Guilt

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  An old sociological or Darwinian theory holds that when we’re looking to gin out babies, we’re biologically propelled toward the partner who’ll color in dull spots in our own genetic code. So when opposites attract, they’re biologically combining to form the perfect offspring. Looking back, I can see how Warren’s very essence looked like a corrective to who I was and didn’t want to be, which is unfair to him. Nor does that theory account for the love we had and the long, pure, edifying conversation we shared. Still, it must be said that someone who doesn’t like herself very much (i.e., me: age twenty-five), someone who views a man as an antidote to her very being, will find—over time—that antidote becomes an irritant. I don’t want to rehash the times we wooed each other again and the times we withdrew, or the million fights we had. The truth is, as noted, we’re inclined to gloss over our failures. One spring morning my students come to help Warren lug his parents’ cherry antiques with all their heft and curlicued fittings from our small house. We unhitch our son’s bunk bed into halves for his dual households, since we’ll share custody. There’s a schedule magnetically stuck to the fridge with a red mom’s house and a blue dad’s house and an iconic Dev who slides from one to the other. At the kindergarten graduation, while every other kid heartily sings and claps and stomps, Dev rocks from side to side, staring from one to the other of us and barely moving his lips. Stabs of guilt like flaming arrows fire into me at his blue-eyed puzzlement. We’re poor, all of us. You can’t turn one home into two the same size. Since my salary comes closer to making the mortgage than Warren’s, he takes a town house in a ghetto complex near a graveyard. With the Whitbread furniture gone, Dev can skateboard in the living room. Even after I rent out my attic to a grad student—a motorcycle-driving lesbyterian who sets my Republican neighbors’ tongues wagging—I can’t make ends meet. At first Warren and I plan to sell the house to give back Mr. Whitbread’s small down payment, till Warren figures out my engagement ring could buy the whole place outright, so I fork that over instead. That’s the kind of stuff we bicker about. Maybe he feels, as I do, that he’s given too much up—in furniture and car (on my part), house (on his part), or time with our son (on both parts). But when two different lawyers urge us separately to chase payouts we both know don’t exist, we fire them. With a mediator, we hammer out a deal neither of us can imagine surviving on, then we sign it.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When she speaks, I clutch the black receiver, for her voice conjures clipped lawns under maple trees, the easeful life of Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy—men in linen suits and women in billowy pastels, pitchers of lemonade on silver trays. I wasn’t entitled to any of that, of course, but the whiff of it lent me glancing courage. She says, Everybody had help. If one of them wouldn’t sleep, I’d let the nurse take the baby home till he got on a good schedule. Or, she says thoughtfully, I’d give them a little phenobarbital. Shortly before Mother takes off, she comes creaking up the stairs early one night with two bottles of beer and a frosted mug. They do not yet glow for I’ve been off the sauce for a year and am so besotted with Dev that drinking’s been forgotten. She pours the golden mixture down the side of the tilted glass, saying, This’ll help your milk let down. I say, I thought you were anti-booze. Even my religious cousin Delores, she says, drank beer when she was nursing. She actually had to pinch her nose to get it down. The fizzy sip tastes of roasted grain, tidy fields waving in wind. By the second or third sip, I remember the slosh of lake water against a boat Daddy had rented, how I sipped from a metal can of Lone Star while he picked through lures alongside me. Thus starts—for healing purposes, of course—my daily beer or two. Within weeks, I stop breastfeeding, partly because I know three or four or five beers could affect Dev’s milk supply. Warren’s at school, so he must miss these escalating beer guzzles. And that’s how—in some cosmic accounting of our family’s rampant dipsomania—Mother’s recovery dovetailed with the start of my own years’ long binge, for from that day forward, I drank in increasing amounts, as if our gene pool owed the universe at least one worthless drunk at a time.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programs about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown. Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years.

