they had somehow ceased to be its raison d’etre. Like so many others, the Augustinian cloister had in fact taken on a life of its own as a social and economic unit in a society devoted to the maintenance of the policy and economy of the Church with all its complicated and expensive structures. Status, social and economic, had come to play the overriding part; the virtues had come, in a way, to be a function, even a decoration, of this important social unit, Instead of being primarily the special calling of a few, the religious life had become the profession of many. Theology had become, to a great extent, a vast rationalisation of this state of affairs.

To walk out into the streets of Erfurt in the Augustinian habit was to command respect. But there were those with resentments in society at large, some poor and ill-paid, who regarded all those committed full time to the Church as part of a well-heeled world into which they were not admitted. Critics from their own class were numerous enough for the clergy officials to be alert and ready with measures against those who seemed to threaten the structure with their criticisms. In a society still largely univocal, there was a feeling of something threateningly revolutionary about stinging criticisms from their own class. Neither side often thought in exactly such terms. In good faith the one attacked the established theories because they did not seem to tie in with the Gospel of Jesus Christ the ‘revelation’ of the New Testament. In good faith the other defended them as part of the Church’s guaranteed sacred interpretation of that revelation. But what made it all so tense was that these matters would quickly escalate into matters of life and death. The Church’s decision that a man was a ‘heretic’ led to his being handed over to the ‘secular arm’ of society, the political authority; heresy equalled treason. Burning was the normal retribution. Lollards were being tried and burnt quite frequently in England. A group of Catholic priests, members of the Church’s Dominican Order, had been declared to be heretics and burnt in Germany, within living memory. Only a few decades previously the famous preacher Savanorola, also a priest member of the Dominicans, had been burnt for heresy in the great piazza at Florence. All this added a hardness and an edge to theology and its practice; it became a political tool.

Inside the monastery and in the university the rules had become very strict, with detailed regulations about how far junior lecturers might go in doing anything more than expound a text as distinct from adding their own comments and glosses. Their lectures were regularly monitored by senior men. Canon Law ruled — with all the force of the received religion behind it, the certainty that through this law in a manner spoke the voice of God. Official theology had come to be a Freudian superego, the law-giver. Luther’s father-obsession was strongly tickled, his attraction to the system was all the stronger.

A religious community sharpens the personal characteristics of its individual members. Shut up together for life this company of men or of women breeds definition. It has rules, and conventions. The community does not have that mixed biological and psychological drive which commonly holds a family together. If the religious community is to prosper, it has to keep the Rule; even the conventions as distinct from the Rule are important and cannot be continually overlooked without danger of disruption. Since the purpose of the community is to release its members from the problems inherent in possessions, in sexual and family life and in the detailed and general ordering of one’s own life, so to be able to serve God through the prayer and work of the community, then the sense of importance attached to every item of its life can become unbeatable, or totally glorious. In practice, day by day, it is simply a hard grind, and often remains so throughout life. The rewards are considerable, streaming out along the psychological and spiritual to the social and practical. Substantial and speedy achievement is possible for such a community, and the sense of unity in spiritual purpose is thrilling. Failure is equally dispiriting, and the disunity and disagreement behind it disconcerting. Martin reacted to all this with his usual intensity. His ultra-sensitive antennae were dangerously fascinated by an atmosphere which seemed to offer both a total solution, complete security, and at the same time a sense of dynamic spiritual energy. The generic religious dimension was intensified: within a context of emphatic dependence were opportunities for initiatives springing from an inner spiritual freedom.

Martin was received as a ‘postulant’, and lived for a few weeks in the guest house, still to be seen just inside the great gates. During this period of preliminary vetting by the community, he wore his own clothes, but took full part in the church services in the fine Gothic church, and the daily life along with the other novices. Meanwhile, he had sent a message home about his great decision. His father was mad with rage when he heard what Martin had done. Later in life Luther recalled that his father had ‘cut me off from all further paternal grace’. Big Hans saw all his plans destroyed at a single blow. All that investment, the expense and careful planning of sixteen years of primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, was about to be handed over to the priests. But the rage was then, shortly after, cancelled out. The plague was sweeping across Thuringia. Several university lecturers and students died in Erfurt. At Mansfeld two of Martin’s brothers died. Friends told Hans Luther that this was divine retribution: he relented sufficiently so as not absolutely to oppose Martins formal entry into the Augustinian Order.

Within the walls Martin found peace. The days and nights went by with a regularity and a rhythm to which his body and mind quickly responded. Regular sleep; regular meals, few indeed yet adequate; the rhythm of the services in church, study, the meals in common, sleep in common — such rhythm was a great restorer. And, overall, a great silence for much of the time. There was no anxiety. He did what he was told to do.

After a few weeks as a postulant it was seen by the Novice Master that Martin was behaving as he should, and could be admitted formally to the novitiate. This was done at the first of three serious initiation-type ceremonies, to be spread over the next two years. In this first the postulant was clothed. His secular clothes were formally removed and the new novice was clothed in the habit of the Order within which he intended to live for the next year in the hope that at the end of that time, he would be admitted fully and allowed to take vows, which would bind him for the rest of his life.

Brother Martin lay prostrate before the altar, arms stretched out in the form of a cross in the great church, while the Prior recited: ‘Lord Jesus Christ our leader and our strength, Thou has set aside this servant of Thine by the fire of holy humility from the rest of mankind. We humbly pray that this will also separate him from carnal intercourse and from the community of earthly deeds through the sanctity shed from heaven upon him and that Thou wilt bestow on him grace to remain Thine.’ This was but one of numerous prayers, exhortations and warnings — the latter included a list of all the unpleasant things which the novice must expect, the restricted diet, the cold, the rising to recite the Office in church while it was still dark, the shame of having to go begging in the streets. The ceremony had a strong psychological resonance. The habit provided a new, ready-made identity, and at the same time both an ideal and an ever-present reminder of rules and other people to be obeyed. The new identity was further rubbed home in the form of a haircut, the tonsure, a physical initiation.

Brother Martin now moved into the Friary proper. With the other monks he slept in the large upstairs dormitory, ate in the refectory, listening to suitable reading at the same time; and had his stall in the church for the services which were patterned across the day and some of the night These services were centred on the recitation of the sacred poetry of the Jews, the 150 Psalms, which the early Jewish Christians had continued to recite when they became followers of Jesus, and which had become the staple Christian prayer. Martin had these Psalms off by heart within a year or two. And it was the Psalms which would be the chosen subject of his very first lectures in the university when he was twenty-nine. Meanwhile, the impressionable young brother of twenty-one was feeding on the rich diet of the Bible, both in choir and his cell. He had a copy for his own use with a red cover to it, as he recalled in later years. In it he found the great myths of the creation, the fall, the flood, the escape from Egypt, the promised land, the twelve tribes, the exile, the prophets, all full of Semitic poetry and wisdom, and great human stories, followed by the incomparable religious texts of the New Testament — ‘He who would save his life must lose it’. All his life he had heard readings. short excerpts, in the regular church services, but now he read right through the Bible, and then began to study it seriously. By the time he came to lecture he had by heart long sections from all over the text, and was able to quote with extraordinary facility. It is a commonplace that memories were incomparably more efficient and enabled people to recall large quantities of written material in the days when the mind was not bombarded all day long with verbal sights and sound. But Luther had a special gift in this direction over and above the widespread facility. The Bible came to be his most familiar and most loved text. His reading of the Latin classics had given him an appetite for well-shaped language, and the Bible came to be for him, not just words but The Word.

