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.

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• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s tone in this treatise was sharply polemical—his friend Johannes Lang thought it “frightful and wild”29—and he brilliantly played to the concerns of the German nobles that the pope and the Italians in Rome with their typical cunning were stealing what was rightly German and tyrannizing the German faithful. And he called upon these nobles to “take back their country,” as it were, to establish Germany as a sovereign nation—or something like it—so that the blubbery maw of Roman bureaucracy that had been feeding on their money would wither and die. With typical creativity, Luther denounced the vast money-hungry bureaucracy of papal officials as “a crawling mass of reptiles”30 and said that they knew that the Germans had no choice but to put up with them. Despite the treatise’s title, it was clearly addressed to the German people, because it was written not in Latin but in German. So Luther was using the new technology of printing to do an end run around the cultural elites who formed the previously impenetrable wall of ecclesiastical power. Suddenly history—via Gutenberg—had provided options that had not hitherto existed, and Luther would master this new way of reaching the people and fomenting a widespread uprising against the distant, out-of-touch taskmasters. For Luther, that wall was a Maginot Line he could simply march around with his pen. In a letter to Wenceslas Linck, he defended his polemical tone: The womb of Rebecca also [had] to bear children who were contentious and kicked each other. . . . Even Paul calls his enemies now “dogs,” now “mutilation,” now “Babblers,” “false women,” “servants of Satan,” and names of that kind. . . . Who does not see that the prophets attack [the sin of the people] with the greatest violence? Here we have become accustomed to these [examples], and therefore they no longer disturb us.31 Luther’s theology was leading him to one new place after another. For example, his understanding of the “priesthood of all believers” meant the whole structure of the church was a pretense. The idea that there was a special caste of people who alone had the privilege to preach and to pastor and to hear confession was simply not biblical. It had been invented out of whole cloth by human beings and had no basis in scripture. Therefore for every Christian to have to submit to this, especially now that it was being used to tyrannize people—to bully them into submitting to a power and authority that was not given by God—was intolerable. In name the empire belongs to us, but in reality to the pope. . . . We Germans are given a clear German lesson. Just as we thought we had achieved independence, we became the slaves of the craziest of tyrants; we have the name, title, and coats of arms of the empire, but the pope has the wealth, power, the courts, and the laws. Thus the pope devours the fruit and we play with the peels.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  What should have been a joyous occasion was marred by the envious attacks of men who had once been his teachers. Luther was particularly irritated by the fact that the assault was headed by Johannes Nathin, the man who had probably been his companion to Rome; this bitter betrayal may be another reason why his memories of Rome became so dark. Two years after the doctoral celebration, he was still complaining about his treatment, and objected in a letter to the Erfurt monastery to a new missive from Nathin, composed ‘as if in the name of you all’, that accused him of being a shameful perjurer. Luther insisted that he was neither a perjurer nor oath-breaker, and had good reason to be angry at the attack. But just as he had received undeserved bless- ings from the Lord, so now he wanted to set aside the bitterness his opponents deserved and accord them cordiality.* The incident was deeply wounding, but may have had more to do with the politics of the order than the location of Luther’s studies. He had undertaken the doctorate because of Staupitz, whose more conciliatory line within the Augustinians Nathin had opposed. He may have seen Luther as a turncoat, which would explain the depths of resentment and the refusal to come to the celebration.* Luther had been caught up in a fight over different visions of the order’s future. Luther would have spent time with his confessor both in Erfurt and Wittenberg; they would also have met on their travels across the region. Luther claimed ‘I got everything from Staupitz’® and, after his death, he recalled his former mentor as a good and comforting pres- ence. In 1518, in the letter he sent with his explanations of the Ninety- Five Theses to Staupitz, he reminded him of a conversation about ‘true repentance’ which had pierced him like an arrow, in which the older man had said that it must begin “with the love of God and righteousness’. Indeed, in a letter to Elector Johann Friedrich in 1545, he wrote of his debt to his confessor, saying that he must praise him ‘if I don’t want to be a damned, ungrateful papist ass’, because he was ‘my father in this teaching who gave birth to me in Christ’.® Yet rather like his relationship with Johannes Braun in Eisenach which also grew cold, Luther seems often to have projected qualities onto Staupitz that were not actually there, and while he later recalled Staupitz’s sayings in his table talk and writings, he often repeated the same remarks, as if his image of Staupitz had become ossified. THE MONASTERY 71 Like Braun before him, Staupitz was another paternal figure whom Luther outgrew.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Hammer away ding-dong on the anvils of Nimrod, cast down their tower to the ground!” he wrote to the people of Allstedt, urging them to join in the rebellion. “Go to it, go to it, go to it,” he urged repeatedly in this letter, and one can get an echo of what must have been electrifying preaching—a heady brew of visual metaphor, rhythmic repetition, and violent language. 