Contempt

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)

  But we do know that at some point the Vatican put the whole matter in the hands of a Dominican named Sylvester Mazzolini. The Dominican order, as we have said, had come into being to protect church doctrine. Mazzolini hailed from the town of Priero, in northwestern Italy, so he took the name Prierias. At the Vatican, Prierias held the title “commissioner of the Sacred Palace,” and it now fell to him to examine the theses and then determine and explain whether they constituted heresy, at which point Luther must appear before the Inquisition in Rome. So at last someone was charged with responding to Luther’s words. And so Prierias did. It was hardly a measured response. Prierias bragged that he had written his stinging answer to the arrogant German monk in only three days! But what had been his findings? For the Wittenberg monk, the title of the work, Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Conclusions of Martin Luther Concerning the Power of the Pope, did not bode well. In the hastily written publication, Prierias did not tunnel to any particular theological depths. For him, the matter was quite simple: As I intend to sift your doctrine thoroughly, my Martin, it is necessary for me to establish a basis of norms and foundations. . . . Third foundation: He who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome, as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength and authority, is a heretic. Fourth foundation: The Church of Rome can make decisions both in word and deed concerning faith and morals. And there is no difference except that words are better suited. In this sense habit acquires the force of law, for the will of a prince expresses itself in deeds which he allows or himself arranges to have done. Consequently: as he who thinks incorrectly concerning the truth of Scriptures is a heretic, so too he who thinks incorrectly concerning the doctrines and deeds of the Church in matters of faith and morals is a heretic. The work had many frothy put-downs, such as “Just as the Devil smells of his pride in all his works, so you smell of your own malevolence” and a description of Luther as “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron.”*15 The conclusion to this peppery opus was a swift kick to the point: “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the matter of indulgences is a heretic.”16 There it was. Luther must therefore now travel to Rome and face the Inquisition.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Before he had left Wittenberg for Orlamünde, Karlstadt had only confirmed Luther’s opinion of him as someone who had gone too far, who had to some extent thrown his lot in with Müntzer and the Zwickau prophets, all of whom pushed a kind of forced egalitarianism that smacked more of pure social ferment and anger at the nobles than of the Gospel of Christ. Karlstadt—who, although no longer allowed to preach, was still lecturing at the university—had overseen a doctoral ceremony and in the midst of it declared that such ceremonies were inherently godless because Jesus had forbidden his disciples to call anyone “master.” We don’t know whether Luther rolled his eyes, or whether anyone did so in those days, but we do know that he was sorely tempted to walk out. Karlstadt and his forced and legalistic interpretations of the Scriptures smelled to Luther like fanaticism, so it is no great wonder he put Karlstadt in the Schwärmer category with the Zwickauers and Müntzer. At Orlamünde, Karlstadt also had free rein to push his dualistic theories about the wickedness of images. He believed that the material world and the world of “creation” must be transcended, and that meant images and statues too. And he twisted the Scriptures themselves, claiming Jesus had said that we as his bride were to present our “naked souls” to the bridegroom. So anything having to do with what he called the “clothing” of the “creation” was strictly verboten. All of this had a vague idea of getting back to the soil and nature, as though “nakedness” were more natural than clothing. But Luther would have seen this as a leap back to Eden without the cross, as though we could go back through our own efforts and forget that blood had ever been shed for our sins. And so it was heresy and foolishness both. Luther also sniffed Old Testament legalism in some of what Karlstadt was brewing and quipped that they would soon be introducing circumcision. But it was all a harebrained hodgepodge, because added to these things was a reliance on “hearing from God” via inner voices and revelation that was unmoored from the Scriptures and therefore wide open to excess and theological confusion. Luther had never put much truck in “hearing God” in the way of the mystics, but it was less this—which could in some circumstances be respectable and biblically grounded—than the idea that Karlstadt and the other Schwärmer were using this mainly as an excuse to slip free from the strictures of Scripture or, as they might have seen it, to be “free” and “natural.