Anger

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 174 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  At some point following these traded gibes, King Christian II of Denmark intervened. He was somehow under the impression that an apology from Luther for his intemperate remarks could swing Henry over to the Protestant side. As it happened, Luther and the others who had broken with Rome needed help in dealing with Duke George, who had organized a Catholic alliance and was furiously intent on smiting once and for all the Lutheran pestilence. No one knew whether warfare would break out, and at that time Elector John even had more ramparts built to further fortify Wittenberg against such an attack. So Luther believed Christian’s tale and wrote nearly as humble a letter as he had ever written. But alas, Christian had his facts wrong, and Henry cynically took the opportunity of this present of a creampuff pitch to blast it out of the park, and then to thumb his nose at the pitcher as he strutted around the bases. He was as vicious in his response as imaginable, accusing Luther of deflowering a nun and of leading scores of thousands to their deaths in the Peasants’ War. This savage, mocking response to Luther’s honest apology provoked Luther to pour out his feelings in his letter to Linck on New Year’s Day of 1527. As we know, three years later, when Henry’s cardinal Wolsey would be unsuccessful in persuading the pope to give Henry an annulment for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (who was the aunt of Emperor Charles), Henry would angrily cashier the cardinal and break with Rome anyway, and so become a Protestant after all, at which point the new pope would embarrassingly revoke Henry’s absurd honorific title, “Defender of the Faith.” But this was three years away. For now, Henry was Rome’s fiercest champion. The year 1527 was difficult in other ways. For one thing, the plague returned. It arrived in Wittenberg that summer, causing many to leave the town, though Luther stayed behind, feeling that it was his duty as a pastor and leader to do so. But even before the plague arrived, Luther had begun having health problems of his own. He had experienced a great tightness in his chest, which he evidently cured with Benedictine root. But there were also further troubles with hemorrhoids and other afflictions. Already two years before, Luther reported an abscess on his leg, which never fully healed. Then, in June 1526, he had a terribly painful attack of kidney stones. Kathie asked him what she could bring him to eat, and he asked for a fried herring and cold peas with mustard. His doctors were aghast that he would eat this, but Luther seems to have known what would do the trick, and sure enough the pains and the stones passed. But Luther would suffer with more stones in the years ahead.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In December 1524, Luther responded to Karlstadt’s writings, publishing the first part of what would be a two-part polemic against him and all the others who differed with him on images, infant baptism, and Communion. It was titled Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments. Going hammer and tongs at the positions laid out by his onetime friend and collaborator—whom he now certainly considered his new chief enemy—Luther cited what he saw as popish legalism and a concomitant obsession with unimportant externals, over and against the true Gospel. For him, this was Old Testament legalism. It was an overzealous anti-popery that had run so far away from Rome that it had stupidly circled the globe to end up back at Rome without ever knowing it. “The pope commands what is to be done,” he wrote, “Dr. Karlstadt what is not to be done.”18 Luther saw both as the opposite of the freedom promised in the Gospel. It bound the conscience and kept people in a stance of perpetual guilt for not having done enough. “For in no place,” he wrote, “do they teach how we are to become free from our sin, obtain a good conscience, and win a peaceful and joyful heart. That is what really counts.”19 Melanchthon was upset at what he perceived as the harshness of Luther’s tone toward Karlstadt, but, alas, very much of what Luther would write in the years hence would read like a modern-day late-night tweet storm. The cranky Luther we associate with his later years was now only clearing his dyspeptic throat. In his critique, he repeated his previous unfortunate and polemical conflation of Karlstadt and Müntzer. But one reason that Luther did see a vital similarity between them had to do with the issue of authority and with what he saw as a common spirit of rebellion. Both Müntzer and Karlstadt were disinclined to play by the rules, and in this Luther saw something important. Karlstadt had not gotten his pastorate in Orlamünde in the proper way and flouted convention in pretentiously forgoing his former title of “doctor.” Both were also cavalier in their slippery and clearly erroneous use and interpretation of certain scriptural passages. Luther was of course perceived by many as antiauthoritarian and as a renegade and rebel in how he saw the pope’s authority, but Luther would have made clear that he was never against authority per se, far from it. It was because of his respect of true authority that he spoke out against false authority. But Luther believed Karlstadt and certainly Müntzer had gone too far on this score. In any case, what readers in Orlamünde made of Luther’s new two-part work was not especially difficult to divine. They discovered for it what was a literally disgusting fundamental application: they used it as toilet paper.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Tetzel was so outraged when he read Luther’s theses that a few weeks afterward, as he was peddling heaven’s treasures near Berlin, he is reported to have said, “In three weeks I will throw the heretic into the fire!” And as the customary garb for heretics burned at the stake was something resembling a bathing cap, Tetzel added, “And he will go to heaven in a bathing cap!”4 • • • So that we are clear on what it was that launched this Revolution of Revolutions, here are the theses that Luther posted, with his brief introduction: Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. [image file=image_rsrc6KT.jpg] The original 1517 printing of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.* This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.* Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh.* The penalty of sin remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inner repentance), namely till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.The pope neither desires nor is able to remit any penalties except those imposed by his own authority or that of the canons.* The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring and showing that it has been remitted by God; or, to be sure, by remitting guilt in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in these cases were disregarded, the guilt would certainly remain unforgiven.* God remits guilt to no one unless at the same time he humbles him in all things and makes him submissive to the vicar, the priest.* The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to the canons themselves, nothing should be imposed on the dying.*