9 Müntzer was particularly eager to attract the miners, and many of those from the Mansfeld region where Luther had grown up were drawn to his movement. By early May, the Mühlhausen–Thuringian peasant army was plundering convents and castles and forcing local nobles in the Eichsfeld to join by entering into a Christian covenant; only Count Ernst, Müntzer’s long-standing foe since the Allstedt days, remained firm. But then the peasant army split. No more than a small contingent went to join the Frankenhausen band, which desperately needed reinforcements, while the rest headed back for Mühlhausen. Müntzer mustered only three hundred men to accompany him to Frankenhausen. By the time they arrived on May 12, the revolt there had lost momentum. Stuck in the town, the peasant army was unable to continue its advance. Müntzer pushed for a confrontation with the region’s rulers. He ended the overtures that had been made to Count Ernst and Count Albrecht of Mansfeld and his correspondence became increasingly driven by his hatred of Luther and the princes. As he wrote to Count Ernst: “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? You shall and will have to prove that you are a Christian”; while to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, Luther’s supporter, he wrote on the same day: “Couldn’t you find in your Lutheran pudding and your Wittenberg soup what Ezekiel has prophesied in his thirty-seventh chapter? You haven’t even been able to detect the flavor, because of that Martinian peasant filth of yours, of what the same prophet goes on to say in the thirty-ninth chapter, that God instructs all the birds of the heavens to consume the flesh of the princes; whilst the brute beasts are to drink the blood of the bigwigs.” 10 Müntzer’s tribal vision of a new godly kingdom might seem far removed from calls for peasant brotherhood, but thousands of people in Mühlhausen and beyond were prepared to give their lives for it. Müntzer’s violent rhetoric now issued in real violence. When three of Count Ernst’s servants were found in the camp they were accused of being spies and executed by popular “divine justice,” with his agreement.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In words that evoked Christ’s flagellation, he said: “Was I not bound and struck when you alone wrote, printed and preached against me and arranged that my books were taken from the press and that I was forbidden to write and preach?” 3 The two men argued for a long time, sometimes falling silent. They knew each other well, and their jibes hit home. You “go about in a grandiose fashion, boast grandly, and want only yourself to be exalted and noticed,” Luther told Karlstadt. “You must always speak in such a way that you maintain your reputation and stir up hatred for other people,” Karlstadt replied. In the midst of these highly emotional exchanges, Karlstadt turned to the audience and declared: “Dear brothers, I pray you, don’t pay attention to my harsh speech. Such harsh speech is a matter of my complexion but my heart is not on that account wicked or angry.” With anger being a deadly sin, Karlstadt here drew on the theory of the humors to explain that he was a choleric individual, but his “heart” was not therefore full of anger, nor was it wicked. 4 Luther taunted Karlstadt with not daring to attack him in public; Karlstadt retorted that it was Luther who was preventing him from doing so. Then, taking a coin from his pocket, Luther announced: “If you do, I will present you with a guilder for it.” Karlstadt accepted the challenge, took the coin, “showed it to all bystanders,” and declared: “Dear brothers, this is a pledge, a sign, that I have authority to write against Dr. Luther.” Karlstadt bent the guilder and put it in his purse. The two men shook hands and Luther drank a toast to Karlstadt. Then they parted. 5 It was a momentous meeting. By bending the coin, Karlstadt took it out of circulation and marked it forever as a token. This was common sixteenth-century practice: Binding marriages could be concluded by giving a coin as a token, while commercial contracts, agreed without paper records, were given force by rituals like the handshake and the drink. Yet the meaning of this ritual was not clear. Luther regarded it as a declaration of enmity, a formal initiation of feud; Karlstadt, as his right to publish. Martin Reinhard published a pamphlet describing the event, so for once Luther did not have control of the propaganda. Luther was furious when he read Reinhard’s account, written “to my infamy and Karlstadt’s glory,” even though the tone of the text was scrupulously neutral. 6 But no reader could miss Luther’s contempt for Karlstadt during their meeting, capped by the gift of the valuable coin (gold, no less). And now there was no turning back: Luther’s promise to Karlstadt allowing him to publish was on public record. 7 Luther made certain that the author of the pamphlet did not get away with it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Ritualised debates, they depended on skill in argument and rhetoric, and provided a kind of licensed intellectual aggression. With the position set out as a series of related sequential claims, it was easier to accept or reject particular points of the argument, and to inspect the links between one proposition and another. It permitted intellectual adventurousness and freedom, because ideas could be tried out, without claiming that they were established truths. Such tests and intellectual combat greatly appealed to Luther, and the Reforma- tion would develop the technique into a high art. In 1517, Luther’s student Franz Giinter defended a set of theses written by Luther against scholasticism, which are in many ways more radical and shocking than the Ninety-Five Theses. They proclaimed that Aristotle was not only unnecessary for the study of theology, but positively harmful. In a university where Aristotle formed a major part of the syllabus, this position was a slap in the face for those like Nikolaus von Amsdorf, who lectured on Aristotle’s Ethics. But Luther’s student won, the faculty collectively awarding him victory. Luther then sent the theses to Erfurt, although not under his name, as he knew that they would meet with opposition. He joked that although the Wittenbergers considered them acceptable and ‘orthodox’, the Erfurters would judge them ‘cacodoxa’ — shit doctrine.” He was right. His former colleagues and teachers at the monastery were outraged.” The theses are an extraordinarily confident set of propositions, which are ordered as though they follow one from another, but their WITTENBERG 95 sequence is emotional as much as logical. Briskly, Luther labels one after another of his statements as ‘contrary to common opinion’, or ‘in opposition to the scholastics’.” They capture his rejection of the whole tradition of medieval theology in all its passionate fury as he concludes: ‘No one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle.’