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  HumanismIt was as a philosophy student at Erfurt that Luther first encountered the fashionable new intellectual movement called Humanism* and there met a number of professors and students devoted to it. Two of these professors were Bartholomaeus Arnoldi Usingen and Jodokus Trutfetter, with whom he would stay in touch for many years. And one of the students at Erfurt during this time was a young man named Georg Burkhardt, a tanner’s son from the Bavarian village of Spalt. This Georg Burkhardt would in a few years do what most Humanists of the time did and take a Latin or Greek name. Burkhardt chose to Latinize the name of his village and was thenceforth known as Spalatinus, although the German form of this was Spalatin, and it was as Spalatin that he was known to Luther. He would one day become an extraordinarily close friend to Luther and as important a player in this story as anyone. But at this early point, the two were simply acquaintances. The school of thought that had previously and for centuries held sway in medieval Europe was known as Scholasticism. Its principal figures were Duns Scotus, William of Ockham—of eponymous “razor” fame—and Thomas Aquinas. Today most regard Scholasticism as a fussy, over-formalized way of instruction that was fatally removed from practical life issues. The idea of ivory-tower academics wrangling and perspiring over outré philosophical riddles—as the marauding Turks lay siege to Constantinople and Christendom—is memorably summed up in the classic question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This was no hyperbolic joke but something that the Scholastics earnestly debated. Also, instead of reading the Bible itself, students during the Scholastic period read Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which were his commentaries on portions of Scripture—or even read Duns Scotus’s gloss on Lombard’s Sentences. Thus students were enticed to gambol on the loose tiles of the roof, unable to see or know anything of the house and foundation below them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell, and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: “Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it.” But when he sees the Word running and contending alone on the battle-field, then he shudders and shakes for fear.15 Luther more than did his part in preaching the Gospel in these years. In 1522, he preached 117 Sunday sermons in Wittenberg. The next year he preached 137 sermons there. And he preached many sermons on the road too. The Prophets ReturnLuther and company had not heard the last of the gung ho Zwickau prophets, whom Luther eventually lumped in with other radicals under the derisive term Schwärmer (fanatics). Sometime in early January, Storch and Drechsel had fled Wittenberg as hastily as they had come and were now traveling throughout Germany to spread their loopy doctrines wherever they might. Storch’s ability to work his hypnotic voodoo on crowds was unparalleled, especially as he wove increasingly spine-tingling tales of what he had seen in the heavenlies. He spoke often of seeing the archangel Gabriel, and even went so far as to claim that Gabriel had told him that he himself would one day sit on Gabriel’s throne, although he failed to explain where Gabriel would then sit. The youngest of the trio, Thomas Stübner—who had been Melanchthon’s student—remained behind with Melanchthon, who kindly put him up in his own home and defended him against a growing number of deeply suspicious Wittenbergers. Stübner stayed with Melanchthon and his wife for some time and did not cease to harry them with increasingly apocalyptic prophecies. At some point, he claimed the Muslim Turks would soon arrive to kill every priest, including the ones who had presumably done the right thing in marrying. He also claimed that in five—or seven—years a violent revolution would come, although those who had remained devout would survive, and there would be no more divisions in Christendom. We can only imagine how the cerebral and sweet Melanchthon dealt with all of this. Things came to a bizarre pass when one day they were all sitting at the table and Stübner—perhaps exhausted from weeks of nonstop prophesying—nodded off. He then awoke quite suddenly, declaring that he was in fact John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  AS THE 1520S rolled to their conclusion, the only reason Luther was still alive and the Reformation had been able to spread as it had was that the emperor had been too busy to enforce the paper tiger known as the Edict of Worms. In fact, since the Diet of Worms in 1521, Charles had not been in Germany at all. He had been busy fighting the French. In 1526, the emperor had been unable to attend the Diet of Speyer, instead asking his younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, to preside. But in the five years since Worms, the mostly unmolested Lutherans had increased their strength dramatically. And the emperor’s strength was further compromised by having to battle the Turks on the eastern border of his empire and having to battle Francis I of France on his western. Charles was getting no help in fighting the Turks from Germany, and then, when he finally defeated France in 1525 at the Battle of Pavia, Pope Clement VII—who had succeeded Adrian VI—used his authority to release the French from the harsh peace conditions that Charles had imposed on them. The emperor couldn’t win. As a result of these papal shenanigans, Charles fell out with Clement, which in turn caused Clement to ally himself with Milan, Venice, Florence, and France, an alliance called the Franco-Italian League, or the League of Burgundy. England was to have been a part of this alliance too, but when Henry VIII failed in his petulant attempts to have everyone cross the channel to sign the treaty on his turf, he stormed out of the league in a sable-colored huff.