Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 65 of 288 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Lutheranism was also part of the background to the greatest literary work of the sixteenth century: the story of Dr. Faustus, the scholar who sold his soul to the Devil. This had circulated as a folk tale, but the printed version of 1587 situated the doctor firmly in Wittenberg—and there were real-life parallels. In 1538, when Valerius Glockner, a wayward Wittenberg student, had confessed to making a pact with the Devil, Luther persuaded him to forswear Satan, saving him from a secular trial that might well have ended in his death.40 The fictional Faust, however, did not escape the Devil, and the work included swipes at the Pope and at Catholic clergy, illustrating the combination of antipapal aggression and devotional intensity that was becoming the trademark of Luther’s legacy. In England, Marlowe took the tale and transformed it into a searing tragedy within five years of the Faustbuch being printed. In the hands of Goethe, it would become the classic of German literature, a metaphor for the Enlightenment struggle that altogether transcended its confessional origins. It is impossible to conceive of German culture apart from Lutheranism, and its echoes have pervaded artistic production of all kinds up to the present day. —PEOPLE from every walk of life were touched by Luther’s message, and it changed their lives forever. Just three examples give a flavor of how he inspired very different individuals. Although Germany’s leading artist Albrecht Dürer never met Luther, he longed to paint “the pious man.” When Luther disappeared from public view after the Diet of Worms, Dürer anxiously followed every rumor, convinced that he had been murdered by the Pope’s minions.41 But how did Luther transform Dürer’s faith? In 1500, he painted an extraordinary self-portrait. Dürer looked directly at the viewer, his beautiful locks filling the visual space. At twenty-eight years old, the age believed to be most perfect, he adopted a Christlike pose, his fur coat the only hint that this was a sixteenth-century person. This picture was redolent of a religiosity that owed everything to the ideals of the imitation of Christ, the spirituality that permeated the sermons of Staupitz and the sodality of his supporters in Nuremberg.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The university was to be part of the new learning, but although several famous humanists and scholars visited and gave lectures, in the first few years none stayed long. In fact, the university was scholastic in orientation and its first rector, Martin Pollich von Mellerstadt, was an old conservative who adhered to the via antiqua and resisted any departure from the teachings of Aristotle and Duns Scotus. Against Mellerstadt’s influence, Staupitz and others strove to introduce the via moderna, but the humanist ideas that were exciting so many in Europe at this time were not on their agenda. Theology held pride of place in the university, and many of its professors—including Mellerstadt himself—had moved from other disciplines into what was regarded as the queen of the sciences to make it the university’s intellectual powerhouse. Within the theological faculty, Andreas Karlstadt was a follower of Thomas Aquinas. Johannes Lang lectured on moral philosophy. Lang had mixed in humanist circles at Erfurt and learned Greek and Hebrew so he could read the Bible in the original languages; Luther had studied Hebrew with him. It was an immensely productive friendship. Luther may well have picked up humanist ideas through Lang, and together they brought the new biblical humanism, critical of scholasticism and determined to return to the original texts, to university teaching.30 Yet this was not a friendship of equals. Although Luther was probably only four years older, the younger man’s admiration for him was evident from the beginning, and Luther did not mince his words when, in 1517, sending him the Ninety-five Theses, he felt Lang did not understand his new theological direction.31 Luther’s position at the university, which he had inherited from Staupitz and would hold until his death, was professor of the Bible, and it required him to lecture on Scripture, hold disputations, and preach to students and members of the university.32 He undertook the task with gusto, lecturing first on the Psalms. Using the new technology of printing when he lectured on Romans in 1515–16, he had the university printer, Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, set the Vulgate text in double-spaced format, with generous margins on all sides. In his lectures Luther then read out his glosses and emendations to the text, based on the more up-to-date editions of Faber Stapulensis and Erasmus’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s text; the students would insert them into their individual copies. Luther would expound the meaning of the text, working from notes he had prepared but sometimes speaking extempore.33 Johann Oldecop, later an opponent of the Reformation, recalled how well Luther explained biblical passages, not using Latin but German.34 This style of lecturing, which engaged closely with the text, would have given the students an almost tactile experience of encountering Scripture and working with it themselves.