A Harsh Home
What inherited or social forces made an unknown monk, living in a small town of some three thousand people, take up the leadership of a religious revolution like David facing Goliath? Martin's father, Hans, was a hot-tempered, strict man who had little love for priests. His mother was a modest, shy and devout woman who spent her days in prayer. Both were hard-working and thrifty. Hans farmed at Möhra and then took up work in the copper mines of Mansfeld.
Martin was born at Eisleben on November 10, 1483, and six more children later joined the family. Hans and Grete knew no means of raising children other than corporal punishment. Luther himself recalled that his father once beat him so severely that for a long time the two openly resented each other, and that his mother once punished him for stealing a nut so harshly that blood ran. Years later, looking back on his childhood, he wrote that the hard and wearing life he had with them drove him to seek refuge in a monastery and join the monks.
The picture of God that his parents gave him mirrored their own natures: a stern father, an unforgiving judge, an enforcer of joyless virtue, a ceaseless demander of intercession, and a creator who sends most of his creatures to hell. Both believed in witches, spirits, angels and demons, and many of these superstitions stayed in Martin's mind to the end of his life. A home steeped in fearful belief and hard discipline shaped the convictions and character of his youth.
Schools and the University of Erfurt
At the school in Mansfeld, where beatings and religious drilling were routine, he was once flogged fifteen times in a single morning for a mistake in declining a noun. At thirteen he entered a school run by a religious brotherhood at Magdeburg, and at fourteen he moved to St. George's school at Eisenach, where he spent three relatively comfortable years in the house of Frau Cotta. He never forgot her saying that nothing in the world is dearer to a man than the love of a good woman. In the book's words, this was a gift that Luther spent forty-two years trying to obtain. In this friendlier setting the natural traits of youth, cheerfulness, sociability and frankness, slowly appeared in him. He had a pleasing singing voice and played the lute skillfully.
In 1501 his now prosperous father sent him to the University of Erfurt. Its curriculum centered on theology and philosophy and still followed scholasticism, though the views of William of Ockham, the nominalist, dominated there. It was apparently under Ockham's influence that Luther came to see that popes and church councils can also err. He found scholastic philosophy so uncongenial that he praised a friend for not having learned the "rubbish taught under the name of philosophy."
The humanists had some influence at Erfurt, and their ideas touched Luther to a degree. But he was preoccupied with the world beyond death, and the humanists did not take much notice of him. At Erfurt he learned a little Greek and a smattering of Hebrew, and read the major Latin classics. In 1505 he received his master's degree in the arts. His father, proud of his success, gave him on graduation an expensive copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis and was pleased that his son had decided to study law. Yet scarcely two months after entering the law faculty, the twenty-two-year-old Martin suddenly decided, against his father's objection, to become a monk.
The Thunderstorm and the Monastery
The decision revealed a contradiction in Luther's nature. He was made for ordinary active life, yet he was still held by the religious fears instilled at home and school. Under them he believed that man is by nature sinful and that sin is disobedience to an almighty, punishing God. He could not reconcile his acquired beliefs in thought and conduct with his inner inclinations. Passing through the turbulent years of adolescence, instead of seeing them as a stage of growth he saw them as a trap Satan had laid in his path. The God of his imagination lacked compassion. The comforting face of Mary had only a small place in his fearful theology, and Jesus was not a kind child who refuses his mother nothing but the Christ of the Last Judgment, the figure so often painted in churches, who threatens sinners with eternal fire. The constant thought of hell kept his intensely religious mind from giving itself to the pleasures of life.
In July 1505, as he was returning to Erfurt from his father's house, a terrifying storm broke and lightning struck a tree near him. Martin took it as a warning from God to repent and seek deliverance from sin. And where, except within the four walls of a monastery that would shield him from the world, from bodily desires and from the temptations of devils, could he find that deliverance? In that moment he vowed to God that if he survived the storm he would become a monk.
Erfurt had twenty monasteries. Martin chose one belonging to the Augustinian hermits, which was known for strict observance of its rule. He gathered his friends, spent one last evening with them drinking and singing, and the next morning entered the monastery as a novice. There, with a pride mixed into his humility, he took on the lowest and hardest tasks. He sang the hymns constantly in a kind of ecstasy that carried him out of himself, spent nights in the cold in the hope of driving the devils from his body, fasted, and scourged himself. Looking back he wrote that he had been a pious monk, so exact in keeping the rules of his order that if any monk could reach heaven by monastic life he could, and that if the grace he sought were long delayed he was ready to torment himself nearly to death with the discipline of the order, with prayer, study and other works. (Parts of this passage are garbled in the book and have been reconstructed here from context.) Once he disappeared, and after some days his friends found him unconscious on the floor of his cell. They brought a lute, one of the monks played it, and to its music Martin came back to consciousness and thanked his friends. In September 1506 he took the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and in May of the following year he was ordained a priest.
