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)

  The pope is not and cannot be the head of the Christian church. Instead, he is the head of the accursed church of all the worst scoundrels on earth, a vicar of the devil, an enemy of God, and adversary of Christ, a destroyer of Christ’s churches; a teacher of lies, blasphemies, and idolatries; an arch church-thief and church robber of the keys and all the goods of both the church and the temporal lords; a murderer of kings and inciter to all kinds of bloodshed; a brothel-keeper over all brothel-keepers and all vermin, even that which cannot be named; an Antichrist, a man of sin and a genuine werewolf.10 But to drive this point home yet further—if that were possible—Luther commissioned Cranach to create a dozen woodcuts depicting the extraordinarily vulgar and disgusting things Luther had written about. The horrific images rival Hieronymus Bosch’s worst, and some of them have an almost emetic power. In one a brindle-haired grinning demon with tail and breasts defecates half a dozen cardinals, while nearby the pope is suckled by a naked hag with Medusa-like hair. In another, a demon sitting with two confreres atop a gallows defecates a diarrhea of tonsured monks who lie in a jumbled pile, one of whom displays his genitals. In making fun of clerical celibacy, Luther even refers to Pope Paul III as “Her Sodomitical Hellishness Paula III.” For anyone interested in such writings, Luther has produced a hatful. The endless comments recorded in his Table Talk conversations offer a smorgasbord of conversational delights, thankfully all infinitely milder. Many of them are undeniably funny, revealing the late-in-life irascibility for which he has, alas, become known. Here are two: Someone sent to know whether it was permissible to use warm water in baptism? The Doctor replied: “Tell the blockhead that water, warm or cold, is water.”11 When one asked, where God was before heaven was created? St Augustin answered: He was in himself. When another asked me the same question, I said: He was building hell for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you.12 At this last part of Luther’s life, his larger personality came out in almost everything he wrote or said. Here is a Christmas sermon he wrote in his last months. In it he is very much himself, hectoring and scolding the ancient Bethlehem and then browbeating his own Christmas congregation and shaming them:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Rooted in the tradition of the mythical theology of the Theologia deutsch, Karlstadt wanted his will to conform to that of the divine, leaving the flesh behind, escaping the body and ascending to a more spiritual plane of existence. Luther was moving away from any such ideas of self- perfection, and it was this rejection and his denial of a free will that led to his conflict with Erasmus.” He had been spoiling for a fight with the great humanist for years. In 1522 he had written disparagingly about his views on predestination in a letter: ‘Erasmus is not to be feared either in this or in almost any other really important subject that pertains to Christian doctrine... 1 know what is in this man just as I know the plots of Satan." The letter passed from hand to hand, as Luther knew it would, and soon 286 MARTIN LUTHER 47. Portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523. reached the man himself, wounding him greatly Finally, in late 1524, Erasmus rose to the bait and published A Discussion or Discourse Concerning Free Will, which he apparently dashed off in just five days. In the months after Luther’s wedding, the struggle with Erasmus preoccupied Luther so intensely that, having attacked Karlstadt in Against the Heavenly Prophets, he neglected the controversy about the sacrament, much to the concern of his Strasbourg friend Nikolaus Gerbel, who complained that Luther should be concentrating his fire on the sacramentarians.* The battle with Erasmus marked the final parting of the ways between the Reformation and humanism. Erasmus had been a great influence on Luther: his letters are dotted with aphorisms taken from Erasmus’s Adages, which he must have known by heart. Now Erasmus the ‘eel’ became the ‘viper’.” Erasmus insisted — as Eck had done at the Leipzig Debate in 1519 — that there was a part of the will which could participate in doing good MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH 287 works, thus denying that humans were totally corrupt. He discussed a range of conflicting biblical passages, conveying the difficulty of knowing who had the ‘spirit’, that is, whose interpretation was correct.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Small wonder that the figure of Fate should have been so ubiquitous in the Mansfelders’ lives. There was a rich mining folklore that left its mark on Luther. With water essential to the process of smelting, he grew up with the belief in “nixes,” or water sprites, mischievous creatures who played tricks on humans. The fossils found in the mines were said to be drawings made by the spirits of the earth and of the air, and strange uncanny lights were believed to point to the rich seams. The adult Luther thought the lights were Satan’s work. Satan was the arch deceiver and, Luther wrote, “in the mines the Devil vexes and deceives people, puts spirits before their eyes so that they believe they see a huge pile of ore and silver, where there is nothing.” And although Luther ostensibly rejected much superstition about mining, he held on to ideas about luck. Some people, he admitted, were lucky to find the rich ores. “I have no luck in mining,” Luther wrote, “because the Devil won’t permit me this gift of God’s.” 50 As so often, Luther provided a theological explanation that overlay older beliefs about fortune—and, only half in jest, attributed power to the Devil instead. 