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The town had few industries but it did specialize in religious services. As a seventeenth-century chronicler put it, Eisenach was “a true religious emporium of a town,” crammed with ecclesiastical institutions: He counted one foundation, three parish churches, seven monasteries, and nine chapels. St. Mary’s had twenty-three altars and St. George eighteen, all of which had to be staffed with clergy. Civic pride may have got the better of the chronicler, however, for some of these “monasteries” were hardly major institutions.20 While Eisenach was another town that, like Mansfeld, venerated St. George, here the martial spirit of the dragon-slayer was counterbalanced by its own woman saint: St. Elisabeth of Hungary, who had married Ludwig IV of Thuringia in 1221 and had lived in the Wartburg. The Franciscans arrived in Eisenach at about this time, and Elisabeth was devoted to them. A wonderfully subversive figure, she rejected the power and ostentation of the counts, coming down from the castle to spend her time in the town below with the down-and-outs, tending the sick and promoting the building of hospitals. There were many legends surrounding her. One time, when her husband was away, she let a leper sleep in his bed. Understandably annoyed when he heard about it on his return, he pulled back the cover only to discover that an image of the Cross was imprinted on the sheets. When Ludwig died on crusade, however, his brother Heinrich von Raspe stepped in as regent, and banished Elisabeth from the castle; she was forced to seek shelter with the Franciscans, who hid her.21 In fact, there is no historical evidence for Heinrich’s cruelty, and Elisabeth later seems to have moved to Marburg of her own volition where she practiced ascetic works. Indeed, she proved a huge asset to the dynasty, and Heinrich himself founded a church in her memory. Elisabeth would remain important in Luther’s life. Years later, he could still rattle off her biography, giving her date of birth and age at death.22 He never spoke disrespectfully of her, even when other saints became the target of his invective; he also named his first daughter Elisabeth.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Catherine’s oil and two whole heads of St. Ursula’s Virgins. The relics were shown in the Castle Church, and Friedrich commissioned leading artists to provide its altarpieces. Unlike patrons of later periods, he used mainly German artists, not Italian or Dutch painters, which added to the sense that this was a distinctively local, patriotic style, with its own heartfelt devotional simplicity, unlike the rich and beautiful Italian religious art of the period. With its nine works by Dürer, Cranach, and Matthias Grünewald, the church’s collection of altars rivaled any other of the time for artistic quality. Just half a century later, when electoral Saxony was defeated, the collection would be broken up, so it is impossible now for the visitor to the church, remodeled extensively in the nineteenth century, to get a sense of what it looked like in Luther’s day. As a devotional space it must have been electrifying. But it was also the final flowering of a style of painting that would be destroyed by the Reformation itself, its spiritual function lost. The magnificence of the church was all the more remarkable because it dominated a town with just 2,000–2,500 inhabitants. 19 Politically, Wittenberg was a settlement of new men, which lacked a patriciate and had fairly rudimentary systems of government. All contracts—whether deeds of sale, property divisions, wills, testaments, or marriage licenses—were registered before the civic court, the judge’s record serving as the repository for all legal deeds. This system made notaries dispensable, but it could work only as long as there was not enough business to overwhelm the court. For the most part, the old-town elite lacked university degrees or legal training, while the incomers were literate in Latin and skilled in the new learning. Printers like Johann Rhau-Grunenberg soon set up shop right by the monastery and near the new Leucorea. Next door to the university building a perfume shop opened, testifying to the refined tastes of the town’s growing population. 20 The town council itself was unlike the proud gatherings of citizens in the imperial cities of southern Germany. These cities, subject directly to the emperor, could make their own laws. They could judge their citizens, condemn them to death, and execute them without appeal; and their councilors, dressed in their elegant black, could attend Imperial Diets, participate in imperial politics, and even devise their own foreign policies. Stadtluft macht frei— city air makes you free—ran the adage. Even though they were in practice often ruled by small oligarchies of patricians and merchants, the myth of civic participation remained powerful.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For Johann Eberlin von Günzburg, a Franciscan monk in southern Germany, Luther’s central message was his attack on monasticism. His three heroes were Erasmus, Luther, and Karlstadt, the trio who battled the monks and priests. Convinced that evangelical freedom must mean social liberation, he imagined a fictional land, Wolfaria, where there would be social justice and support for those in need. He wrote a series of pamphlets in support of the Reformation, the most famous of which was The Fifteen Confederates, where fifteen characters from various social estates explained why they supported Luther. When it came to monasticism, Günzburg wrote with extraordinary insight. It is probable that he had acted as confessor to a convent. His work went far beyond Luther’s simple insistence that nuns were sexual beings subject to lust, and he diagnosed what he saw as their miserable lives and twisted spirituality. It was the insecurity of the monks, Günzburg argued, that shackled the nuns’ intellectual and devotional capacities, “for coarse, unlearned, foolish monks are assigned to the convents; for them it would be painful if the nuns know more than they do, and so they don’t tolerate those who are more knowledgeable than they are. This they justify under the cover of claiming that studying is not appropriate for nuns, that it places obstacles in the way of humility, piety, and so on.” Like Luther, he thought that convents would only deform a young woman’s desires and development. He understood, too, the bitterness of relationships in a closed institution: “If she has a vindictive abbess or prioress or if she angers a sister especially beloved by her superiors, she will never have rest or peace.”43 For a time, excited by the radical potential of the Reformation, Günzburg became a supporter of Karlstadt, but without losing his original admiration for Luther. This drew him to Wittenberg, where he spent 1522–23, and in the end he returned to the Lutheran fold. He eventually found a position with the duke of Wertheim, at first preaching in the small village of Remlingen, and then in Wertheim itself. He lost his post when the duke died in 1530, and his later years were tough. His health broken, he spent his remaining years ministering in the small parish of Leutershausen, mired in controversy; he died in 1533. A man who would have expected to spend his life in a monastery, all his physical needs catered for, Günzburg ended up an author, traveler, father, and convinced evangelical. For him the Reformation meant the liberation of the monks, the freeing of nuns from a tyranny and perverted sexuality, and the possibility of a new world of social justice. Luther was a hero whose life had inspired and transformed his own.