Brother Martin was totally at the service of religion, a neophyte, new born. His depressions had retreated for the time being. ‘I experienced in myself and in many others how quiet Satan is in the first years of monastic life,’ Luther would tell his friends in later years. Apart from anything else, the sheer novelty of the life made a great impact. Within a few months the hardships were beginning to bite as the winter came on and there was heating nowhere except in one room where the brethren could go to warm up if the cold became too intense; and with Advent at the beginning of December the meals fell to one a day with only some dry bread and wine in the evening. But this was all grist to his mill. He read the Lives of the Fathers and wondered at the austerities of the desert hermits: ‘I used to imagine such a saint, who would live in the desert, and abstain from food and drink and live on a few vegetables and roots and cold water.’ His Novice Master was a father in God to him and enabled him quite easily to adapt himself to the life, ‘a fine old man’ and a ‘true Christian’ as Luther referred to him later. The community spent between four and five hours a day in church. The time that was over from this and other monastic exercises Brother Martin spent in memorizing the Rule and other such texts, studying the Augustinian tradition, and doing some chores about the house, including cleaning the latrines. Then there was begging in the town with a sack on one’s back.

Silence was obligatory for most of the day, and a series of signs were used to substitute for the ordinary business of life, asking for the butter at table or enquring what the time was. There were set times of recreation when conversation was normal. The atmosphere in the house was influenced by Father Johann von Staupitz, Head of the Saxon-Thuringian province of the Order, and author of the new statutes for the thirty reformed or ‘observant’ friaries. He was a man of insight who tried to keep a high standard of observation without going to extremes. He had the knack of understanding others, and of enabling an authentic religious dimension to flower within the dangerous ambience of the social and political authoritarianism which continually threatened o destroy it. At this time, he was often away in Wittenberg where he had recently co-operated with Elector Frederick in founding a new university; its philosophical and theological sector was largely in the hands of the Augustinians who had had a house in the town for many years. But as provincial Superior of the Order, Staupitz called in at Erfurt from time to time, trying to keep the numerous tensions at a low pitch. From the first he was excited about the arrival of the brilliant young graduate from the university, with a suggestion of some special charisma about him.

Another friar of outstanding importance in the Friary during Martin’s first year was Johann Jeuser von Paltz, head of theological studies in the house for the last twenty years, also a professor of theology in the University. Like Martin, be had come to the cloister from the University. He was a man of high spiritual and theological reputation, who went on preaching tours, which combined encouragement of piety among the faithful with financial service to the monastery since Indulgences were the principal reward that he offered the listeners. In 1502 he had a set of his sermons printed under the title ‘The Mine of Heaven’. It proved a valuable mine for the Friary which was able to complete the rebuilding of their library with the income. The library would itself further contribute to the theological and spiritual standards of the Friary. The sermons would help the numerous people who heard them to keep on the right path in this world and to save their souls in the next. The widespread criticism of Indulgences he thought of as the perverse ravings of ill-instructed fools.

The twelve months went by, and before the end of the summer in 1506 Brother Martin was recommended by the Novice Master for full profession of vows. The second initiation ceremony was held, again before the altar in the church, and even more solemn moments. Holding a lighted candle in his hand, Luther said aloud in front of the whole community: I, Brother Martin, do make profession and promise obedience to Almighty God, to Mary the Sacred Virgin, and to you, the prior of this cloister as representative of the general head of the order of Eremites of the holy bishop, St Augustine, and his rightful successors, to live until death without worldly possessions and in chastity according to the rule of St Augustine.’ He received the reply, ‘Keep this Rule, and I promise you eternal life.’ The next stretch of time led up to the crown of his new life, ordination to the priesthood. During this year, Martin’s inner tensions began to tangle with the tensions in the community, and a worrying sadness took over from time to time, while great inner joy was also experienced by him. The momentum of life within the conventional structure carried him forward on its flowing tide.

NOTES:

1. Thuringia is the geographical area of wooded hills and valleys roughly including Eisenach and Weimar down to Coburg.

Mansfeld, where Martin Luther was brought up, was a small country town, with a population of a little over 3000. Its walls were stout and ancient, with four corner towers. Outside and on a hilltop was the great castle of the Counts of Anhalt. Altogether the place provided a sense of security, implying a certain doubt about security outside the walls of town or castle. The townsfolk at Mansfeld as elsewhere felt superior to the countryfolk who lived outside on the farms and came to Mansfeld to sell their produce and buy what they needed. In a sense everyone was ‘rural’ — almost everyone had a fair smattering of knowledge about crops and cattle and country matters. But, inside the walls, the burghers thought highly of themselves, all the more so since they themselves were subservient to the princes of Church and State. The town community, although lacking modern police, and subject finally to the will of the local ruler, was able to regulate its own economic and political affairs. Within it the Church operated as a separate privileged corporation. A sizeable slice of local affairs was in its affluent, authoritarian, often corrupt but also quite often sincere and able hands.

Mansfeld had at its centre the Church of St George, and near to it the town school, to which Martin went at the age of seven. He had been born not at Mansfeld, but at Eisleben, late at night, and was baptised the next day, 11 November, St Martin’s Day, 1483. It was the following year that Margaret and Hans Luder as they usually spelt it) moved with the baby to Mansfeld and settled there for good.

The town was set in a variegated landscape of forest and field. Copper mining occupied as many people as the farms. The copper was sold to travelling merchants, Mansfeld being on the route from Nuremberg to Hamburg — Hamburg and the sea

which hardly anyone in this inland area had ever seen. Martin’s grandfather was a farmer, but the farm went to a younger son. His father had taken up mining, at first working for someone else, before he gradually built up his own business. Before Martin was eight, his father, along with a partner, had a lease of a foundry, having borrowed capital from a merchant — he was a shareholder in one of the small firms engaged in mining. He was a success. ‘Big Hans’, as he was called, was elected in 491 to be one of the ‘Four’, representatives of the citizens, who sat on the town council — ‘Big Hans’, to distinguish him from his brother ‘Little Hans’, who was frequently in the courts for brawling and use of a knife when his temper was roused. Hans Luther’s identity as a respected senior citizen is attested by the inclusion of his name in a list of citizens requesting the local bishop for a special Indulgence to be attached to the local church in 1497. By 1511 he was part owner of not less than six mines and two foundries.

In the last years of their lives, Martin’s parents were painted by Cranach the Elder. The paintings show the rough, determined, resigned faces of hard-working small proprietors. Big Hans was tough, shrewd, earthy, sometimes drinking a little too much beer; but, said Martin, this brightened the family atmosphere. His father was ‘by nature a jovial companion, always ready for fun and games!’ His mother Margaret nee Lindernann) has a suffering look about her, and seems to have had the strong traditional piety of the age. Her sharp eyes are the same as the famous glinting eyes of her son, which Cranach often portrayed — he lived in Wittenberg and came to the painting of Luther’s parents from a very close friendship with Martin of over ten years.