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thus Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) evolved a philosophy which was in some respects strikingly similar to Kabbalah. This was ironic, since he regarded Judaism as an ignoble religion which was responsible for the primitive conception of God that had perpetrated great wrong. The Jewish God in Hegel’s view was a tyrant who required unquestioning submission to an intolerable Law. Jesus had tried to liberate men and women from this base servitude, but Christians had fallen into the same trap as the Jews and promoted the idea of a divine Despot. It was now time to cast this barbaric deity aside and evolve a more enlightened view of the human condition. Hegel’s highly inaccurate view of Judaism, based on the New Testament polemic, was a new type of metaphysical anti-Semitism. Like Kant, Hegel regarded Judaism as an example of everything that was wrong with religion. In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), he substituted the idea of a Spirit which was the life force of the world for the conventional deity. Yet as in Kabbalah, the Spirit was willing to suffer limitation and exile in order to achieve true spirituality and self-consciousness. As in Kabbalah again, the Spirit was dependent upon the world and upon human beings for its fulfillment. Hegel had thus asserted the old monotheistic insight—characteristic also of Christianity and Islam—that “God” was not separate from mundane reality, an optional extra in a world of his own, but was inextricably bound up with humanity. Like Blake, he expressed this insight dialectically, seeing humanity and Spirit, finite and infinite, as two halves of a single truth which are mutually interdependent and involved in the same process of self-realization. Instead of pacifying a distant deity by observing an alien, unwanted Law, Hegel had in effect declared that the divine was a dimension of our humanity. Indeed, Hegel’s view of the kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the world, has much in common with the Incarnational theologies that have developed in all three faiths. Hegel was a man of the Enlightenment as well as a Romantic, however, and he therefore valued reason more than the imagination. Again, he unwittingly echoed the insights of the past. Like the Faylasufs, he saw reason and philosophy as superior to religion, which was stuck in representational modes of thought. Like the Faylasufs again, Hegel drew his conclusions about the Absolute from the working of the individual mind, which he described as caught up in a dialectical process which mirrored the whole.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Platonism was one of the most popular philosophies of late antiquity. The new Platonists of the first and second century were not attracted to Plato the ethical and political thinker but to Plato the mystic. His teachings would help the philosopher to realize his true self, by liberating his soul from the prison of the body and enabling him to ascend to the divine world. It was a noble system, which used cosmology as an image of continuity and harmony. The One existed in serene contemplation of itself beyond the ravages of time and change at the pinnacle of the great chain of being. All existence derived from the One as a necessary consequence of its pure being: the eternal forms had emanated from the One and had in their turn animated the sun, stars and moon, each in their respective sphere. Finally the gods, who were now seen as the angelic ministers of the One, transmitted the divine influence to the sublunary world of men. The Platonist needed no barbaric tales of a deity who suddenly decided to create the world or who ignored the established hierarchy to communicate directly with a small group of human beings. He needed no grotesque salvation by means of a crucified Messiah. Since he was akin to the God who had given life to all things, a philosopher could ascend to the divine world by means of his own efforts in a rational, ordered way. How could the Christians explain their faith to the pagan world? It seemed to fall between two stools, appearing to be neither a religion, in the Roman sense, nor a philosophy. Moreover, Christians would have found it hard to list their “beliefs” and may not have been conscious of evolving a distinctive system of thought. In this they resembled their pagan neighbors. Their religion had no coherent “theology” but could more accurately be described as a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment. When they recited their “creeds,” they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere , for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one’s heart. When they said “credo!” (or pisteno in Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position. Thus Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 to 428, explained to his converts: When you say “I engage myself” ( pisteuo ) before God, you show that you will remain steadfastly with him, that you will never separate yourself from him and that you will think it higher than anything else to be and to live with him and to conduct yourself in a way that is in harmony with his commandments.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nonetheless, as far as Karlstadt would push things in the wrong direction, it would all show itself to be almost as nothing when compared to the excesses of Thomas Müntzer. For example, that July Müntzer preached a sermon in front of Duke John. It was essentially a threat disguised as a sermon. Either the princes would join in with the Allstedt reforms, or God would smite them. Müntzer was not one to mince words: What a pretty spectacle we have before us now—all the eels and snakes coupling together immorally in one great heap. The priests and all the evil clerics are the snakes . . . and the secular lords and rulers are the eels. . . . My revered rulers of Saxony . . . seek without delay the righteousness of God and take up the cause of the gospel boldly.2 In other words, slaughter with your swords those who disagree with me, or you yourselves will be slaughtered. Müntzer is one of those cases in history when a madman rises to power and draws others into his madness, resulting in an unrelenting bloodbath. Müntzer, like all utopianists, was divorced from reality and wished to be so divorced, thinking the reality of this world as something to be fled as soon as possible. All political and religious reform movements are tempted in the direction of cultishness and violence, and at the time of Luther, Müntzer was the one who led this charge over the cliff. Throughout history