6. In the folklore of mining, each ore had its respective planet, Venus in the case of copper. In Ulrich Rülein von Calw’s mining book from 1527, copper is depicted as the large-breasted naked goddess of love gazing into a mirror, her curly tresses falling luxuriantly down her back, while a pair of scales, emblems of justice, are held in her right hand. The mine owners’ bitter experiences shaped Luther’s economic thought. His periodic outbursts later in life against the “little tricks” of the “thieves,” “robbers,” and “interest squires” expressed a populist hatred of major capitalists like the Fuggers, who engaged in the sinful practices of usury, and who tried to gain a monopoly on sources of wealth such as trading minerals. 51 Luther reached for the moral language of sin to explain economic behavior, castigating their avarice, one of the seven deadly sins, but this ethical approach left him unable to deal with the mechanisms of the new capitalism. He rejected many commercial practices as unchristian and maintained all his life that usury was a sin, although he was willing to countenance a basic rate of return on lending. Offered shares in the mines of the Saxon dukes later in life that would have returned him a much-needed three hundred guilders a year, Luther refused, declaring “I am the Pope’s louse, I torment him, and he keeps me, and I live off his goods.” Luther did not want to be a capitalist. For him, shares were Spielgeld, toy money. 52 It is hardly surprising that when Johannes Tetzel, the preacher who would eventually spark Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, began to sell indulgences in 1508, he headed straight for the new mining region of St.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Whether the Ninety-Five Theses were intended for a wider audience or not, this sermon, written in German, was clearly designed to spread his ideas beyond the bound- aries of Wittenberg and throughout the whole empire. How could Luther have had the courage to mount such an assault on both the papacy and on the fundamental values of the Church? He later said that at this time he was like a ‘blinded horse’, forced to wear blinkers to keep in a straight line. He prayed that ‘if God wants to start such a prank using me, he should do it by himself, and not “mix me (that is, my wisdom) up in it’.*° He described a state of mind in which he was not fully in control of his actions but had handed over responsibility to a higher power. Later he often used the word Spil, game or play, a word which in German can have connotations of frivolity, to describe the events surrounding the publication — as if God had been using him to cause mischief, and he were not fully in charge of what he was doing. A game is also an activity where the outcome is unknown. Certainly Luther’s letters from around this time communicate a sense of exalted determination to make his views public: here is someone who is looking to neither right nor left. While the earlier Theses had stopped just short of questioning the power of the Pope, Luther now wrote that ‘the Pope does very well when he grants remission to the souls in Purgatory, not by the power of the keys, which he does not have’. He later recalled that Hieronymus Schurff had asked incredulously, “You want to write against the Pope? What do you want to do? They [the Church] won't stand for it.’ Luther was well aware that he was setting out on a path which could end in martyrdom. The response to the theses did not consist merely of plaudits, and one of the first refutations came as a bitter blow. Johannes Eck, a humanist and an admired acquaintance, recommended to Luther by none other than his Nuremberg friend Christoph Scheurl, penned a demolition of the arguments. Luther was deeply hurt by what he saw 98 MARTIN LUTHER as a personal betrayal and retaliated with anger. On the other hand, the passionate support he received in Nuremberg contributed to the rapid spread of the theses amongst Germany’s educated elite.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Eck knew how to tempt an opponent into ever more radical positions. And Luther was easy game, for this was how he characteristically formed his own thought, working outward from one position to the next. Eck lured him into agreeing that the Bohemian heretic Jan Hus had been right on several key issues, although here Luther had not exactly fallen into a trap: He had already speculated in May that some of Hus’s claims may have been right. Nonetheless, it did not play well with his audience, especially not with Duke Georg, whose family had won both the duchy and the electoral title from the emperor for fighting the Hussites. The University of Leipzig had also provided a refuge for many of the German professors who had left Prague during the Bohemian conflict. Moreover, the statement also implied that Luther was questioning the authority of the Council of Constance, which had condemned Hus in 1415. In so doing, his critique of the Pope also began to part company with the conciliarists, who over the last hundred years had attempted to limit papal power by arguing that councils were superior to the Pope.26 Melanchthon realized the dangerous consequences of this admission. Writing at the time, he believed Luther had not intended to deny the authority of councils, but merely meant that they could not introduce new matters of doctrine. All he had said was that the Council of Constance had not condemned all the beliefs of the Bohemians.27 But the damage was done. Sebastian Fröschel remembered how Luther had casually said to Eck, in the presence of Duke Georg, that there were some “pious and Christian articles” among those condemned at Constance. Georg was deeply shocked: He shook his head, placed his hands on his hips, and shouted “A plague on it!”28 However one interpreted Luther’s remarks, though, it was clear that he was beginning to build on the ideas developed at Augsburg: that Scripture was superior to the authority of popes, councils, and Church Fathers. Eck considered other things Luther said to be “senseless” and “offensive” as well, such as his insistence that the existence of Purgatory could not be proved from Scripture. And if the Pope were head of the Church solely according to human law, then who, Eck asked, had given Luther his monastic habit, his power to preach or to hear confession? Luther retorted that he wished that there were no mendicant orders. Criticism of the mendicants was not unusual at the time, but coming from an Augustinian monk, it was hardly likely to commend him to his brethren.29