If there was a convivial atmosphere most of the time, it was within the context of hard physical facts. Birth and death were frequent events. Plague, bubonic and other, was a regular visitor. There was a new child in the family most years; perhaps half or more died. Nobody could remember how many there had been. Eight were living when Martin was twenty-two. He was the eldest. Discipline within the family as in society at large was equally rough and ready. There was a lot of beating which Luther continued to resent for the rest of his life. He remembered the severity of both his mother who beat him for stealing a nut, drawing blood, and of his father who laid into him so hard on one occasion that it took the father some time to get Luther (so he said) to stop holding a grudge against him. ‘My parents kept me under very strict discipline, even to the point of making me timid.’ But these strongly felt statements in the ‘Table Talk’ are immediately followed by: ‘they meant it heartily well.’ This quite lengthy passage is full both of tension and of understanding: ‘It’s a bad thing if children and pupils lose their spirit on account of their parents and teacher.’ It is clear that Luther thought his parents, combined with his schoolmasters, managed to cow him. ‘They weren’t able to keep a right balance between indulgence and punishment. One must punish in such a way that the rod is accompanied by the apple.’ This passage also contains a classic piece of hindsight: ‘By such strict discipline they finally forced me into the monastery.’ He is speaking, at the age of fifty-two, about an event in his early twenties. In fact, he entered the monastery in direct opposition to his father’s wishes. What he sees, however, looking back, is a young man, so fearful of all the demands of life and religion that he thought the best thing to do was to retire from it to a monastery. The argument suited the general religious polemic of the later Luther. But there was insight here, as well as hindsight. Luther had a sense of inferiority, and believed its origins to lie in the sometimes over-strict home regime. It may also have postponed the flowering of Luther’s energies and abilities, heightening them when they did burst forth with an almost pathological force.

Luther’s relationship with his father in adult life was important, and involved great tension between the two of them. Big Hans was a forceful character and, although law abiding, a man with the same drive that got his brother into trouble with the peace-keeping authorities, and later his son into collision with some of the establishment structure of society. During Martin’s childhood his father must have dominated at home, as he dominated also at work. Luther was frightened of him at times. Later he was grateful as he realised that his father’s success had enabled him to go to school.

Luther recalled that his mother used to go out, like many others to gather the firewood for the house from the surrounding forests. Later in life Luther, with his wife, engaged in a good deal of gardening and small farming, and drew on the early experience, of his parents, his grandfather, and of his uncle who had inherited the old family farm.

In spite of regular visitations by the plague, and the threats to health and safety from both disease and, in the countryside, occasional robbers, there was an emphatic though provisional economic and social stability. No foreign troops had threatened the town or district for many years, no recruiting sergeant threatened to take away the young men of the district; though occasionally disbanded mercenaries or followers of the few remaining knights, were a danger. And it was only a few hundred years since a finally settled civilisation had arisen. Everyone carried weapons. It was a special proviso of university examination boards that such weapons were not to be carried into the examinations. Violence lay thin below the surface. University authorities sometimes stood in danger of assassination for failing to pass a candidate.

There was a long-established system of rights and proprietorship; it was a society which was a large step on from subsistence economy, through trade, banking and regular communications, This stability needed to be called provisional because of the bitter resentment of property and monopoly rights felt from time to time by apprentices, journeymen, the generally less privileged, and by the peasants throughout the countryside. The stability was anchored to religion and its highly structured expression of the Christian ‘Myth’. Ritual observance and inner devotion gave a strong motivation to numerous norms at all points of behaviour. But partly blanketing this motivation was a universal resentment of the privileges, economic and legal, of the very numerous clergy.

Though solemn and serious in background, religion provided more occasions for jollification than the opposite. ‘Holy days’, which were holidays, were numerous, commonly the celebration of the life and achievement of a saint. The annual cycle of seasons, roughly attuned to the life of Jesus, with its main stages at Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, the Ascension and Whitsun, were again more joyful than sombre. A hint of the atmosphere survives in the continued celebration of carnival in Europe today, particularly the festive goings-on in the older German towns during the enormously long carnival season from St Martin’s Day (11 November) till Shrove Tuesday in February.

The reverse side was sombre. There was a final reckoning to come, a ‘last judgement’. The ‘four last things’, death, judgement, heaven or hell, were commonly depicted on the frescoed walls, or sculptured stone in the church. Even the crucifix came, so Luther says, to have for him a threatening appearance — the suffering Christ, arms at full stretch, seeming to hang over him, demanding more than he could ever give. Keyed in with this was something of hysteria and violence to be seen not only in movements like those of the flagellants who whipped themselves in public, and of the craze for relics of every kind, but in the art of the time too. In Diner’s famous pictures of Melancholy and of The Knight, Death and the Devil, and even more in Grunewald’s pictures of the crucifixion there is a kind of desperation. In trying to reach a truly actual depiction of the horror of the subject, the painters imparted a sense of despair, or expectation of terror, which became a common psychological coin.

Along with this dark side of religion went the widespread ‘superstition’, belief in the work of evil spirits, witches and the like. Luther’s father spoke of the injuries he had seen on a miner’s body, made by an evil spirit. His mother believed one of her children to have been killed by a witch. Luther believed that a lake in Prussia was haunted by evil spirits, and certainly attributed many troublesome events, including his own ill health, to preternatural influence. Partly it was simple lack of knowledge of how thunder and lightning work and a hundred other mechanisms of the natural world; partly it was response to the mystery of life itself, the human potential for malice and for love, a mystery which still calls for answers beyond those easily formulated by the human sciences.

‘Superstition’ is hardly a satisfactory description of the sense of ‘something else’ and the half-instinctive ‘pagan’ activities which went with it. Sound hypotheses can be advanced for various experiences of telepathy, sense of terror, and of healing, and of other things which come under the umbrella of extrasensory perception. Religious activity and phenomena are not adequately identified as merely subjective or merely functions of other systems, biological, psychological and sociological. Understood in their own right, they comprehend everything, the whole of a person’s experience. Instead of there being no room left for religion, it could be that today there is only a little room left for superstition. Many phenomena previously thought of as part of a world of superstition may be seen to have a genuine religious validity; or the phenomena themselves may be seen after all to be systematic parts of the mechanics of new models of the cosmos.

If such a position is to be acceptable some definition of the genuinely religious is needed. Two components stand out: dependence and freedom. (1) Man is genuinely free, he can take decisions which are not predictable. Most notably he is a ‘moral’ being. In his relations with other people, he can act from the dictates of his own conscience; at its highest the relationship of love can be elevated to a degree of complete service and good will which seems to transcend the space-time continuum. (2) The sense of this extra dimension is that which leads to a recognition by man of his final dependence on something which must also, in some sense, be the organising principle of the whole cosmos. These two are the characteristics of the genuinely religious. Their presence, and their absence, enabled Luther’s parents and Martin himself to feel a sense of rightness and of satisfaction in their religious life, and equally distress and revulsion at its exploitation and corruption.

Hans found that he had a very promising boy, one who could do honour to the family and to the town. Rather than apprentice him in his own business, or some other, he decided to send Martin to school. At primary schools the Trivium, the threefold discipline of grammar, logic and rhetoric was taught. Often, perhaps, the students got little further than grammar. But they also did some music, at any rate in the form of the songs which all schoolchildren sang frequently in the street. In the case of older children away from home this was a means to begging at least a part of their daily bread. All teaching was in Latin and began with the standard religious prayers, the Pater Noster (‘Our Father’), the creed, and the Ten Commandments. There was a standard grammar text book, an old classic work by Aelius Donatus. Latin was the language of all educated people. German was forbidden in school to older boys, even in the playground, and most rigidly in the classroom. People who had been to school in the end found it easier to use Latin than German for many professional purposes. Shorthand notes of meetings often used a combination of Latin and German, and the combination became very common in popular writing and songs.