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was not entirely against these things, but he always wanted to be measured and responsible in moving forward. But once again Karlstadt skipped cavalierly ahead of things by declaring in writing that anyone who did not take both bread and wine together during Communion was committing a sin. When Luther learned of this, he was furious. It was one thing to say that laypeople should be permitted to take the bread and the wine together, as the priests did—and he certainly agreed with that—but it was a step too far to say that not doing so was actually itself a sin. The Gospel gave us the freedom to do these things if we chose, but it did not in any way compel us. Then Gabriel Zwilling preached very critically about monasticism and encouraged the monks in the Augustinian cloister to abandon their cowls. On November 12, no fewer than thirteen of them took him up on this. By the end of the month, another fifteen would leave. It was a startling development, and the prior of the monastery, Conrad Helt, was so upset that he wrote to Frederick, asking for his help. Luther wrote to Spalatin, saying that his concerns over this exodus en masse were similar to the concerns he had over Karlstadt’s mutton-headed exegesis regarding celibacy and marriage. Luther wanted to be sure that the monks who had left would not later regret what they had done. In both cases, one may see evidence of Luther’s pastor’s heart. He was concerned more about the people than about the correctness of the theology. So Luther decided to write on the subject, again trying to undo the damage that those to whom he had entrusted everything in his absence had done. The treatise he wrote was The Judgment of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows. In this treatise, Luther wrote a lengthy preface in the form of a letter to his own father, essentially apologizing for his own ill-considered monastic vow of sixteen years earlier. The preface and treatise are in Latin, so one doubts whether Luther’s father, who did not read Latin, ever knew of it. Nonetheless, it gives us a beautiful picture of Luther’s love for his father and of his own thinking on what he had so impetuously done so many years before.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Can you not think it through, dear friends? If your enterprise were right, then any man might become judge over another. Then authority, government, law and order would disappear from the world; there would be nothing but murder and bloodshed. As soon as anyone saw that someone was wronging him, he would begin to judge and punish him. Now if that is unjust and intolerable when done by an individual, we cannot allow a mob or crowd to do it. . . . What would you yourselves do if disorder broke out in your rank and one man set himself against another and took vengeance on him? Would you put up with that? Would you not say that he must let others, whom you appointed, do the judging?23 But Luther was most bothered by the Schwärmer who had incited this rebellion with their careless words. All of them ought to have known better. Like his namesake Martin Luther King Jr., Luther was not advocating doing nothing, but he was strongly advocating against violence as a Christian means of solving social injustices. Luther’s advice was to trust God and to trust him radically. His message was scriptural: if we do not take these things into our own hands, but cry out to the Savior, we will see how he fights on our behalf. But it is clear from history that people rarely have the kind of faith that believes this sufficiently to resist taking action. To make his point, Luther quoted Romans 12:19: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.” Then he wrote, Indeed, our leader, Jesus Christ, says in Matthew 7 [5:44] that we should bless those who insult us, pray for our persecutors, love our enemies, and do good to those who do evil to us. These, dear friends, are our Christian laws. But then Luther lustily laid into those who had led these peasants astray: “The devil has sent false prophets among you; beware of them!” He mentioned no one by name, but everyone understood that he meant Müntzer and Karlstadt and the Zwickauers. They had foolishly whipped up thousands of peasants into a state of righteous anger that had nothing to do with the humble Gospel of Christ, and that humble Gospel is always infinitely more powerful than any righteous anger that resorts to the sword and the fist. He then reminded them of Jesus’s admonition to Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, “He who takes the sword will perish by the sword.” Then he gave them a contemporary illustration from his own experience:

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  It’s a sad testament to my virtue that an inked-up arm is all it really takes to bed me. (As one friend said later, You gotta love a date willing to do stuff he’ll regret.) Proof of David’s undying conviction, I take it as, though Lecia points out cynically that any Mary tattoo need only Blessed Virgin carved above it for reason to remount its throne. That and David’s move to my block prove, in my moronic head, some divine power’s orchestrating our future together. For a week or so, it’s bliss. Any night I don’t have Dev, David and I smoke cigars in my tree fort or read Russian short stories aloud till dawn. We watch movies where stuff blows up exclusively. Within the month, he phones Mother to announce, Mrs. Karr, I plan to marry your daughter. Mother’s heartless comeback: Didn’t you just get out of some place? Then one day, almost like a switch is thrown in us both, reality sets in, turning the whole deal inside out. I’m raking leaves, waiting to borrow David’s car for after-school pickup, but he slides alongside the curb, rolls down his window, and announces he’s going to the gym instead. Can’t I drop you at the gym and then get Dev? I want to know. David prefers to pick up Dev himself, then work out. But I’m trying to shelter Dev from David’s presence in my life, which David resents. He wants to plug into the husband slot right away. Words get sharp. I throw down the rake and stalk inside. He follows. The ensuing fight rocks the rafters—a worse tussle than Warren and I ever dragged through. And soon our every day is a rage, the whole romantic endeavor flip-flopping from cuss fight to smoochy-faced makeup—the reversals coming too fast to get down in a diary. When Dev’s home, I won’t let David sleep over, which pisses him off no end, as does my leaving early from a research trip he takes me on. I’m mad he doesn’t fit into the slot marked reliable. (Of course, his temper fits are as vivid to me now as my own are invisible. No doubt he was richly provoked, for I’m nothing if not sharp-tongued in a fight, and however young he was, neither was I in shape to partner anybody.) If David enters the mind-set he calls a black-eyed red-out, he’s inclined to hurl all manner of object—book and backpack not least. And as a verbal opponent, he’s a colossus, once driving me to that lowest of schoolyard attacks—personal appearance: At least I’m not a four-eyed, broke-nosed fop was one of many sentences I had to apologize for.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In early February 1517, Luther wrote to his friend Johannes Lang, enclosing a letter he hoped Lang would give to their former teacher Jodokus Trutfetter. That letter and the letter to Lang touch upon something that would figure prominently in what lay ahead for Luther, because it concerned nothing less than upending the entire medieval system of education: We are to believe everything, always obediently to listen and not even once, by way of a mild introduction, wrangle or mutter against Aristotle and the Sentences. What will they not believe who have taken for granted everything which Aristotle, this chief of all charlatans, insinuates and imposes on others, things which are so absurd that not even an ass or a stone could remain silent about them! . . . I wish nothing more fervently than to disclose to many the true face of that actor who has fooled the church so tremendously with the Greek mask, and to show to them all his ignominy, had I only time! . . . He is the most subtle seducer of gifted people, so that if Aristotle had not been flesh, I would not hesitate to claim that he was really a devil.2 These are strong words. Luther’s volcano was not quite on the verge of blowing, but it was not dormant either. The pieces of the bigger picture were coming together, and one of them of course concerned what Luther clearly saw as a church that was no longer in love with the truth and the pursuit of same, that answered good and honest questions with an imperious “Be silent and do as we say, or else.” Luther knew instinctively that this was wrong, that it went against the essence of the God of the Bible, and in his letter to Lang and Trutfetter anyone with eyes to see may discern hairline cracks in his previously immaculate alabaster exterior. On May 18, he wrote to Lang again: Our theology and St. Augustine are progressing well, and with God’s help rule at our university. Aristotle is gradually falling from his throne, and the final doom is only a matter of time. It is amazing how the students disdain the lectures on the Sentences. Indeed, no one can expect to have any students if he does not want to teach this theology, that is, lecture on the Bible or on St. Augustine, or another teacher of ecclesiastical eminence.3 So all of these things were slowly leading Luther in a certain direction, theologically and otherwise. But there was a moment in 1517, it seems, long before he posted his Ninety-five Theses, when it all came together, when the signal issue of God’s grace shone over everything he had been thinking and worrying over, when the clouds parted and he could see clearly that for which he had been so diligently searching.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And so Tetzel now arrived in Jüterbog, just twenty-five miles from Wittenberg, to set up his papally sanctioned medicine show. What he was selling now made snake oil cure-all potions seem like fresh fruits and vegetables. Indeed it was so fabulous and so extraordinary that people hauled themselves from many miles around to hear him, and not just to hear him but to throw money at him, that they might get something of what he was offering, which, to cut to the chase, was heaven itself. And who would not trade money for eternal paradise, if one really believed it was? And no one could doubt that it was, for the pope himself was behind this and the papal insignia were displayed and intentionally clearly visible wherever Tetzel preached. This special indulgence that the pope had sanctioned and that Tetzel was preaching was through Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, whose own bishopric needed the funds. He would split them evenly with Rome, as was the usual practice. The main reason Tetzel did not come directly into Wittenberg itself was that the Saxon elector Frederick saw the raising of moneys via indulgences as being in direct competition with people coming to visit his relic collection. This indulgence was therefore a threat to that source of income for him and electoral Saxony. There were other reasons too. But many of the faithful in Wittenberg had nonetheless heard about this tremendous opportunity to have their sins forgiven for a simple cash payment, so when Tetzel set up his operations in nearby Jüterbog and Zerbst—each equidistant from Wittenberg and just beyond the electoral border—many Wittenberg citizens scurried thither, for who but a fool would remain home when heaven was for sale? But as a local priest and pastor, Luther heard all too plainly what was going on and was more than anything concerned for the souls of his flock. He knew that Rome was playing on the ignorance and foolishness of the faithful with this indulgence business, and while this had been going on for many decades, it had never come quite so close to him, so the cynicism of it had never been quite so obvious and awful. It all came even closer to home when some of Luther’s own parishioners showed up in the confession booth and beamed with ignorant pride as they showed Father Martinus the precious certificates they had purchased from Tetzel; they clearly expected a much less harsh penance from Luther because, in their minds, they had already paid in advance for the sins they were there to confess. If anyone doubted as much, here was the receipt. They were themselves unsure what the certificate they had purchased was worth, but surely Father Martinus would know and could redeem it for them now, couldn’t he?