Fear

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)

  Their journey next took them through Thuringia to Luther’s beloved Eisenach. But that evening, Luther suddenly became very ill, with a high fever. It seemed so serious that his friends were concerned for his life. A doctor was called and did what doctors often did in those days when they had no real idea of what malady they were treating: he bled Luther and then prescribed a hearty dose of schnapps. Evidently, however, these things did the trick, and eventually Luther felt at least well enough to continue the journey. But he was convinced that all of these things were the work of the enemy of mankind and truth who was raging against God’s purposes, and these disturbances only confirmed to him that nothing must prevent him from getting to Worms. Myconius, who wrote a chronicle of Luther’s journey in 1541, said that Luther roared defiantly that even if the fires against him should reach from Wittenberg and Rome up to heaven itself, he would still answer the summons and appear at Worms, and once there he would not fail to “kick the Behemoth in the mouth between his big teeth.”2 He was well aware that he was a man on a mission. When they arrived at Frankfurt, Luther was feeling rather well again, and played the lute for his companions. Spalatin was by this time already in Worms, and having taken in the atmosphere there, he was gravely concerned for Luther. So he wrote to his friend advising him not to come, saying that condemnation and then death seemed the only possible outcome. But Luther was resolute. He had set his face toward Worms; replying to Spalatin from Frankfurt, he defiantly wrote, I am coming, my Spalatin, although Satan has done everything to hinder me with more than one disease. All the way from Eisenach to here I have been sick; I am still sick in a way which previously has been unknown to me. Of course I realize that the mandate of Charles has also been published to frighten me. But Christ lives and we shall enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the powers in the air. I enclose copies of the Emperor’s letters. It is not wise to write further letters until I first see in person what has to be done, so that we may not encourage Satan, whom I have made up my mind to frighten and despise. So prepare the lodging. Farewell.3 Spalatin later wrote, “He wants to come to Worms. Even if there be as many Devils there as tiles on the roof!”4

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  15 Journey of the Magi Who is there? I. Who is I? Thou. And that is the awakening—the Thou and the I. —Paul Valéry Women in my bloodline don’t pop out babies like pieces of toast. We’re narrow-hipped. Birthing tends to drag on—long days of false labor followed by a good twenty hours of exorcism-quality dismay. We’re less known for patience than drive, and being flat on our back is anathema. Lecia’s own son took so long to find daylight that his father—during a grisly period called transition that involves much howling—excused himself, sending Mother into the room as backup. Lecia had been cursing him and God and most of the nurses. Mother stood bedside a few minutes, then—as Lecia huffed for air—held up her handbag, saying, Look at this cute little purse I bought. At which, my sister screamed, Get her the fuck out of here! Mother, later outraged at Lecia’s overreaction, said, I was just trying to take her mind off it. In my case, delivery takes a full twenty-two hours—forty-four if you count the false labor that kept me manically rocking in a chair all night like some bulbous figure in a horror movie. At the hospital, they inject various mickeys into my IV, telling me I’ll be asleep in a minute, but that’s only one of many lies—like banning the word pain in favor of discomfort, conveniently reducing the hospital’s need to deal with it while treating the mother like a piece of furniture. In natural childbirth classes, with women sprawled around the room on wrestling mats, the men had seemed mystified by the process. One night in the car going home, Warren said, When are we supposed to learn the stuff that stops the pain? We already have, I said. That’s what the breathing exercises are. My God, he said, that won’t accomplish anything. Almost two days into my own marathon, I enter the half-drugged, hallucinogenic state that causes the room I lie in to bulge like a fishbowl around me. Staring at the calico curtains hung against the vomit-green walls to make the birthing room look homey, I keep echoing Oscar Wilde’s last words: Either this wallpaper goes, or I do. The big disappointment? The needle painfully jabbed into my spine to block pain quote-unquote didn’t take. This is the breezy parlance of the anesthesia dude. He stands in the door with clip-on sunglasses flipped up from his specs. He’s clearly on his way out. Whaddayou mean, I roar at him, whaddayou MEAN it didn’t take! I’m incapable of speaking without exclamation points and italics and any available typographical inflation. In between cogent sentences, the nurse with the tiny white head and gargantuan blue eyes—real crocodile-sized peepers—leans over me, saying, Breathe... Warren’s head appears alongside hers, his face bulging forward like a drop of water squeezed from a turkey baster. Breathe... I holler, DO IT AGAIN! The nurse is telling me it’s too late. You didn’t say it might not take, I say.