and in the last decades particularly, many have rejected religion precisely because of this sort of pharisaical judgmentalism, harsh legalism, and in the end cruelty and violence that have been manifested in various groups. But just as in Luther’s time, these things have manifested on both ends of the theological spectrum. In Luther’s day, there was on one side the ultra-traditionalist medieval papacy that would ultimately use violence to protect its power and on the other side the radical “left” of such as Thomas Müntzer and his disciples whose intolerance would bring about violence in another way. Luther rightly saw that freedom and truth and love cannot be separated. They partake of each other, and whenever they are divided from each other, the devil gains a foothold and violence enters. On the one hand, he understood that the pope and the church had combined with the emperor to squelch true freedom, to repress honest inquiry, and to do so with deadly force. They were so invested in preserving the status quo that any who persisted in disagreeing with them would be cruelly persecuted and perhaps burned alive. Luther had been crusading against this since the day he posted his theses on the doors of the Castle Church, and this side of things had so merged church and state that these twin powers were essentially a single dreadful authority, one that would not brook dissent.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Müntzer also made it clear that Luther must be one of those slaughtered. He called him “Brother Fattened-Hog”—and Melanchthon “Brother Soft-Life”10—and derided Luther for his love of pleasure and for living only “to devour juicy morsels at court.”11 Then Müntzer demanded an “international” hearing for his ideas. To those in power—which was to say, to those listening to him—Müntzer threatened unleashing the peasant hordes. Either the nobles before him would use their swords for God’s purposes—as he saw them—or God’s “people” would take things into their own hands. All must either accept his gospel or confess themselves heathen and die. There is nothing quite like religious madness, and that it is a foretaste of hell can hardly be debated. Müntzer’s vision was a fever dream from the mind of Satan, that same fever dream as bubbles from the minds of numerous like figures through history unto our own day, for whom the devil is God and life is death, for whom grace is weakness and cruelty is justice. This is the hellish apotheosis of self, in which all “others” are either enslaved or killed. And so Müntzer—having delivered himself of this cheery homily to the territorial lords—awaited their decision. Won’t you help me smash the sky and ascend with me into the empyrean? Or will you consign yourselves to be slaughtered and go to hell? How Dukes John and John Frederick had squirmed during this message we can only guess, nor will we ever know whether when it was over they shook Müntzer’s hand on the way out and told him they had enjoyed his sermon. We do know that Müntzer soon after had this “sermon”—along with an added bonus section on dreams—printed. Then, on July 17, Müntzer contacted Karlstadt in Orlamünde, inviting him to join his “league of the elect” and inviting him to prevail upon fifteen villages to join them. To his eternal credit, Karlstadt immediately saw that Müntzer was about to do what everyone had feared, to lead an armed “people’s” revolt against the nobles, and so he promptly tore up the letter. But then he rode his horse to a friend’s home and reconstituted the letter to show his friend what Müntzer was proposing, so he would have proof. Karlstadt had never promoted violence, and two days later he wrote to Müntzer, firmly refusing to participate and counseling him to cease and desist from his martial plans. To be sure, they had some important things in common, but leading hordes of peasants to slaughter nonbelievers—and forcibly drag the End of All Things from the distant future into the present—was not one of them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther also almost violently takes issue with Erasmus’s contention that one’s stance on free will is not important. For Luther, there is no doctrine more important, because for him this was the doctrine that determined how one read all the rest of the Bible. And if this one thing is properly understood, then we can sweep away all of the contrary suggestions in the Old Testament Scriptures that Erasmus cited. To say the question of free will is open to various interpretations is no different to Luther from saying the question of the bodily resurrection and the Incarnation are open to differing interpretations. Not only are they not open to different interpretations, but how we stand on these supremely vital issues determines all else. Thus Luther had worked hard to establish the clarity of this single doctrine beyond all doubt. For him, it is a treasure for emperor and peasant alike, for Kaiser and Karsthans. It is not a theological side issue; on the contrary, it is the one thing everyone can and must understand: without Jesus to save us utterly, we are utterly lost. With Jesus, we are saved. For Luther, all the flailing and the winnowing of his exegeses had produced these vital kernels that were meant to nourish mankind unto eternal life, and whatever contrary arguments Erasmus had put forth must be blown away like chaff. The contrasting stances of Luther and Erasmus are fascinating. That their simmering feud finally boiled over in Luther’s greatest work ended their communication, but not their private feuding. And for all his efforts to distance himself from Luther, the one final grunting shove that was De libero arbitrio still did not sufficiently distance him in the eyes of his most Roman critics, who forever saw him as suspiciously pro-Lutheran. For them, Erasmus’s important work was nonetheless too little, too late. And in 1559, when Pope Paul IV published the Vatican’s first Index of Prohibited Books, one certainly expected to find Martin Luther’s books there, and did, but if one looked closely, one would have seen Desiderius Erasmus’s were there too.