** They begin with an aggressive defence of St Augustine, and culminate in the radical statement: “The truth therefore is that man, made from a bad tree, can do nothing but want and do evil.’ As Luther memorably puts it, “Man is by nature unable to want God to be God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Though he was careful to say in his letter to the Elector that he was neither initiating a feud nor writing a letter of insult, it is hard to imagine any campaign more uncompromisingly aimed at destroying someone’s reputation. To Luther, this was a matter of male honor. As he put it, a “robbery” had been committed, and a woman stolen from her rightful husband by an unjust and overmighty ruler. 79 Luther undoubtedly saw the case through the lens of the Old Testament story of David’s theft of Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Of course, he had to admit that Hornung had chastised his wife by “stabbing her a bit with a blunt knife,” although he argued that this was “out of marital zeal.” 80 Katharina Blankenfeld—or perhaps her seducer Joachim—replied, giving as good as she got and telling “Bishop Luther” to look in the mirror: He was fornicating with a nun, and he should ponder his own conduct when he went strolling with his lute in the Wittenberg streets of an evening, an insult that insinuated he was a serenading womanizer. Luther promptly published her letter, with a line-by-line commentary of his own that mocked her as an uppity woman. “And may God protect everyone from this Mrs. Katharina Blankenfeld,” he wrote, “unless a good pig-handler can get hold of her first with a sharp knife and castrate her.” 81 The affair rumbled on, and if Luther had at first been convinced that Katharina had been abducted against her will, he soon demonized her as the ultimate shrew. His passionate involvement was further colored by the fact that Joachim’s wife, a Lutheran, had fled Brandenburg for Wittenberg in 1528. Not for the first time, it seemed that Luther had stolen a woman from a Catholic grandee and was thumbing his nose at him. His view of marriage could occasionally seem cavalier. His partisan upholding of Hornung’s marriage, for example, contrasts with his equally passionate insistence, in other cases, on allowing husbands like the pastors whose wives had deserted them to remarry. Ursula Topler, who married the preacher and ex-Dominican Jodokus Kern, had left her convent because she was persuaded of the truth of Luther’s teachings, but she was determined to lead a nonsexual marriage with her husband, who, unfortunately for her, did not share her ideal. When he treated her roughly she fled to the Catholic Count Ernst II of Mansfeld, while her husband went to law to get her back. Kern was minister at Allstedt, where he had been sent by Luther in late 1524 to counter the influence of Müntzer.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  By this point, Luther’s new Augsburg friends, fearing that Rome was going to put him on trial, urged him to leave town, and on the night of October 20–21, he apparently climbed over the city wall. The next day, his Appellation to the Pope was posted on the door of Augsburg Cathedral, an event almost certainly arranged by Luther to give his appeal legal force and make it public. It also ensured that Cajetan now had no choice but to pass on his appeal to Leo; it was no longer a matter that could be dealt with through private reconciliation. An incomplete version of the appeal also somehow reached Johann Froben, one of the leading printers of the day, in Basle, and before long it flew all over Europe.43 Once again, Luther had proved master of the dramatic act. He was also emphatically burning his bridges. —THE “tournament” at Augsburg had a long afterlife, both in personal letters and in print. In the intervals between his meetings with Cajetan, Luther wrote a series of letters to Spalatin, Karlstadt, and the Elector, explaining and justifying his behavior but also setting out the events as a drama. He chose Karlstadt as his confidant, asking him to circulate the letters to Melanchthon, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Luther’s colleague Otto Beckmann, and “our theologians.”44 The letters, with their detailed narrative and quotation, were designed to be read aloud, to entertain, to keep the Elector on side, and, crucially, to contradict Cajetan’s version of the encounter.45 A month after the meeting, when the cardinal presented his own account of events to Friedrich, Luther had already given his side of the story. He then set out to rebut Cajetan’s version point for point. And whereas the cardinal’s letter consisted of ten neat paragraphs and a postscript, composed in precise, classic Latin, Luther’s response, five times as long, was written in verbose, emotional prose.46