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Before Lightning StrikesAfter taking his master’s degree, Luther was prepared to begin the study of law. Until this juncture in his life, he had been precisely fulfilling his father’s expectations, and now, by entering the study of law, he would take the final step toward becoming a lawyer. But perhaps something about having arrived at this point gave him pause. Perhaps the finality of it struck him. But whether the idea to enter a monastery had ever been in his head, as we guess it must have been, it must have been jarred loose to swim into his ken at this juncture. In any case, the mythic notion that his idea of entering the monastery was exclusively delivered by a lightning bolt from the sky near Stotternheim can hardly be the whole story. Like much else in the more fanciful and idealized versions of his life, it is far more folk legend than fact. That one day he was fear stricken and blurted a vow, and by some powerful sense of obligation decided to see it through, can hardly be the whole truth. Luther had been planning on studying the law and becoming a lawyer and had now at last stepped through this final door. He had purchased his Corpus Juris—the expensive book every law student must have to study—and was now seemingly incorrigibly on his way. But in addition to Luther’s apprehending the finality of his life’s course at this time, we may imagine that other things affected him now too. It is easy for the modern mind to forget that at all times in history before our own the imminence of sudden death loomed heavily, especially for anyone thoughtful or sensitive, and Luther was both. Already at Erfurt the Anfechtungen* that would famously affect him as a monk began to rear its hopeless head, causing him to wonder disturbingly about his own eternal fate and whether, were he to die suddenly, he would be welcomed into the loving arms of God or, more likely, be condemned to fall everlastingly into the taloned clutches of grotesque devils.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  18 Ivy Beleaguered Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. Thursday Me. —Witold Gombrowicz, Diary In my thirty-fourth year to heaven, I find myself at the copy machine of an exalted, ivy-embroidered university, pressing down on the spine of a memoir by Vladimir Nabokov. The green light under my hands slides over the book’s face, and the spillage from the edges scalds through my shut eyelids. It’s seven-thirty a.m., and I can feel the corpse tint of my face: Frankenstein-monster green. The machine goes whap...whap at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like thunk. The whaps stab me. The thunks make my eyes bulge in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll’s. It’s my first year teaching six classes, which has freed me from the deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecom consulting I could spend eighty hours a week at. Not a new-mom job by any stretch, that work. The sole vestige of the career? I’m on retainer freelancing for a business mag whose editor has left two strongly worded messages on our machine. I’m late with my article on the new Russian perestroika. Whap...thunk. The image of my blond three years’ son this morning, sobbing and holding out his arms to me while Warren strapped him into the child seat, is a hot stove I can’t stop touching. Warren drops him off at daycare now for reasons that are complex. Sure, I need to get in early to copy course materials illicitly—an infraction the secretary, who comes in at nine—warned adjunct teachers about back in the August training session, copies being too costly for the sniveling, no-hope-of-tenure human I am. Also, on the snowy road here some mornings, I stop to puke out the car door, releasing into a snow bank an acidic coffee bile that stays on my teeth despite brushing vigorously enough to bloody my gums, leaving a bile taste no mint can mask. At the daycare center, mommy-vomiting is frowned on. But even if I didn’t want to vomit before I got to the daycare center—which resembles a modest colonial parson’s house like in The Scarlet Letter—the perky bustle of the place would incline me in a vomitous direction. The last time I did the morning dropoff was right after Christmas break. The director had waved me into her office, walls tacked with the bespattered finger paintings of Harvard’s budding geniuses. I’d sat on a stiff chair while she told me Dev was so anxious he couldn’t fall asleep at naptime. Is everything okay at home? she asked. She had front teeth like fence pickets, and the reflection on her octagonal wire-rims was my puffy face. Of course everything was great. I was great and my husband was great. Happiness was the currency we paid to get our kid accepted here.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Just as Saint Martin’s stand at Worms (Borbetomagus) in the fourth century may be viewed as an odd augury of Luther’s life a thousand years in the future, so Hilten’s apocalyptic statements can be similarly prophetic and unsettling. Hilten predicted in his apocalyptic writings that a man would arise in the year 1516 who would fight to reform the church—and who would succeed—and who would end the centuries-long reign of the monks. We do not know whether Luther was aware of Hilten’s writings at this time, but we do know that in the years ahead Luther would indeed identify himself as that figure Hilten had prophesied. This would certainly have strengthened him in his battle, bolstering the faith and courage that would become his greatest weapons in that battle. Hilten also prophesied that within a hundred years the Muslims would have overtaken Christendom, so for Luther in the decades ahead—given Hilten’s accuracy in predicting Luther’s own ascent and successes, if indeed he had done this—it must have been impossible not to feel that Hilten was right about the rest of it, that they were indeed all living in the Last Days of the world, and that the Antichrist was indeed abroad spreading destruction and in his final throes would wreak such unimaginable havoc that “even the elect” might be deceived. Hilten died as a prisoner in the monastery in 1500, at the age of seventy-five, most likely of starvation, which might or might not have been self-imposed. But in his story we may again see that the idea of a holy man standing against the church was not at all a foreign one. We must not tolerate a simplistic view of church history, as though there had been no dissent until the Great Day of Martin Luther. Many others had done as much to bring the church back to its true and only roots and had failed. That the church was lacking in many ways and that many monks and priests and other ecclesiastics were greedy, hypocritical, and odious were hardly new ideas. And apart from what had been done about it or hadn’t been done about it, the laypeople saw it and expressed their thoughts on the subject, both privately and not so privately. But in all of these things, they had lacked a champion who would fight and win.