Ten Months at the Wartburg
Luther's stay in the old castle of the Wartburg, built on a hill about two kilometers from Eisenach and hidden from the emperor and the world, was a life in prison. For about ten months (May 4, 1521 to February 29, 1522, in the book's dating) he lived in one of the half-dark rooms of the fortress, whose furniture was a bed, a table, a stove, and a tree trunk used as a stool. A few armed soldiers guarded the castle, an officer watched its inner court, and two young boys served Luther. For comfort and probably for disguise he laid aside his monk's habit, put on a knight's clothes, grew a thick beard and was known by the assumed name Junker Georg. Sometimes he amused himself hunting game in the woods around the castle, but remembering that many Antichrists were still alive, he took no pleasure in killing a hare. Idleness, sleeplessness, overeating and too much beer left him heavy and unwell. Like a German nobleman, he grew moody and foul-mouthed, and wrote that burning in the fire would be more welcome to him than rotting in a corner of seclusion: he wanted to be in the fight. But Frederick's minister advised him to stay hidden for a year until the emperor's anger cooled. In the end Charles never made any move to arrest or imprison Luther.
In solitude, doubt took from Luther his peace of mind and conscience. He asked himself whether he alone could have found the truth while all the scholars and jurists were mistaken, and whether he had the right to shatter the authority of the established faith. Might not the principle of individual judgment open the way to revolution and the death of law? If we believe the short tales in his collected stories, voices disturbed him in the castle and he imagined that devils spoke to him. He said he had seen the devil several times, and once the devil pelted his head and face with nuts. A famous story tells that Luther once jumped up and threw his inkwell at the devil, but missed. To keep these temptations at bay he busied himself with letters to friends and enemies, with writing religious tracts, and with translating the New Testament into German. Once he made a hurried trip to Wittenberg to put the revolution in order.
The Revolt Spreads Beyond Luther
Luther's bold defense at Worms and his survival made his followers bolder. At Erfurt, students, artisans and peasants attacked public buildings, destroyed forty village churches and some libraries and documents on land rents, and attacked a humanist (June 1521). In the autumn of that stirring year the Augustinian friars of Erfurt left their monastery, joined Luther's followers, and called the Church a "center of rigid ideas and a den of greedy, proud, faithless, crafty, two-faced and comfort-loving men."
While Melanchthon at Wittenberg was setting out the Protestant beliefs systematically in his Loci Communes (1521), his colleague Karlstadt declared that the mass should be said in the language of the German people; that bread and wine should be given to the faithful without verbal confession of sins or preliminary fasting; that religious images should be removed from churches; and that clergy, monks and priests alike should be free to marry. He himself, at forty, married a young woman and so opened the way for other clergy to marry (January 19, 1522; the book dwells on the bride's youth, which is omitted here). Luther approved his colleague's marriage but wrote at the same time: "Good heavens, will our Wittenberg townsmen give their daughters to monks?" Soon after, he sent Spalatin his treatise On Monastic Vows (November 21, 1521), defending the breaking of vows. Because the essay was too blunt, Spalatin delayed its printing. In it Luther called sexual instincts natural and irrepressible and held that the vow of chastity was a trap the devil laid for monks. Years passed before Luther himself married, but his delay seems to have had no effect on the beginning of the German revolution.
The fire of revolt kept leaping up. On September 22, 1521, Melanchthon celebrated the Lord's Supper in both kinds, and so the Bohemian Utraquists reached their old goal. On October 23 the mass was stopped in Luther's own monastery. On November 12 thirteen monks left the monastery and married, and soon half of the German monks followed them. On December 3 a crowd of students and townspeople with knives burst into the parish church of Wittenberg, drove the priests from the altars, and stoned a number of worshippers who were praying before the statue of the Virgin. The next day forty students wrecked the altars of the Franciscan church in the city. That same day Luther, still living in hiding, came secretly to the town and approved the marriage of monks, but warned clergy and people against violence, saying that although force is not always wrong, it needs the permission of the lawful authorities. The next morning he returned to the Wartburg.
Soon afterward Luther wrote a tract, A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion, and sent it to Spalatin for printing. He feared that if the religious revolution went too fast or turned into class war, it would drive the nobles away and fail. But the first pages were criticized for seeming to encourage revolt and the use of force. He wrote that a dangerous uprising seemed near and that, if it came, priests, monks, bishops and all the clergy might be killed or driven out unless they earnestly set about reforming themselves, because the burden of material, bodily and spiritual deprivation weighed heavily on the people and had made them ready to rise. The people could no longer bear it and at any moment the peasants, as they threatened, might raise a riot with clubs and flails. He was glad to see fear grip the clergy, since it might bring them to their senses. (In the book Luther goes on to say that he would gladly sacrifice many clergy for the freedom of the oppressed peasants; that sentence is omitted here.)
Still, Luther warned the people against violence and wrote that vengeance belongs to God: a revolt has no logic, and the innocent suffer more than the guilty from it. Every revolt, however reasonable its aim, is wrong, since its damage always outweighs the fruit of reform. When the masses rise, they cannot tell good from bad, have no clear aim, and a fearful injustice seizes society. He had always sympathized with the victims of rebellion.