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In the German lands, Charles V imposed on May 15, 1548, the “Interim,” a settlement that required Lutheran preachers to accept many traditional Catholic practices, including the existence of seven sacraments, although it did permit married clergy and Communion in both kinds. It split the Lutheran movement between those who were willing to compromise and those who were not. Many preachers went into exile. Long-standing divisions among the Lutheran leadership also became evident, as Melanchthon was prepared to reach an accord while Amsdorf angrily rejected any deviation from what he saw as Luther’s legacy. The tensions that had long underlain the alliance between Luther and Melanchthon began to play themselves out in public; Luther was no longer there to arbitrate and balance the opposing factions, and Melanchthon lacked both the authority and the personal charisma to lead. The movement started to splinter. [image "73. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, 1553." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_086_r1.jpg] [image "73. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, 1553." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_086_r1.jpg] 73. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, 1553. This was also part of Luther’s legacy, because, though he opposed the hierarchy of the papal Church, he had not created an institutional structure to replace it. While his 1539 tract On the Councils and the Churches had grandly rejected conciliarism, it failed to detail how his new Church should function, or what the relationship should be between the individual congregation and the Church as a whole. No overall organization constrained the haphazardly created “superintendents,” who were, as Luther recognized, bishops in all but name. Lutheran preachers, subordinate to the secular authorities who paid their salaries, now had to plot their own course through the doctrinal wars and wishes of the local political powers; if they modeled their behavior on Luther’s prophetic mode, they often found that charisma availed little against local authorities. Adulating Luther, the movement also saddled itself with a model of preacherly authority that encouraged each local pastor to counter anything he considered a deviation in doctrine as though it would open the door to the Devil—a recipe for acerbic, public argument. Luther’s personal network had enabled him to place “his” men in parishes all over north and central Germany, even as far as Denmark, Bohemia, and Poland, and had given him the ear of many rulers and princes, but this network died with the personal authority that had generated it. The next generation saw a church that was riven with factions, as Gnesio-Lutherans (so-called “genuine” Lutherans, also known as Flacians after the prominent theologian Matthias Flacius), and Philippists (followers of Melanchthon and supporters of a more moderate Lutheranism) all claimed Luther’s mantle. Yet these divisions, life-and-death matters as they were to those involved in them, did not destroy Lutheranism. The heated polemical rhetoric could not drown out their shared adherence. In any case, the intricacies of doctrinal dispute would have meant little to those outside the ministry.

• From A History of God (1993)

  no more favoring the wicked! Let the weak and the orphan have justice, be fair to the wretched and the destitute, rescue the weak and needy, save them from the clutches of the wicked!” Ignorant and senseless, they carry on blindly, undermining the very basis of human society. I once said, “You too are gods, sons of El Elyon, all of you”; but all the same, you shall die like men; as one man, gods, you shall fall. When he stood up to confront the Council over which El has presided from time immemorial, Yahweh accused the other gods of failing to meet the social challenge of the day. He represented the modern compassionate ethos of the prophets, but his divine colleagues had done nothing to promote justice and equity over the years. In the old days, Yahweh had been prepared to accept them as elohim, the sons of El Elyon (“God Most High”),30 but now the gods had proved that they were obsolete. They would wither away like mortal men. Not only did the psalmist depict Yahweh condemning his fellow gods to death, but in doing so he had usurped the traditional prerogative of El, who, it would seem, still had his champions in Israel.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But avoiding answering this would not be easy. Luther was being pressured by those on his side for a reply. Still, his busyness with other things made that difficult. That fall Joachim Camerarius was fairly drooling with anticipation for something from Luther, as were many of the other Humanists on the Reformation side. But Camerarius was more vocal about it than most. After the winter had passed, however, there was still nothing, not even something like a cloud the size of a man’s hand on the horizon to give him hope. So Melanchthon wrote to him on April 4. He assured his former pupil that yes, Luther had at long last begun his reply to Erasmus and must soon be finished. For Luther, he said, it was all in the beginning, and now that he had begun, it surely couldn’t be long! But Philip Melanchthon was whistling in the wind. Luther had been busy dealing with many things, but none of these things were a reply to Erasmus. In early 1525, Luther had been dealing with Karlstadt, and then in April he had visited Eisleben and had written his two works during the black crescendo of the Peasants’ War. And of course in June he was suddenly married, which had prompted Melanchthon to send Camerarius his letter of Greek pique on that bitter subject. On July 19, Melanchthon wrote to Camerarius once more to tell him that his cheery April promise was in error. In fact, there was nothing in the works at all. Luther was busy lecturing again too. In midsummer, he began his lectures on Nahum and by the end of the year would have also spoken on Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Zechariah. When could he find time to answer Erasmus’s work? It was sometimes as if he didn’t even have the ability to choose to do it, as if free will didn’t even exist on non-salvific issues either! Camerarius visited Wittenberg in August. At this point, he was so desperately champing at the bit for Luther’s response that he was even so forward as to importune the great man’s new wife on the subject. Perhaps the twenty-six-year-old Kathie could be persuaded to force her husband to sit down and write what every Reformation Humanist was now contorted with agony to see. In the end, Kathie actually did persuade her husband of eight weeks to settle down to attack the unpleasant project. The result of his work was titled De servo arbitrio (contrasted with Erasmus’s De libero arbitrio), or On the Bondage of the Will.