An Unexpected Storm
Cranach's woodcut of 1520 gives some idea of Luther in 1517: a monk in a worn cowl, of medium height and fairly slender build, with large, penetrating eyes, a long nose, a chin that shows resolve, and a face that bespeaks courage. Yet what moved him to write his theses was a sincere anger, not an empty and baseless boldness. The local bishop found nothing heretical in the text, but advised Luther to write nothing further on the subject for a while. The anger the theses stirred up was unexpected and frightening even to Luther. In May 1518 he told Staupitz that his greatest wish was to withdraw and live quietly. But Luther was deceiving himself: he had a strong appetite for a fight.
The theses became the talk of educated Germany. Thousands had been waiting for such a protest, and the suppressed anticlerical feelings of several generations found their voice. Sales of indulgences fell, but many prominent men rose to answer the protest. Tetzel himself, with help from others, published a pamphlet of 106 theses against Luther in December 1517. When it reached Wittenberg, students seized the man who was selling it and burned eight hundred copies in the market square. Luther, though secretly pleased, disapproved of the act. In a sermon on indulgence and grace he answered Tetzel in his fighting spirit: he would pay no heed to those who found their purses emptied by his truths and called him a heretic, since such cries came from those whose dark minds had never grasped the truths of Scripture.
Jakob van Hoogstraten of Cologne denounced Luther in harsh terms and urged that he be dealt with as a heretic by the harshest legal penalty. Johann Eck, vice-chancellor of the University of Ingolstadt, in a treatise called the Obelisks (March 1518), accused Luther of spreading the "Bohemian poison," meaning the heresies of Hus, and of shaking the foundations of the Church. In Rome, Sylvester Prierias, the pope's censor of books, published a dialogue that, in the book's words, defended papal supremacy with exaggeration and stretched the doctrine of indulgences to an extreme.
The Resolutions and the Summons to Rome
In reply Luther wrote a Latin work, the Resolutions (April 1518), and sent copies to the local bishop and to the pope, assuring both of his obedience and loyalty to the Church's old tradition. In it he spoke well of Leo X. He wrote that although there were many learned and pure men in the Church, in these times even they could do little for her; that a pope as admirable as Leo, whose learning and purity honor all good people, now sat at her head; but that in an age when affairs are so broken, one gentle man, worthy of a better time, could do nothing alone. (The book adds a bitter remark about earlier popes and about Rome, which is abridged here.) Luther then bowed before the pope in unusually humble terms: he cast himself at the holy feet, to be given life or condemned, called or deposed, approved or rebuked, and would hear the pope's voice as the voice of Christ living and speaking in him; if he deserved death he would not refuse it.
Yet, as Leo's advisers saw, the Resolutions ranked a council of the whole Church above the pope, spoke indifferently of relics and pilgrimages, denied the surplus merits of the saints, and rejected all the additions that popes had made over three centuries to the doctrine and ritual of indulgences. Relics, shrines and the sale of indulgences were a main source of papal income, and Leo was hard pressed to fund his charities, his pleasures, his wars, the completion of the basilica and the work of the administration. So Leo, much alarmed, abandoned his earlier view that Luther's quarrel was an ordinary and passing squabble among monks, took charge himself, and summoned Luther to Rome (July 7, 1518).
The summons put Luther in a hard position. Even the mildest pope would have kept him politely in some Roman monastery, and in time his followers would have forgotten him. He therefore wrote to George Spalatin, chaplain and secretary to the elector Frederick, saying that the German princes should prevent the forced extradition of their subjects to Italy. Frederick agreed, because he favored Luther, who had made his university prosper. Emperor Maximilian also advised Frederick not to withhold any help from the monk, since Luther could be useful in dealings with Rome.
At that very time the emperor had convened the Diet of Augsburg to consider the pope's demand for a new tax for a crusade against the Turks. The pope asked that the clergy give a tenth and laymen a twelfth of their income, and that every fifty households supply one man for the campaign. The Diet rejected the request and in turn recalled the grievances that Luther had voiced and that had made him famous. It reminded the papal legate that Germany had often been taxed in the name of war on the Turks and the money used for other purposes, that German church revenues had flowed into the pockets of Italian priests, and that the first-year revenues of bishops, the fees for appointments and the costs of church lawsuits weighed heavily on the German people. The tone of the answer was so sharp that one delegate said nothing like it had been heard in all of German history. The emperor, seeing the princes' defiance, wrote to the pope to proceed cautiously with Luther, but promised to suppress any heresy in Germany.
Cajetan at Augsburg
Leo was forced to be conciliatory. A Protestant historian ascribes the success of the revolution to the pope's moderation. Leo gave up the plan to summon Luther to Rome and instead proposed that he answer the charges of disobedience and heresy before Cardinal Cajetan at the Diet of Augsburg. He instructed his legate to pardon Luther and give him office if he recanted and submitted, and otherwise to ask the civil authorities to send him to Rome. About the same time Leo announced his readiness to grant the "Golden Rose," his highest sign of favor toward rulers, to the pious elector Frederick, perhaps because he now meant to support Frederick as successor to the emperor.