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther soon received a report of the event from Melanchthon, in which Melanchthon asked Luther what he thought might still be conceded, to which Luther unsurprisingly answered: nothing. Luther praised Melanchthon’s great work and did not suggest that anything be changed, although he did wish that the Confession had more fulsomely rejected the authority of the pope. To be sure, this would have made it impossible for the emperor to accept the document, and Melanchthon very much hoped to craft something that would make it possible for the Lutherans to go about their business. Luther was just as inclined to go to war—or rather, to offend who would be offended and accept whatever consequences should follow, including his own martyrdom. Melanchthon was of a different view. On July 15, Luther wrote to Jonas, Spalatin, Melanchthon, and Agricola, counseling them to fold up their tents and return home to Wittenberg: I believe that by now you have the answer of the opponents, which, as you write, you were expecting; that is, you will have to hear “fathers, fathers, fathers, church, church, church, usage, custom.”* Moreover you will hear nothing taken from Scripture. Based on these arbiters and witnesses, the Emperor will pronounce a verdict against you. Then will follow threats and boasting. . . .23 Luther went on to say they had already done more than should be expected: they had “rendered unto Caesar” by appearing at the diet and faithfully doing all they had done, and they had “rendered unto God” by preparing the Augsburg Confession, in which they had made clear what they believed, which also had the effect of exposing those on the other side to the truth. Thus “those who do not believe are without excuse.”24 “Therefore,” Luther wrote, “in the name of the Lord I free you from this diet. Home, and again, home!” In other words, Luther was fed up with the haggling he knew was going on and suspected that Melanchthon was all too eager to continue in the vain hopes of some agreement Luther knew he would never get. Campeggio, the papal legate, had told Melanchthon that he himself had the authority to make some concessions regarding the issue of priests getting married and the issue of “communion in both kinds,” but Luther knew this all to be a sickening waste of time: “To Campeggio’s boast that he has the power to grant dispensations, I reply with Amsdorf’s words: ‘I shit on the legate and his lord’s [the pope’s] dispensations; we shall find sufficient dispensations [elsewhere].’” He concluded the letter with “Home, home! May the Lord Jesus preserve and comfort you, who for his name’s sake have worked hard, and have been sufficiently afflicted. Amen.” And in a final playful fillip—because he never in these letters revealed his location in print—he teasingly listed his location as “Gruboc”—which was simply the name of his location spelled backward.25

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Melanchthon had embarked on the Loci communes (Common- places), his great work of systematisation of Reformation theology, which would create a doctrinal corpus for the new movement. Luther's 200 MARTIN LUTHER respect for the younger man grew, and as he read Melanchthon’s drafts in the Wartburg he would repeatedly state that Melanchthon was the better scholar. Yet his colleague was not easy to keep on the straight and narrow. Far from taking on Luther’s mantle in his absence from Wittenberg, he seems to have found inspiration in the sermons of a monk, Gabriel Zwilling, who had moved into the Augustinian cloister from Zwickau, and who preached radical reform. A contemporary reported that Melanchthon never missed one of his sermons." Luther's irritation showed through. ‘As is your way, you are just too gentle’, he told the younger man, grumbling to Spalatin that Melanchthon ‘gives in too easily to his moods, and bears the Cross more impatiently than is fitting for a student, let alone such a great teacher of teachers’.” Chivvying him to be a leader, Luther toyed with the idea that Melanch- thon should preach or at least (since he was not ordained, though Luther no longer thought this an obstacle) he should give public lectures, so that all could hear his exegesis of the Bible.” For his part, Karlstadt, Luther’s co-debater at Leipzig, was producing a flood of treatises. First he attacked monastic vows, then he began to ponder sexuality and marriage, before condemning religious images and finally, moving towards a reinterpretation of the Mass and Communion. His new theological views had ramifications for his ideas about society, too; and he began to question hierarchies of all kinds. Luther read much of his work and, as he was prone, arrived at many of his own views in response to Karlstadt’s arguments. Alone in his ‘Patmos’ — as he called his study in the Wartburg, likening it to the island where John wrote the biblical book of Revelation — his intel- lectual development at the time paralleled in many ways that of Karlstadt. But whereas Karlstadt was dealing with new situations arising in Wittenberg and was forced to make policy in reaction to a host of different pressures — from the Elector, the populace, the univer- sity, the radical Augustinians — Luther was alone with the Devil. In To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther had argued that priests who lived with concubines ought to be allowed to marry, and in the spring of 1521 the Wittenberg graduate and university rector Bartholomiaus Bernhardi had been the first to do just that, in public.” However, in 1520 Luther had not included monks like himself in his musings about marriage because they had made special vows of chastity of their own free will. Now, in Wittenberg, matters were moving apace IN THE WARTBURG 201 as Karlstadt attacked monastic vows, first in a set of theses for debate, then in longer writings in both Latin and German.