* Luther worked very hard on it all through the fall, and it did not appear until New Year’s Eve. Its tone was hardly continent, and it so stung the venerable Erasmus that he wrote to Luther directly:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  His remarkable memoir gives us a sense of the hectic atmosphere of Luther’s camp: people coming and going, arguments, and a not very effective watch on the door.* Cochlaeus managed to wheedle his way into Luther’s lodgings and even to insinuate himself into a meal, where he found himself seated between the man himself and a noble whom he took to be none other than the Saxon Elector. Over the meal, the two began to argue about transubstantiation. Cochlaeus challenged Luther to give up his safe conduct, which did not allow him to preach or write, and debate with him man to man in public. It was a dangerous challenge, for had Luther done so, the Catholic side could have taken him captive. Luther was almost ready to agree, and had to be restrained by his supporters: he may have continued to believe that a public 188 MARTIN LUTHER debate could settle the matter, and part of him was inclined to risk martyrdom as a result. Cochlaeus did not let go and followed Luther up to his private sleeping quarters. He wanted to continue the argument with Luther alone, and threw back his cloak to prove that he was unarmed. There was an extraordinarily reckless bravery, or perhaps naivety, in Luther, who was willing to discuss matters with anyone, anywhere, any time. Cochlaeus later described himself as the one who almost persuaded Luther to recant. For him the question Luther had to answer was: how can you know that your interpretation of Scripture is right? Interpretation can never be clear, and this is why we have to trust the tradition of the Church, he argued. Cochlaeus reported that tears streamed from Luther’s eyes as the humanist exhorted him not to close the door on the Church, and not to corrupt the young Melanchthon. On this issue, as on many others, Cochlaeus was not entirely wrong. Luther himself knew that he suffered from the sins of anger and pride. But for Luther, authority of interpretation was not an issue, because Scripture was unambiguous. It was a position he had first developed in his debate with Cajetan. Scripture must be invoked against the papists and decisions of the Church councils, and Scripture clearly showed that the Pope was the Antichrist. This did not mean that it did not require people learned in Hebrew and Greek to understand it; that was why the education of the clergy was so important. But then, Luther believed, after immersion in the Scripture and careful reflection, the meaning of God’s Word would be plain. It would not be long, however, before people on his own side began to read the self-evident truths of Scripture differently from the reformer.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  With marriage denied the status of sacrament, and the principles of secular jurisdiction still being worked out, people now invoked Luther himself as the ultimate authority in marriage disputes—just as they had previously appealed to the Pope. With the old papist Church courts destroyed, he was increasingly asked for advice. His responses could be arbitrary and at times seemed to have been made up on the spot. So, for example, he told Josef Levin Metzsch of Wittenberg that it was fine to marry a woman related to him in the third degree without the approval of a bishop or the Pope, but when Metzsch followed Luther’s advice, he found that lawyers were counting the children as illegitimate.77 He also often found it easier to sympathize with the husband’s point of view. On one occasion, he and his colleague Johannes Bugenhagen admonished Stefan Roth to exert his husbandly authority, and force his ill wife to leave Wittenberg and follow him to Zwickau, for her reluctance sprang not from her sickness but her wickedness. Roth should “see to it, that you be a man” and not permit “marital authority, which is the glory of God…to be held in contempt by her.” He ought to realize that “[t]he fodder was making the ass frisky”; that is, he was just making her more self-willed by giving in to her, a form of words that insinuated that she was sexually out of control as well.78 The case of Wolf Hornung, a minor nobleman, became a particular obsession. Hornung’s wife, Katharina Blankenfeld, had caught the eye of none other than the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, the brother of Luther’s old antagonist Albrecht of Mainz. Joachim forced her to become his mistress, and when Hornung discovered his wife’s adultery, he assaulted and stabbed her. The Elector had then imprisoned Hornung, and humiliated him. Luther took up his cause, writing repeatedly to the errant wife, her mother, and the Elector; he probably also composed Hornung’s letter of defense. When all this achieved nothing, he adopted the tactics that he had used since the beginning of the Reformation: He went public. Luther wrote and published stern letters not only to Katharina Blankenfeld and to the Elector, but also to the bishops of the region and the knights of Brandenburg, telling them to admonish their lord. Though he was careful to say in his letter to the Elector that he was neither initiating a feud nor writing a letter of insult, it is hard to imagine any campaign more uncompromisingly aimed at destroying someone’s reputation. To Luther, this was a matter of male honor. As he put it, a “robbery” had been committed, and a woman stolen from her rightful husband by an unjust and overmighty ruler.79

