Martin Luther, the man who trolled Catholics
What drove Martin Luther to defy the all-mighty Catholic Church – and change the world for ever?
‘My parents kept me under a very strict discipline, to the point of making me timid’
Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident Peter Stanford Hodder & Stoughton €30 ★★★★★
Martin Luther, the instigator of the Reformation, is not a subject to be dealt with lightly: indeed, as his biographer admits, at first he proves ‘a difficult figure to like’. As the most celebrated son of the German town of Wittenberg, Luther is famed for obstinacy rather than charm. Drama clung to him and to his conception of himself: the young Luther’s first defining moment reportedly came during a thunderstorm when lightning struck near him, and the frightened youth made a promise to Saint Anne that he would enter a monastery if only he survived.
The lightning diverted him from the law, which his father had intended him to study, but for Luther the storm never really ceased: politically, it raged around his head ever after, and his moods were such that he frequently seemed to have swallowed it.
The word that Luther used for his internal turmoil was Anfechtung, which the author explains ‘defies simple translation into English, but carries with it a real sense of physical assault’. In his early days, Luther was convinced that God was angry with him, and sought the authority of Scripture to find a way beyond divine wrath – an independent examination of word and faith that was later to have seismic consequences.
One need not be a devotee of Freud to guess that young Martin’s vision of a perpetually angry God bore some relation to his unbending father Hans, although even Hans seems warmer than his mother Margarethe, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder as a frown in a headscarf. Luther was later reported as saying: ‘My parents kept me under a very strict discipline, to the point of making me timid.’ His mother, he recalled, once whipped him ‘until the blood flowed’ for stealing a nut.
When necessary, Luther was not above a bit of late-medieval ‘spin’: he emphasised that he sprang from humble peasant stock, although Hans had in fact risen above it somewhat to prosper solidly in the local mining industry. Still, if Hans desired – as he seemed to – that his own son make a greater impression upon the world, his wish was fulfilled beyond imagining.
For many, Luther remains a symbol of individual defiance against an oppressive authority, the lowly Augustinian friar who dared to take on the all-mighty Catholic Church.
The spark that lit his indignation was the arrival near Wittenberg of Johann Tetzel, a former member of the Inquisition who was now an enthusiastic salesman of indulgences: clerical pardons that could be purchased on behalf of the living and to speed the dead through purgatory. Tetzel, in the best tradition of ad-men, was rumoured to have an ear for a catchy jingle: ‘Place your penny on the drum/The Pearly Gates open and in strolls mum.’
In response, Luther famously produced a public challenge to the abuse of papal indulgences in the form of his Ninety-Five Theses, or debating points – although the author argues that the cherished image of him nailing them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg ‘has only a debatable claim to fact’.
Throughout the many volumes of Table Talk, compiled from notes taken by students on Luther’s conversation, he never once mentioned it. Stanford believes it more likely that he sent his protest in a letter to his local Archbishop on October 31, 1517. When no reply was forthcoming, Luther shared the letter and theses with a small group of friends and colleagues, one of whom passed it to a printer.
With its message rapidly proliferating thereafter in pamphlets and woodcuts, its impact was explosive. In today’s terms, it went viral.
For Luther himself, the risks involved in dissent were far from abstract, particularly as his argument widened to include fundamental questions of papal authority. He would have known that such a protest could lead the Church to deal with him as it had with Jan Hus, the priest burned at the stake in 1415 for raising similar objections. Yet his dogged conviction was such that for a time he seemed sincerely to believe that the Church authorities
could do little else but agree with his arguments. They didn’t, but Luther’s translation of the Bible into German – perhaps his greatest achievement – handed people the freedom to interpret the Scriptures for themselves.
Peter Stanford, a practising Catholic himself, has titled his biography Martin
Luther: Catholic Dissident and he wisely gives weight to both aspects of the man: the born-and-bred Catholic and the dissenter, with the two sides often engaged in a ferocious internal battle that was surely the stuff of Luther’s angst.
What arises is an honest but sympathetic portrait of a profoundly complicated and at times contradictory individual, seen in the heated context of his times.
Luther extolled the German peasantry but was protected from a vengeful Rome by German princes. He preached non-violence and had such a horror of rampaging revolt that on one notorious occasion – in a 1525 tract Against The Murderous And Thieving Hordes Of Peasants – he exhorted rulers to ‘smite, slay and stab’ to quell rebellion.
His primary concern was Man’s direct relationship to God, as he made clear with his doctrine of ‘justification by faith’, yet he was a busy player in the bristling theatre of 16th-century politics, and later stained his reputation with anti-Semitism.
His language could be soaring or earthy, dwelling on communion or constipation, and the solemn young friar ended his days as a happily married paterfamilias with four surviving children.
Stanford has managed a rare thing: an easy, pleasurable read through difficult concepts and hard choices. Yet he conveys Luther’s enduring qualities, not least the absence of self-satisfaction and the presence of ‘sheer, selfless courage’. In his quest to declaim his truth, Martin Luther’s constant resting place was discomfort: a lesson in conscience for his times, and for ours.