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In 1920, Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them into protectorates and mandates. This colonial project only made a more silent process of Westernization official, since Europeans had been establishing a cultural and economic hegemony during the nineteenth century in the name of modernization. Technicalized Europe had become the leading power and was taking over the world. Trading posts and consular missions had been established in Turkey and the Middle East which had undermined the traditional structure of these societies long before there was actual Western rule. This was an entirely new kind of colonization. When the Moghuls had conquered India, the Hindu population had absorbed many Muslim elements into its own culture, but eventually the indigenous culture had made a comeback. The new colonial order transformed the lives of the subject people permanently, establishing a polity of dependence. It was impossible for the colonized lands to catch up. Old institutions had been fatally undermined, and Muslim society was itself divided between those who had become “Westernized” and the “others.” Some Muslims came to accept the European assessment of them as “Orientals,” lumped indiscriminately with Hindus and Chinese. Some looked down on their more traditional countrymen. In Iran, Shah Nasiruddin (1848–96) insisted that he despised his subjects. What had been a living civilization with its own identity and integrity was gradually being transformed into a bloc of dependent states that were inadequate copies of an alien world. Innovation had been the essence of the modernizing process in Europe and the United States: it could not be achieved by imitation. Today anthropologists who study modernized countries or cities in the Arab world such as Cairo point out that the architecture and plan of the city reflects domination rather than progress. 23 On their side Europeans had come to believe that their culture was not only superior at the present time but had always been in the van of progress. They often displayed a superb ignorance of world history. Indians, Egyptians and Syrians had to be Westernized for their own good. The colonial attitude was expressed by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1007: Sir Alfred Lyall once said to me: “Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind. Every Anglo-Indian should always remember that maxim.” Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And unlike the insistence on the sinfulness of human works, or the attack on indulgences, this was not a theological argument but 142 MARTIN LUTHER a simple demand for practical reform that could be taken up by ordi- nary people and would lead to far-reaching changes in every parish. Although Luther was careful to concede that those who were given only the bread still received the whole sacrament, the genie could not be put back in the bottle.®° It was the call for Communion in both kinds that popularised the early Reformation as parish after parish demanded to be given the wine as well as the bread. It was also a frontal attack on the status of the clergy as a separate, priestly estate, who therefore merited receiving the whole sacrament and not just the bread. It would only be a matter of time before Luther launched his attack on the nature of the priesthood itself. His criticisms of indulgences had attacked papal authority and the Church hierarchy; now, he was questioning something basic to every parishioner’s experience. Not only that, but he went on to attack brotherhoods, the most important of lay religious organisations, which underpinned the whole system of indulgences with the practice of Christians praying for each other to ensure salvation. These brotherhoods, Luther wrote, were nothing more than excuses for ‘gluttony, drunkenness, useless squan- dering of money, howling, yelling, chattering, dancing, and wasting of time . . . If a sow were made the patron saint of such a brother- hood she would not consent.’* Luther was beginning to develop a distinctive German prose style — vivid, energetic, bursting with repeated verbs, and as earthy as Bruegel’s pictures. There was a growing market for such writing. In the months after the Leipzig Debate, printing suddenly exploded. Between 1518 and 1525, publications by Luther in German exceeded those of the seven- teen next most prolific authors put together. Indeed, Luther alone was responsible for 20 per cent of all the works published in German presses between 1500 and 1530.* As a result of his efforts, printing became one of Wittenberg’s new industries, and it would eclipse Leipzig altogether: when Duke Georg decided against the Reforma- tion, and banned the printing of works by Luther, numbers of titles published there annually plummeted from an average of 140 to forty- three, to the consternation of Leipzig’s printers.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The political theory he had developed in 1523 in his tract On Secular Authority had distinguished between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, which enabled him to argue that the Pope should not enjoy any temporal power. Because the power of princes belonged to this world, however, Christians should obey them, while it was the ruler’s duty to prevent the godless from attacking their fellow men. Luther clung to this neat apposition throughout his life. But it also left him without a positive account of what the state can do and how it might help its citizens, and it did not allow for a situation where a Christian or a Christian ruler would have to resist a superior authority. When the formation of the Schmalkaldic League finally forced him to consider that the emperor might have to be resisted, he abdicated responsibility, and left the matter for jurists to decide, eventually moving to a position that tacitly accepted the arguments for resistance. 