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. But Jews, Christians and Muslims who punctiliously attend divine services yet denigrate people who belong to different ethnic and ideological camps deny one of the basic truths of their religion.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, has also been dubbed “the atheist priest”: he finds the traditional realistic God of theism unacceptable and proposes a form of Christian Buddhism, which puts religious experience before theology. Like Robinson, Cupitt has arrived intellectually at an insight that mystics in all three faiths have reached by a more intuitive route. Yet the idea that God does not really exist and that there is Nothing out there is far from new. There is a growing intolerance of inadequate images of the Absolute. This is a healthy iconoclasm, since the idea of God has been used in the past to disastrous effect. One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call “fundamentalism” in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right. Fundamentalists campaign for the abolition of legal abortion and for a hard line on moral and social decency. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority achieved astonishing political power during the Reagan years. Other evangelists such as Maurice Cerullo, taking Jesus’ remarks literally, believe that miracles are an essential hallmark of true faith. God will give the believer anything that he asks for in prayer. In Britain, fundamentalists such as Colin Urquhart have made the same claim. Christian fundamentalists seem to have little regard for the loving compassion of Christ. They are swift to condemn the people they see as the “enemies of God.” Most would consider Jews and Muslims destined for hellfire, and Urquhart has argued that all oriental religions are inspired by the devil. There have been similar developments in the Muslim world, which have been much publicized in the West. Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was already prefig- ured in his conflict with Karlstadt, from the moment that Luther decided to defeat the Wittenberg movement and support the Elector’s attempt to make peace with the Diet by slowing the pace of evan- gelical reform. Luther had already rejected the communal Reforma- tion, powered by popular pressure, which inspired Karlstadt. This was the Reformation that was also popular among the lower townsfolk in Allstedt, Miihlhausen and Frankenhausen, where Miintzer had his most loyal and zealous supporters.¥ But it could inspire rich and educated men too, such as Christoph Meinhard, an Eisleben citizen who was probably related to Johann Agricola, a close friend of Luther.” The bounded community of a congregation where people knew each other, and could count on the bonds of oaths and a collective morality, drove Miintzer’s Reformation just as it had powered Karlstadt’s. This was not what animated most of the peasant protest, however: Mintzer was repeatedly outraged by those who would not follow his biblicist vision, and at the end blamed the disaster of Frankenhausen on the fact ‘that everyone was more concerned with his own self-interest than in bringing justice to the Christian people’.” Miintzer remains a difficult character to assess.* Direct divine inspir- ation was very important to his theology, with biblical texts playing only a supporting role. Most of all, he was a radical mystic, who sought union with God, not primarily a social radical. His theology displays an underlying tension between his mysticism, rejecting every- thing to do with the flesh, and his revolutionary radicalism, which led him to engage with the material world. Some of these paradoxes are evident in his views of sexuality, for example. For Miintzer, like 268 MARTIN LUTHER Karlstadt, Christ’s call to his disciples to leave behind wife and family was a key text, and there is a powerful streak of asceticism in his writings. When Melanchthon defended the marriage of monks, Miintzer castigated him: ‘By your arguments you drag men to matri- mony although the bond is not yet an immaculate one; but a Satanic brothel, which is as harmful to the church as the most accursed perfumes of the priests. Do not these passionate desires impede your sanctification?’ Yet although he commended virginity, he took a wife in June 1523, and like Karlstadt, he chose a noblewoman.” Mintzer seems to have nursed a strong sense of dispossession, and his convic- tion of being a persecuted outsider made him able to articulate a shared sense of social alienation, reaching out to others across class barriers. A powerful speaker, he knew how to inspire groups of peas- ants, townsfolk and villagers, women as well as men. Throughout his career, whether in Zwickau, Allstedt or Miihlhausen, he seems to have followed the same political strategy.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  By contrast, Lemnius consistently praised Melanchthon as the only serious scholar in Wittenberg, the light of all Germany — an encomium which was unlikely to heal the rift between the two men. One poem about Luther spilled out pure bile: You suffer yourself from dysentery and you scream when you shit, and that which you wished on others you now suffer yourself. You called others shitters, now you have become a shitter and are richly blessed with shit. Earlier anger opened your crooked mouth, now your arse opens the load of your stomach. Your anger didn’t just come out of your mouth — now it flows from your backside. This is hardly great poetry, but Lemnius was not wrong about how anger was darkening Luther’s final years. Luther responded by penning his own Latin verse, ‘Luther’s Dysentery Against the Shit Poet Little Lemmie’, which pitied Albrecht of Magdeburg as the recipient of Lemnius’s execrable poetic offerings, and mocked the poet as consti- pated: ‘with your stomach you press out the shit, and you would like to poo a huge heap, but, shit poet, you manage nothing!’* Lemnius kept his promise to dish the dirt on Wittenberg. In 1539 he produced the Monachopornomachia (The War of the Monk’s Whores), a play which owes much to Cochlaeus’s Tragedy of Johann Hus but is FRIENDS AND ENEMIES 375 far cruder and less psychologically shrewd.* Its schoolboy humour derides Luther for being forced into marriage with Katharina von Bora, whom everyone knows is a whore. But Luther, suffering from gout and the stone, cannot travel, so she is permanently under his watchful eye and does not get enough time with her young lover. Her friends, the wives of Spalatin and Jonas, recount the wonderful sex they enjoyed while their husbands were away at Augsburg at the Diet. At times, Luther is presented as virile, foolishly enslaved to his lusts; but in another scene he begs Katharina to stroke his member and help it stand. Spalatin’s wife explains how she manages to satisfy both her husband and her lover without having two vaginas: she ‘raises her bottom’ for her beau. Lemnius and Cochlaeus let their imaginations run riot about the private lives of Luther and the reformers, and their obsession sprang from what was still so shocking in Luther’s theology: his marriage to a nun and his surprisingly positive attitude towards sexuality. Lemnius could not bear it. In his eyes a cabal of old, ill and impotent men dominated Wittenberg with their sex-obsessed wives and did not appreciate his talent. But in his writings, the Wittenberg of university students also emerges, a town crammed with girls only too eager to find a student lover, and once again with its own brothels even though they had been closed in 1522 as part of Karlstadt’s moral reformation.