Under the protection of the imperial guard, Luther met Cajetan at Augsburg on October 12 to 14, 1518. (The book's date is garbled and is reconstructed here.) The cardinal was learned in theology and known for his purity, but he misunderstood the pope's instructions and thought he must play the judge rather than the diplomat. To him the matter was only one of church discipline: may a monk who has sworn obedience to his superiors openly criticize them and spread ideas the Church condemns? Instead of examining the truth of Luther's claims, he demanded that Luther retract and not disturb the peace of the Church again. Hard words passed between them. Luther returned to Wittenberg without repenting, and Cajetan asked Frederick to send him to Rome. Frederick refused.
Luther wrote up his conversation with the legate with some relish and circulated it. In the copy he sent to his friend Wenceslaus Link he added that he sent it so Link could judge whether he was right to claim the Antichrist ruled the papal court, which seemed to him worse than the Turks. In a milder letter to Duke George he asked for "a general reform of the Church in all matters, material and spiritual," and so used for the first time a word that would later give the movement its name.
Leo increased his efforts at compromise. In a bull of November 9, 1518, he rejected many of the powers attributed to indulgences: buying one did not cancel guilt or sin, and only freed the buyer from punishments imposed by church authorities, not by civil ones; and for souls in purgatory the pope could only plead with God by his prayers that part of the surplus merits of Christ and the saints be applied to them. On November 28 Luther appealed from the pope's judgment to a church council. In the same month Leo sent Karl von Miltitz, a young Saxon noble of minor rank at Rome, to take the Golden Rose to Frederick and, quietly, to bring that "child of the devil" Luther to obedience.
Miltitz and the End of Tetzel
On reaching Germany, Miltitz was astonished to find that half the country was hostile to the pope. Of five friends of his at Augsburg and Nuremberg, three supported Luther. In Saxony anti-papal feeling ran so high that he had to disclaim any sign that he was the pope's representative. But when he met Luther at Altenburg (January 3, 1519), he found that argument worked better than intimidation. Luther then seemed sincerely concerned for the unity of western Christendom and generously gave way. He agreed to keep silent if his opponents did; to write to the pope and obey him; to admit openly the need to pray for the saints, the reality of hell, and the usefulness of indulgences in freeing a person from church penalties; and to urge the people to remain loyal to the Church. The details were to be submitted for final approval to a German bishop trusted by both parties.
Miltitz, much pleased, went to Leipzig, summoned Tetzel, and after rebuking him for his excess, falsehood and embezzlement, removed him from office. Tetzel returned to his monastery and died soon afterward (August 11, 1519). On his deathbed he received a kindly letter from Luther saying that the sale of indulgences had been only the occasion of the trouble, not its true cause, and that the people's revolt against the Church had not sprung from his acts, "but this child had another father." On March 3 Luther wrote a letter of complete obedience to the pope, and Leo replied in a friendly letter on March 29, inviting Luther to Rome and offering to pay his costs. Yet on March 13, with evident doubt, Luther had written to Spalatin that he wondered whether the pope was the Antichrist or one of Christ's apostles. In the circumstances he judged it wiser to stay at Wittenberg.
Melanchthon and Karlstadt
Nearly all the professors, students and townspeople of Wittenberg supported Luther. He was especially glad of the support of a young humanist and theologian to whom Frederick had given the university's chair of Greek in 1518 at twenty-one. His famous great-uncle Reuchlin had turned the young man's name, Philipp Schwarzerd ("black earth"), into the Greek Melanchthon. Small and frail, with a pleasing face, high forehead and shy eyes, he walked with a limp and was so beloved at Wittenberg that five or six hundred students gathered at his lectures, and Luther himself, who praised him as a man of every virtue, sat humbly among his hearers. Erasmus said of him that he was of a quiet temper and even his enemies spoke well of him. As Luther was quarrelsome and combative, so Melanchthon loved calm and compromise, so much that Luther sometimes chided his moderation. Yet Luther showed affection to a man so different in fate and manner, and this feeling shows the noblest and gentlest side of his character. He wrote that he was born to fight with rogues and fanatics and had to clear away stumps and trunks like a woodsman, while Master Philipp walks softly and quietly and, with the rich gifts God has given him, sows and waters with joy.
Another Wittenberg professor shone even more brightly at first. Andreas Bodenstein, who took the name Karlstadt from his birthplace, became a university professor at twenty-five (1504, by the book's figures) and at thirty held the chair devoted to Thomas Aquinas. On April 13, 1517, according to the book, he published 152 theses against the buying and selling of indulgences and so hastened Luther's historic revolt. Karlstadt, at first opposed to Luther, became one of his warmest followers; Luther said of him, "He is more passionate than I am myself." When Eck's Obelisks appeared, Karlstadt defended Luther's views in 406 theses. One of his points was the superiority of the authority of Scripture over church decrees and traditions, which formed the main pillar of the German Reformation. Eck asked to debate with him in public.