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s odd and unexpected request for more time must have an answer, so von der Ecken conferred with the diet and the emperor. Then he returned to speak. But before he gave the court’s yea or nay, he must first express his prickly dismay and astonishment that a theological professor should be unable to quickly give the simple answer for which he had come to this diet. Such things were hardly to be endured. Then he said, And therefore [you] do not deserve to be granted a longer time for consideration, yet, out of innate clemency, his imperial majesty grants one day for your deliberation so that you may furnish an answer openly tomorrow at this hour—on this condition: that you do not present your opinion in writing, but declare it by word of mouth.13 It seems the diet feared that Luther—whose ensorcelling powers of persuasion via the printed page had brought them to this difficult pass—might have asked for time so that he could repair to his room to summon from his pen yet another mesmerizing manifesto that would doubtless be printed over and over and read far and wide and cause much further damage to the Holy Church. Was that the Saxon fox’s plan? And even before that, the manifesto would drag them all into an open disputation with this clever fellow, which is precisely what they had worked so hard to avoid in structuring things as they had done. If he could bamboozle them into responding to a lengthy piece of writing, their whole reason for being here would have been for naught, and Aleander’s fears that this whole tawdry German affair was giving Luther yet another platform—and the best platform yet—to spread his pernicious ideas would be shown to be disturbingly well-founded. So they sent Luther from the chamber. In his communiqué to papal headquarters, Aleander—who had criticized Luther’s cheerful countenance upon his entry into the chamber—now smirked: “When [Luther] left he no longer seemed so cheerful.”14 Back at his quarters, many nobles visited Luther to encourage him not to fear for his life, that all would be well. But Luther was not observed to waver from his stance at all. Afterward, he found time to write a letter, in which he declared, “With Christ’s help, however, I shall not in all eternity recant the least particle!”15 Later that evening, Luther met with Spalatin to talk about what he should say the next day. It is probable that Amsdorf was there that evening, as well as Justus Jonas and Schurff. What they discussed, we cannot know. And though it well might go without saying, we know that in the time he had to do so, Luther prayed with his customary ardor.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  My head cants like a blue tick hound’s. Maybe I owe myself a drink. I’ve been dug in on Warren’s one-or-two-beer policy, part of re-forming myself to fit him. As for doing with so little alcohol, so safely squirreled away do I feel in our book-lined rooms, undergoing my willed overhaul, that I could almost subsist on his breath alone. In my old life, I never kept liquor in my apartment, for—while I could go without for weeks—I never knew when I’d wind up draining anything around. And around the punk bars where I hung out in grad school, if I got lured into the alley and offered cocaine, I could snuffle up the stuff, but I lacked both the money and the recklessness to be a bona fide cokehead. Only once did I incur a debt, and having to sell a TV to pay it back curbed future coke binges. At a few all night parties, I sat among half-strangers in a screaming sweat on a sagging couch—jaw clenched, eyelids stapled to my forehead— while some leering dealer suggested I go back to his place. A small point of pride: I never said yes. The scene scared me. I scared me. I wouldn’t call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control. So long as I didn’t leave my apartment, I didn’t drink. In Cambridge, that person no longer exists. With an invisible eraser, I’m internally rubbing hard at the core of her, and Warren’s steady, unwavering gaze is lasering away her external edges. Soon she’ll be mist. I stand at the bar, its tiered bottles like a shiny choir about to burst into song. With only five or six dollars in tips, how much trouble can I get in? Warren will pick me up soon, and the bar’s on the cusp of closing early. At one end, a man in evening clothes with long gray hair swept back sits behind a sherry glass. On the stool next to him, a tipped violin case. Across from him is the despicable waiter, cradling a brandy snifter. His normally pony-tailed

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  It took weeks to finally convince the leaders they were safe, but in one meeting North American President Mark Fields took a chance and admitted a new vehicle launch under his purview would be delayed. Other executives looked on nervously. Mulally said, “I could see it in people’s eyes that they thought doors would open up behind Mark and two large human beings would remove him. ‘Bye-bye Mark.’” Instead, Mulally began a round of applause and said, “Mark, thank you so much. That is great visibility.” Then he asked the group, “Is there anything we can do to help Mark out?” Within seconds, ideas were flying around the room. Said Mulally, the moment passed in the blink of an eye but changed everything. As he frequently told his leaders, “You have a problem; you are not the problem.” Method 4: Regularly Check In on ProgressWhile micromanaging is definitely to be avoided, we advise managers that they must keep good track of the progress their team members are making, and this is especially important for perfectionists. Leaders can help them understand that their work is going just fine and uncover procrastination or wrong turns, if that’s the case. A great example of creating a system for checking on progress is that of managers at SpaceX, who found a way to make faster decisions for their biggest client—NASA. Until recently, NASA sent a fax (seriously) whenever they had a query, and once a week SpaceX brought together a fifty-person team to address each question before