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  While the lean monk with the deep-set eyes was able to inspire and lead others, he was also fostering a certainty that could be ruthless in its dismissal of those who disagreed with him — those ‘Jews’ who belonged to the false church, the ‘synagogue’. * Luther returned home from Heidelberg in excellent health, writing to Spalatin that despite the long journey he had put on weight, and that the food had suited him very well; the Wittenberg monastery’s dreadful meals were something for which he regularly apologised to visitors.” More importantly, he must have felt also that he had strong support, being surrounded by the young ready to sweep away the old. At his side he had Karlstadt, whom even Luther's opponent Johannes Cochlaeus would later describe admiringly as a man who had JOURNEYS AND DISPUTATIONS 109 ‘cultivated his rough intellect, which was like a hard crag’."° The fact that the man who had conferred Luther's doctoral degree on him now enthusiastically joined his junior colleague signalled a profound change in Luther’s position within the university and the order. “You know the brilliance of those who support us’, he wrote to Trutfetter; the whole university, he averred, was on his side.” The battle lines were now being drawn. The debate at Heidelberg was a turning point because it showed that Luther’s emerging theology was going beyond the criticism of indulgences. It had brought new followers, in particular Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, who would promote his ideas beyond the Nuremberg network to the humanists of southern Germany. As a Dominican, Bucer was a particularly surprising convert. A student at the University of Heidelberg and a passionate follower of Erasmus, he took careful notes on the disputa- tion and would eventually leave his order — deeply moved by what he had witnessed, he wrote to his friend the humanist Beatus Rhenanus, ‘as if in a dream’."* He became one of the most important theologians of the Reformation, and a powerful advocate of unity and compromise amongst the evangelicals. Capito, a Benedictine, was cathedral preacher and university professor at Basle, another important intel- lectual centre; he was also a friend of Albrecht of Mainz. Other members of the audience at Heidelberg were Theobald Billican, Martin Frecht and Johannes Brenz, who would all become future leaders of the Reformation in southern Germany.” The disputation made a huge impression on each of them, changing their lives forever, even if they would not agree with all of Luther's later teachings. But once back in Wittenberg, the optimism of the spring quickly dissipated.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Catholic works simply would not sell.* It was not only theologians who were turning to print. Now laypeople were weighing in on Luther's side as well, and their work THE LEIPZIG DEBATE 143 25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon Luther's ‘rose’, the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor's cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther's university. was finding keen readers. A sign of what was to come was the 1519 publication (in German) of Apology and Christian Reply of an Honourable Lover of the Divine Truth of Holy Writ, by the layman and Nuremberg civic sécretary Lazarus Spengler; it was the very pamphlet that the author of Eccius dedolatus claimed Eck wanted to burn.™ Spengler’s broadside was published in Nuremberg, Basle, Leipzig, Wittenberg and Augsburg, and went into a second edition. ‘Whether Luther’s teaching is in accord with Christian ordinance and reason I leave to every rational pious person’s judgement’, Spengler wrote. ‘But this I know for certain, that although I don’t consider myself to be particu- larly skilled or intellectually educated in these matters, I have never known any teaching or sermon pierce my mind so strongly, my whole life long.’ Those who were attacking Luther's teaching as ‘sour beer’ were not worthy ‘to do up his shoelaces’. In particular, Spengler attacked those who argued that Luther's teaching was suitable only for universities and educated folk: ‘If [his teaching] is just and godly, then it ought to be shouted and proclaimed publicly, and not just 144 MARTIN LUTHER taught in the universities, or to speak more truly, in the Jewish syna- gogues.’® Lutheran rhetoric increasingly equated scholastics and university conservatives with Jews, a mobilisation of anti-Semitism that would create a difficult legacy for the movement. Luther’s teaching, as Spengler understood it, attacked the abuses of the Catholic Church and was based on Scripture. As far as his posi- tive theology was concerned, however, Spengler was less clear: Luther, he said, relieves the conscience which has been burdened with error and false scruples, through which Christians have been made anxious rather than comforted, driven to despair rather than recovery, even though the way to salvation is ‘utterly sweet and healing’.* In other words, Luther seemed to be repeating pretty much what Staupitz had preached. It seems that at this stage Spengler — a linchpin of Staupitz’s Nuremberg sodality — could see no real difference between Luther and his former confessor. But all seemed united against the rapacious indulgence-sellers. Before the debate, Luther had been an unknown.