Martin found his schoolmasters at Mansfeld to be no less strict than his parents, according to many comments: ‘Ah, what a time we had on Fridays, with the lupus and on Thursdays with the parsings from Donatus.’ The lupus (wolf)was the Latin name for the senior pupil who acted as prefect and reported any misdemeanours such as speaking German. Donatus’s grammar seems to have given trouble even to Martin Luther, but probably he was remembering some of the less gifted pupils and their miseries when he said of these parsing sessions: ‘These tests were nothing short of torture. Whatever the method that is used, it ought to pay attention to the difference in aptitudes and teach in such a way that all children are treated with equal love.’

In 1496 Martin, now twelve, was sent away to school, to the great commercial and cathedral town of Magdeburg, forty miles down the Elbe on the way to Hamburg, the famous trading port. The journey itself was undertaken by Martin in company with the son of one of his father’s business associates at Mansfeld. This was Hans Reinecke, a little older than Martin; the two of them were to remain friendly for the rest of their lives.

Magdeburg, the first sizeable town he had seen, was a revelation to Martin. Instead of one main paved street, there was a medley of surfaced streets, churches, buildings of all kinds, and all the noise of a busy urban and commercial environment to be found in a town with a population of 12,000. He was on his own For the first time, and in a quite new dimension. He had the fun of going round with a group of other schoolchildren singing from house to house — the traditional way of earning something to help defray living costs. They were at the cathedral school. Some of the teachers were from the house of the Brethren of the Common Life, recently established in Magdeburg. This was an Order founded in the Netherlands in the previous century, intended to provide a way of dedicating one’s life, with the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but without becoming a priest. The idea was to devote oneself to work for the good of society, often to teaching. The brothers preferred a quiet, contemplative kind of piety to the more demonstrative kind of liturgy. From this they got the popular name of Nullbruder, which is how Luther referred to them later in life. They probably contributed their quota of serious and devoted, one might reasonably say authentic, religion to Luther’s makeup.

There is only one other reference in Luther’s writings to his year at Magdeburg. This was to his seeing an old man, a Franciscan friar, carrying a bag of bread which he had begged. He looked very ascetic and exhausted to the boy’s eyes, ‘the picture of death, mere skin and bones’. Martin was overcome with wonderment and a secret wish to emulate him, when he was told that this wizened old man was not in fact so very old, and was no less than one of the Dukes of Anhalt who had left his affluent circle and devoted himself to the strict life of a friar.

The impact of such a sight on Martin was part of his awakening to the greatest single driving force in church and society. The ‘religious orders’ were single sex communities of monks or friars, and of nuns. These ‘religious’ took the three vows: to own nothing personally, to be obedient to the head of their community, and to live a celibate life. ‘Monk’ was generally used for members of the older orders using the Rule of St Benedict sixth century AD) who remained in the same monastery for life and were broadly ‘contemplatives’. Friar was used for the modern orders of men who were committed to working in society, and to ‘passing on the fruits of contemplation’, and were frequently moved from one friary to another.

The early monks in Europe had practised a subsistence economy. They had been so successful at it that they quickly became rich and the abbeys were the greatest landowners after the monarchs themselves. The strict rule enabled them to work more effectively than any other group in society. The sheer efficiency of people keeping a strict rule and living without family ties was such that the religious orders had become not only a spiritual ideal but a kingpin of society. Add to these considerations the current theological theory that ‘the religious life’ was a way of perfection and offered greater prospects for salvation than other ways of life, and it is not difficult to see how the monks, the friars and the nuns became so ubiquitous. And given the resultant wide ranging power, it is not difficult to see how devastatingly corruption was able to seep into the communities at every level, and in every way.

For the following ten years the power of the ideal reverberated in Martin’s mind. The habits were to be seen daily in the street, and inside them all conditions of men and women, but always some whose devotion and holiness impressed him.

Next year Martin was moved to another school; this was at Eisenach, as far away again from his home but in the opposite direction. The Luthers had relations there, including the man elected mayor the year of Martin’s arrival. This was Heinrich Lindemann, brother of Luther’s mother. At Eisenach Luther continued with the normal curriculum, and in a setting which appealed strongly to his artistic sense. In later times he often referred to his love of the good old town of Eisenach’. With a population of only 2000, set on the edge of the Thuringian forest, it was picturesque as it still is. Above it towered the hill on which was the great castle of the Wartburg. Already so old that it was no longer in regular use by the local Wettin princes, the castle was for military and special occasions, for hunting parties and security, and would sometimes be used to house an unexpected guest who wished not to be seen in the town. As such it was to play an important part in Luther’s own life. In the thirteenth century it had been the residence of the Landgrave of Thuringia, and in the time of the Landgrave Hermann the Minnesingers and the epic poets, and notably Walter von Vogelweide, came to it. In the nineteenth century it became a central inspiring symbol for a number of Wagner’s operas. Musical life was strong in all German towns and in their schools, specially so at Eisenach.

Martin imbibed the traditional culture and kept his place in a severe social hierarchy, shuttling between various respectable and well-set-up families, the Schalbes and the Cottas for whom he did baby sitting, and accompanied Heinrich Schalbe’s son to school. The Schalbes supported a charitable foundation, the Collegium Schalbe, a small alms house community. The town was full of churches and the ringing of bells. Martin went to Vespers on Sunday evenings and acquired a great love of the Magnificat, and a lifelong devotion to Mary the Mother of Jesus, which was not lessened in later years by new ecclesiastical styles. Again there was singing in the streets and the memory of an angry voice shouting as the boys ran away from a door thrown open, only to return when it was clear that the voice was offering them some sausage. Commerce, which had dominated the streets of Mansfeld and Magdeburg, was swamped at Eisenach by cloisters and schools. When in a polemical rather than a romantic mood, Luther later referred to it as a ‘nest of priests’; they were one in ten of the population.

Martin’s great-aunt Margarete and her husband Conrad Flutter befriended the boy. Hutter was sacristan of the church of St Nicholas. Ten years later Martin included him in an invitation to the first Mass he would celebrate as a priest, in a letter written to the rector of another church at Eisenach, the Rev. Johann Braun, a Franciscan friar with whom Luther kept up a friendship for many years. In a postscript to this same letter Luther tentatively suggested that the Schalbes would be very welcome, but feared he was being presumptuous even to suggest it on account of their superior social status.

A story retailed by Dr Matthkus Ratzeberger, Luther’s medical doctor at Wittenberg in later years, about the headmaster of Luther’s school at Eisenach, Johann Trebonius, tells of the customs to be found there. This master on entering the classroom would take off his scholar’s beret and bow to his students; his assistant masters were instructed to act likewise. His reason was that ‘God may intend many of them for burgomasters, chancellors, scholars or rulers’. This solid German self-respect went along with great care for discipline and convention and for the detail of the school work. The other side of it was an arrogance, and a carelessness about justice, which led to revolts among the poorest, and a certain self-indulgence. It was an affluent culture, rather decadent and unimaginative.

We get a useful echo of what Martin’s schooldays were like from sermons and letters of twenty years later. When he was forty-six, Luther published a ‘Sermon on Sending Children to School’, encouraging parents to send their children to school.