sending responses back. Using collaborative technology, SpaceX has now given NASA direct visibility into each project so they can identify the SpaceX engineers who are working on which components. NASA can directly talk with those engineers and make decisions in real time. This collaboration has allowed SpaceX to cut its average wait time for defining product requirements by 50 percent and eliminate the costly weekly four-hour status meeting. The key in making check-ins less anxiety-inducing is to put more control of these conversations in the hands of employees. Ambiguity creates anxiety, so instead of subjective measures, use individual and team roadmaps to evaluate how people are coming on hitting their goals. Also, make check-ins regular. When they become an expected part of work life, versus surprise inspections, anxiety about reporting in is reduced substantially. Finally, when managers go out of their way to offer up support with problems or missed deadlines during check-ins—and they come from a place of understanding—it can help create a relationship where people know they will be held accountable, but in positive ways.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Place your palms against your inner thighs, so that the outside edges of your thumbs are pressing against your labia, possibly even squeezing them together. Rock your hips against the pressure of your hands. Some people prefer indirect stimulation over direct stimulation. You may notice as you try these techniques that the muscles in your arms, legs, butt, and/or abdomen get tense. That’s a normal part of the body arousal process. You might even find yourself feeling like you don’t want to stop doing a particular kind of stimulation. I humbly suggest you go with your gut; don’t stop. Keep going for as long as it feels good, just keep paying attention to the pleasurable sensations without trying to change them or even understand them. Try direct stimulation. For most people this is pleasurable only when arousal has already started up, so once you’re feeling pretty pleasurable and warm, try any of these: With the flat of one or two or three fingertips, lightly touch the head of the clitoris with a steady back-and-forth motion. Try slow, fast, or anything in between that feels good, and with light, brushing touch, light pressure, deep pressure… try different combinations of speeds and pressures. With as many fingertips as feels comfortable, rub circles directly over your clitoris—fast or slow, light touch or deep pressure, or anything in between. Again with varying numbers of fingers, and with different pressures and speeds, tug upward on the clitoris, from the clitoral hood. With whatever variation on fingers, speed, and pressure you want to try, flick upward from just under the head of the clitoris. As your arousal level changes, notice and observe what happens to your body. Don’t try to make it change. If you notice that your brain starts whirring away at anxieties or fears, notice that, too, know that you can worry about all that some other time, release those thoughts, and return your attention to the sensations inside your body. Keep breathing. As you experience sexual pleasure, your muscles will tense, and often people find themselves holding their breath or breathing more shallowly. Periodically check in with your breathing, relax your abdominal muscles, and allow yourself to breathe. Don’t try to make anything happen, just allow yourself to notice what it feels like and let your body do what it wants. If you feel worried that you’re losing control of your body, relax into that fear, reassure yourself that you’re safe, know that you can stop anytime you choose. And of course, if it gets to be too much, feel free to stop anytime you like. The more you keep going, the more the pleasure and tension will spread through your body, and it will cross some intense threshold, and explode… eventually.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive. But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last. Neither Camilla nor Henry had a history of trauma themselves, but Henry—the nice guy, the gentleman—had a previous girlfriend who was sexually assaulted while they were dating. We don’t talk about trauma survivorship enough, and we talk even less about cosurvivorship, the emotional work of supporting a survivor. Relatively few men—the research indicates only about 5 percent—perpetrate the overwhelming majority of assaults,12 but a lot of men have partners who have survived an assault. And yet we do almost nothing to teach men how to support survivors as intimate partners, or how to take care of themselves as cosurvivors. Henry was barely aware of how his previous partner’s trauma affected his approach to sex until he and Camilla developed their plan of him “chasing” her. It felt awkward for him because he loved her enthusiastic desire more than anything else, but—remember the ticking pilot light—Camilla needed a lot of warming up before she could feel that enthusiastic desire. How could he know she was into it? Is it really desire and consent if she “wants to want” sex, rather than plain old wanting sex? Camilla helped him out by talking about the brakes and accelerator: “I don’t have sensitive brakes, I have a stubborn accelerator. I’m a fully loaded moving van, accelerating from a dead stop at the bottom of a hill. But moving forward slowly isn’t the same as wanting to stop, right? All I need is something really awesome waiting for me at the top of the hill. And you already know I’ll tell you when something feels good. Surely you trust me to tell you if something hits the brakes.” “Sure,” he said. “Well, then.” And there was one of those silences—you know, where someone’s brain is turning over an idea like a puzzle piece, figuring out where it fits in the overall picture. “Moving forward slowly isn’t the same as wanting to stop,” he repeated. “You have a slow hot-water heater, a ticking pilot light.” “That’s right.” “And you’ll tell me if you want to stop.” “Darn skippy.” Henry the gentleman, Henry the geek, nodded slowly. “I think I got it.” (He gets it slightly wrong in chapter 6, but I promise there’s a happy ending.)