• From Satyricon (1)

  A translation worthy of the name is as much the product of a literary epoch as it is of the brain and labor of a scholar; and Melmouth’s version of the letters of Pliny the Younger, made, as it was, at a period when the art of English letter writing had attained its highest excellence, may well be the despair of our twentieth century apostles of specialization. Who, today, could imbue a translation of the Golden Ass with the exquisite flavor of William Adlington’s unscholarly version of that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding’s rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke’s masterly rendering of Lucian’s True History? But eternal life means endless change and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever changing tissue of the living. Were it not for this, no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, except in instances where the discovery and collation of fresh manuscripts had improved the text. In the case of an author whose characters speak in the argot proper to their surroundings, the necessity for revision is even more imperative; the change in the cultured speech of a language is a process that requires years to become pronounced, the evolution of slang is rapid and its usage ephemeral. For example Stephen Gaselee, in his bibliography of Petronius, calls attention to Harry Thurston Peck’s rendering of “bell um pomum” by “he’s a daisy,” and remarks, appropriately enough, “that this was well enough for 1898; but we would now be more inclined to render it ‘he’s a peach.’” Again, Peck renders “illud erat vivere” by “that was life,” but, in the words of our lyric American jazz, we would be more inclined to render it “that was the life.” “But,” as Professor Gaselee has said, “no rendering of this part of the Satyricon can be final, it must always be in the slang of the hour.” “Some,” writes the immortal translator of Rabelais, in his preface, “have deservedly gained esteem by translating; yet not many condescend to translate but such as cannot invent; though to do the first well, requires often as much genius as to do the latter. I wish, reader, thou mayest be as willing to do the author justice, as I have strove to do him right.” Many scholars have lamented the failure of Justus Lipsius to comment upon Petronius or edit an edition of the Satyricon. Had he done so, he might have gone far toward piercing the veil of darkness which enshrouds the authorship of the work and the very age in which the composer flourished. To me, personally, the fact that Laurence Sterne did not undertake a version, has caused much regret. The master who delineated Tristram Shandy’s father and the intrigue between the Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby would have drawn Trimalchio and his peers to admiration. W. C. F.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Ah! But these are not courtesans, they are the dregs of cities. A courtesan worthy of the name is a beautiful woman, gracious and amiable, at whose home gather men of letters and men of the world; the first magistrates, the greatest captains: and who keeps men of all professions in a happy state of mind because she is pleasing to them, she inspires in them a desire for reciprocal pleasure: such an one was Aspasia who, after having charmed the cultured people of Athens was for a long time the good companion of Pericles, and contributed much, perhaps, towards making his century what it was, the age of taste in arts and letters. Such an one also was Phryne, Lais, Glycera, and their names will always be celebrated; such, also, was Ninon d’Enclos, one of the ornaments of the century of Louis XIV, and Clairon, the first who realized all the grandeur of her art; such an one art thou, C-----, French Thalia, who commands attentions, I do not say this by way of apology but to share the opinion of Alceste. A courtesan such as I have in mind may have all the public and private virtues. One knows the severe probity of Ninon, her generosity, her taste for the arts, her attachment to her friends. Epicharis, the soul of the conspiracy of Piso against the execrable Nero, was a courtesan, and the severe Tacitus, who cannot be taxed with a partiality for gallantry, has borne witness to the constancy with which she resisted the most seductive promises and endured the most terrible tortures, without revealing any of the details of the conspiracy or any of the names of the conspirators.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He lost his post when the duke died in 1530 and his later years were tough. His health broken, he spent his remaining years minis- tering in the small parish of Leutershausen, mired in controversy; he died in 1533. A man who would have expected to spend his life in a monastery, all his physical needs catered for, Giinzburg ended up an author, trav- eller, father and convinced evangelical. For him, the Reformation meant the liberation of the monks, the freeing of nuns from a tyranny and perverted sexuality, and the possibility of a new world of social THE CHARIOTEER OF ISRAEL 419 justice. Luther was a hero whose life had inspired and transformed his own. Argula von Grumbach, a lay noblewoman in Ingolstadt married to a knight, and mother of four children, also had her life turned upside down by Luther’s message. In the early 1520s, she devoured his writ- ings and read his translation of the New Testament. When in 1523 the university in Ingolstadt started proceedings against a Lutheran student, she was outraged and determined to take up his cause. She wrote a letter in his support and had it published.“ It was a runaway success, published in fourteen editions in just two months, and it made her famous. Her convictions gave her the courage to override all the contemporary expectations of what a woman could and could not do. She corresponded with Luther himself and in 1530 she even met him in the castle at Coburg. It was doubtless her social status as a member of the noble Staufen family that enabled her to become Luther's friend — she belonged to the social group Luther had always cultivated. The world of intel- lectual equality between men and women which she had dared to imagine did not come to pass. She was derided by the university and mocked by men who thought her actions and behaviour inappropriate to a woman. Pressure was put on her husband to control her. Grum- bach stopped publishing in 1524, and her last offering was a poem which defended her standing as a wife and mother against a slanderous poem by one of her antagonists, who alleged that she ‘forgot all female modesty’. ‘Paul himself’, her critic proclaimed, had said ‘you should not dispute, but govern the house at home and keep quiet in church.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  8 The friendship between the two men began when Karlstadt rushed to Leipzig in the middle of winter, on January 13, 1517, to buy a copy of Augustine so that he could refute Luther’s claims, only to discover that Luther was right to reject scholasticism. It seems originally to have unleashed intellectual energy and creativity on both sides. Karlstadt now attacked scholasticism with vigor in a set of theses in April 1517, setting out a theology based on Augustine and criticizing the use of Aristotle’s metaphysics. 