• From A History of God (1993)

  One of Akbar’s most vigorous opponents during his lifetime had been the outstanding scholar Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), who was also a Sufi and, like Akbar, was venerated as the Perfect Man by his own disciples. Sirhindi stood out against the mystical tradition of Ibn al-Arabi, whose disciples had come to see God as the only reality. As we have seen, Mulla Sadra had asserted this perception of the Oneness of Existence (wahdat al-wujud). It was a mystical restatement of the Shahadah: there was no reality but al-Lah. Like mystics in other religions, the Sufis had experienced a unity and felt one with the whole of existence. Sirhindi, however, dismissed this perception as purely subjective. While the mystic was concentrating on God alone, everything else tended to fade from his consciousness, but this did not correspond to an objective reality. Indeed, to speak of any unity or identity between God and the world was an awful misconception. In fact, there was no possibility of a direct experience of God, who was entirely beyond the reach of mankind: “He is the Holy One, beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond, again beyond the Beyond.”4 There could be no relation between God and the world, except indirectly through the contemplation of the “signs” of nature. Sirhindi claimed that he himself had passed beyond the ecstatic condition of mystics like Ibn al-Arabi to a higher and more sober state of consciousness. He used mysticism and religious experience to reaffirm belief in the distant God of the philosophers, who was an objective but inaccessible reality. His views were ardently embraced by his disciples but not by the majority of Muslims, who remained true to the immanent, subjective God of the mystics. While Muslims like Findiriski and Akbar were seeking understanding with people of other faiths, the Christian West had demonstrated in 1492 that it could not even tolerate proximity with the two other religions of Abraham. During the fifteenth century, anti-Semitism had increased throughout Europe and Jews were expelled from one city after another: from Linz and Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and Moravia in 1454. They were driven out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Lucca and Milan in 1489 and Tuscany in 1494. The expulsion of the Sephardic Jews of Spain must be seen in the context of this larger European trend. The Spanish Jews who had settled in the Ottoman empire continued to suffer from a sense of dislocation coupled with the irrational but indelible guilt of the survivor. It is, perhaps, not dissimilar to the guilt experienced by those who managed to survive the Nazi Holocaust and it is significant, therefore, that today some Jews feel drawn to the spirituality that the Sephardic Jews evolved during the sixteenth century to help them to come to terms with their exile.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It had nothing in common with the Protestant conception of the absolute sovereignty of God, which meant that men and women could contribute nothing toward their own salvation but were entirely dependent upon a deity outside themselves. These old doctrines about God were increasingly condemned as flawed and inadequate. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) insisted that the old creeds and doctrines had become idols, ends in themselves and substitutes for the ineffable reality of God. True Christian faith was a leap out of the world, away from these fossilized human beliefs and outmoded attitudes, into the unknown. Others, however, wanted to root humanity in this world and to cut off the notion of a Great Alternative. The German philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–72) argued that God was simply a human projection in his influential book The Essence of Christianity (1841). The idea of God had alienated us from our own nature by positing an impossible perfection over against our human frailty. Thus God was infinite, man finite; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. Feuerbach had put his finger on an essential weakness in the Western tradition which had always been perceived as a danger in monotheism. The kind of projection which pushes God outside the human condition can result in the creation of an idol. Other traditions had found various ways of countering this danger, but in the West it was unfortunately true that the idea of God had become increasingly externalized and had contributed to a very negative conception of human nature. There had been an emphasis on guilt and sin, struggle and strain in the religion of God in the West ever since Augustine, which was alien, for example, to Greek Orthodox theology. It is not surprising that philosophers such as Feuerbach or Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who had a more positive view of humanity, wanted to get rid of this deity which had caused widespread lack of confidence in the past. Atheism had always been a rejection of a current conception of the divine. Jews and Christians had been called “atheists” because they denied pagan notions of divinity, even though they had faith in a God. The new atheists of the nineteenth century were inveighing against the particular conception of God current in the West rather than other notions of the divine. Thus Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature … the opium of the people, which made this suffering bearable.” 