God wishes to make beggars into Lords. . . Look about you at the courts of all the kings and princes, at the cities and the parishes. . . There you will find lawyers, doctors, counsellors, writers, preachers, who for the most part were poor and who have certainly all attended school, and who by means of the pen have risen to where they are lords. Do not look down on the fellows who come to your door saying Bread for the love of God , and singing for a morsel of bread. . . I too was such a collector of crumbs, begging from door to door, especially in my beloved city of Eisenach — though afterwards my dear father lovingly and faithfully kept me at the University of Erfurt, by his sweat and labour helping me to get where I am. Nevertheless, I was once a collector of crumbs, and I have got where I am through the writer’s pen.

From this time comes Luther’s love of German proverbs and of Aesop’s Fables, and his ability with language. The gruelling mandarin world of grammar and syntax, at the same time sophisticated and effete, involving the memorising of long catalogues of types of expression turned out to be a tool he could use to enormous effect. He understood how these two disciplines are at the service of rhetoric, or ‘communication’; the sole purpose of language was to get across what one wanted to say. Meanwhile, however, rhetoric had its rules which had to be learnt by the schoolboy, now looking beyond the school to university.

Schooldays came to an end. Martin had fulfilled the early promise and was clearly university material. In the previous one hundred and fifty years, tertiary education had grown apace in German-speaking lands. For Luther’s father there were two universities to choose from within sixty miles of home. Leipzig was nearer but the less attractive of the two. Erfurt had a number of points in its favour, most notably that it was only thirty miles from Eisenach. Luther’s schoolmasters had sent many other pupils on to Erfurt University, and there was a regular exchange of information between the school at Eisenach and Erfurt. One of the lecturers at Erfurt, Johann Trutvetter, a future chancellor of the University, was a native of Eisenach. In the heart of Saxony, Erfurt was, like Eisenach, both a beautiful and a prestigious place, with something of the same traditional atmosphere about it. But Erfurt was on a far bigger scale, ten times the size, set on another attractive site surrounded by vineyards, forest and farmland. Martin’s move there was part of a natural progression through the best of the Saxon educational structure.

Erfurt University had a history of a hundred and fifty years, going well back behind the date of its first official registration in 1392. It was thus one of the older of the fifteen universities founded in central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Together they witnessed to the prosperity and the intellectual vigour of the region, as great in its way as that of Renaissance Italy, and far greater than that of England where no university had been founded subsequent to the thirteenth century foundations of Oxford and Cambridge, though Scotland could boast three universities founded in more recent times. The presence of the university had attracted houses of monks, friars, and nuns to the city, and by the time Martin arrived there were many, including communities of most of the best known orders — the Benedictines, Augustinians, Carthusians, Dominicans, Franciscans and Servites. Their various habits were to be seen daily in the streets, though in the case of the Carthusians only one or two lay brothers ever went outside the monastic walls. It was another veritable ‘priests’ nest’; indeed its local nickname was ‘Little Rome.’

The population was over 20,000. Economically the town depended much on the marketing of woad, the famous dye grown in the surrounding district, used for dyeing textiles and marketed to merchants who travelled through Erfurt to pick it up. The town itself was an ecclesiastical town, part of the property of the archbishopric of Mainz. This complicated its financial operations and tended to keep business away. The surrounding country was under the jurisdiction of the competing secular authority, the Ernestine branch of the Saxon House of Wettin. Dues had to be paid as boundaries were crossed. Inside Erfurt, too many authorities were taking their tax cut, and too much cash ended up, as interest on loans, in the hands of the bankers. There was chronic unrest, often breaking out in the form of angry protests by those at the bottom of the economic ladder. The contrast between their condition and that of the wealthy burghers and the over-numerous and sometimes very well-fed priests who often had little to do, was provocative. Preachers had been known to remind people that if a man was starving it was not a sin for him to steal. Outside the town walls lay a few pitiful shanty-type suburbs. Typhus was endemic and the plague a regular visitor; it had an open invitation in these slums.

The wealthy Augustiniac house was busy building new halls for library and rectory and also a lecture hall beside their great Gothic church, already a landmark in the town on their property which formed an island in the busy streets — the Order was wealthy, as a result of numerous bequests in the past century. There were many other fine buildings, including the Cathedral of Mary the Virgin, and the magnificent Church of St. Severus right beside it. Both stood, and still stand, on an eminence with a beautifully modulated flight of steps up to them. Higher up again behind them was the episcopal palace and the ancient Benedictine abbey, whose history took one back hundreds of years into Erfurt’s past; later, Napoleon would use it for stables, and today the German Democratic Republic uses it as a warehouse. Such architecture influenced the lives of those who lived in Erfurt. They were conscious of privilege. The buildings played their part in enhancing grand occasions such as the visit in October 1502 of the papal legate, the Cardinal Archbishop of Lurk, when there were great processions, with banners and litanies and hymns throughout the town.

When Martin arrived, he was not seeing Erfurt for the first time, since the city was directly on the route from Eisenach to Mansfeld. He had been used to do the three- or four-day journey on foot while at school. Erfurt was not so different from Magdeburg in being an important and sizeable city. But it had an air of ecclesiastical authority and of learning which impressed Luther. He was proud to belong to the University. He took his place with ease in the traditional religious set-up, within the structure of church occasions, Masses for the dead, Masses for all sorts of guilds and fraternities, veneration of relics, plans for pilgrimages.

Luther was never easily impressed by criticism of existing conventions or authority, though he must certainly have heard such criticism. His father and uncles occasionally let drop an oath about the behaviour of the clergy. Even at pious Eisenach, the schoolboys were not ignorant of the wheeling and dealing for ecclesiastical promotion. Many priests had no job save that of offering Mass daily, Enquiring minds asked what was the use of these pensioners and whether they might not have contributed a little more to the well-being of society. People in various parts of Europe had been asking this and similar questions for much more than a century. Numerous official synods and programmes had been drawn up to curb the abuses of moneyraising through Indulgences, and a wide variety of corrupt practices. But this very fact provided an effective inoculation against any really revolutionary movement. Everyone criticised the abuses and the clergy all the time. The strongest critics were often themselves members of the clerical class. Every reform programme got bogged down in a chorus of assent to it, and in the lack of will power to surmount the enormous difficulties inherent in any attempt to tamper with the finances and the Canon Law which immediately became involved.

The picture was also confusing because there was a widespread seam of strict observance. At Erfurt the priory of the Augustinians was one of a group entitled ‘observant’ on account of fairly recent commitment to a stricter regime than had previously been customary. The friars there followed a rule of considerable asceticism. The standard fasts, every Friday, and during other long periods of time including Lent, allowed for only one meal taken late in the day. Indulged in strictly, these fasts could and sometimes did undermine health. But at other times they ate and drank massively. The allowance of beer and wine on the numerous feast days saw them red faced as they left the table, Luther observed later.

At Erfurt certainly both sides of the coin were in full view, from the sometimes strict life of the observant Augustinians and the stricter life of the Carthusians, to the interference in daily affairs of the representatives of the Archbishop of Mainz. The Archbishop died in 1505 and in order to save the expenses involved in electing and then in providing for a new archbishop the seat was left vacant for eight years. It was then filled in an election of extraordinary irregularity. Twenty-three-year-old Prince Albrecht Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, who was already Archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of the diocese of Halberstadt, was elected in addition to his existing benefices. He had been under age for Magdeburg according to Canon Law, and he was still under age for Mainz. He had had to pay a great fine to Rome in order to get approval of the former; a further great fine was payable again for approval of the latter: a fine of 21,000 ducats for the appointment, and one of 10,000 ducats for wrongly accumulating ecclesiastical offices. This money was lent to him by the banking house of Fugger. It was to be repaid from cash collected by means of the preaching of an Indulgence which would encourage the faithful to do the good work of subscribing to church funds. Half of the proceeds would go to the building of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome (the present building) and half to the Fuggers, as the Archbishop’s repayment. That was ten years ahead; but this was the normal atmosphere of ecclesiastical affairs which had aroused intense criticism and resentment for many years. It was not only that every baptism, every marriage, every possible occasion involved some contribution. Reformers inside the Church were continually defeated by the problems involved in trying to see how both to maintain the Church in existence and to rid it of the incubus of this obviously corrupting structure.