9 Luther, for his part, wrote his theses against scholasticism under Karlstadt’s influence, and his first ringing declaration, “To say that Augustine exaggerates in speaking against heretics is to say that Augustine tells lies almost everywhere,” is a clear adaptation of one of Karlstadt’s theses. 10 In turn, Karlstadt’s support for his ideas evidently emboldened Luther, especially since his fellow Augustinian friends Linck and Lang were decidedly more cautious about his emerging theology. Indeed, from mid-1517 on Luther began to talk of “our theology,” and soon would speak of “us Wittenberg theologians.” 11 Karlstadt did not at first share Luther’s opposition to indulgences—perhaps, as some have suggested, because he could see that their abolition would lead eventually to the collapse of the All Saints foundation and his own income. On the other hand, he took a firm line against the veneration of saints far earlier than Luther did, daring to make his views public despite the important role that the Elector’s collection of relics played in the town, not least in bringing pilgrims whose money was vital to the financial health of the foundation. 12 Moreover, study in Rome had left him with a powerful anti-Roman animus. He had, for example, been quick to advise the Elector that new arrangements for benefices at All Saints must build in independence from the papacy or else Friedrich might find that Rome and its “courtesans” would seize control. His extreme anti-Romanism may have rubbed off on Luther, whose own negative experience of Rome had been neither as extensive nor as disillusioning. The first strains in their friendship emerged at Leipzig in 1519. Although Karlstadt had been Eck’s original target, the final theses for debate scarcely hid the fact that Luther was the real antagonist. During the negotiations about where and how the debate was to be held, Luther corresponded directly with Eck, making no bones about the fact that he and Eck were the ones who counted. Moreover, all observers agreed that Karlstadt had the worst of the debate. Where Luther’s and Karlstadt’s theology converged was in their admiration for the Theologia deutsch and the mystic Johannes Tauler.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Meanwhile, matters were moving fast in Wittenberg. While Melanchthon became Luther’s main collaborator and instrument in the town, the relationship between the two men was not without its difficulties. Melanchthon had embarked on the Loci communes (Commonplaces), his great work of systematization of Reformation theology, which would create a doctrinal corpus for the new movement. Luther’s respect for the younger man grew, and as he read Melanchthon’s drafts in the Wartburg he would repeatedly state that Melanchthon was the better scholar. Yet his colleague was not easy to keep on the straight and narrow. Far from taking on Luther’s mantle in his absence from Wittenberg, he seems to have found inspiration in the sermons of a monk, Gabriel Zwilling, who had moved into the Augustinian cloister from Zwickau, and who preached radical reform. A contemporary reported that Melanchthon never missed one of his sermons.14 Luther’s irritation showed through. “As is your way, you are just too gentle,” he told the younger man, grumbling to Spalatin that Melanchthon “gives in too easily to his moods, and bears the Cross more impatiently than is fitting for a student, let alone such a great teacher of teachers.”15 Prodding him to be a leader, Luther toyed with the idea that Melanchthon should preach or at least (since he was not ordained, though Luther no longer thought this an obstacle) give public lectures, so that all could hear his exegesis of the Bible.16 For his part, Karlstadt, Luther’s co-debater at Leipzig, was producing a flood of treatises. First he attacked monastic vows, then he began to ponder sexuality and marriage, before condemning religious images and, finally, moving toward a reinterpretation of the Mass and Communion. His new theological views had ramifications for his ideas about society, too, and he began to question hierarchies of all kinds. Luther read much of his work and, as he was prone, arrived at many of his own views in response to Karlstadt’s arguments. Alone in his “Patmos”—as he called his study in the Wartburg, likening it to the island where John wrote the biblical book of Revelation—his intellectual development at the time paralleled in many ways that of Karlstadt. But whereas Karlstadt was dealing with new situations arising in Wittenberg and was forced to make policy in reaction to a host of different pressures—from the Elector, the populace, the university, the radical Augustinians—Luther was alone with the Devil.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One of the reasons may lie in the fact that when he arrived in 1511, there was a group of academics all about the same age, creating more of a level playing field. In addition to Lang, there was Andreas Karlstadt, three years younger, but his academic senior and the man who conferred his doctorate on him. The professor of law, Hieronymus Schurff, was just two years older; Wenzeslaus Linck, prior of the Wittenberg monastery from 1511 to 1515, gained his doctorate in 1511, a year before Luther. Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Staupitz’s nephew and a highly competent dialectician, was just a few months younger; he taught in the philosophy faculty but soon switched to theology. Although they all taught different subjects, they formed a cohesive peer group; many of them shared a similar formation and several were Augustinians living together in the Wittenberg monastery, which housed about forty monks. 40 Another reason for Luther’s rise may have been the effect of his forceful personality in what was still a minor institution. Even in 1536, there were only twenty-two faculty posts at Wittenberg: four each in theology and law, three in medicine and eleven in the arts. 41 Karlstadt, for one, was profoundly influenced by his erstwhile junior colleague and new friend, and rapidly absorbed his ideas. In 1516 Luther’s student Bartholomäus Bernhardi gave a disputation, part of the customary academic training, and advanced some of Luther’s ideas on grace developed in the lectures on Romans; in its course, Luther publicly stated that he did not believe St. Augustine was the author of the treatise attributed to him, De vera et falsa poenitentia . Karlstadt vigorously disagreed and immediately procured his own copy from Leipzig. But on rereading the text he decided that Luther was correct, and he began to be influenced by Luther’s understanding of Augustine. 42 Both radical and passionate, Karlstadt easily got lost in the thread of his own thought and needed direction: Luther’s intensity seems to have unleashed his creativity, sparking him to rethink all his intellectual and spiritual positions. Schurff, more cautious by nature, was also captivated, perhaps because Luther was able to articulate the desperation and sense of sinfulness he too had felt. Luther clearly had an intellectual drive that drew others to him, in part because they recognized their own ideas in what he argued. He was intellectually independent and decisive, and could communicate complex opinions with passion.