16 Even though he adopted a Messianic view of history that was heavily dependent upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, he dismissed God as irrelevant. Since there was no meaning, value or purpose outside the historical process, the idea of God could not help humanity. Atheism, the negation of God, was also a waste of time.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Rather than continue in a life of ‘evil and whoredom’, the syphilitic landgrave had set his eye on the seventeen-year-old Margarethe von der Saale, whose mother would CONSOLIDATION 359 only agree to a union if they married.’ As the case was presented to Luther, Philip, tortured by his conscience, and racked by sexual desire, was unable to receive Communion and wanted to know how to make his situation acceptable to God. As he explained: ‘Since I am of such a temperament, as the doctors know, and it often happens, that I have to be away at League and Imperial meetings, where people live it up, take physical pleasures and so forth. How I can manage there without a wife, since I can’t always take numbers of court women with me, is terrible to think.’° His wife, however, had been faithful to him, so divorce was not an option. Even had she sued for divorce — and a Lutheran marriage court would certainly have granted her one given the patent adultery — Philip, as the guilty party, would (like Henry VIII) have been prohibited from remarrying. The landgrave’s position in the sacramentarian dispute had always been that of mediator, and although he had officially taken Luther’s side he had never repudiated the Zwinglians. Indeed, he had been careful to distance himself from Luther’s line at Augsburg, never accusing the south Germans of heresy and insisting on their protec- tion; and when he drew up a new Church ordinance in 1538 it had been to Bucer, not Luther, that he turned first of all.* This meant that the Wittenbergers could not afford to alienate him; and Philip knew this full well; in the letter asking for advice, he cannily pointed out that he might even be forced to seek a papal dispensation if the reformers would not help him.” After considering the case in detail, and with Bucer acting as mediator, Melanchthon and Luther signed a memorial on 10 December 1539, in which they agreed that the land- grave could marry his concubine in secret, while remaining publicly married to his wife.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He sold some of the fine legal textbooks his father had bought him and donated others to the monastery.” Then he invited all his student comrades to a lavish meal, with music and entertainment. At the height of the party, he told his shocked companions of his decision to become a monk, announcing melodramatically, “Today you see me and never again!’®° He then left for the monastery, accompanied by his sobbing companions. Luther had staged his departure in the form of a Last Supper, a dramatic enactment of his separation from the world of the flesh.* Luther’s entry into the monastery was a major act of disobedience, a repudiation both of his father’s plans and of the values of Mansfeld society. Once inside, he remained in seclusion for the first month, which made it impossible for his irate father to intervene, or for his friends to try and change his mind. Moreover, he did not return home to explain his decision in person, but rather told his family of the decision by letter. Enraged, his father wrote back bitterly, returning to the informal ‘du’ address. He at first withheld permission for his son to enter the monastery and, as Luther noted, eventually only gave way ‘unwillingly’. One version of the story has it that he gave way only after he lost two of his children to the plague in 1506. 48 MARTIN LUTHER What the rebellion must have cost Luther is evident in a story about his first Mass as a priest in 1507 at which his father was present. When he arrived at the moment of consecration where the wafer becomes the body of Christ, he experienced such panic that he would have fled had the prior not prevented him from doing so.” As Luther told the story in 1537, it was the words tibi aeterno Deo et vero (to you, eternal and true God) which plunged him into terror. The incident concerned the miracle of the Mass, where the bread, now the body of Christ, is displayed or is administered by the priest to the believer. At the ensuing feast to celebrate his first Mass, for which Luther's father, always the man for the grand gesture, had given the sum of twenty guilders, the breach was still evident. Luther asked whether his father now accepted his decision, and in front of everyone at table, Hans Luder replied: ‘Remember the fourth commandment, to obey father and mother’; ‘What if it was an evil spirit’ behind the events in the storm, he asked? It was a very serious charge, made at the point where Luther had just acted as Christ’s representative on earth for the first time.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems that the first years of the union were not happy, with Melanch- thon describing marriage as a ‘servitude’.