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  1.________________________________________2.________________________________________3.________________________________________4.________________________________________5.________________________________________Now select the two or three that feel like the right combination of impact, ease, and immediacy, and list all the things that would have to happen in order for this change to occur. Be as CONCRETE AND SPECIFIC as you can. These should be ACTIONS rather than abstractions or ideas or attitudes. Ask yourself, “If we decide to create this change, what goes on our to-do list?” Change 1 Change 2 Change 3 Finally, select just one change that you will actually implement. Choose a start date together that feels like good timing. Ideally this will be within the next month. Make your plan. AND DO IT! part 2sex in contextfouremotional contextSEX IN A MONKEY BRAINWomen ask me questions, and then they tell me their stories. I have a whole mental library full of them—hilarious stories of sex adventures gone awry, sad stories of relationships that couldn’t be healed, awe-inspiring stories of survival and transcendence. Every single one is a story of discovery. Merritt’s story is about survival. “Why should I trust my body?” she said. “My whole adult life, my body has been unreliable and falling apart. When I get stressed, everything just shuts down—I get sick, I get injured, none of my systems work. And that includes sex.” This made some sense, given her sensitive brakes, but it seemed to me there was more going on. “It sounds like your body is opting for the ‘freeze’ stress response, where it just shuts down instead of trying to escape or fight,” I said. “It’s what happens when a person has either long-term, high-intensity stress, or is in the process of healing after trauma. Does either of those sound like you?” “Both,” Carol and Merritt said together. “You think stress explains why I have a hard time trusting my body?” Merritt asked me. I definitely do. This chapter is about stress and love and how they affect sexual pleasure. Trust your body. Listen to it—not to the specific circumstances of the moment but to the deep, primal messages of your evolutionary heritage: I am at risk/I am safe. I am broken/I am whole. I am lost/I am home. If you’re already skilled at listening to these messages in your body, feel free to skip this chapter. But if, like most of us, you could use help translating the signals your body is sending, you’ll find this chapter informative. Because it’s not just the sexual aspects of a context that influence whether you get turned on. It’s all the other emotional aspects, including your preexisting emotional state. And of all the emotional systems managed by your emotional One Ring, the two that may have the most immediate impact on sexual pleasure are stress and love. Stress is the physiological and neurological process that helps you deal with threats. Love is the physiological and neurological process that draws you to your tribe.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Ashley, a twenty-six-year-old who works in financial services, told us her anxiety is tied to job stability. “My generation’s experience has been affected by what’s happened over the past twenty years: 9/11, people got laid off; the crash of 2008, same thing. Now it’s AI and robots that are making our jobs unnecessary.” In his book Kids These Days , journalist Malcolm Harris argues millennials are putting in more hours and producing their work more efficiently for corporations but are receiving less in return. Young people, he says, “take on the costs of training ourselves (including student debt), we take on the costs of managing ourselves as freelancers or contract workers, because that’s what capital is looking for. We’re not individuals, not as far as bosses are concerned. The vast majority of us are (replaceable) workers.” While that might sound harsh or a touch Marxist to some leaders, we’ve found Harris’s views are not that extreme in his generation. Under promise of anonymity, we interviewed dozens of millennials and Gen Zers for this book—most of whom are college-educated, working professionals—and it was eye-opening. The majority expressed views that so far capitalism has let them down: They get less pay, fewer benefits, less support, and less security than prior generations. In fact, the fear of being laid off is a big reason workers agree to 24/7 availability, checking their phones at three in the morning or on vacation. They are driven by fear, and fear is indistinguishable from a threat in certain parts of our brains, especially the limbic system. When this part of the brain determines that a threat is present, an alert response is activated. Rather than helping us focus on how to improve a situation, an alert response too often leads to preoccupation with what might go wrong and indecision about what course to take, and that can lead to chronic stress. While some leaders believe economic, job, or competitive uncertainty and resulting stress will get their people fired up for a challenge, that’s simply not the case for a large portion of the workforce. Uncertainty triggers diverse physical responses in people, with often detrimental consequences on performance. Consider how it affected two professional basketball players. Sam Cassell was a terrific free-throw shooter on any given day, averaging 86.1 percent throughout his NBA career. Yet in clutch situations, a) overtime or b) a game with less than five minutes to play and neither team ahead by more than five points, Cassell shot a remarkable 95.5 percent! When things were uncertain, Cassell had ice in his veins. He, however, is an exception, not the rule.