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Peasants, so the images seemed to suggest, were pious evangelicals—simple Christians who could preach better than the educated clergy. It seemed that in Peringer’s sermons God’s spirit was being poured out on ordinary folk. Even Spalatin, who heard him preach at Nuremberg, was impressed. But in 1524 Peringer was unmasked as an ex-cleric, who certainly knew how to read and write (and preach)—much to Luther’s amusement, who teased Spalatin for being taken in. Yet if Peringer had not existed, he would have had to be invented. His imposture gave voice to a prevalent mood in Germany of admiration of simple folk, especially peasants, and suspicion of intellectuals. Karlstadt, who shared in this mood, now began to toy with leaving the university for good and becoming a vintner—he had grown up in a wine-growing area—or living as an ordinary priest. He eventually opted for the latter and chose to move to Orlamünde, for which he was technically responsible as archdeacon. Karlstadt was careful to square this with the authorities, and in May 1523 the parish formally asked the Elector to appoint him as pastor. It was quite a comedown. It meant taking on a lowly paid job that he had previously employed someone else to do, in the days when he had aspired to the richest benefice in Wittenberg. Instead of the fine clothes he had worn after his return from Italy, the former university professor now took to wearing gray peasant attire, and donned the peasant felt hat in place of his doctor’s cap.10 As he later put it, “I now have a gray coat (thank God) in place of the finery which at one time greatly delighted me and caused me to sin.” Luther mocked his “felt hat and a gray garb, not wanting to be called doctor, but Brother Andrew and dear neighbor, as another peasant,” but these were visible signs of Karlstadt’s determination to relinquish social superiority.11 The parsonage in Orlamünde was falling down and the fences were broken; the woods had not been properly tended and the previous incumbent, who had left under a cloud, had used the manure set aside for the priest’s vines for his own fields. Yet this was the peasant life that Karlstadt had craved—although it is unclear how much laboring he did himself.12 [image "43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_051_r1.jpg] [image "43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_051_r1.jpg] 43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But the very next day, Saxo, 70 who had been firmest in his protestations, denied him three times. The Romanists howled for Luther’s blood, worst amongst them, the bishops of Mainz and Merseburg. Luther, in the house of Caiaphas, remained calm. The bishop of Trier considered what to do: Luther was a pious Christian and he could see no reason to condemn him. But the priests yelled “Burn him!” So they took Luther’s writings and put them on a pyre with the image of his face on top of the books. To the left of him they put Hutten’s writings and to the right, Karlstadt’s. Yet although the fires burnt the books to ashes, the portrait of Luther refused to burn. The author of The Passion of the Blessed Martin Luther, or His Sufferings was the humanist Hermann Busche, who named himself Marcellus after the man who had buried the martyred St. Peter. 71 The equation of Christ and Luther seems blasphemous. Yet the pamphlet, which enjoyed huge success, was in line with much of Luther’s own understanding of Worms: Luther himself saw it as a passion, and believed he was imitating Christ. In his account of events at Augsburg in 1518, he had compared himself to Christ in the house of Caiaphas, and he had been prepared to see his arrival at Erfurt on the way to Rome as his “Palm Sunday.” There was a long tradition of profound devotional identification with Christ reaching back through mystics and saints, which encompassed pious laypeople as well as clerics. Paintings of the Crucifixion or of the Holy Family routinely showed the onlookers, aside from Christ himself, dressed in the sumptuous silks and velvets of the day, with slashed trousers and sleeves with extravagant patterns. This was not because the artists did not know what people wore in biblical times: rather, their devotional images imported the present into the biblical past, allowing viewers to overcome historical time as they entered into devotional time and participated in the stories of Christ’s Passion. In 1500, Albrecht Dürer had painted himself, facing the viewer, with long, curling hair and with his hand raised in blessing in the style of Christ—a self-portrait that was anything but a proclamation of the divine status of the artist. For Dürer this would have been a devotional act, attempting to model himself as closely on Christ as possible as he reached his twenty-ninth year, about the age it was believed that Christ had begun his ministry. Luther’s description of his sufferings as a “passion” was not the only way he understood what was taking place—he had too great a sense of irony ever to credit it completely. But he habitually applied biblical drama to present his experience.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was not only theologians who were turning to print. Now laypeople were weighing in on Luther’s side as well, and their work was finding keen readers. A sign of what was to come was the 1519 publication (in German) of Apology and Christian Reply of an Honorable Lover of the Divine Truth of Holy Writ, by the layman and Nuremberg civic secretary Lazarus Spengler; it was the very pamphlet that the author of Eccius dedolatus claimed Eck wanted to burn.54 Spengler’s broadside was published in Nuremberg, Basle, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Augsburg, and went into a second edition. “Whether Luther’s teaching is in accord with Christian ordinance and reason I leave to every rational pious person’s judgment,” Spengler wrote. “But this I know for certain, that although I don’t consider myself to be particularly skilled or intellectually educated in these matters, I have never known any teaching or sermon pierce my mind so strongly, my whole life long.” Those who were attacking Luther’s teaching as “sour beer” were not worthy “to do up his shoelaces.” In particular, Spengler attacked those who argued that Luther’s teaching was suitable only for universities and educated folk: “If [his teaching] is just and godly, then it ought to be shouted and proclaimed publicly, and not just taught in the universities, or to speak more truly, in the Jewish synagogues.”55 Lutheran rhetoric increasingly equated scholastics and university conservatives with Jews, a mobilization of anti-Semitism that would create a difficult legacy for the movement. [image "25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon, Luther’s “rose,” the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor’s cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther’s university." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_029_r1.jpg] [image "25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon, Luther’s “rose,” the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor’s cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther’s university." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_029_r1.jpg] 25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon, Luther’s “rose,” the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor’s cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther’s university.