The Leipzig Debate
Karlstadt accepted at once, and Luther helped arrange it. Eck proposed thirteen theses, one of which said that the superiority of the Roman Church over others before the time of Sylvester had never been denied and that the occupant of Peter's chair was always recognized as his successor and Christ's vicar. In fact it was Luther who had claimed in the Resolutions that in the Church's early centuries the bishop of Rome had no privilege over other bishops. Luther therefore took Eck's theses as an attack on his own views, declared that they voided his pledge of silence, and resolved to join the debate in support of Karlstadt.
In June 1519 the two fighters, with Melanchthon, six other Wittenberg professors and two hundred students armed as if going to battle, set out for Leipzig. Their road in fact crossed a land whose people were hostile to Luther. At a gathering presided over by George, duke of Albertine Saxony, in the hall of the Pleissenburg castle before an excited crowd, Eck and Karlstadt began to contend over the new and old ideas (June 27). Few at Leipzig thought that a new emperor was about to be chosen at Frankfurt. After several days Eck's skillful arguments had overcome Karlstadt, and Luther decided to take his place. Luther was quick-witted and a powerful speaker, but also reckless and blunt. He stubbornly denied the authority of the bishop of Rome in the earliest age of the Church and reminded his audience, most of whom disagreed with him, that the Greek Orthodox Church still does not accept Rome's primacy. When Eck accused him of holding the ideas of Hus, he replied that councils too may err and that many of Hus's beliefs were right. (The book's sentence on this point is incomplete and is reconstructed here.) By the end of the debate on July 8, Eck had achieved his aim of securing a record of Luther's heresy. And so the foundation of the Reformation widened from a minor quarrel over buying and selling indulgences to a dispute over the authority of the pope and his rule over Christendom.
Eck returned to Rome, reported the result to the papal court, and proposed that Luther be excommunicated. Leo, who thought haste and severity unwise, still hoped for a peaceful solution. Besides, he was so far from Germany that he could not grasp the depth and breadth of the revolt.
Hutten, Sickingen and the Road to the Break
Prominent and influential men such as Hieronymus Holzschuher, Lazarus Spengler and Willibald Pirckheimer spoke for Luther; Dürer prayed for his success; humanists circulated countless tracts against the pope. Ulrich von Hutten, who reached Augsburg in 1518, mocked in verse Leo's call for money for the Turkish war and hoped the papal agents would go home from Germany with empty purses. When he heard of the Leipzig Debate he called Luther the liberator of Germany, and from then on his pen played the part of a sword in the Reformation. He also joined the knight Franz von Sickingen, who longed for a revolution, and persuaded him to protect Luther with his armed men. Luther thanked them, though he was not a man to seek force for his own safety.
In March 1520 Hutten published an old German text from the time of Emperor Henry IV (1056–1106) that had defended Henry against Pope Gregory VII, and dedicated it to the young emperor Charles V as a symbol of the German wish to avenge Henry's humiliation. Hutten, who thought freeing Germany from Roman rule more urgent than driving the Turks from central Europe, wrote that the forefathers of the Germans had thought it shameful to obey even the Romans of that day, the most vigorous and warlike people in the world, whereas the Germans now bowed to a degenerate set of men given to pleasure, and their labor went to feed that pleasure. In April 1520 he published one of his two series of verse dialogues, which after Luther's writings did more than any other work to stir German longing for freedom from Rome. He called Rome a bloodsucking monster, the pope the chief of robbers, and Rome a sea of impurity and an abyss of wickedness, and asked whether it was not time to rise and destroy this center of misery. Erasmus warned Hutten, who faced the danger of imprisonment, to moderate his attacks on Rome. Hutten then hid in Sickingen's castles but did not stop fighting. He urged Frederick to confiscate the property of all monasteries and use inside Germany the money that flowed to Rome each year.
Still, little Wittenberg remained the center of the revolution. In the spring of 1520 Luther published a work called Theses (the book's title for it is "Outline"), in which he answered in the sharpest tone the latest and firmest Catholic claims about papal authority over the Church. He declared that if Rome held such a belief, with the knowledge of pope and cardinals, then the true Antichrist sat in God's temple and ruled Rome, the pampered Babylon, and the papal court was the temple of Satan. He went on to say that if Roman madness continued, emperors, kings and princes would have to gather their forces and, with the sword instead of words, overthrow these plagues of the world. (The book's last lines, which call for violence in strong language, are abridged here.)
Later that year Karlstadt published a booklet, On the Canons of Scripture, which placed the Bible above popes, traditions and councils and ranked the four Gospels above the Epistles. If Luther had thought the same, Protestantism would not have drawn so much from the writings of Paul and Augustine and from the belief in predestination. The work was novel for its time in doubting that Moses wrote the first five books and in questioning the full authenticity of the four Gospels, but its reasoning was weak, since it measured the Bible's authenticity by the traditions of the early centuries and then rejected tradition. Encouraged by the support of Melanchthon, Karlstadt, Hutten and Sickingen, Luther wrote to Spalatin on June 11, 1520 that the die was cast: he despised the rage of the Romans as much as their favor and would never be reconciled with them; let them condemn and burn what was his, and he would do the same to theirs. He no longer feared them and was writing a book on the reform of Christianity in which he attacked the pope in tones fit for the Antichrist.