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Before Luther completed the third part of his acid triptych, he again met with Miltitz, who seems somehow to have gamely swum the fetid moat with an olive branch after all. For taking the trouble to do so, Miltitz was actually able to wheedle Luther into writing another letter to Pope Leo. Luther did write it, and this time it found its way to the pope. It was attached when he sent the treatise The Freedom of a Christian to Rome. In the letter, Luther generously and some would say disingenuously separates the pope from those around him, casting the hapless Leo as “more sinned against than sinning.” He was the victim of evil flatterers, who hovered about the papal throne like red-hatted succubi. In the letter, it is the papacy itself, with all of its attached ecclesiastical machinery, that has become anti-Christ, not Leo himself. In the letter, Luther calls him “my father” and “most excellent Leo,” trying to peel the man away from the farce and sin that surround him. He was trying to give Leo an opportunity to see things as they were and to save face, to do something that might allow the church to survive and reform. So in the letter, it was for the soiled church itself that Luther reserved the licking flames of his attack: The Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death and hell, so that not even the Anti-Christ, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness. . . . Let not those men deceive you, as they pretend that you are lord of the world who will not allow any one to be a Christian without your authority, who babble of your having power over heaven, hell, and purgatory. . . . They that call thee blessed are themselves deceiving thee. They cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths. He said that those trying to deceive the pope were “godless flatterers,” which he explained was why he felt compelled to appeal to a church council. He didn’t wish the pope himself to be offended. But then, just in case the pope wasn’t offended, Luther added something more: I have truly despised your see, the Roman curia. Neither you nor anyone else can deny that it is more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was. As far as I can see, it is marked by a completely depraved, hopeless, and notorious godlessness. What must the effete Leo have made of it all? Luther’s certainty and confidence and faith and courage in speaking to no less than the pope are at least impressive, but he would speak just as openly with the emperor himself. Indeed, just a few months earlier he had written the emperor, saying,

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Then coming back from New York on the train one day, I slip into a familiar gap. It’s right before Christmas in a packed coach car, the overhead shelves crammed with suitcases and spilling bags and packages. I settle into a window seat with the backrest tilted far back. It’s the only place left. Behind me, a young woman—maybe nineteen—asks me to move my seat up. After fiddling with it for a second, I tell her it’s stuck in a deep recline. Then I lie back while passengers clot the aisles and jam in their overhead bags. She leans forward and says, very close to my ear, I bet if I yanked your hair, you could move that seat . And from my sagging state of half-sleep, I snap awake and shoot back, You picked the wrong bitch to fuck with on this train. Around us, the entire car stops. People hold gestures midair. She starts to kick the back of my seat—hard and rhythmically, which I don’t respond to at first. If I were thinking like anything but an animal, I would’ve apologized to her by now. But I sit there fuming instead, telling myself stuff like, She’s just doing this because I’m a woman of a certain age . I’m determined not to respond to the kicks that keep coming, but eventually, she says with force, You better not get off in Albany, bitch, ’cause I’ll slap your face. With blood pounding in my temples and all the venom that a woman disappointed in love can bring to an instant, I press my face into the slot between the seat and the window and hiss, If you touch me, I’ll cut your fucking hand off. I don’t even know where this sentence comes from. Not to mention that—in terms of cutting off a hand—I lack even a pair of cuticle scissors. All human activity within sound of me ceases. The entire car is throbbing with hatred for us both. The girl withdraws like a slug doused with salt, and the train lurches west . About twenty minutes out of the station, while I sit infused with acid at the outburst, I try to write the girl a note, but I wind up crouching by her seat to apologize. She shrugs coolly. Once home, I call my sobriety coach, Patti, who says, What d’you expect, Mare? Run around without a meeting, and eventually, you’ll start acting like a drunk again. I wasn’t that bad back then. Silence from Patti, who knows better. Okay, sometimes I was. She suggests I doctor bathwater with lavender salts, set votive candles all over, kill the lights, then step into my own baptismal fount. Maybe there I can rethink events on the train. Follow that, she says, with a list of how your life has changed since you quit drinking.