* Yet for all his bluster that 204 MARTIN LUTHER sexuality was not a problem for him, and his insistence that ‘flesh’ was a broad term, one senses that Luther was confronting his own ‘flesh’. It is surely significant that here he chose the married man Melanchthon as his confidant, and not the bachelor Spalatin (to whom, by contrast, he had been remarkably frank about his constipation). Moreover, Luther was beginning to discuss his sexual identity by way of examining the relationship with his father. * These musings would find their way into the treatise De votis monasticis (On Monastic Vows), which Luther finished in November 1521. Its preface took the form of a ‘letter’ to his father, in which Luther developed the ideas he had explored in the letter to Melanchthon, sometimes in the very same words. It was a letter only in a fictional sense: as it was written in Latin, his father could not have read it, nor could he have read the treatise itself which was dedicated to him. It is a remarkably compact, emotional and dramatic piece of writing. Luther now offered his father an apology. I disobeyed your wishes, he confessed, and I know that you had other plans for me: ‘you were determined, there- fore, to tie me down with an honourable and wealthy marriage’. He told the story of his first Mass, and he recalled that even after they had made their peace with one another, his father had again exploded: ‘Have you not also heard . . . that parents are to be obeyed?’ Yet at the time, Luther wrote, ‘I hardened my heart as much as I could against you and your word’ —a revealing terminology that would have reminded the reader of Christ and the true Word. Now, Luther wrote, he realised that the apparition in the storm could not have been from God, because his decision to enter the monastery was against his father’s will. Conceding that the vision was indeed diabolic, he still placed it within a wider divine plan: it was one of the Devil’s attacks on Luther that proved that he was one of the elect. Satan, he wrote, ‘has raged against me with incredible contrivings to destroy or hinder me, so that I have often wondered whether I was the only man in the whole world whom he was seeking’. All this, he realised, was part of God’s purpose that he should get to know monasticism and the universities from the inside, so he could write against them with real knowledge. This was why he became a IN THE WARTBURG 205 monk, and still was a monk. “What do you think now?’ he asked his father. “Will you still take me out of the monastery?” But his father could not boast that he freed his son from monasti- cism.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I take three.) In February I decide I’m under too much stress to quit booze cold turkey. Full sobriety as a concept recedes with the holidays. I’ll cut down, I think. But all the control schemes that reined me in during past years are now unfathomably failing. Only drink beer. Only drink wine. Only drink weekends. Only drink after five. At home. With others. When I only drink with meals, I cobble together increasingly baroque dinners, always uncorking some medium-shitty vintage at about three in the afternoon while Dev plays on the kitchen floor. The occasional swig is culinary duty, right? Some nights I’m into my second bottle before Warren comes in with frost on his glasses and a book bag a mule should’ve toted. Maybe he doesn’t notice, since I’m a champion at holding my liquor. Nonetheless, by the end of March, I have to unbutton my waistbands. Only drinking socially leads to a flurry of long afternoon lunches we can’t afford with people I barely know, so—for thrift’s sake—I often just split a bottle of wine while my lunch partner eats. In academia, meticulously split checks are the norm. At the poetry readings Warren hosts for his job every few weeks, I swill plastic cups of vinegary white wine and yammer like somebody pulled a string on my neck till the library lights get turned off. After one such event, Warren drives home with his jawline flexing. What? What’s the matter? I ask. Do you have to stay till the last drop is drunk? he says. His sole mention of my drinking, as I recall. Which pierces me. How hard I’ve tried not to drink. I call him the fun police and unleash the litany of chores that tip me out of bed every day at five A.M . That this was a dead echo of Mother’s speechifying on Warren’s not being enough of a party boy eludes me. The more I drink, the more weekends I split off, leaving Warren to care for Dev solo while I take naps. Also, evenings Warren comes home early enough, I hide in my study drinking as he and Dev play at making the bed, which involves Dev bouncing as Warren floats the sheet over his head, occasionally wrestling the little ghost form down. Through the wall, I can’t make out words, only Dev’s staccato whoops and giggles, followed by Warren’s deep-throated purr, which sounds like hubbidee hubadub hubbadee…hum sally bum bum . The timbre’s barely tolerable, for when Warren speaks to me, the airspace is sandpapered and abraded, spiked as a bondage collar. I can’t look at him without hearing some muffled verdict pounded out by my own heartbeat— guilty guilty guilty . Across the months, I start to find myself first one place, then another, arriving in situations as if tipped out of a bucket . I find myself in a restaurant before noon ordering a pricey Bloody Mary, telling myself the tomato juice makes it a vegetable serving.