Karlstadt, Zwilling and the Zwickau Prophets
The revolution proceeded more or less quietly. At Christmas 1521 the mass was held at Wittenberg, in the book "at Karlstadt," in plain clothes and in German, and those present were invited to declare their brotherhood by holding unleavened bread and drinking from the cup. At the same time Gabriel Zwilling, a leader of the Augustinians, urged people to throw religious images in the fire and to destroy church altars everywhere. On December 27, "prophets" arrived from Zwickau and fanned the flame. Zwickau was the greatest industrial town in Germany, with a large crowd of weavers ruled by the owners of industry, and the armed rising of the Taborites in Bohemia had stirred a socialist movement among its workers. Thomas Müntzer, priest of the church of St. Catherine, attached to the weavers, was the embodiment of the workers' hopes and a firm supporter of the Reformation. Luther's teaching that Scripture is the sole authority had raised the question of who is competent to interpret it. Müntzer and two companions, Nikolaus Storch the weaver and the scholar Markus Stübner, claimed that the interpretation of Scripture was in their hands alone, since they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. They claimed that God's Spirit had taught them that baptism before maturity is not permitted, since the sacraments help only those who have faith and a child cannot be expected to have it. They foretold that the world would soon end, that all unbelievers, especially priests of the established religion, would perish in the catastrophe, and that God would then rule the world under a communal order. In 1521 the weavers' revolt was crushed and the three "prophets" were banished from the city. Müntzer went to Prague, and after being expelled there too, became pastor at Allstedt in Saxony. Storch and Stübner went to Wittenberg and, in Luther's absence, made a favorable impression on Melanchthon and Karlstadt.
On January 6, 1522, the Augustinian community at Wittenberg was dissolved entirely. On January 22, Karlstadt's friends, who held the majority on the town council, ordered that all religious images be removed from the churches and that the mass be held only in the simple form Karlstadt proposed. Karlstadt ordered the crucifix too removed with the other images, and, like the early Christians, banned music from church services, saying that the intoxicating tunes of the organ draw the human mind back to this world and, when we should be thinking of Christ's sufferings, call to mind Pyramus and Thisbe; organs, trumpets and flutes should be left to the theaters. When the council's officers failed to remove the images, Karlstadt's followers rushed into the churches, tore the images and crucifixes from the walls, and stoned priests who resisted them.
Karlstadt, though himself a scholar, followed the Zwickau prophets in holding that God speaks to people directly as he spoke in Scripture, and speaks more through heart and soul to simple folk than through tongue and book to the learned. He declared that schooling and study harm faith and that true Christians should avoid books and learning and live as craftsmen and farmers in illiteracy. One of his followers, Georg Mohr, gave up teaching and urged parents to keep their children from study. A number of students, under this influence, left the university and went home to take up manual trades.
Luther Returns: The Eight Sermons
Luther feared that, as his opponents predicted, the loss of the Church's power and unity would break up the social order. Ignoring the emperor's ban and Frederick's advice, he left his hiding place and hurried to Wittenberg in priest's dress and with his tonsure shaved. In eight sermons from March 9, 1522, he called on scholars, churchgoers and townspeople to keep order and calm and warned them against violence, saying he himself had freed millions with nothing but the tip of his pen. He told the Wittenbergers: follow me, I was the first God chose to show you his will; you have erred in doing these things without consulting me. Do not think that by destroying things that are abused you can uproot abuse. A man may misuse wine and women; shall we then ban wine and destroy women? Once people worshipped the sun, moon and stars; shall we then clear the heavens of them? He also warned the Wittenbergers not to trouble those who loved to keep religious images, crucifixes, music and the old form of the mass, and said that he himself liked religious images. He arranged that in some Wittenberg churches mass be held as before, and in others communion be given with unleavened bread only at the high altar and with bread and wine at the side altar. What gave the sacrament its value in Luther's eyes was the faith of those who took part, not the manner of the rite.
These eight sermons in eight days showed the most brilliant and most Christian side of Luther. He staked his whole future on restoring order and calm to Wittenberg, and he succeeded. The Zwickau prophets tried to win Luther over and, to prove that they were inspired by God, claimed they could read his thoughts. Luther accepted the test, and the prophets said he agreed with them in his heart. Luther attributed their prophecy to Satan and ordered them to leave the city.
The Fate of Karlstadt
By order of the town council, whose members had now changed, Karlstadt was removed from his posts and became pastor at Orlamünde, where from the pulpit he attacked Luther as a "gluttonous cleric and the new pope of Wittenberg." Before the Quakers, who would appear two centuries later, Karlstadt cast off clerical dress, put on a plain gray jacket, gave up all titles and asked his followers to call him "Brother Andrew." He refused a priest's pay and earned his living by plowing, preferred prayer to drugs and physicians, held plural marriage compatible with Scripture (a point the book states briefly), and kept only the outward form of the sacrament. At Frederick's request Luther went to Orlamünde to answer Karlstadt's claims, but the people of Orlamünde stoned him and drove him from their town. After the Peasants' War was put down, Karlstadt, fearing he would be prosecuted for incitement, sought refuge with Luther and was received. After long wandering this tired radical was appointed professor at the University of Basel, and in 1541 died quietly there in an academic setting.