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I was talking about the nonjudgment research with my colleague Jan, and she told me she’d had a relevant experience over the weekend. She had noticed herself getting disproportionately enraged about a small thing—losing a stamp when she was trying to mail a letter—and she later made the connection that her anger wasn’t really about the stamp. The anger had been activated the night before, when she watched a movie about a misogynist jerk, which triggered her own history with a misogynist jerk from two decades ago. “So what did you do with the anger?” I asked. “I told myself I didn’t need to feel angry, because the jerk is gone from my life now.” “You judged? You hit the brakes?” “What else was I supposed to do? Be mad at a guy I haven’t seen in twenty years?” The threat—the misogynist jerk—wasn’t around anymore to fight against or run away from… and yet she had these feelings. So what could she do with them? She could complete the cycle. The Feels exist in her body, without reference to the jerk whom she successfully left behind. But this is not the habit most of us learn early in our lives, and it takes practice. When we have feelings we can’t really do anything about and we don’t know how to let ourselves simply feel without doing anything, our brains will look for some situation it can do something about, and it will try to impose the feelings on that situation. So don’t be mad at the guy who’s long gone. Just allow the anger to move through you. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, it’s just random Feels, left over from the past, that have to work themselves out. Don’t hit the accelerator, but don’t hit the brakes either. Notice the anger and allow it. Be still, and it will blow through you like a hot desert wind or a typhoon. nonjudging 2: healing traumaWhen a person experiences trauma, it’s like someone snuck into their garden and ripped out all the plants they had been cultivating with such care and attention. This is particularly awful when the person who tears up the garden is not a stranger but someone the person trusted. There is rage and betrayal, there is grief for the garden as it was, and there is fear that it will never grow back. But it will grow back. That’s what gardens do. And you facilitate that growth by allowing the garden to be what it is, in process, rather than what it was or what you wish it were. How? Self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Patience. Feeling okay with feeling not-okay.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith. Thus Rabbi Meir Kahane, the most extreme member of Israel’s Far Right until his assassination in New York in 1990: There are not several messages in Judaism. There is only one. And this message is to do what God wants. Sometimes God wants us to go to war, sometimes he wants us to live in peace.... But there is only one message: God wanted us to come to this country to create a Jewish state. 13 This wipes out centuries of Jewish development, returning to the Deuteronomist perspective of the Book of Joshua. It is not surprising that people who hear this kind of profanity, which makes “God” deny other people’s human rights, think that the sooner we relinquish him the better. Yet, as we saw in the last chapter, this type of religiosity is actually a retreat from God. To make such human, historical phenomena as Christian “Family Values,” “Islam” or “the Holy Land” the focus of religious devotion is a new form of idolatry. This type of belligerent righteousness has been a constant temptation to monotheists throughout the long history of God. It must be rejected as inauthentic. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims got off to an unfortunate start, since the tribal deity Yahweh was murderously partial to his own people. Latter-day crusaders who return to this primitive ethos are elevating the values of the tribe to an unacceptably high status and substituting man-made ideals for the transcendent reality which should challenge our prejudices. They are also denying a crucial monotheistic theme. Ever since the prophets of Israel reformed the old pagan cult of Yahweh, the God of monotheists has promoted the ideal of compassion. We have seen that compassion was a characteristic of most of the ideologies that were created during the Axial Age. The compassionate ideal even impelled Buddhists to make a major change in their religious orientation when they introduced devotion (bhakti) to the Buddha and bodhisattvas. The prophets insisted that cult and worship were useless unless society as a whole adopted a more just and compassionate ethos. These insights were developed by Jesus, Paul and the Rabbis, who all shared the same Jewish ideals and suggested major changes in Judaism in order to implement them. The Koran made the creation of a compassionate and just society the essence of the reformed religion of al-Lah. Compassion is a particularly difficult virtue. It demands that we go beyond the limitations of our egotism, insecurity and inherited prejudice. Not surprisingly, there have been times when all three of the God-religions have failed to achieve these high standards. During the eighteenth century, deists rejected traditional Western Christianity largely because it had become so conspicuously cruel and intolerant. The same will hold good today. All too often, conventional believers, who are not fundamentalists, share their aggressive righteousness. They use “God” to prop up their own loves and hates, which they attribute to God himself.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  At the diet in Augsburg, it was especially important that Cajetan succeed in persuading the German estates to agree to pay the Turkish tax. The Vatican desperately needed help in fighting the encroaching Islamic forces, and indeed desperately needed money in general. But from the beginning of the diet, the German princes were quite clear about their displeasure with the church’s endless demands for money. Here again one sees the political and nationalistic forces that were never far from the surface of these events. So at this diet the German estates resoundingly chose not to pay the new Turkish tax. They declared they had had enough of these Crusades and fighting the infidels. As far as they were concerned, the church had taken advantage of their generosity in this, and in case there was any doubt, they put their grievances on this and other subjects in a document. In it they even went so far as to accuse the church of corruption, declaring that in “cases before the ecclesiastical courts the Roman Church smiles on both sides for a little palm grease.” They also protested at how “German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps.” And they complained about the poor quality of the priests sent to them in Germany, saying many of them were “shepherds in name only.” On and on the grievances mounted as the humiliated Cajetan stood listening. It all ended with a simple plea: “Let the Holy Pope stop these abuses.”3 But the only abuses the pope and Cajetan were eager to stop were the heresies being spouted by that “son of perdition” from Wittenberg named Martin Luther. So Leo had written a letter to Frederick, who as one of the seven electors was one of the most important figures at the diet. Leo hoped to use his papal powers of persuasion to turn Frederick—and with him the whole of the diet—in Rome’s favor: Beloved son, the apostolic benediction be upon you. We recall that the chief ornament of your most noble family has been devotion to the faith of God and to the honor and dignity of the Holy See. Now we hear that a son of iniquity, Brother Martin Luther of the Augustinian eremites, hurling himself upon the Church of God, has your support. Even though we know it to be false, we must urge you to clear the reputation of your noble family from such calumny. Having been advised by the Master of the Sacred Palace that Luther’s teaching contains heresy, we have cited him to appear before Cardinal Cajetan. We call upon you to see that Luther is placed in the hands and under the jurisdiction of this Holy See lest future generations reproach you with having fostered the rise of a most pernicious heresy against the Church of God.4

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Have you forgotten that at Worms the German nobility presented His Imperial Majesty with about four hundred grievances against the clergy and declared openly that if His Imperial Majesty did not wish to abolish such abuses, they would do so themselves, for they could not long endure them?12 He reminded them that much he had said—and especially his original attacks on indulgences and monasticism—had been met with great approval by the common people, who knew the truth of them and were glad someone was pointing them out. But who among all of you would ever have repented for such frightful abomination, would ever have sighed or would ever have moistened an eye? Yes, now like hardened, unrepentant men you want to pretend that you never did any evil. Now you have come to Augsburg and want to persuade us that the Holy Spirit is with you and will accomplish great things through you (although in your whole lifetime you have done Christendom nothing but harm) and that he will thereafter lead you straight to heaven with all such abominations, unrepented and defended besides, as though he had to rejoice over you who have served your god-belly so gloriously and laid waste his church so miserably. For this reason you have no success and also shall have none until you repent and mend your ways.13 One cannot help but wonder whether such strong language pushed these recipients away from what Luther said or indeed succeeded in bringing any of them to reconsider their views, which might have led to conviction and repentance. In any case, Jonas was hugely pleased with it and told Luther so, calling the work “unexpected, wonderful, and powerful.”14 But when one reads the details, one can see how the corruption and hypocrisy must have been enraging to anyone with a soul. Luther talks, for example, of the particular outrageousness of the “butter-letters,” which were letters of indulgence that granted the purchaser the privilege of eating an unlimited amount of foods otherwise forbidden during Lent. On and on he thundered, aiming particular fire at the single lie that lay at the rotten black heart of it all, that men and women could themselves “make satisfaction” for their own sins, that the free gift of God’s grace did not exist, and that Jesus had therefore suffered and died in vain. “This doctrine,” he wrote, “has filled hell and has troubled the kingdom of Christ more horribly than the Turk or the whole world could ever do. . . . Alas, where are the tongues and voices that can say enough about this?”15 His ending is a chilling imprecation, and one wonders who reading it could fail at least to see that here was a man who believed in something, for whom life was more than a search for comfort:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  After Dukes John and John Frederick pondered Müntzer’s immodest proposal, they knew action must be taken against him. So he was summoned to be interrogated at the Weimar court, as were a number of his Allstedt followers. But some of these followers, who were interrogated separately, easily volunteered Müntzer’s plans to lead an armed revolt. It was not as if this hadn’t been clear enough in the sermon, but in this different context it must have come across to Müntzer that his plans were not met with approval. In any event, Müntzer now somehow intuited that the jig was up for him. Witnesses said that after he left the chamber, he was ashen. But late on the night of August 7, he did what he always seemed to do in such awkward spots: he opted to skedaddle, literally climbing over the Allstedt city wall. But this time, he left a wife and child behind. All those who had joined his “secret league” and whom he had whipped up into an ungovernable frenzy were humiliated at his ignominious departure. Everyone else, however, was tremendously tickled to see him take his leave. But Luther rightly believed they hadn’t heard the last of him. Indeed, Müntzer next settled in Mühlhausen and once again began attracting followers. There he met up with a fitting partner in one Heinrich Pfeiffer, who was himself an accomplished agitator of the first water. It was in Mühlhausen that Müntzer now wrote his most rousing and bitter philippic against Luther, titled Highly Necessary Defense and Answer Against the Soft-Living Flesh of Wittenberg, Which in Miserable and Perverted Fashion Has Soiled Poor Christendom Through the Theft of Holy Scripture. Müntzer’s burning hatred of Luther was now further irritated because of his earnest belief that Luther was a wart-ridden toady to the princes, that he sided with them against the suffering peasants: The princes bleed the people with usury and count as their own the fish in the stream, the bird of the air, and the grass of the field, and Dr. Liar says, “Amen!” What courage has he, Dr. Pussyfoot, the new pope of Wittenberg, Dr. Easychair, the basking sycophant? He says there should be no rebellion because the sword has been committed by God to the ruler, but the power of the sword belongs to the whole community. In the good old days the people stood by when judgment was rendered lest the ruler pervert justice, and the rulers have perverted justice. They shall be cast down from their seats. The fowls of the heavens are gathering to devour their carcasses.12 But if whom the gathering fowls would devour were to be judged as dispositive, Müntzer must be reckoned a false prophet. Still, to those who, in the end, would be devoured, his keening self-righteous voice was a temporary and soothing balm, one with which “Dr. Pussyfoot” could not at this point compete.