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Getting the poems off my desk frees me to label a folder MEMOIR , which stays pristinely empty for months, till I stuff a few scrawled notes in. Next summer maybe I can set off down that row. That winter, snow falls without letup. From the eaves, the icicles grow jagged fangs big around as my thigh, past the windows. Living in the mouth of the winter witch, a friend calls this phenomenon. Also, we must’ve pissed off the snowplow driver, who has a nasty habit of dropping his shovel loads in our driveway. Hours on end, Warren and I, faces chapped, hack away at mountains of ice while Dev frolics in his blue snowsuit. The marriage has become nights on end of cordial agony. In the two years since I’ve gotten sober, Warren and I have alternately clung to or given room to each other till—over a tense series of months—we can no longer hold on. An old sociological or Darwinian theory holds that when we’re looking to gin out babies, we’re biologically propelled toward the partner who’ll color in dull spots in our own genetic code. So when opposites attract, they’re biologically combining to form the perfect offspring. Looking back, I can see how Warren’s very essence looked like a corrective to who I was and didn’t want to be, which is unfair to him. Nor does that theory account for the love we had and the long, pure, edifying conversation we shared. Still, it must be said that someone who doesn’t like herself very much (i.e., me: age twenty-five), someone who views a man as an antidote to her very being, will find—over time—that antidote becomes an irritant. I don’t want to rehash the times we wooed each other again and the times we withdrew, or the million fights we had. The truth is, as noted, we’re inclined to gloss over our failures. One spring morning my students come to help Warren lug his parents’ cherry antiques with all their heft and curlicued fittings from our small house. We unhitch our son’s bunk bed into halves for his dual households, since we’ll share custody. There’s a schedule magnetically stuck to the fridge with a red mom’s house and a blue dad’s house and an iconic Dev who slides from one to the other. At the kindergarten graduation, while every other kid heartily sings and claps and stomps, Dev rocks from side to side, staring from one to the other of us and barely moving his lips. Stabs of guilt like flaming arrows fire into me at his blue-eyed puzzlement. We’re poor, all of us. You can’t turn one home into two the same size. Since my salary comes closer to making the mortgage than Warren’s, he takes a town house in a ghetto complex near a grave yard. With the Whitbread furniture gone, Dev can skateboard in the living room.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  32 The Nervous Hospital What fresh hell is this? —Dorothy Parker A fter fourteen hours sacked out in the bin, I wake to find my mouth glued together. Beside my bed are a pair of green foam slippers embossed with smiley faces, which design seems a grotesque mistake on somebody’s part. I step right into them. I tie on the striped robe they’d given me, then stump out to accept whatever I’ve signed up for. At the nurses’ station, I’m handed a paper cup with another double dose of antidepressants to toss down. In the dayroom, I find a game show blaring at two women. One’s a large woman holding a teddy bear missing both eyes. The other’s fortyish, with a flapper’s curly bob and a small, muscular frame. I’m Tina, she says, manic-depressive. I’m Mary, I say, depressive-depressive. On TV, the correct door has been chosen by a woman who bounces up and down and claps at a new bedroom set. Tina’s dressed in bike shorts and a lime-green striped athletic jersey with the Italian flag on the sleeve. She says to the other lady, Do you want to tell Mary your name? I’m Dimples, she says in a little girl voice. She’s white as parchment, with soft flesh that spills as if poured from her sleeves and shorts legs . On TV, a horn honks. The audience sighs with disappointment. Tell her your bear’s name, too, Tina prompts. But Dimples just covers her face with the eyeless animal and falls quiet. We’re supposed to engage her, but she’s no Dale Carnegie. Multiple personality disorder. Tina says, Do you work out? This starts me crying. For the first few weeks, I turn into a regular waterworks. In my family, we claim to cry at card tricks, but with no card tricks in sight, I sob my guts out. Anybody who’ll listen to my sorrows gets an earful, and since each shift features a nurse ordained to hear me out—Mary, preeminently—at least twice a day, I boohoo my head off. Plus group therapy. Plus a shrink they assign me three times a week. Which makes those first days dissolve together into a kind of steam-room fog I sit red-faced in the middle of, blowing my nose. I mostly cry about the pain I know I’m causing Dev by going inpatient. And I sob about his dad, whose tenderness for me has perhaps been killed off by my small black heart. And I wail in abject terror that—now I’m not only an alcoholic but also a lunatic—Warren will divorce me and take Dev. When Warren comes in wearing khaki shorts and a kind, owlish expression to meet with the social worker and me, saying he wants