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So Luther had bested Cajetan and somehow could not resist a witty nationalistic dig for good measure. But he was more interested in showing how the papal bull itself did not comport with Scripture. And yet in all of this, Luther’s greatest fears were realized. He saw that the cardinal cared not a fig for the Holy Scriptures, and quite seriously maintained that church decrees superseded them. The theological foolishness of this, and the disturbing evidence of it, were horrifying to Luther. He saw now what he had deep down feared but had desperately hoped could not be true: that the greatest minds of the church were genuinely unaware of having become unmoored from the rock of the Scriptures and were even indifferent to this. They were blithely floating down the river toward a great cataract and didn’t seem to notice that they had ever moved. Luther sincerely hoped that somehow he might waken them from their reveries and get them to see their danger so they might paddle to shore before it was too late. The second “problem” that Cajetan had raised concerning Luther’s claims was the idea that it was one’s faith that produced God’s forgiveness. Church teaching clearly implied that it was not the person’s faith but the priest’s act that followed the person’s declaration of faith. The moment a priest granted absolution, the person asking forgiveness was forgiven. The church held the power of God to forgive, and this forgiveness could not exist outside the church exercising that power. It must be mediated through the church and could not happen without the church and the church’s priest. It was the church, after all, that had been given the keys. But Luther said that this was not possible, because even if the priest were granting absolution, the person must in his heart have faith, else the priest’s absolution was an empty religious act. It was the faith that mattered more than the priest’s actions. Luther backed up his position with several scriptural references, the most notable being the one with which he has come to be most closely associated, Romans 1:17, which states, “For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”6 It did not say or imply that the church must somehow be involved in this, nor did the other scriptural examples imply that. On the contrary. Luther was implying that the priest was really only ratifying what had already taken place between the believer and God by faith. As these conversations proceeded, Cajetan became increasingly and impossibly furious. Eventually, it only remained for smoke to blast from his ears. Lest this happen, he contained his anger no longer and erupted, demanding that this presumptuous German monk leave his presence immediately, adding, “And do not return to me again unless you want to recant!”7

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But at the very moment when Martin would celebrate Mass for the first time, the twenty-three-year-old novice balked. All of these witnesses from his earlier life looking on with pride might have underscored what was for this young monk a giddy realization: that he was about to do the very thing that would separate him from all mankind forever, that he was about to handle the body and blood of the incarnate God, that he was about to address the Holy One in whose presence he should tremble or die. He knew that to do what he was doing now in a state of unconfessed sin was tantamount to stepping off a cliff. Priests had a genuinely godlike role in the medieval church. They were separated from every other human being on earth in that they had the right to perform the most sacred of all acts on the planet. Luther was well aware of this and felt unworthy of this honor. Luther would have been familiar with the annual practice described in the Old Testament, in which on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) the high priest entered the so-called holy of holies, the heavily curtained-off sacred center of the temple. That holiest of all things in this world, the magnificently carved ark of the covenant, containing the very tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai, was there, and it was firmly believed that God’s presence was there, too. The high priest would enter wearing a special garment with bells attached, and the idea was that while the bells could be heard as he moved about, he was known still to be alive. Some traditions held that a rope was tied around his ankle so that if, in the presence of the living God, he were struck dead, he might be pulled out. To look upon the living God, to stand in his presence, was something that was so awesome as to be terrifying. And this is what Luther now felt. So here, at the very threshold of entering into that presence via the sacramental offering, he flinched. “We offer unto thee,” he said, “the living, the true, the eternal God.” Years later, he said, At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, “With what tongue shall I address such Majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say ‘I want this, I ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal, and the true God.”7

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  LUTHER KNEW THAT if he was forced to go to Rome, he would face death. This was why he had appealed to Spalatin to see whether Frederick could be persuaded to push for having Luther’s trial held in Germany. Once more we see how very clearly and almost exclusively political the papacy then was. Whereas today the pope is a religious figure and only the titular head of the Vatican state, the pope was at the time far more a prince—and at this time a prince in the worldly Florentine Medici mold—than anything else, so that his life’s focus and that of those around him consisted principally of manipulating worldly power. The elegant evil of the Medici popes sometimes makes Machiavelli himself come across like a gap-toothed rube. Frederick was already displeased with the way Rome was spending German money. The indulgence sellers were yet another way that German money was leaving Germany. So Rome was partly troubled by Luther’s spicy attacks on indulgences because they fed into the larger narrative that already existed in the minds of many Germans regarding the church. Of course another way that Rome put a financial burden on Germans—and on Frederick—was via taxes. An imperial diet had already been scheduled that fall at Augsburg, for example, and at the top of the agenda was a so-called Turkish tax, which was supposed to help pay for the considerable military efforts against the Muslim armies, who had been expanding ever westward for many decades. Emperor Maximilian was hoping this would be approved, but it was mainly the pope who was pushing for it, and he planned to send one of his legates—the highly esteemed cardinal Cajetan—to the diet. Another ingredient in this unpleasant stew was the election of the next emperor. Maximilian I was at this time in his late fifties, but he was in ill health and constant pain due to a particularly unpleasant fall from his horse. He additionally seemed to possess a strong morbid streak, as evidenced by the fact that he had for the previous four years traveled everywhere with his own coffin. Maximilian was also obsessed with ensuring that when he died, he would be succeeded by his grandson Charles I of Spain. His own son Philip the Handsome, who was Charles’s father, had died in 1506. Maximilian wanted at all costs to prevent Francis I of France from becoming the next emperor, and he enlisted the help of the immeasurably wealthy Fugger family to bribe the seven electors in this direction. Frederick the Wise was also on the list of those who might well be the next emperor. But for his own reasons, Pope Leo X did not want Charles I to be the next emperor, so he felt obliged to remain on Frederick’s good side.