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As the debate drew near, things heated up more and more. For one thing, Luther still had not received official permission to participate from the cranky Duke George, who certainly disliked him for being in the camp of George’s rival cousin, Frederick. So it wasn’t until the time of the actual debate in June that Luther was sure he would be allowed to debate at all. For another, Eck and Luther had a number of ugly written exchanges in which Luther accused Eck of being interested not in truth but in flagrant showboating. He called him “a prankster and a sophist,”5 and it is clear that he had been hurt by his former friend’s vicious attacks. Eck fired back by saying that anyone who attacked the beloved church could be no friend, that his first responsibility was to defend the church. Luther’s friends—and Karlstadt too—all thought that his raising the white-hot topic of papal supremacy was ill-advised and did all they could to dissuade him from bringing it into this debate. Spalatin was especially forceful, thinking something so impolitic could lead only to trouble. But Luther would not be moved. “I beg you, my Spalatin,” he said, “do not fear anything and do not let your heart be torn to pieces by human considerations. You know that if Christ were not leading me and my case, I would have been lost long ago.”6 The way things had transpired had galvanized Luther profoundly. In his mind, there was no doubt that the truth would win, whatever became of him. He had not asked for this fight, but neither could he hide from it. The more he saw that the facts were on his side, the more emboldened he was to present them, to uphold the truth. What especially irked him was the idea that the church—and Eck—were twisting the Scriptures to make their silly points. If only they hadn’t done that, his sense of justice would not have been so provoked, but this was far beyond the pale, and he felt he must expose it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For if we have broken all laws of men and cast off their yokes, what difference would it make to us that Philip is not anointed or tonsured but married? Nevertheless he is truly a priest and actually does the work of a priest, unless it is not the office of a priest to teach the Word of God. In that case Christ himself would not be a priest, for he taught now in synagogues, then in ships, now at the shoreline, then in the mountains. . . . Since, therefore, Philip is called by God and performs the ministry of the Word, as no one can deny, what difference does it make that he is not called by those tyrants. . . . May Christ compensate for my absence and silence with Melanchthon’s preaching and voice, to the confusion of Satan and his apostles.27 Luther still hoped that with Cranach and Christian Döring appealing to the city council, Melanchthon could be appointed the preacher. Because he was not ordained, this would also powerfully underscore the idea of “the priesthood of all believers.” But the council was simply not up to this dramatic departure and rejected the appeal. So Zwilling and later Karlstadt filled that vital role in Luther’s absence, and the very events that Luther hoped would not happen did happen. So until he was able to come back for good and right the wrongs and clarify what was confused, things would rumble forward in bumpy fits and starts. These included episodes of violence in Wittenberg too. On October 8, a number of monks from St. Anthony’s cloister in Lichtenberg had come to Wittenberg on one of their standard begging tours. But now when they came, they unwittingly stumbled into an atmosphere decidedly hostile to them and their mendicant behavior. It was even reported that students pelted them with stones and clods of earth. Luther was gratified that things were moving forward, but how they were moving was often dismaying. Usually they moved a bit too quickly. But in one instance, they were not moving forward at all. Luther now learned that Albrecht of Mainz, who had inadvertently kicked off everything in 1517 with his abuse of indulgences, was again short of cash and hoping that his refurbished relic collection—with the subsequent boon of indulgences that came with viewing them—would be the best way out of his troubles. When Luther discovered this, he boiled with fury.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Brother Ernst, just tell us, you miserable, wretched sack of worms, who made you a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his dear blood? . . . By God’s mighty power you have been handed over to destruction. . . . I tell you: The eternal and living God has decreed that you be removed from your chair by power given us . . . for God has said about you and your kind . . . Your [eagle’s] nest will be torn down and destroyed.29 To Count Albrecht, who was theologically aligned with Luther, something Müntzer clearly also thought beyond the pale, he wrote, In your Lutheran gruel and Wittenbergian soup, have you not been able to find what Ezek[iel] 37 prophesies? Besides, have you not been able to taste in your Martinian peasant shit how the same prophet goes on to say in chapter 39 that God makes all the birds under heaven devour the flesh of princes and all the dumb animals guzzle the blood of the big shots, as described in the secret revelation in [chapters] 18 and 19? Haven’t you caught on that God values his people more than you tyrants?30 Was it indeed God who had said these things? Each letter bore the same cracked signature: “Thomas Müntzer with the sword of Gideon.”