46 At the same time, however, he was consistently disrespectful to princes himself, listing them in the same breath as beadles and hangmen, and mocking those he did not like at every opportunity, with brilliant insults. The man who railed against sedition and insisted on obedience to princes believed in his own authority as a prophet, and he thundered against the rulers from the sidelines. Perhaps Luther’s most lasting achievement was the German Bible. After the fevered translation of the New Testament in 1522, he worked with colleagues to produce the full Bible of 1534, illustrated with memorable images by Cranach. 47 It was not just that his prose shaped the German language, creating the modern vernacular as we know it. 48 Each book of the Bible was prefaced with a short and brilliantly clear introductory exegesis, so that the reader encountered the text through Luther’s understanding of it. And because his authorship was not clearly indicated, his explanation appeared indistinguishable from Scripture itself. Luther always maintained that the Word of God was absolutely plain and did not need interpretation, thus avoiding the question his very first opponents had raised: How do you decide between rival interpretations of biblical passages, and should not Church tradition therefore be the guide? His conviction that the Word of God was clear prompted ordinary people for centuries to come to read the Bible for themselves—even if Luther would not have always agreed with what they took from it. At the same time, his insistence on aligning his own authority with God’s Word helped give rise to a church of pastors who were theologically trained, academics whose authority rested on their intellectual command of religion, demonstrated in their sermons. At the heart of Luther’s theology lay his insistence that Christ was truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But another, more fundamental difference lay in the way the two men expressed themselves. Luther was as German as Germany itself, which is to say that there was a bluntness and a love of truth that sometimes came at the expense of comity. He cared about theological doctrine in a way that was sometimes ferocious and unyielding, and he obviously thought that it must be so, and that God would sort it all out in the end. But Erasmus was opposed to confrontation. He was more a wit than a theologian—in fact, he was not a theologian at all—and he was more an advocate of finesse and satire than blunt pronouncements or cutting japery. Erasmus’s indifference to theology per se is an important difference between them and would be the thing that led to their dramatic and public clash. His patron saint, for example, was the Thief on the Cross, who was saved without ever having heard about the Trinity or the Filioque clause—or even having heard that Jesus was fully man and fully divine. Erasmus would rather elide the details of many of these theological issues. They were simply not his focus. He endeavored to convey the basics of the faith to as wide an audience as possible. In fact, he was so intent on this that some of his writings were even translated into the Aztec language, as that society had been breached by the Europeans a few years earlier, in 1519. This is not to say that Luther did not wish to appeal to the common man, nor that he didn’t see this as a priority. On the contrary, what probably enabled him to succeed as he did was his almost uncanny ability to do this. His already remarkable talent at communicating directly with the average German in the pew was honed further yet in the years in which he preached often in Wittenberg. It is probably Luther’s astonishing intellectual wingspan—to be able to go from Greek and Latin translation and deep exegesis and scholarship to preaching candidly and clearly to the open-minded peasant—that marks him as a genius for the ages. He not only did not disdain the common man but positively hated those who did. He saw the obscurantism of Scholasticism and Aristotle as enemies of Christ and of those Christ loved and cared for. A comment on this subject is recorded from his Table Talk later in life. “Cursed are all the preachers that in the church aim at high and hard things,” he said, “and, neglecting the saving health of the poor unlearned people, seek their own honor and praise, and therewith to please one or two ambitious persons.” In a dedicatory preface to A Treatise on Good Works, Luther wrote,

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther likened those who trusted in works, like the Jews, to the sow that ‘is washed only to wallow in the mire’.® The Jews, he alleges, look for biblical truth ‘under the sow’s tail’, that is, their interpretation of the Bible comes from looking in a pig’s anus; they accuse Christians of stupidity which could not even be assigned to a sow, which ‘covers itself with mire from head to foot and does not eat anything much cleaner’; they defame Christian belief, ‘impelled by the Devil, to fall into this like filthy sows fall into the trough’. If they see a Jew, Christians should ‘throw sow dung at him . . . and chase him away’.