to work on loving each other better, I blubber with hope at our prospects. I swear forever to love him till death, and while there’s still a blank between us, I mean it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nonetheless, the severe asceticism took its toll: Luther was pushing his body to its absolute limits, losing weight and suffering periods of depression, so much so that he assumed he did not have long to live. Why did his religiosity take such an ascetic form? A naturally spon- taneous, impulsive person throughout his life, it seems that he delib- erately chose a monastic environment to subordinate himself, and control his wishes and desires. By entering the monastery he had rebelled against his father and rejected the male identity and patriar- chal power that was his to inherit. Instead he chose a religious life of learning but also of obedience that centred on physical mortification. 58 MARTIN LUTHER He referred to his own punctiliousness and his competitive streak — it seems that he wanted to win in the holiness stakes. There was also a sense of overwhelming guilt, but it is difficult to guess where this came from. It may have had something to do with being the favoured son, but this hardly accounts for the force of these feelings, and their all-consuming nature. Luther seems almost to have luxuriated in feel- ings of guilt, as if, by driving them to their extreme, he could experi- ence a heightened devotional state of self-hatred that would bring him as close as possible to God. There was a pervasive silence in the monastery, with no talking after the evening meal. Strict Augustinianism was an extreme version of late medieval piety that focused on repetition and control of external behaviour such as fasting. It sanctified pain and sensory deprivation, and the interrupted sleep could send the individual into a trance-like devotional state. Later, Luther was to speak with anger about the kind of seeming holiness that focused on externals, leaving consciences burdened, because it was impossible for the monks to fulfil every duty. All the monks, he recalled, thought ‘that we were utterly holy, from head to toe’, but in their hearts ‘we were full of hatred, full of fear and full of unbelief’. He remembered a proverb from his youth that ran ‘If you like to remain alone, then your heart will remain pure’, and he later recalled a hermit in Einsiedeln in Switzerland who would speak to nobody, for ‘whoever has dealings with men, to him the angels cannot come’.” To the older Luther, this kind of aloofness was unnatural and dangerous, as those suffering from melancholy (as he did himself) should be encouraged to eat, drink, and above all socialise with others.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Karlstadt, the former provost of All Saints who had once driven a hard bargain over how much his chaplain should pay him from the income of the Orlamünde property, now wrote: “Would to God that I were a real peasant, field laborer, or craftsman, that I might eat my bread in obedience to God, i.e., in the sweat of my brow. Instead, I have eaten from the poor people’s labors whom I have given nothing in return. I had no right to this nor could I protect them in any way. Nonetheless, I took their labors into my house. If I could, I should like to return to them everything I took.”54 In 1524 he was not only idealizing peasant life: He was now also reaping the consequences of his theology for social relations, realizing how as a priest he had been complicit in the exploitation of the poor. For him, the Reformation was becoming a movement of liberation of the common people. He was not alone. [image "12. T he Peasants’ War" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_052_r1.jpg] [image "12. T he Peasants’ War" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_052_r1.jpg] IN THE AUTUMN of 1524, the biggest social uprising in the German lands before the era of the French Revolution began. The Peasants’ War started in southwest Germany as a series of local rebellions that gradually joined together, most areas adopting the “Twelve Articles of the Peasants,” drawn up by a furrier and a Lutheran preacher in Memmingen. Each demand, whether for the abolition of serfdom or the free hunting of game, was supported with biblical quotation, and the articles opened with the bold evangelical insistence that every community should be able to call its own pastor to preach the gospel. In the Twelve Articles, the key concepts of the Reformation—“freedom,” “Christ alone,” Scripture as the only authority—were applied to the peasants’ situation, creating a forthright program that found support all over Germany. Print played a powerful role: The articles were rapidly disseminated and they enabled the diverse peasant bands to unite, even though many areas formulated their own local grievances as well. It was not just expedience that caused the peasants to appeal to evangelical ideas: Many monasteries and Church foundations owned land and were among the most rapacious landlords, while the massive monastic tithe barns that stood in so many towns were a visual reminder of their economic power in an agrarian society. Evangelical “brotherhood” and the idea of the freedom of the Christian resonated with peasant insistence on the need for relations between lords and peasants to be regulated by Christian values, not property rights.1