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was such an extraordinary concession that Melanchthon thought he was insincere, and Luther was outraged: “I won’t answer Martin Bucer’s letter. You know how I hate their games of dice and their slyness; they don’t please me. This is not what they have taught up to now, but they will neither recognize it nor do penance, rather they just continue to insist that there was no disagreement between us, so that we would have to admit that they taught truly but we had wrongly fought against them, or rather, that we were crazy.”32 His response squandered the chance of a compromise that might have greatly strengthened the evangelical position. —LUTHER, alone in an isolated castle, complained bitterly that nobody wrote to him. He was exaggerating, but communication did thin when important negotiations were going on. To make things worse, ever since his father’s death he endured headaches that were like an uprising or tumult in his head, as if it were full of thunder, making him nearly faint. These were so severe that he was unable to write or read for days at a time, and he also developed toothache.33 Stranded in Coburg—or Grobuk, as Luther, always a lover of anagrams, took to calling it—he had plenty of time to contemplate his physical ailments. Barely a letter went by without a mention of them, and discussion of illness became part of the currency of exchange between Melanchthon and Luther, as Luther worried about Melanchthon’s insomnia and Melanchthon scolded Luther for working too hard and not paying attention to his health. Luther saw a spiritual significance in these maladies, referring again to the “colaphizings” of the Devil, using St. Paul’s term for the beatings or buffetings around the head inflicted by the Devil, a term Luther had started to use in 1527. At that time, he had suffered from piles, and in 1528, in a letter to a fellow sufferer he gave an extraordinary description of the illness: “When emptying bowels the flesh around the border of the anal area was pushed out, swelling to about the size of a walnut, in which there was a mustard-seed-sized wounded spot. This spot was sorer the looser the bowels, and less painful the harder the poo. If it was mixed with blood, then there was a relief and almost pleasure in pooing, so that I was often inclined to defecate. And if it was touched with the finger, it itched pleasurably and the blood flowed.” He therefore advised his correspondent not to “stop the flow, let the blood out, because they say it is the ‘golden artery,’ and it is indeed golden. It’s said that everything evil to do with illness flows out; it’s a dung-gate for all illnesses, and those people live the longest.”34

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The whole papacy, Luther argued, was organized around its lust for money, making it a monstrosity. He described the complicated financial vehicles of the papacy as Wucher, or usury, a brilliant polemical move that aligned the financial practices of the Church with the complex manipulations of the big merchant houses—the hated “big Jacks”—and the Jews. This is the rhetoric of the mine owner’s son, who had witnessed how the big capitalists’ control of money manipulated the world of his father in Mansfeld. But the genius of the tract was to combine the economic grievances about the Church’s financial affairs with the religious issue of the authority of Scripture. While it has been argued that the work shows Luther at his least theological, and betrays the influence of his new friends versed in law and imperial politics, it is the theological radicalism that makes the old calls for reform far more potent. [image "UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1500: Vanitas, reverse side of the portrait of a young man. Limewood, 35 x 29 cm. Inv.849. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Vanitas, Rueckseite eines Portraits eines jungen Mannes. Gemaelde.]" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_035_r1.jpg] [image "UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1500: Vanitas, reverse side of the portrait of a young man. Limewood, 35 x 29 cm. Inv.849. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Vanitas, Rueckseite eines Portraits eines jungen Mannes. Gemaelde.]" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_035_r1.jpg] 31. Avarice lurks on the reverse of Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Man, 1507: an old woman with a wrinkled, exposed breast, reaching with her other hand into a fat sack of gold.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On his return from his secret visit to Wittenberg, Luther wrote A Sincere Admonition by Martin Luther to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection, which was printed in early January 1522. 54 But although Luther represented disturbance as the work of the Devil, he did not condemn the forceful removal of images, which was so often the trigger for unrest. He also rejoiced that in recent events, “the ignorance of the papists has been revealed. Their hypocrisy has been revealed. The pernicious lies contained in their laws and monastic orders have been revealed. Their wicked and tyrannical use of the ban has been revealed. In short, everything with which they have hitherto bewitched, terrorized, and deceived the world has been exposed.” This did not look like backpedaling, but full-throated advocacy for change. 55 In the meantime, the targets of the evangelicals in Wittenberg began to widen. By December 10, matters became more clearly political. A group of citizens including members of the so-called forty—representatives of the four quarters into which the town was divided—disrupted a council meeting and demanded that those involved in the disturbances of December 3 and 4 should be set free. They formulated a set of six articles aimed at bringing about reform. 