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  When Albrecht of Mainz saw these threatening posters, he turned the color of milk. Already at dawn he flew to Charles’s residence to sound the warning. But the young emperor only laughed in his face. He hardly thought a few posters warranted changing the course they had settled on. But Albrecht knew more of what these German peasants might do than this callow Spanish stripling, and he would not relent, so he returned with his brother, Joachim of Brandenburg, and the two of them convinced the other estates, all of whom now petitioned the emperor. They asked him to give them time to persuade Luther to recant. Perhaps a deal could be struck to forestall the disaster that might lie ahead. The emperor wanted nothing to do with any of it himself, but he would give them three days to do what they could. What follows has rarely been mentioned in books about Luther, and it is a strange omission, because in these three days with the representatives of the German estates, Luther finally did get something far closer to the hearing he had always longed for. The desperation of the German nobles to avoid a bloody social uprising had brought them to this place where they hoped to reason and forge some kind of compromise with the wild monk from Wittenberg. Even if they failed, at least they would have tried, and the peasants would have seen that they took their concerns to heart and had attempted to give Luther the fair hearing he had asked for. So they praised the emperor for his stand for the faith, but now they would take the three days he had given them to see what they might accomplish. What followed in the next three days is an extraordinary last-ditch effort to avoid all that lay ahead. Because it did not provide anything as powerfully symbolic as Luther’s stand before the emperor a few days earlier, it is usually overlooked. Nor did Luther or anyone else say anything as memorable as his last words at the diet. Nonetheless, it is significant because it shows how very differently things might have gone and how close this final attempt came to diverting the river of history into another channel. The group of ten who would meet with Luther was a variegated one and included the archbishop of Trier, Richard von Greiffenklau zu Vollraths, as well as Albrecht’s brother, Joachim of Brandenburg, and Duke George the Bearded, who even in this group was Luther’s staunchest opponent. More on Luther’s side were the Humanists Dr. Conrad Peutinger of Augsburg, whom we have already met, and Chancellor Jerome Vehus. On April 22, Luther was summoned to appear at the lodgings of the archbishop of Trier at six in the morning, two days hence.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  First Blood of the ReformationDuring the seventeen years that Johannes von Staupitz was vicar-general of the Augustinian order, many Augustinian monks were drawn to Wittenberg to study, because this was Staupitz’s university. Of course, if not for Staupitz, Luther himself would never have been there. The time of Staupitz’s vicariate (1503–20) coincided with all of Luther’s tenure there, and as a result many of the Augustinians who came to Wittenberg became acquainted with Luther and his theology. One of the monasteries with which Staupitz had had a special connection was the one in Antwerp in the Netherlands. The monks there had embraced Luther’s teachings very early and as a result came under intense persecution when they returned to their homeland. This was because at that time the Netherlands was under the regency of Queen Margaret of Austria, who was an aunt to Emperor Charles. After her nephew in 1521 had issued the Edict of Worms, she—with the help of Jerome Aleander—brutally attempted to stamp out the spread of Luther’s rogue doctrines. Thus it happened that the first three men martyred for their Reformation faith were burned at the stake in her territories. Already in 1519, the Antwerp Augustinians were preaching against indulgences, and as a result of this and other good things they began to attract the attention of some enemies, as well as some friends, including Dürer and Erasmus. Erasmus wrote Luther a friendly letter, saying, “In Antwerp there is a prior in the [Augustinian] cloister, a genuine Christian with nothing false about him, who glows with love for you; a former student of yours, as he boasts. He is virtually the only one who preaches Christ. Nearly all the others simply prattle and think of profit.”2 Erasmus was referring to Jacob Propst, who had studied in Wittenberg in 1505–9 and returned there in 1520 to get his theological degree. Albrecht Dürer lived in Antwerp during this time and was so taken with Propst that he painted his portrait, and when Propst left Antwerp for Wittenberg, Dürer gave it to him as a gift. But no sooner had Propst returned from his studies in Wittenberg than he was arrested and imprisoned at Brussels. Under cruel imprisonment and severe interrogation, he eventually recanted publicly, after which he was sent to the Augustinian monastery in Ypres. But once there, Propst publicly repudiated his recantation and continued preaching in the Lutheran manner, after which he was arrested a second time. Astonishingly, he managed to escape and made his way to freedom, arriving again in Wittenberg.