• From Shunned (2018)

  “If Jehovah God is going to resurrect anyone,” I said, content to play along, “it would definitely be the magnificent Bob Curtis. No question.” Dad was looking out the side window toward a large, empty hangar and the blue DEPARTING FLIGHTS sign. “Yes, Lindy,” Mom continued, looking at me. She went on about death being full payment for sins, how those who are resurrected will get to start life with a clean slate. “It would be a shame for you to miss seeing Bob again. You obviously loved each other very much.” Bob would have laughed at being characterized a sinner, for indeed he was (by her standards)—and so what? Despite my lethargy, I was amused. I slowed the car, pulled up to the curb, and turned off the ignition as I thanked them for coming. In that moment, it occurred to me to tell them something more. I turned and leaned against my door to face them. “I want you to know, Mom and Dad, that Bob never judged you. Many people would be appalled by parents who shun their daughter for leaving a religion.” “We know that,” Mom said matter-of-factly, and I realized it took courage for them to have shown up at the service, their reputations preceding them, unsure how they might be received. “Bob never judged you,” I repeated. “He would never shun his own daughter, but he didn’t make unilateral assessments about people. He didn’t perceive you as wrong or hold your beliefs against you, and that made all the difference to me.” There was a thick silence inside the car. Dad was sitting back in his seat, and Mom was looking at me, waiting for me to say more, but I was tapped out. With every breath I was growing more tired, exhaustion seeping into my body like an invisible ether. We got out of the car, and I hugged Mom while Dad removed the luggage from the trunk and placed it on the curb. It crossed my mind that I might never see them again, but the idea did not stir tears. I had bigger fish to fry. Mom urged me to call them if I needed anything. I hugged Dad. I knew I would not call them for help and they would not call me until life brought us another serious illness or death exemption. I got into the car and pulled into the far exit lane, then glanced into my rearview mirror to see Mom and Dad standing at the curb, watching me drive away. Acknowledgments [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] T his book was years in the making and I could not have completed it without the support and encouragement of some very special people. My heartfelt gratitude to: Bob , for your intelligence, humor, and boundless love and generosity, before, during, and after. Angeles Arrien , for lending me your cherished terrapin rattle at a very difficult time and helping me discover how to begin again.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Eleven years later, Dürer included himself in another landmark picture, the All Saints Altar for Nuremberg’s Landauer chapel. It is a painting that has eluded definitive interpretation. It shows the saints, led by St. Augustine, while beneath them hovers another celestial group of representatives of all the different social orders, from emperors to peasants. Dürer included himself in the picture as a small figure on a grassy sward on the earth below, holding a cartouche to proclaim that he was the painter. He stands alone, observing the New Jerusalem and the heavenly hosts, to whom the Christian community is joined through prayer. The altarpiece epitomized the devotional life of the old Church—the Church of indulgences, mutual prayer, and works—and it was painted for a chapel where perpetual Masses were said for the dead. This was the piety that Luther’s Reformation would sweep away. Dürer’s painting of the four apostles, finished in 1528, the year he died, exuded a completely different spirituality. John and Mark are blocks of color, their solidity conveying the authority of Scripture. Dürer incorporated into the painting quotations from Luther’s German Bible of 1522. He also chose not to depict the customary four evangelists, replacing Matthew and Luke with Peter, who embodies the Church, and Paul, whose writings were key to Luther’s thought. This was the religion of the Lutheran Bible. The painting was not displayed in church but Dürer donated it to Nuremberg’s town council, in homage to one of the first cities to have introduced the Reformation, in 1524. Like the peasants, Dürer used the word freedom to encapsulate Luther’s message. He hoped for a future where all, “Turks, heathens and Calicutts [Indians], may turn to us.” He saw Luther as a man who preached “clear and transparent doctrine,” and who helped people become “free Christians.” But Dürer does not seem to have made much of the corresponding concept of the absolute sinfulness of man, and where Luther looked inward, praising his fellow Germans over the hated Italians, Dürer was a citizen of Nuremberg, open to global commerce and exchange, who knew how much he had learned from his journeyman years in Italy. He also collected objects from around the world—feathers, weapons, “Indian cocoanuts and a very fine piece of coral,” curiosities of all kinds that found their way into his art.42 Luther, by contrast, barely ever mentioned Africa, India, or the New World, either in his writings or his conversations. While he envisaged the Reformation as the struggle of the true Christians against the Pope and the Devil, for Dürer it meant the future coming together