™ Lemnius described his aristocratic friends spending their time in clubs like the Cyclops, all too easily getting into fights and duels.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  76 Luther retained a strong ethical ideal of marriage, yet his often contradictory and incompatible convictions led him to give some rather unorthodox advice in the many marriage cases with which he was now forced to deal. With marriage denied the status of sacrament, and the principles of secular jurisdiction still being worked out, people now invoked Luther himself as the ultimate authority in marriage disputes—just as they had previously appealed to the Pope. With the old papist Church courts destroyed, he was increasingly asked for advice. His responses could be arbitrary and at times seemed to have been made up on the spot. So, for example, he told Josef Levin Metzsch of Wittenberg that it was fine to marry a woman related to him in the third degree without the approval of a bishop or the Pope, but when Metzsch followed Luther’s advice, he found that lawyers were counting the children as illegitimate. 77 He also often found it easier to sympathize with the husband’s point of view. On one occasion, he and his colleague Johannes Bugenhagen admonished Stefan Roth to exert his husbandly authority, and force his ill wife to leave Wittenberg and follow him to Zwickau, for her reluctance sprang not from her sickness but her wickedness. Roth should “see to it, that you be a man” and not permit “marital authority, which is the glory of God…to be held in contempt by her.” He ought to realize that “[t]he fodder was making the ass frisky”; that is, he was just making her more self-willed by giving in to her, a form of words that insinuated that she was sexually out of control as well. 78 The case of Wolf Hornung, a minor nobleman, became a particular obsession. Hornung’s wife, Katharina Blankenfeld, had caught the eye of none other than the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, the brother of Luther’s old antagonist Albrecht of Mainz. Joachim forced her to become his mistress, and when Hornung discovered his wife’s adultery, he assaulted and stabbed her. The Elector had then imprisoned Hornung, and humiliated him. Luther took up his cause, writing repeatedly to the errant wife, her mother, and the Elector; he probably also composed Hornung’s letter of defense. When all this achieved nothing, he adopted the tactics that he had used since the beginning of the Reformation: He went public. Luther wrote and published stern letters not only to Katharina Blankenfeld and to the Elector, but also to the bishops of the region and the knights of Brandenburg, telling them to admonish their lord.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This might appear like conventional Lutheranism, but references to “shocked consciences” were new and emotional terms, deviations from what had now become the established Wittenberg terminology. Moreover, Agricola was putting the Crucifixion in place of the Law, that is, God’s law, through which we come to recognize our sin. As Luther saw it, he was too quick to set aside the law of the Old Testament, the “law of anger,” as if Christians did not first have to come to a realization of their own sin as they failed to fulfill God’s commandments. Only then would they come to recognize and appreciate Christ’s saving death. Having spent so much energy over the last decade in developing definitive statements of the evangelical faith, he was increasingly defensive, unwilling to tolerate the slightest deviation or innovation. Agricola put the subjective feelings of the believer at the heart of salvation—something that Luther refused to do—and his theology, with its concern for troubled consciences, moved too quickly to focus on the forgiveness of sin and to relieve the individual’s misery. The reaction was harsh: When Agricola published three sermons with Luther’s own printer, Hans Lufft, in July 1537, they were seized, and the hapless printer was imprisoned.39 Next Luther published Agricola’s theses on the law (which had been circulating secretly and were rumored to be critical of Melanchthon) in a broadsheet, much to Agricola’s alarm. Pointedly, Luther dedicated his refutation to Caspar Güttel, the preacher at Eisleben, and it was to Güttel, too, that Luther dedicated Against the Antinomians, which he published in 1539; it attacked Agricola and denounced those who rejected the Law as binding on Christians.40 The dispute dragged on for several years, with passionate reconciliations followed by equally passionate denunciations. At one point, Agricola even sought Luther out in the church, begging for forgiveness. To his friends at table, Luther confided how he felt: “As God is my witness, I loved you and still loved you,” while Agricola insisted that he “had always considered [Luther] as my father in God’s place, through whom I too became a Christian and a child of God.” But for the past three years, Luther had walked all over him, “and I crawled after him like a poor little dog.”41 Agricola’s difficulty was that he continued to depend on Luther—without his goodwill, he stood no chance of an ongoing job or even of getting his salary paid by the Elector.42 In 1538, Luther revoked Agricola’s permission to lecture at the university, telling him that he had only been allowed to lecture so he would stop wasting time and annoying people.43 Then Luther reversed direction and made peace with him, persuaded the Elector to permit him to preach again, and publicly declared his honor to the university.