The student Martin Luther came humbly into this complex world of the great Saxon university town of Erfurt. The University register of May 1501 shows that Martinus Ludher ex Mansfeldt was entered as a student in the faculty of arts. He was numbered thirty-eight out of 300 or so newcomers. He had a long oath to take in Latin, swearing by God and the gospels to obey the rector and the statutes, to refrain from creating disturbances in the University and in the town, to look to the University courts not to the town courts if he was in trouble, and to leave the University if commanded to do so. Universities were indeed part of that threefold magisterium of social authorities which operated throughout Europe, church, state and university.

Luther is listed among those who were able to support themselves. Big Hans had made the advance payment of twenty groschen, and had put enough money in Martin’s pocket to enable him to live as a student. Nearly all students were members of a particular college or Bursa as it was called, and Martin was almost certainly in St George’s. It was a stone building and had the nickname ‘beer-bag’ among the students. There was some kind of initiation ceremony of an unofficial student kind permitted by authority and defended by Luther many years later as a necessary bit of ‘experience’. But discipline in general was strict. Each Bursa had its college chapel and a lecture hall. The students slept in dormitories with a young lecturer close by under the same roof. The day began and ended with a service in chapel. During meals the Bible and other suitable books were read aloud. Dress had to be dignified. Special permission was required for exit after dark. There was no street lighting in Erfurt, and the carrying of lanterns was essential at night if numerous small brooks were to be avoided. The lantern count was used as a check to know who was absent.

When Luther was in a polemical mood in later years, he would say that the city was ‘a bawdy house and a beer house’. It was normal for such a city to have a tolerated brothel, a Frauenhaus, and Erlurt was no exception, although married men were forbidden to visit it. Sometimes it was engagingly called the Muhmenhaus, the Aunties’ House. Alter a great fire in 1472 the city council took responsibility for rebuilding it. Erotic and religious interest went side by side. Society was both permissive and conventional. Perhaps a cliche may be valid — the reaction from self-indulgence found an outlet in pilgrimages and formal religious gestures of all kinds, sometimes hysterical. As contemporary painting shows, from burgher to worker, from student to professor, from priest to bishop the town atmosphere was reassuring in its closeness and humanity. But in many European towns there was tension near the surface, and this was certainly so in Erfurt as in London: tension between the underdog and the authorities and the wealthy generally, tension between the whole populace and the clergy. Faced with such tension throughout his life, Luther had a lively sense of the importance of established authority as long as it was not blatantly tyrannical or unjust. When he came to live in Erfurt he was in a mood to reverence those who ran the University and the town, and to range himself on their side in any dispute.

In later years Luther remembered the seamy side of things, but he also remembered the impressive nature of the University and the satisfactory nature of participating in it, regretting the disappearance of much of the great tradition. He looked back with some yearning to the day of graduation for those taking their degrees of Master: ‘What majesty and splendour there was when one received his master’s degree. They brought torches to him and presented them. I think that no earthly joy could be compared with it.’

The first degree, the BA, could be taken in a minimum of eighteen months and Martin took it in just that time. It was fairly grinding work. To start with, the course was a completion of study he had already been doing in language, the complicated structure of logic and grammar. Bracketed with them was rhetoric. There was also the beginning of natural philosophy, and some study of nature largely as categorised by Aristotle. Aristotle also supplied the essential basis for the logical studies; the first text book on logic had been written by Luther’s own lecturer Trutvetter, who was also Rector of the University. There was much memory work, but the essential work was in the true academic tradition, in the sense that students were forbidden to take verbatim notes and had to digest the material and represent it at regular disputations, first daily in the college, and then at weekly public debates in the University’s faculty hall.

Luther soon became adept in propounding a hundred or so arguments for a thesis.

Once a year on 24 August there was a grand ‘free for all’ in the University lasting the whole day, when any proposition from the liberal arts could be put forward. Facetiousness was tempting and was not always avoided, even though forbidden. Luther recalled one of the jokes which related to the conventional posture usually given to statues of St Dominic and St Francis respectively: ‘Query: why is Dominic represented with threatening fingers, but Francis is always depicted with outstretched hands? Answer: Dominic is saying ‘‘Oh, Francis, what naughty fellows you have in your order", and Francis is replying ‘What can I do about it?’

Luther got through the exam, placed thirtieth out of a total of fifty-seven. Two-thirds of the students had already fallen away, as usual. Luther was a slow developer and was only to rise almost to the top in the finals. This first degree was taken by him in the autumn or 1502. It involved a promise under oath that he had studied the books set, and that he would lecture in the faculty of philosophy at the end of his course.

Study of the quadrivium, urn, for the Master’s degree, now began, and the student was set on a serious career. The quadrivium was something like a preliminary, but academically serious study of all that was known. The four headings were music, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry; and there were other studies which lay outside those formally required. In this latter area Martin found time to become closely acquainted with a selection of classical authors, long sequences of whose work he had off by heart, due to his remarkable gift of memory. Throughout his life he could quote easily from Vergil, Plautus, Ovid and Livy; and he read at this time also Juvenal, Horace and Terence.

Martin’s artistic side developed, and he became an expert musician. He was known among his comrades as an excellent lute player, and one who enjoyed singing. He had a chance to practise his music when lying up after an accident. When journeying cross country a short sword was carried, and Martin had one with him on his occasional walks home to Mansfeld. On one of these occasions, near the end of the return journey, after resting before the last mile or two, he cut himself severely with his sword through some carelessness. He lost a great quantity of blood both then and again during the following night when the wound which a doctor had bound broke open again. Luther remembered the occasion as one of some panic when he prayed to Mary the Mother of Jesus for help, and then of a time of convalescence when he was able to indulge his love of music.

Martin enjoyed university life, but attracted little attention apart from being recognised as a most promising student. To judge by his capacity for typically German buffoonery on occasion in later life and his ability to drink deeply, he must have been in these respects a normal student. The University turned out to be an almost perfect preparation for the life he was to lead. Erfurt gave him the entree into the cultural life of Germany, and indeed of sixteenth-century Europe. He met there many of the people who would become close friends or remain acquaintances for the rest of his life, and many of whom would play some part in the unfolding drama which was to be set in motion by himself. A fellow student who was also destined to join the same Order, was Johann Lang. Another who would eventually become the chaplain, librarian and right-hand man in religious matters of the Saxon Elector, Frederick, at Wittenberg was Spalt. Another again was the poet Johann Jager from Hesse who liked to change his name to the Latinised Crotus Rubeanus, to signify his allegiance to the humanist movement.