of all the religions and people of the world in peaceful unity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was the insecurity of the monks, Günzburg argued, that shackled the nuns’ intellectual and devotional capacities, “for coarse, unlearned, foolish monks are assigned to the convents; for them it would be painful if the nuns know more than they do, and so they don’t tolerate those who are more knowledgeable than they are. This they justify under the cover of claiming that studying is not appropriate for nuns, that it places obstacles in the way of humility, piety, and so on.” Like Luther, he thought that convents would only deform a young woman’s desires and development. He understood, too, the bitterness of relationships in a closed institution: “If she has a vindictive abbess or prioress or if she angers a sister especially beloved by her superiors, she will never have rest or peace.” 43 For a time, excited by the radical potential of the Reformation, Günzburg became a supporter of Karlstadt, but without losing his original admiration for Luther. This drew him to Wittenberg, where he spent 1522–23, and in the end he returned to the Lutheran fold. He eventually found a position with the duke of Wertheim, at first preaching in the small village of Remlingen, and then in Wertheim itself. He lost his post when the duke died in 1530, and his later years were tough. His health broken, he spent his remaining years ministering in the small parish of Leutershausen, mired in controversy; he died in 1533. A man who would have expected to spend his life in a monastery, all his physical needs catered for, Günzburg ended up an author, traveler, father, and convinced evangelical. For him the Reformation meant the liberation of the monks, the freeing of nuns from a tyranny and perverted sexuality, and the possibility of a new world of social justice. Luther was a hero whose life had inspired and transformed his own. Argula von Grumbach, a lay noblewoman in Ingolstadt married to a knight, and mother of four children, also had her life turned upside down by Luther’s message. In the early 1520s, she devoured his writings and read his translation of the New Testament. When in 1523 the university in Ingolstadt started proceedings against a Lutheran student, she was outraged and determined to take up the student’s cause. She wrote a letter in his support and had it published. 44 It was a runaway success, published in fourteen editions in just two months, and it made her famous. Her convictions gave her the courage to override all the contemporary expectations of what a woman could and could not do. She corresponded with Luther himself and in 1530 she even met him in the castle at Coburg. It was doubtless her social status as a member of the noble Staufen family that enabled her to become Luther’s friend—she belonged to the social group Luther had always cultivated.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  57 With Cajetan comprehensively defeated, or so it appeared to Luther, and with the Elector on his side, Luther seemed to be immune from attack, at least for the moment. * “Obelisks” were printers’ markers for errors; “asterisks” for things to be added. The titles were in-jokes by humanists who knew all about the new technology of print. T HE LONG-AWAITED DEBATE with Johannes Eck, which had been brewing since the spring of 1518, was finally arranged for June 1519 at Leipzig, in the territory of Georg of Saxony. The meeting was another of the dramatic intellectual set pieces that pushed the Reformation forward, and was a decisive step in the movement reaching a wider public beyond an academic audience. But while it saw the emergence of a pro-Luther party, it also gave rise to the beginnings of a coalition against him. Moreover, it marked yet a further radicalization of Luther’s theology; indeed, the older Luther would date his Reformation “breakthrough” to around this time. For Luther, there was no going back after Leipzig. If the battle with Cajetan had been a tussle with father figures, the disputation with Eck was a battle of brothers. Unlike the hated Italians at Augsburg, Eck was no papal courtier. Born in Egg, near Memmingen in Swabia, he was the son of a peasant and had been raised by his uncle, a priest in Rottenburg am Neckar, who taught him classics and sent him to the University of Heidelberg. Eck’s intellectual formation was not unlike that of Luther: He had read Ockham, Aristotle, and Augustine before becoming interested in mystical theology and humanism. He could not be dismissed out of hand as an old-fashioned scholastic or a Thomist like Cajetan. Fluent not only in Latin and Greek but also, unusually, in Hebrew, he was numbered among the “humanist theologians” by the Augsburg civic secretary and fellow humanist Conrad Peutinger. 1 Eck had become pro-chancellor at the University of Ingolstadt in 1512, where he introduced a number of reforms. His students included men like Urbanus Rhegius, who later became an influential cathedral preacher in Augsburg, and who praised his teacher as someone whose sheer intellectual brilliance incited the envy of others, and blinded “the horde of those suited to evil darkness.” 2 Not only did Eck defend Johannes Reuchlin against the Dominicans but he also invited him to Ingolstadt, where he stayed from late 1519 to the spring of 1521; Eck regarded the lectures Reuchlin gave there as among his major intellectual influences.