56 Popular agitation continued. On Christmas Eve, a group of laypeople invaded the parish church and threatened to throw “lead pellets” at the altar. They smashed a few Mass lights as well, and sang scurrilous songs including “O beer of Brunswick,” and “A maid has lost a shoe”—girls who lost their virginity were paid with a ritual gift of a shoe, so the point of the song was plain. Then they moved on to the Castle Church, where they howled “like dogs and wolves” so as to disrupt the service, and went up into the church balcony, where they “wished the priests plague and the flames of hell.” Although this might have frightened the clerics, it was all comparatively good-humored, and it was direct action concentrated solely against the saying of private Masses. Nevertheless it was a clear provocation to the Elector, whose own church the protesters had invaded. 57 Meanwhile, in late December, three radicals who became known as the Zwickau prophets arrived and began preaching, one of them staying in Melanchthon’s house, and the atmosphere of religious fervor increased yet further. 58 Now attention returned to begging with the establishment of a system of poor relief. At some point in 1521, the Wittenberg council had instituted a Begging Ordinance, the first council in Germany to do so. 59 This followed naturally from the abolition of the Mass, because if there was no point in saying Masses for the dead, there was no sense in the brotherhoods or in the benefices that paid for the priests. Brotherhoods, as Luther had argued, were useful only for getting drunk and eating too much. Instead, the money should go into a common chest, and be given to support the poor.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In place of the excitement of the early years of the Reformation, Luther had become an increasingly immobile figure, no longer just the accuser but now attacked and besieged himself. Profoundly tired, he was exhausted from the years of struggle when he had attacked first the Pope, then the Catholic polemicists, followed by the peasants, Erasmus, and his own former followers.34 Anger had driven Luther’s attacks, pushing him to formulate his deepest theological insights. Just a few months before, in May 1527, he had published That these words of Christ “This is my body” still stand firm against the Fanatics, the fulmination against the arguments of the sacramentarians that his followers had been urging him to write for so long.35 Luther neatly encapsulated the views of his opponents in the phrase “the flesh avails nothing,” and counterposed it repeatedly with the gospel’s clear statement “This is my body.” He concluded in blood-curdling tones, addressing the councilors of Basle, Strasbourg, “and all those who have such sacrament-mobs amongst you,” warning them not to “put a bag over your head, but be well aware of the game they are playing. Müntzer is dead but his spirit has not been rooted out….The Devil does not sleep….I warn, I advise: Protect yourself, watch out, Satan has come amongst the children of God.”36 Anger seems always to have energized Luther, enabling him to sweep away tradition and open himself to new religious truth. It also gave him the psychological strength not to yield in the face of huge pressure—and never to recant. Yet these same qualities also made it difficult for him to appreciate the views of others, or to see that not every theological battle was a fight for Christ. If someone deviated from what he regarded as the correct theological position, they were at once called to account—Luther demanded complete intellectual and spiritual submission. As a result, he was surrounded by yes-men. Indeed, the man who had done so much to fight for conscience and freedom and against spiritual tyranny was in danger of creating a church that was in some respects less tolerant than the one he had attacked.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The mine owners’ bitter experiences shaped Luther’s economic thought. His periodic outbursts later in life against the “little tricks” of the “thieves,” “robbers,” and “interest squires” expressed a populist hatred of major capitalists like the Fuggers, who engaged in the sinful practices of usury, and who tried to gain a monopoly on sources of wealth such as trading minerals.51 Luther reached for the moral language of sin to explain economic behavior, castigating their avarice, one of the seven deadly sins, but this ethical approach left him unable to deal with the mechanisms of the new capitalism. He rejected many commercial practices as unchristian and maintained all his life that usury was a sin, although he was willing to countenance a basic rate of return on lending. Offered shares in the mines of the Saxon dukes later in life that would have returned him a much-needed three hundred guilders a year, Luther refused, declaring “I am the Pope’s louse, I torment him, and he keeps me, and I live off his goods.” Luther did not want to be a capitalist. For him, shares were Spielgeld, toy money.52 It is hardly surprising that when Johannes Tetzel, the preacher who would eventually spark Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, began to sell indulgences in 1508, he headed straight for the new mining region of St. Annaberg, named after the miner’s saint, the mother of the Virgin Mary: Miners needed all the protection they could muster. As Myconius, the town’s Lutheran preacher, would put it later, they hoped that “if they just put in the money and bought grace and indulgences, all the mountains around St. Annaberg would become the purest silver; and as soon as the coins clinked in the bowl, the soul for whom they had put it in would fly straight to heaven with their dying breath.”53 It may have been that omnipresence of uncertainty, danger, and risk in the mining world that settled in Luther’s soul and gave him a deep conviction of the complete omnipotence of God: a sense that human beings are utterly exposed in their dealings with Him, and that there are no mediators or strategies that could protect them. Magic would not work, insurance did not exist, law offered only flimsy protection. The miner could call on the saints, especially St. Anna. But in the end, he faced God alone.