* But two days later, the fight was over. It was a rout, as utter as can be conceived outside fairy tales, a carnival of carnage in which four thousand peasants were slaughtered, while something like four of the nobles’ soldiers were killed. On the following day, the surviving peasants who were crouched above the city were challenged to turn over their “false prophets” and surrender. If they complied, they would be treated with mercy. But Müntzer was still awake inside his own mad dream and would spend his last free hours gamely firing up the weary souls around him. He crowed that whatever bullets came their way, he would catch in his magical sleeve! Of course when the nobles’ demands were not met, they began the attack. When the first cannon blast fell short, Müntzer howled in triumph. But when subsequent attempts were less inaccurate and Müntzer’s sleeves proved to be mortal, the mock-heroic prating died down, and the peasants did what anyone would do who is not ready to die: they lifted their skirts and speedily scattered. Most of them actually ran toward their enemies, thinking they could find safety someplace inside the city. But they did not, and when the troops caught up with them, the butchery continued.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The whole world knows your nature; truly you have so guided your pen that you have written against no one more rabidly and, what is more detestable, more maliciously than against me. . . . How do your scurrilous charges that I am an atheist, an Epicurean, and a skeptic help the argument? . . . It terribly pains me, as it must all good men, that your arrogant, insolent, rebellious nature has set the world in arms. . . . I would wish you a better disposition were you not so marvelously satisfied with the one you have. Wish me any curse you will except your temper, unless the Lord change it for you.7 Putting Luther’s inveterate inability to play nice to the side, what had he said in his much-anticipated work? For one thing, Luther had not composed it de novo but decided to rebut Erasmus point by point and to follow the general form of Erasmus’s own essay, so it was not a stand-alone explication of Luther’s views but more a refutation of Erasmus’s. Still, it is widely regarded as Luther’s magnum opus, and Luther too came to see it that way. For one thing, Luther regarded this issue as the central theological issue in all that he did. This was the heart of the heart of the good news—of the best news conceivable—that we cannot choose our way out of hell, nor do anything of our own accord to be freed from sin and eternal damnation, but, mirabile dictu, Christ had come to set us free. All we need do is believe in him, and we are freed from sin and death forever and irreversibly. We are under no obligation to do anything at all to save ourselves; indeed we cannot do anything, and it is vitally important that we perfectly understand that we can do nothing. Nothing. So this misunderstanding that we might perhaps add something, even the smallest something—which idea Erasmus was in his soft way promoting—was nothing less than the most evil and harmful misunderstanding in the history of the world. It should be said that Luther in the acerbic work nonetheless earnestly commended Erasmus for dealing with the single vital issue: You alone . . . have attacked the real thing, that is, the essential issue. You have not worried me with those extraneous issues about the Papacy, purgatory, indulgences and such like—trifles, rather than issues—in respect of which almost all to date have sought my blood . . . ; you, and you alone, have seen the hinge on which all turns, and aimed for the vital spot. For that I heartily thank you; for it is more gratifying to me to deal with this issue.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Wordsworth was careful not to give this experience a conventionally religious interpretation, though he was quite happy to talk about “God” on other occasions, especially in an ethical context. 8 English Protestants were not familiar with the God of the mystics, which had been discounted by the Reformers. God spoke through the conscience in the summons of duty; he corrected the desires of the heart but seemed to have little in common with the “presence” that Wordsworth had felt in Nature. Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth would only call it “something,” a word which is often used as a substitute for exact definition. Wordsworth used it to describe the spirit which, with true mystical agnosticism, he refused to name because it did not fit into any of the categories he knew. Another mystical poet of the period sounded a more apocalyptic note and announced that God was dead. In his early poetry, William Blake (1757–1827) had used a dialectical method: terms such as “innocence” and “experience,” which seemed diametrically opposed to one another, were discovered to be half-truths of a more complex reality. Blake had transformed the balanced antithesis, which had characterized the rhymed couplets of poetry during the Age of Reason in England, into a method of forging a personal and subjective vision. In Songs of Innocence and Experience , two contrary states of the human soul are both revealed to be inadequate until they are synthesized: innocence must become experience and experience itself fall to the lowest depths before the recovery of true innocence. The poet has become a prophet, “Who Present, Past, & Future, sees” and who listens to the Holy Word that spoke to humanity in primordial time: Calling the lapsèd Soul, And weeping in the evening dew That might controll The starry pole, And fallen, fallen, light renew. 9 Like the Gnostics and Kabbalists, Blake envisaged a state of absolute fallenness. There could be no true vision until human beings recognized their lapsed condition. Like these earlier mystics, Blake was using the idea of an original fall to symbolize a process that is continuously present in the mundane reality about us. Blake had rebelled against the vision of the Enlightenment, which had attempted to systematize truth. He had also rebelled against the God of Christianity, who had been used to alienate men and women from their humanity. This God had been made to promulgate unnatural laws to repress sexuality, liberty and spontaneous joy. Blake railed against the “fearful symmetry” of this inhumane God in “The Tyger,” seeing him as remote from the world in unutterably “distant deeps and skies.” Yet the wholly other God, Creator of the World, undergoes mutation in the poems. God himself has to fall into the world and die in the person of Jesus. 10 He even becomes Satan, the enemy of mankind.