Staupitz, Mysticism and the Discovery of Faith
His fellow friars gave him friendly counsel. They assured him that Christ, by enduring the cross, had paid for the original sin of mankind and opened the gates of heaven to the saved. Reading the German mystics, especially Tauler, gave Martin hope of deliverance from inherited sin and union with a just and almighty God. Some time later a treatise by Jan Hus came into his hands, and the doubts it raised added to his spiritual torment. He wondered why a man who had set down such Christian thoughts with so powerful a pen should have died in the flames, and closed the book with a heavy heart.
Johann von Staupitz, vicar-general of the Augustinian order in the region, watched over Martin like a father and urged him to read the Bible and the writings of St. Augustine instead of giving himself up to austerities. The friars also showed their affection for his peace of mind by giving him a Latin Bible, a rare thing in those days.
In 1508 or 1509, Luther came upon the words in Paul's Epistle to the Romans, chapter 1, verse 17: "The just shall live by faith." (The book's chapter and verse are garbled; this is the reading from context.) This sentence slowly changed his thinking about salvation. He came to believe that a person is saved not by good works, which can never repay his sin before an infinite God, but by firm and steadfast faith in Christ and in the atonement he made for sinful humanity. In Augustine he also met another doctrine that revived his inner terror: predestination, the belief that before the creation of the world God chose some for salvation and condemned others to eternal damnation, and that only the elect will be saved by Christ's sacrifice. In the end Luther turned away from Augustine's idea, and his belief in salvation through faith in Christ grew firmer.
Wittenberg and the Journey to Rome
In 1508, on Staupitz's recommendation, Luther was transferred to another Augustinian monastery, at Wittenberg, and began work at the university there, first as a lecturer in logic and physics and later as professor of theology.
Wittenberg was the northern capital of Frederick the Wise, and he seldom lived there. A contemporary of Luther described it as a poor and unimportant town of small, old houses. To Luther the inhabitants were immoderate drinkers, brash and fond of pleasure. Among the people of Saxony, where drunkenness was the most widespread in Germany, the Wittenbergers were noted for excess. According to Luther, a short distance east of the town (the book says 1.5 kilometers, the figure being garbled in the source) civilization ended and barbarism began. In such a place Luther spent most of his days alone and withdrawn.
He was evidently counted among the distinguished brothers of his order, because in October 1510 he was sent with another friar, on a mission the book calls unknown, to the Augustinian hermits in Rome. His first sight of the city was full of reverence and awe: as he came into view of Rome he fell on his knees, raised his hands to heaven and cried, "Hail to thee, holy Rome!" During his stay he performed all the duties of a pilgrim, venerated the relics of saints and fathers of the Church, climbed the steps of St. Peter's on his knees, visited many churches, and bought so many indulgences that, as the book puts it, he almost regretted that his parents were already dead and he could not free their souls from torment. He visited the ancient Roman Forum, but the art of the Renaissance, which Raphael, Michelangelo and hundreds of others were then bringing to the capital, apparently left no mark on his mind.
For some years after the journey Luther said nothing about the worldliness of the clergy or the moral decay then afflicting the city. Ten years later he suddenly called the Rome of 1510 a "filthy" city, said the popes were worse than the emperors of the pagan age, and condemned the papal court in a sharp and lurid image. (The book's exact wording is omitted here.) The book suspects that Luther had never entered the circle of the high clergy and so did not know their corruption from close view.
The Slow Break with the Church
After returning to Wittenberg in February 1511, Luther rose quickly through the academic ranks and became district vicar of his order. Besides teaching Scripture he preached steadily in the churches around the town and carried out his duties with great sincerity and ability. A leading Catholic scholar says of him that his official letters are encouraging to those whose faith has weakened and full of sympathy for those who have stumbled; they show deep religious feeling and rarely give practical instruction, although a few counsels in them are not in harmony with genuine Christian belief. When plague came to Wittenberg in 1516 he was unafraid and, despite his friends' advice, did not leave his post.
During these years, 1512 to 1517, Luther gradually moved away from the official teaching of the Church. He now spoke of "our theology," different from what had once been taught at Erfurt. In 1515 he held the clergy, who fed the people human maxims and stories in place of Christ's teaching, responsible for the corruption of the world. In 1516 a manuscript in German of unknown authorship fell into his hands, and he found its content so agreeable to his belief that man can be saved through faith that he published it under the title Theologia Germanica. He condemned the sellers of indulgences who took advantage of the simplicity of the poor.
In private letters he identified the pope with the Antichrist described in the First Epistle of John. In July 1517, invited by George, duke of Albertine Saxony, to preach at Dresden, he argued in his sermon that a person can be saved only by faith in Christ. The duke, fearing that stressing faith over moral virtue "might make people insolent and unruly," rebuked him. Three months later the fearless monk, by posting his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, challenged the world.