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther continued, “I would have preferred death at the hands of the tyrants, especially those of the furious Duke George of Saxony, but I must not disregard the counsel of good men; [I must await God’s] appointed time.”9 He had a sense of the high danger of what he had done, and he had settled in his mind before God that he would do what he must and suffer such consequences as the Lord allowed. He still had the conviction that while he had enjoyed the laurels and adulation of his Palm Sunday entrance at Worms, a Good Friday lay ahead. But he knew that to recklessly push toward that would be wrong. He must play the role God had appointed until such time as God himself clearly opened the door to Luther’s martyrdom. And so now he submitted himself to the still-hidden plans arranged by his prince, Frederick the Wise. He then wrote to Cranach, explaining his version of the strange events at Worms: I thought His Imperial Majesty would have assembled one or fifty scholars and overcome this monk in a straightforward manner. But nothing else was done there than this: Are these your books? Yes. Do you want to renounce them or not? No. Then go away! O we blind Germans, how childishly we act and allow the Romanists to mock and fool us in such a pitiful way! Luther then made explicit his sense that he was walking the path toward his own Calvary. For a little while the Jews have to chant: “Crucify him!” But Easter Sunday will also come for us, and then we will chant “Alleluia.” For a little while one has to be silent and suffer. For a little while you will not see me, and again in a little while you will see me—so said Christ. I hope it will now be the same way [with me]. But God’s will, the very best possible, be done in this—as in heaven, so also on earth. Amen.10 We can only imagine the host of things in Luther’s mind at this juncture. He was not so spiritually minded that he was no earthly good, so he not only thought about the possibility of his own martyrdom but recognized that we must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,* just as Jesus commanded. So he was respectful of the governing authorities, and now thought it appropriate that he write to the emperor, who he knew was furious with him and had been for some time.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This ideal prevailed, despite its inherent paradox. Clement’s theology left crucial questions unanswered. How could a mere man have been the Logos or divine reason? What exactly did it mean to say that Jesus had been divine? Was the Logos the same as the “Son of God,” and what did this Jewish title mean in the Hellenic world? How could an impassible God have suffered in Jesus? How could Christians believe that he had been a divine being and yet, at the same time, insist that there was only one God? Christians were becoming increasingly aware of these problems during the third century. In the early years of the century in Rome, one Sabellius, a rather shadowy figure, had suggested that the biblical terms “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit” could be compared to the masks ( personae ) worn by actors to assume a dramatic role and to make their voices audible to the audience. The One God had thus donned different personae when dealing with the world. Sabellius attracted some disciples, but most Christians were distressed by his theory: it suggested that the impassible God had in some sense suffered when playing the role of the Son, an idea that they found quite unacceptable. Yet when Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 272, had suggested that Jesus had simply been a man, in whom the Word and Wisdom of God had dwelt as in a temple, this was considered equally unorthodox. Paul’s theology was condemned at a synod at Antioch in 264, though he managed to hold on to his see with the support of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. It was clearly going to be very difficult to find a way of accommodating the Christian conviction that Jesus had been divine with the equally strong belief that God was One. When Clement had left Alexandria in 202 to become a priest in the service of the Bishop of Jerusalem, his place at the catechetical school was taken by his brilliant young pupil Origen, who was about twenty years old at the time. As a youth Origen had been passionately convinced that martyrdom was the way to heaven. His father, Leonides, had died in the arena four years earlier, and Origen had tried to join him. His mother, however, saved him by hiding his clothes. Origen had started by believing that the Christian life meant turning against the world, but he later abjured this position and developed a form of Christian Platonism. Instead of seeing an impassible gulf between God and the world, which could only be bridged by the radical dislocation of martyrdom, Origen developed a theology that stressed the continuity of God with the world.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So Rome made the fatal decision to put all of its chips on this political line. The past and the future be damned. The present now throbbed for attention. So the church needed Luther to come to Rome so that it could get him to recant—or face the fiery consequences. To this end, it put as much pressure as possible on Frederick to distance himself from Luther and turn the troublesome renegade over to Rome. But just what could Rome do to convince Frederick? Meanwhile, Luther saw this was happening, but to his inestimable credit he put Frederick above himself. He resolved that to get Frederick out of the line of fire, he would leave Wittenberg and Saxony. He knew he would be putting himself in tremendous danger, but out of respect for his sovereign, and with full faith in the God whose truth he desperately meant to uphold, he would go. It is another example of Luther’s faith that despite having no idea what lay ahead for him, he would do the noble thing and trust in God. In a letter to Spalatin on November 25, he wrote, I daily expect the condemnation from the city of Rome; therefore I am setting things in order and arranging everything so that if it comes I am prepared and girded to go, as Abraham, not knowing where, yet most sure of my way, because God is everywhere. But I will of course leave a farewell letter; see to it that you have the courage to read the letter of a man who is condemned and excommunicated. Farewell for now, and pray for me.8 Staupitz was by this time in Salzburg, Austria, and in an extraordinary letter he invited the reprobate Luther to take refuge with him there: The world hates the truth. By such hate Christ was crucified, and what there is in store for you today if not the cross I do not know. You have few friends, and would that they were not hidden for fear of the adversary. Leave Wittenberg and come to me that we may live and die together. The prince is in accord. Deserted, let us follow the deserted Christ.9