• From A History of God (1993)

  During the long terrible march to Jerusalem, when the Crusaders narrowly escaped extinction, they could only account for their survival by assuming that they must be God’s Chosen People, who enjoyed his special protection. He was leading them to the Holy Land as he had once led the ancient Israelites. In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries. Thenceforth Christians in Europe regarded Jews and Muslims as the enemies of God; for a long time they had also felt a deep antagonism toward the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, who made them feel barbarous and inferior. 21 This had not always been the case. During the ninth century, some of the more educated Christians of the West had been inspired by Greek theology. Thus the Celtic philosopher Duns Scotus Erigena (810–877), who left his native Ireland to work in the court of Charles the Bold, King of the West Franks, had translated many of the Greek Fathers of the Church into Latin for the benefit of Western Christians, in particular the works of Denys the Areopagite. Erigena passionately believed that faith and reason were not mutually exclusive. Like the Jewish and Muslim Faylasufs, he saw philosophy as the royal road to God. Plato and Aristotle were the masters of those who demanded a rational account of the Christian religion. Scripture and the writings of the Fathers could be illuminated by the disciplines of logic and rational inquiry, but that did not mean a literal interpretation: some passages of scripture had to be interpreted symbolically because, as Erigena explained in his Exposition of Denys’s Celestial Hierarchy , theology was “a kind of poetry.” 22 Erigena used the dialectical method of Denys in his own discussion of God, who could only be explained by a paradox that reminded us of the limitations of our human understanding. Both the positive and the negative approaches to God were valid. God is incomprehensible: even the angels do not know or understand his essential nature, but it is acceptable to make a positive statement, such as “God is wise,” because when we refer it to God we know that we are not using the word “wise” in the usual way. We remind ourselves of this by going on to make a negative statement, saying “God is not wise.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  It has been suggested that some of the psalms celebrated the enthronement of Yahweh in his Temple on the Feast of Tabernacles, which, like the enthronement of Marduk, re-enacted his primal subjugation of chaos. 24 King Solomon himself was a great syncretist: he had many pagan wives, who worshipped their own gods, and had friendly dealings with his pagan neighbors. There was always a danger that the cult of Yahweh would eventually be submerged by the popular paganism. This became particularly acute during the latter half of the ninth century. In 869 King Ahab had succeeded to the throne of the northern Kingdom of Israel. His wife, Jezebel, daughter of the King of Tyre and Sidon in what is now Lebanon, was an ardent pagan, intent upon converting the country to the religion of Baal and Asherah. She imported priests of Baal, who quickly acquired a following among the northerners, who had been conquered by King David and were lukewarm Yahwists. Ahab remained true to Yahweh but did not try to curb Jezebel’s proselytism. When a severe drought struck the land toward the end of his reign, however, a prophet named Eli-Jah (“Yahweh is my god!”) began to wander through the land, clad in a hairy mantle and a leather loincloth, fulminating against the disloyalty to Yahweh. He summoned King Ahab and the people to a contest on Mount Carmel between Yahweh and Baal. There, in the presence of 450 prophets of Baal, he harangued the people: how long would they dither between the two deities? Then he called for two bulls, one for himself and one for the prophets of Baal, to be placed on two altars. They would call upon their gods and see which one sent down fire from heaven to consume the holocaust. “Agreed!” cried the people. The prophets of Baal shouted his name for the whole morning, performing their hobbling dance around their altar, yelling and gashing themselves with swords and spears. But “there was no voice, no answer.” Elijah jeered: “Call louder!” he cried, “for he is a god: he is preoccupied or he is busy, or he has gone on a journey; perhaps he is asleep and he will wake up.” Nothing happened: “there was no voice, no answer, no attention given them.” Then it was Elijah’s turn. The people crowded around the altar of Yahweh while he dug a trench around it which he filled with water, to make it even more difficult to ignite. Then Elijah called upon Yahweh. Immediately, of course, fire fell from heaven and consumed the altar and the bull, licking up all the water in the trench. The people fell upon their faces: “Yahweh is God,” they cried, “Yahweh is God.” Elijah was not a generous victor. “Seize the prophets of Baal!” he ordered. Not one was to be spared: he took them to a nearby valley and slaughtered the lot.