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The universities of Paris and Erfurt were meant to judge the outcome of the debate, and all publication on the proceedings was banned until they reached their decision. Unsurprisingly, both universities dragged their feet, Erfurt finally declining to give a decision at all. Paris did not reach a judgment until April 1521, when it commented not on the debate itself but on the heretical nature of all of Luther’s writings.39 By then it was an irrelevance. Both Eck and Luther had long since resorted to print to get their side of the story across. Luther republished his positions as he had set them out before the debate, prefacing them with his account of the proceedings. He published the sermon he had preached at the castle during it on Matthew 16:13–19, which included the verse “on this rock I will build my church”; the preface again insinuated that Eck was motivated by envy: “Envy can attack the truth but will never again be victorious.”40 In August, he published a commentary on his Leipzig theses, prefaced with a long letter to Spalatin in which he summarized the debate. It sold out by early September. Finally in December an unofficial protocol of the debate was published in Erfurt by Luther’s supporters, and quickly reprinted.41 Humanists from Leipzig and Wittenberg—the Hebrew scholar Johannes Cellarius, Johannes Hessius Montanus, and Rubius—all wrote rival accounts, attacking one another and their respective universities. The tone of the exchanges became yet more shrill as the post-debate squabbling continued, and began to move from a humanist spat toward a much wider discussion of religious truth, with Cellarius finally proclaiming “that Martin loves the gospel truth more than do all his adversaries together.”42 Eck for his part published a string of pamphlets, accusing Luther of bad faith and of having broken the conditions both sides had agreed on for the debate. His final salvo was a collection of documents, including letters from Luther written during the negotiations that, so Eck claimed, proved Luther had acted perfidiously. He translated them all into German; but Eck had to publish the collection with a member of his family, for by now he was finding it difficult to get his writings printed. Across the empire, printers were eager to publish the new, evangelical message for a hungry audience: Works by conservative propagandists could no longer command a market.43

• From A History of God (1993)

  Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism?… which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance and humanity?21 The churches had only themselves to blame for this defiance, since for centuries they had burdened the faithful with a crippling number of doctrines. The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive. The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason. But their belief in a Supreme Being remained intact. Voltaire built a chapel at Ferney with the inscription “Deo Erexit Voltaire” inscribed on the lintel and went so far as to suggest that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. In the Philosophical Dictionary, he had argued that faith in one god was more rational and natural to humanity than belief in numerous deities. Originally people living in isolated hamlets and communities had acknowledged that a single god had control of their destinies: polytheism was a later development. Science and rational philosophy both pointed to the existence of a Supreme Being: “What conclusion can we draw from all this?” Voltaire asks at the end of his essay on “Atheism” in the Dictionary. He replies: That atheism is a monstrous evil in those who govern; and also in learned men even if their lives are innocent, because from their studies they can affect those who hold office; and that, even if it is not as baleful as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue. Above all, let me add that there are fewer atheists today than there have ever been, since philosophers have perceived that there is no vegetative being without germ, no germ without design etc.22 Voltaire equated atheism with the superstition and fanaticism that the philosophers were so anxious to eradicate. His problem was not God but the doctrines about him which offended against the sacred standard of reason.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  47 This was grist to Cochlaeus’s mill, and in his satire, Agricola appears onstage, distraught that his play has somehow offended the reformer. Desperate to regain Luther’s favor, he persuades his wife to intercede with Katharina von Bora, the only person who can get Luther to change his mind. Cochlaeus paints Agricola as a drunkard and bully, whose wife seeks in vain to control him. There was probably more than a grain of truth in this: There were complaints at Eisleben that Agricola drank too much. Simon Lemnius, one of Melanchthon’s most gifted students, was next to attract Luther’s wrath, putting the friendship between Luther and Melanchthon under serious strain as a result. Taking a student prank too far, he published a volume of Latin epigrams that mocked many of the prominent citizens of Wittenberg. 48 Everything published in the town was subject to censorship but the printer, Nikolaus Schirlentz, had thought that he was dealing with a harmless volume of poetry; either he believed Lemnius’s assurance that Melanchthon had given his approval, or his Latin did not stretch to understanding the contents. Melanchthon, as rector of the university at the time, was responsible for censorship, and when Lemnius left town, it was rumored Melanchthon or his family had helped his star pupil to escape. 49 Some argued that the verses were relatively innocuous; after all, penning gently mocking poems in Latin and Greek was a hobby in which Luther and Melanchthon had often indulged. Luther, however, was enraged; he had a poster printed and attached to the church doors, a format used to offer bounties for criminals. It roundly condemned the young man, saying he deserved the death penalty. 