Scholars who liked to call themselves humanists found in Erfurt one of their perennial meeting places; it was not the principal centre of the humanist movement, but the leaders visited it regularly. The Italian Renaissance was becoming naturalised in northern Europe. Saxon humanists had been visiting Italy for some decades. These men had glimpsed the idea that beyond all the philosophical and theological systems lay the study of man and the study of the means he used to express himself. As humanists they tended to distance themselves intellectually from the somewhat claustrophobic curricula of the largely clericalised German lecture halls, just as they had already distanced themselves geographically by their Italian trips.

The movement had its roots in the new and serious attention to classical texts. The philologist Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) was the inspirer of many who began to realise how important it was to assure themselves of the accuracy of the texts they were studying, and of the real meaning intended by their authors. They learnt Hebrew and Greek to study the original texts of the Bible. Great scholars were already at work in this way, Ximenes in Spain and Erasmus in northern Europe. One of the superficial but important symbols of this distancing was the renaming by scholars of themselves with Latinised versions of their names — Hausschein (Houselight) becomes Oecolampadius, and Schwarzerd (Blackheath) becomes Melancthon. For a few months about 1516, Luther began to call himself Eleutherius (Freeman) but soon reverted to his Saxon identity.

German humanism developed a nature of its own. In 1500 appeared a new student edition of Tacitus’ Germania published by the humanist poet Celtis who accompanied it with a poem Germania Generalis . Enthusiasm began to be generated for the native culture, and renaissance patriotism burgeoned in verse and prose. In 1495, Celtis had done a Latin description of the origins and customs of the model town of Nuremberg. This Saxon humanism was taken up enthusiastically by Ulrich von Hutten, the knight poet and anti-clerical. The Latin of these men became the Latin of Cicero and Ovid and Plautus, rather than of St Bernard.

Conrad Mudt, calling himself Mutianus was one of the leading German humanists and visited Erfurt regularly from his base in Gotha. He had been in Italy for a whole decade and professed a detached and a patronising attitude to the Church’s rites, while drawing a fat salary as a Canon. In 1515, just when Luther himself would be starting his really serious criticism of the current syllabus, Mutianus was also voicing criticism, but from the superior position of a literary man, rather than a theologian. He was influenced by Erasmus, whose criticism of the whole theological scene had been widely disseminated for the previous seven years in In Praise of Folly, ajeu d’esprit, written for Thomas More, being in fact a play on his name in its original Latin title Encomium Moriae — a piece begun as Erasmus was journeying happily across Europe in 1509 to a reunion he was greatly looking forward to after a stay in Italy, where neither the food nor the hours at which it was eaten pleased him. Mutianus wrote to a friend: ‘Today the apes of theology occupy the whole university, teaching their students the figures of Donatus, a most unintelligible thing; the figures of Parvulus, pure nonsense; mere exercises in complexities the silliest stuff.’ Such criticisms were already abroad when Martin was a student.

These superior literary men formed a kind of snobbish club. With their new classical names, and their insights into history and literature, their attitudes stretched all the way from a lampooning of the gullible piety of the masses to a more philosophical agnosticism or a mysticism, which stood apart from ecclesiastical authority.

The humanists were criticising virtually the entire range of existing educational norms at the university, hardly bothering to distinguish any more between the various schools whose protagonists, however, were in a substantial majority and still took their own differences very seriously. The dominant group at Erfurt, as at most other universities, was that of the narrow logicians of the day, followers of the philosopher William of Occarn. This was known as the modernist movement, and its philosophy was that of nominalism: philosophical argument was no more than a descriptive tool, the words were just names, and pointed no further. Philosophy was to stick to its world, and theology would keep to its territory of revealed truth, grasped not by the reason but by faith. Other groups were the Scotists using the works of the philosopher Duns Scotus, championed by the Franciscans; the Thomists using the texts of Thomas Aquinas, championed by the Dominicans — Aquinas had worked philosophy and religion into a great single Summa, transposing Aristotle into the context of Christian theology under the influence of Augustine and Bernard, in which fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, was integrated organically with philosophy; finally there was also a via antiqua, the ancient way, which was centred on Plato, but was also used to describe the Thomists.

The cross currents and interrelationships were numerous. At Erfurt the Occamists gave Martin a confidence in logical processes and the use of argument and dialectic which never left him, however much he thundered against it as a way to religious faith. He often said that, philosophically, he remained of the modernist persuasion. The humanist movement in its turn gave him a confidence in human culture, a love of the classics and a connatural feeling for language, for beauty in the form of words, and for words in their natural setting of everyday language that eventually flowered in the German Bible, a whole language coming both to birth and to a first apotheosis — a miracle of the sixteenth century to set beside the achievement of Shakespeare in England at the end of the century.

Luther’s own thought was to develop out beyond all these various influences. Yet he remained the product of a sixteenth century university. All his life the influences could still be traced, and could be confusing in their complexity. Like other innovators he was deeply marked by the influences of his formative intellectual years, and made use, sometimes in very unexpected ways, of the theories which first excited him, even though he had essentially outgrown them. Luther would come to echo the modernists that philosophy was indeed in no sense the handmaid of theology, not because of the merely intellectual inappropriateness of this as he saw it, but because the whole world of man, all the world of philosophy was thrown entirely into the deepest of shadows under the sign of sin when a man had become bound by the Word of God. In spite of this Aristotle remained a permanent influence. Luther, the graduating student, soaked up his texts, so that, though he would fulminate later against the habit of using this ‘pagan’ for an understanding of religion, he would himself retain Aristotle’s Poetics and the Organon in his proposed educational system of 1521. (An Den Christlichen Adel). The poetry of Vergil was becoming an important part of his life, as well as music and the love of ceremony.

At the final examination for the MA, twenty-one-year-old Luther came second out of the mere seventeen pupils who had survived. The graduation ceremony was in February 1505. He swore the oath not to receive the Master’s degree at any other university. He was invested with his Master’s brown beret and his ring. And he duly gave the usual address and provided a feast as all new Masters had to do. These were great and glorious moments for him, symbolised for the rest of his life by the torches, having about them an atmosphere of almost unearthly joy.

Martin Luther was a professor at the Saxon University of Wittenberg. An Augustinian friar, Visitor of the group of friaries in the region, often preaching in the town church, at the age of thirty-two he was the successful local man, He had just published his first little book, a translation into German of the seven penitential psalms. Students flocked to his lectures, townsfolk flocked to his sermons. All were drawn by the flow of his quietly spoken but fiery words, full intelligence and of feeling. The friars admired the persistence with which he kept the Rule. A solid career lay ahead, perhaps brilliant. But so far he had published no academic work, and seemed not specially to wish to do so. Wittenberg was a backwater, and no one had heard of him outside his circle.

Five years later, Luther was excommunicated and under the ban of the Empire, and people were reading his books and pamphlets all over Europe. Against all precedent he remained at his old posts with the support of colleagues, the populace and the local ruler. At the age of forty-one he married, settled with his wife in the old Friary which he had never left, and brought up his family there. He became an institution in Wittenberg, the most famous man and the originator of great changes in much of northern and central Europe.

Luther suffered from chronic and intense depression. During the years between his late twenties and early thirties he found a partial solution of the worst of it. Connected with the solution was a fresh grasp of the ‘Myth’ which underlay European culture and percolated all the operations of society. The realisation of this solution released a flow of writings and actions. Luther found himself pitted against the most powerful organisation in Europe, the Church. A member of it, like everyone else, he wanted to change it, to reform it. But the authorities would not have it. Normally they would have triumphed and Luther would have been burnt or permanently disgraced. But he voiced a message and a complaint which found an immediate and extraordinary response at every level of society, from that of the deepest spiritual experience to that of the most practical economic and political realities.