* Luther calls for the secular authorities to burn down all the syna- gogues and schools, and ‘what won't burn should be covered over with earth, so that not a stone or piece of slag of it should be seen for all eternity’. The Jews’ houses should be destroyed and they should be put under one roof, like the gypsies. The Talmud and prayer books should be destroyed and Jewish teachers banned. They should be prevented from using the roads, usury banned, and the Jews forced to undertake physical labour instead. Assets from money- lending should be confiscated and used to support Jews who converted. This was a programme of complete cultural eradication.” And Luther meant it. When Melanchthon sent Philip of Hesse a copy of the text, he told him that it ‘truly’ contained ‘much useful teaching’. An electoral Saxon mandate of 1543 referred to Luther's ‘recent book’ as it ordered that anyone who encountered Jews should seize them and all their goods and report them to the authorities; they would be entitled to receive half of the confiscated goods as their reward.” Indeed, Luther’s violence was sometimes too much even for his contemporaries. Just a few weeks later, in early 1543 he produced Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ), which the Swiss theologian Heinrich Bull- inger condemned, while Andreas Osiander in Nuremberg wrote privately to a Jewish friend of his in Venice to express his revulsion. But it was not repudiated by Lutherans and was reprinted in 1577, with Nikolaus Selnecker, an early biographer of Luther's, adding a preface that included scurrilous stories such as one about the Jews in HATREDS 393 Magdeburg who refused to come to the aid of a Jew who had fallen into a privy because it was the Sabbath. Vom Schem Hamphoras appeared again in 1617, the centenary year of the Reformation, alongside On the Jews and their Lies, as the headline work in this vicious potpourri.” This was Luther off the leash, and the text reads like a revelation of his inner fantasies. Luther again assaulted the rabbinic tradition of interpreting Scripture, arguing that the Jews were led by the Devil who is behind any invocation of magic.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On the way back, the two Augustinians stopped at Augsburg, where, Luther recalled, he was taken to meet the holy Anna “Laminit,” or “leave me not.” The daughter of simple craftspeople, she was believed to live miraculously without eating. This kind of religiosity—or what modern writers have termed “holy anorexia”—was a powerful streak in late medieval devotion, encouraged by an extreme asceticism that regarded bodily appetites as inimical to religious perfection. Female saints in particular might fast to extremes and undergo mystical experiences. In a church that was deeply distrustful of women, asceticism offered them an avenue of expression and authority. Laminit reported visions of St. Anna, her name saint and the saint to whom we know Luther himself was attached. Not only did she go without food, but she was famed as passing neither water nor stools. She had drawn people since 1498, and her following included rich Augsburg patricians. [image "11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_015_r1.jpg] [image "11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_015_r1.jpg] 11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud. Luther shrewdly asked her whether she wanted to die, a question to which it would have been difficult to give a correct answer. As he remembered it, she replied, “No! There I don’t know how things work; here I do.” She was unmasked soon after by the duchess of Bavaria, who discovered her secret stash of luxury food, such as pepper cakes and pears; it turned out that she emptied her stools out of the window. It was also rumored that she had a child by a leading patrician and merchant. Laminit was consequently drummed out of town. For the later Luther, Laminit was a fraud, a “whore” and schemer, but whether he saw through her or not at the time we cannot know. It may be that he, like others, was already beginning to have doubts about this extreme and exhibitionistic mortification of the flesh, a skepticism that would color his later theology and that was fostered by his relationship with his confessor, Johann von Staupitz.46

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In both theology and temperaments the two men were fundamentally different. Luther came to insist on the primacy of Scripture as the source of all authority. Although Staupitz draws, like Luther, on Paul, he did not make such a radical claim and repeat- edly cited St Augustine and other Church Fathers.” Like Luther, he emphasised the sinful nature of human beings and argued that our works can never earn us salvation; he too criticised indulgences. But he did not have much to say about faith as a gift from God: his emphasis is more on the sinfulness of human beings than it is on God’s gift of grace or on the Bible. He focused on the emotional disposition of the believer, who has to be encouraged to leave attach- ments to this world behind. Luther, although highly attuned to his own religious emotions, did not believe that attaining a particular emotional state was spiritually important. Staupitz liked to talk about the ‘sweetness’ of God, the ‘sweet Saviour’, the ‘sweet bliss-maker’, the ‘sweet word’ and the ‘continuous sweetness’ of the mystical union of the soul with Christ.* This had its darker side. A brilliant preacher, his sermons were also laced with the anti-Semitism which was common currency at the time, and which Luther could also share, exploiting feeling against the Jews as persecu- tors to intensify emotional identification with Christ and Mary. So Staupitz describes Jews as ‘dogs’, who ‘spat at him [Christ] with all the filth that they could muster’, and believed that ‘the Jews sinned much more seriously than Pilate’ in killing Jesus because they did it out of ‘envy’. ‘All the world testifies to the envy of the Jews’, Staupitz wrote. ‘O you evil Jew! Pilate shows you that your nature is harsher than a pig, for it has mercy with its own kind.’ Staupitz’s German writing, different in literary quality from Luther's, draws on a long medieval tradition of devotional works written for laypeople by Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and the so-called ‘German Theology’. It often uses repetition to inculcate a state of meditative calm, and visual metaphors in order to grasp a spiritual truth. In Staupitz’s hands language is less an intellectual vehicle than a form of meditation, a means to mystical contemplation and dissolution of individuality. Luther never wrote in this manner. Once he had finally rejected the obligation to pray his ‘hours’, he also opposed what he described as ‘mummery’ — the simple and repeated mouthing of prayers.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  27 Court books from the period give some rare insight into what life was like in the world of mining. There were constant thefts of wood, ladders, and equipment from the shafts, and violence was never far away. 28 A man killed a prostitute in a brothel in nearby Hettstedt and was executed for it. Another slew a man and threw the body down a mine shaft—he too paid with his life—while a third attacked his own father, damaging his fist so seriously that he was unable to work. 29 Criminal law at the time mixed Roman law with older traditions that placed the emphasis on mediation. Thus murder could still be settled by paying the victim’s family compensation, though even so, between 1507 and 1509, at least three criminals were executed for murder. 30 There were constant quarrels between different groups of miners. The Haspeler, who wound the winches, hated the Sinker, who sank the shafts. The Sinker were mostly from Silesia and, scorning marriage, lived with girlfriends in houses near the mines where they also kept chickens and other livestock. 31 Mining was dangerous work. The tunnels that led off from the shafts were narrow, and miners had to work lying down on their bellies. There was little light. If the weather turned bad, the lamps would suddenly go out as sulfur gas accumulated in the mine shaft, poisoning any miners still below. It was believed that the gas was a product of the evil airs drawn from the brimstone and metals, rising in the tunnels and chilling men to death. 32 Mining was thirsty work, and as water was not drinkable, brewing was the town’s other major industry. Alcohol fueled quarrels, and since just about all men carried knives, fights tended to become bloody. Most brawls took place in taverns or drinking shops. 33 Luther’s own uncle, “Little Hans,” a wastrel who went from one pub brawl to another, would meet his death in a fracas at a drinking house in 1536. 34 People used whatever was to hand, grabbing the tavern lamps to bash an opponent, or hoisting the beer jugs to buffet an opponent about the head. Representing comradeship, these jugs also had symbolic significance: One man would insult another as not worthy to share a jug with a respectable man. 35 Drinking was surrounded with bonding rituals and there were competitive drinking games where a man had to stand his ground. One favorite required the use of the “pass glass,” ridged with bands separated by different widths, from which the drinker had to down his tipple exactly to the next ridge; the Luder family owned at least one of these. In such a pugilistic culture, insults were routine. One man might taunt another: “If you were born of a pious [that is, chaste] woman, come out and fight, but if you were born of a rogue, stay indoors.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. 10 Every other Wittenberg clergyman paid up without demur, but Luther was permitted to estimate the value of his properties himself, and the Elector paid the tax he owed. It is significant that in his letters from Coburg, Luther envisaged his son playing with Melanchthon’s and Jonas’s sons, or with the other children in the monastery—but not with those of the Wittenberg citizens. 11 His milieu consisted of those lodging with him, his acolytes and dependents, and the guests he invited to dinner. He called the members of the household—who would have numbered between forty and fifty people at any given time, including servants, lodgers, and visitors—his “Quirites,” a classical Latin term for Roman citizens.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Behind these two was the figure of Luther’s old antagonist Cochlaeus, now ensconced at Leipzig as Duke Georg’s chaplain. Taking the idea of mocking Luther’s marriage in drama to a whole new level, he wrote a vicious satirical play about the marriages of evangelical reformers, in which their wives reminisce about the wonderful times they enjoyed while their menfolk were away at the Imperial Diet. Luther appears as the stud whom all the other wives want to bed. Mrs. “Bishop of Altenburg,” Spalatin’s wife and a frightful snob, complains that no child will come of “kissing and cuddling,” and wants to borrow Luther for the night—in line with the reformer’s own advice that a woman who cannot conceive a child with her husband should lie with another, as Cochlaeus is not slow to point out.39 In the play’s final scene, Katharina tries to get Luther to go to bed with her, insisting that, as Paul says, she is the owner of his body and so he must be subject to her. Luther, impressed by her biblical knowledge, fears that she may have had recourse to another teacher—Cochlaeus insinuating that she had not been a virgin when she married Luther. —LUTHER’S remarkably uninhibited views about sexuality—and consequently marriage—were the result of his radical Augustinianism. If we can never do anything good, as all human acts are sinful, then sexual acts are no different or worse in kind than other types of sin. This gloomy anthropology paradoxically freed Luther to take a relaxed view of sexuality. Lust was part of human nature—it was how God had created mankind. Moreover, despite his decades of monastic observance, Luther believed that chastity could never be willed; indeed, we have no free will because we are always in bondage to the Devil. This was where Luther parted company with Karlstadt. 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.40