50 This was not quite the same thing as advocating his execution, although according to Lemnius himself, Luther had said in public that he would not preach in the town until Lemnius had been executed. Lemnius was tried by the university in his absence, he was banished in perpetuity, and his book was burned. By any measure this was an overreaction, and perhaps what excited Luther’s rage was that Lemnius had also penned a poem of praise to the archbishop of Mainz, and this accolade to “that shit bishop,” as Luther called him, gained the young poet protection and patronage. “I won’t stand anyone in Wittenberg praising that damned, accursed monk, who would like to see us all dead,” Luther thundered. Once safe in Halle, Lemnius began publishing much more scurrilous work that portrayed Luther as a lecher, a man who had married a nun; an authoritarian who made himself pope and bishop and had seized power in Wittenberg; and a boor with no respect for poetry and the arts. 51 Like Cochlaeus before him, he castigated Luther for fomenting rebellion, and in a long response to Luther’s broadsheet, accused the reformer of conniving at murder, because Beskendorf, thanks to Luther’s intervention, had not been punished severely enough for murdering his son-in-law.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (You make him stop, I said, staring into my computer.) The burden of the move quite literally broke the Brit’s back—a slipped disk flattened him. After months of hauling his dinner to him on a tray, I wanted to bubble-wrap him and stick stamps on his forehead. (So much for in sickness and in health .) We scheduled back surgery in London, Dev and I letting a summer place while he healed. But by then I was already wondering if we could get the deposit back on the reception hall, envisioning the dress I’d bought boxed up with mothballs. (If I’d been thinking like an adult instead of a grade schooler with a Cinderella costume, I’d never have permitted anybody to give up a fancy job and house in Notting Hill.) I broke things off, but his departure tore open an old wound. Once he’s gone, I begin to sense—as I shove my cart through the supermarket amid the Republican families on Sunday—a giant S on my chest for Spinster. Dev’s preoccupied with friends and rap records. Despite Patti and friends, the old lack of close family makes me fumingly mad at God, who, it may seem nutty to say, is real to me after years of prayer, not like the Easter Bunny or anything. All pain still makes me mad at God. Running into Big John, who steers me into overhauling how I pray, strikes me as grace. We make best pals playing racquetball at my health club—a joke, given he’s six-five and a former Olympic contender for the water polo team. With our handicapping, I only have to score a single point to win. As a young man, John had been torn between a career as an athlete and the Jesuit seminary, but he’d drunk his way out of both businesses. On getting sober, he’d started a swim club to pursue his dream of coaching Olympic-caliber competitors. A lumbering guy with curly brown hair and eyes the color of pool chlorine, he pursues that Olympic vision waking and sleeping. When we meet, he’s sober longer than I am, and—due to his own heartbreak—he’s reconsidering whether he’s called to be a Jesuit. To discern the answer, he undertakes a lay version of the Exercises, emerging nine months later like a creature dipped in fine metal, heartbreak cured. Right after, his coaching career takes off like gangbusters. His swimmers start taking national prizes, and four are pulling down Olympic-level times. One gold-medals in Sydney. In short, following Ignatius jacked up both his mood and his productivity, and—competitive bitch that I am—this spiked my interest. Still, I waffle when a nun outlines the time commitment—classes, spiritual direction, hours of prayer, journals. Also, while I wasn’t—for longer than I care to admit—boinking anybody, I didn’t want to scare off any future prospects. Imagine saying to your date that you can’t give up any nay-nay till your Franciscan spiritual advisor gives the thumbs up.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. Shortly afterward, Reinhard was forced to leave his post in Jena, and when he moved to Nuremberg, he was driven from there, too. Reinhard soon knuckled under, asking forgiveness, but Luther was unwilling to intervene on his behalf. 8 — H OW had the former allies come to this?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  5 Those who copied Luther and excoriated the failings of the elite from the pulpit could soon find themselves isolated. No fewer than fifteen individuals, including the mayor, were happy to testify against the preacher of Werdau, who had insulted the councilors as “Herods” and “Caiaphases.” 6 Johannes Heine, the pastor at Elssnig, near Torgau, had a sideline in herbal and magical healing, claiming that his cures were not magical but accomplished “through God’s grace, which was given to him.” His unworthy conduct was reported during a Church Visitation and he was thrown into prison. 7 Even Lutheran loyalists were not immune to the attractions of such quasi-magical practice. Luther had to write a long letter to Jonas’s wife telling her that while it might seem like a good idea to read a gospel passage aloud as a cure, the fact that it had to be done at a certain place and time suggested that it was not pious but superstitious. One pastor refused to allow warm water for baptism because, he argued, it was a mixture of the elements of fire and water and therefore was not pure water—Luther made short shrift of this, telling him he should consult those who knew their philosophy. 