From the age of forty his story was that of a man of achievement. The prophet and priest had to turn politician and administrator. He had planned none of it, speaking only what he saw to be true. His is a story above all of success without really trying. It meant improvisation. From forty to sixty-two he did his best to continue to expound his message, to battle against the apparently irreformable old institution and to encourage new styles. And there was the battle against enemies within — the usual battles of a revolutionary against his supporters who want it done another way.

A major part of the phenomenon of Luther is the extraordinary corpus of writings, over one hundred volumes in the Weimar edition. In most big libraries, books by and about Luther occupy more shelf room than those concerned with any other human being except Jesus of Nazareth. He translated the Bible and set a style for the German language. He has something more than a minor place in the history of music. More than 2500 of his letters have survived. Together with the Table Talk they provide a lively picture of his life. But the heart of it all is religious and theological.

This religious content has boxed Luther off from a wide range of readers, not least because his friends and enemies in the subsequent centuries have made professional and technical capital out of his work. Religion, along with highlighted excerpts from the more ribald parts of the Table Talk, have tended to make a caricature of Luther, as though he might be some kind of a foul-mouthed Billy Graham. Certainly, it is not possible to avoid the technical content of his thought, any more than it is possible to understand the lives of Cromwell, Napoleon or Churchill without learning about military, naval and political matters; there has to be some theology. But in Luther it is lit with imagination, perception and humour. The power of the European Myth comes through. And Luther recognised his own penchant both for exaggeration and for somewhat earthly language, often caricaturing himself.

I use the general word ‘myth’ from time to time, rather than ‘religion’, to describe the basic assumptions which permeated the whole of society, because ‘religion’ can sometimes suggest something apart from the rest of life. But Christianity affected everything. The Myth was all. And ‘myth’ seemed a useful general term, because Christianity is indeed anchored firmly to a story. However, it is also clear at this point that the usefulness of ‘myth’ is limited. The essence of Christianity is that it claims to be a religion to end ‘religions’, a Myth to end all myths. It is based not just on one story among others, but on a story which its followers held to be a description of something that happened historically, not just true in a ‘symbolical’ sense. So it is a special Myth. Its uniqueness is sharply illustrated by the sign which it used, at first that of a cross, and then of a man dying crucified on the cross, sometimes transformed, reigning triumphant from it, sometimes shown dying an agonised death.

So when I use ‘myth’ I do so to indicate precisely the living and universal nature of religion, the sense in which ‘Christianity’, ‘Gospel’, ‘Christ’ or ‘The New Testament’ meant something unique, something different in kind from what they sometimes mean today, when these terms can conjure up a vision of the superannuated part of European culture. Already, in Luther’s time Christianity was often decadent. But equally it was often vibrant. It was that vibrancy which gave power to Luther and his reforming colleagues. In any case it was all-embracing.

The ‘story’ was presented to everyone, including the people of Wittenberg, in the churches by the priests. Excerpts from ‘the books’, the Bible, were read out. Psalms, hymns and prayers were sung or read. The visual element was strong in a society in which many less than half the people could read or write. Wall paintings, painted windows, sculptures depicted particular stories and drew morals. The Church had the complete management of the Myth as the religious authority, run essentially by the Pope and the bishops. But life was univocal — all things were both secular and religious. There was a dual government of society by the State and the Church which were at the same time colleagues and competitors of one another in the exercise of power. They were assisted by the lawyers, the university men, the bankers, occasionally by organised representation from the rest of society, and by the military men. Behind it all was ‘God’ and his favour as preached and, more important, as dispensed by the Church.

The power which had come to the Church in this atmosphere of universal acceptance had led to massive economic involvement on the one hand and an ‘adaptation’ of the ideals of the Gospel on the other, an adaptation which also included residual superstition and paganism from pre-Christian times. The priests had begun to look and act rather like the very priests of the old Jewish Law or even of paganism which Jesus of Nazareth had, according to the story, come to displace for all time. And the story itself was severely misrepresented, so Luther, and then great numbers of his followers, concluded.

Biographies of ‘great men’ can be misleading in their selectivity. The history of any time must include a record of the lives of the millions of ordinary people. In the twentieth century, study of local archives, agricultural history, industrial archaeology, sociology and many other disciplines has sometimes given a quite different emphasis, even a totally new meaning to the small number of public events which used to occupy the history books, political events, wars, the lives of great men and women. History is not the story of an elite. In some sense the ‘great’ men and women of history were only the enablers of what would certainly have occurred in some form. And this certainly includes the Reformation. Yet the fact remains that they did set their own personal seal on events, and on institutions which then survived for centuries. As persons, and makers of events and institutions they remain perennially fascinating.

Not many people have read the story of Luther outside the ranks of theologians and historians. Yet he changed the face of Europe as radically as Napoleon. And while Cromwell put English history into a new gear, Luther ushered in a whole new way of life in Europe which had been struggling to birth for a century and more. Both Cromwell and Luther are difficult in that not only were they convinced of divine commission, but expressed that conviction. In Luther’s case this has tended to make him seem some kind of fanatic. One cannot evade the truth lying at the heart of such a suspicion; and he is sometimes touched with what maybe called the psychopathology of genius. Yet, in many ways he was an ordinary man. The portrait at forty-two shows a notably human face. The letters and Table Talk reveal a man with ordinary family problems, a normal concern with sex, expressed with that half innocent openness so typically German. He had, too, a typical German attitude to those in authority, realistic and conscientious.

I have tried to give a picture of this man of gigantic accomplishment, a man, however, who was rather less than the hero and rather more than the mere villain of some older biographies. I attempted a previous picture in Martin Luther, a Biographical Study, written primarily for specialists in history and theology. One paragraph and the Appendix on Indulgences are reproduced in this book. The present study is an attempt to present the man more fully. Theology is indeed the inner stuff of the revolution he worked. But I start from the man, and in particular from his letters.

Thanks are due to many people for help in respect of a book which has taken five years to write. First to my publisher for being so patient. It is dangerous to make a contract with an author who is also a publisher; he tends to have a cavalier attitude when it comes to delivery dates. Over the years Hamish Hamilton’s editors, first Raleigh Trevelyan and latterly Jane Everard, have been of great assistance in helping me to get the text into the right shape. Then with great pleasure, I must thank Professor George Yule of Aberdeen University who read my typescript and made many particular and a few general suggestions of great importance, and Professor Gordon Rupp who very kindly ran his critical eye over the proofs.

I give some account of sources in my Note at the end of the book. But I must mention here the great kindness of Fortress Press, Philadelphia, in allowing me to quote freely from many of the fifty-four volumes of their translation of Luther’s Works. Their edition, together with all its numerous introductions and annotations, has been of inestimable value to me.

A special note of gratitude is due to my literary agent, Mark Hamilton of A. M. Heath and Co. Ltd who has looked after me so well since the middle fifties, to the American publisher John McHale who first turned my mind to Luther, and to Boston College, America, who greatly daring allowed me to teach a Luther seminar for an invaluable semester in 1972. Finally, I must salute my family: my children who, so one daughter tells me tolerated the writing of the book and provided some inspiration, and my wife who has, in a manner of speaking, lived bravely with Luther for twenty years, after only a brief sojourn with John Wesley.

John M. Todd