8 The new pastors were meant to be theologically trained, but there were not enough of them, and in rural Saxony, local tradition and magical belief would not simply melt away in the face of university knowledge. Luther’s influence spread through his personal connections and was limited by them as well. They are thus highly important for understanding his achievements; not only friendships but also the many bitter fights with allies and enemies alike were integral to the nature and development of the Reform movement. Georg Witzel is a good example—a former acolyte, he turned on Luther and published a stinging attack in 1532, which tried to outdo his former mentor’s style. Luther, he wrote, “maintains, furthers and drives it all alone, and according to his brain, makes and unmakes, turns and reverses, says and lies, appoints and sacks everything according to his inclination and pleasure.” He was driven by his “raging, stormy, inconstant proud head, [and] bloodthirsty heart.” 9 Luther’s world was primarily focused on the university. He was at once part of Wittenberg society and yet he did not think of himself as an ordinary citizen, in the way that Zwingli, for example, had done in Zurich. His exemption from the Türkensteuer in 1542, a levy on every inhabitant of the Reich to finance the campaign against the Turks, was an evident demonstration of this.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But she doesn’t collapse in operatic weeping like she’s done in the past. Which is strange. She seems very still as she pats the side of the futon. She says, Sit down next to me. I’m not in the mood to cuddle and say so. Her eyes are cloudy as an ancient oracle’s. She says, I’ve made amends to you, Mary. Best I could. And that’s it? You’re sober now. I zero out your account. You want to get mad at me, she says, knock yourself out. I don’t want to get mad, Mother, I say. I am fucking mad. Well, get it off your chest, she says. So I do, pacing up and down, ranting like a Pentecostal preacher while she sits in a Buddha-esque pose studying me. Finally, I float into place next to her like a soggy balloon. She stubs out the end of her smoke and looks at me with her misted eyes. She actually shrugs. What will you have me do? she asks. There’s nothing she can do. I say so. After getting sober, you’re supposed to make up to people you’d plowed over. Mother’s sorry occupies two sentences: You know all that stuff that happened when you were little? I’m sorry about that. She doesn’t risk a joke, but I see mischief in her, some bemusement. It’s disarming about Mother, her ability to laugh at the wrong instant. Just stay sober, I say. Plus keep your grandson for one fucking hour without it being a federal case. It interferes with my serenity, she says. Lecia had gone through a similar fight where she’d told Mother, You don’t cook. You don’t clean. You haven’t had a job in forty years. What exactly do you bring to the party? The way Lecia told it, Mother had looked puzzled. She’d actually cocked her head like she was trying to remember her purpose on the planet and had finally, confidently, popped out with: I’m a lot of fun to be with. I remind her of that, saying, So what do I get? You’re a lot of fun to be with? Basically, she says. Or look at it this way: Maybe I left you a lot of good stories to write about. Maybe you’ll make your fortune on me. Or my misfortune. Poets don’t make fortunes. Don’t be so sure, kid. I’ve been praying about it for you. I won’t inhale and hold it, I say. You know what I pray’ll happen for you? It better involve money. That you’ll get this program. For God’s sake, Mother, stop proselytizing for one day. I’m not gonna be your cliché-spouting recovery acolyte.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  There was little chivalry in the taverns. A man would tell a woman to go hang out with the priests and monks in Hettstedt “as she had doubtless done before.” “There are no more than two or three pious women in the whole of Mansfeld,” another man announced angrily. He stayed pointedly silent when his companion asked him whether he included his wife in that number. 36 Work disputes could rapidly descend into arguments about an individual’s sexual, moral, and social behavior because honor, the central social category, was both sexual and economic. During Luther’s childhood, Hans Luder would have been a force to be reckoned with. He was a physically powerful man, and once, when a pub fight broke out in his presence, he poured beer over the two combatants to separate them, clouting both on the head for good measure with a jug until the blood ran. 37 He was also not a man to be crossed lightly. We find him complaining about the high charges of the winch-winders, and about another mine operator who, he claimed, was stealing his ore (the accused countered that Luder was taking his charcoal). 38 The court books are littered with disputes between the mine operators—small wonder, with 194 shafts at the industry’s peak in the early sixteenth century in the Mansfeld and Eisleben areas, where it could be hard to know where one mine’s territory began and another ended. Time and again, the mine inspector would be called to check the location of boundary stones. Tunnels honeycombed the hills. The longest was a remarkable eight miles long, and it was rumored that a man could reach Eisleben from the castle in Mansfeld through the tunnels. It was also a world of dizzyingly complex financial arrangements. Much of the mining structures had to be maintained collectively, and the records afford a glimpse of the maze of loans, counter-loans, and securities as money circulated among the small group of mine operators, or was advanced by the capitalists of Nuremberg, and as mines were relinquished and redistributed. 39 Hans Luder would have been caught between several competing forces: the counts, who leased the mines and constantly sought to extract more money by altering the legal terms; the other mine managers, who were only too quick to seize an advantage; the miners, whose labor actually produced the wealth from the ground, and who were beginning to organize collectively; and the capitalists in faraway Nuremberg and Leipzig, who drove hard bargains and to whom it was only too easy to become irrevocably indebted. These economic relations were new, and they were complicated.