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —THESE musings would find their way into the treatise De votis monasticis (On Monastic Vows), which Luther finished in November 1521. Its preface took the form of a “letter” to his father, in which Luther developed the ideas he had explored in the letter to Melanchthon, sometimes in the very same words. It was a letter only in a fictional sense: Since it was written in Latin, his father could not have read it, nor could he have read the treatise itself, which was dedicated to him. It is a remarkably compact, emotional, and dramatic piece of writing. Luther now offered his father an apology. I disobeyed your wishes, he confessed, and I know that you had other plans for me: “you were determined, therefore, to tie me down with an honorable and wealthy marriage.” He told the story of his first Mass, and he recalled that even after they had made their peace with each other, his father had again exploded: “Have you not also heard…that parents are to be obeyed?” Yet at the time, Luther wrote, “I hardened my heart as much as I could against you and your word”—a revealing terminology that would have reminded the reader of Christ and the true Word. Now, Luther wrote, he realized that the apparition in the storm could not have been from God, because his decision to enter the monastery was against his father’s will. Conceding that the vision was indeed diabolic, he still placed it within a wider divine plan: It was one of the Devil’s attacks on Luther that proved that he was one of the elect. Satan, he wrote, “has raged against me with incredible contrivings to destroy or hinder me, so that I have often wondered whether I was the only man in the whole world whom he was seeking.” All this, he realized, was part of God’s purpose that he should get to know monasticism and the universities from the inside, so he could write against them with real knowledge. This was why he became a monk, and still was a monk. “What do you think now?” he asked his father. “Will you still take me out of the monastery?”30

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Why did his religiosity take such an ascetic form? It seems that Luther, a naturally spontaneous, impulsive person throughout his life, deliberately chose a monastic environment to subordinate himself, and control his wishes and desires. By entering the monastery he had rebelled against his father and rejected the male identity and patriarchal power that was his to inherit. Instead he chose a religious life of learning but also of obedience that centered on physical mortification. He referred to his own punctiliousness and his competitive streak—it seems that he wanted to win in the holiness stakes. There was also a sense of overwhelming guilt, but it is difficult to guess where this came from. It may have had something to do with being the favored son, but this hardly accounts for the force of these feelings, and their all-consuming nature. Luther seems almost to have luxuriated in feelings of guilt, as if, by driving them to their extreme, he could experience a heightened devotional state of self-hatred that would bring him as close as possible to God. There was a pervasive silence in the monastery, with no talking after the evening meal. Strict Augustinianism was an extreme version of late medieval piety that focused on repetition and control of external behavior such as fasting. It sanctified pain and sensory deprivation, and the interrupted sleep could send the individual into a trancelike devotional state. Later, Luther was to speak with anger about the kind of seeming holiness that focused on externals, leaving consciences burdened, because it was impossible for the monks to fulfill every duty. All the monks, he recalled, thought “that we were utterly holy, from head to toe,” but in their hearts “we were full of hatred, full of fear and full of unbelief.”21 He remembered a proverb from his youth that ran, “If you like to remain alone, then your heart will remain pure,” and he later recalled a hermit in Einsiedeln in Switzerland who would speak to nobody, for “whoever has dealings with men, to him the angels cannot come.”22 To the older Luther, this kind of aloofness was unnatural and dangerous, as those suffering from melancholy (as he did himself) should be encouraged to eat, drink, and above all socialize with others.

• From Satyricon (1)

  I called Giton when I had finished my meditation: “Tell me, little brother,” I demanded, “tell me, on your honor: Did Ascyltos stay awake until he had exacted his will of you, the night he stole you away from me? Or was he content to spend the night like a chaste widow?” Wiping his eyes the lad, in carefully chosen words took oath that Ascyltos had used no force against him. (The truth of the matter is, that I was so distraught with my own misfortunes that I knew not what I was saying. “Why recall past memories which can only cause pain,” said I to myself. I then directed all my energies towards the recovery of my lost manhood. To achieve this I was ready even to devote myself to the gods; accordingly, I went out to invoke the aid of Priapus.) {Putting as good a face upon the matter as I could} I knelt upon the threshold of his shrine and invoked the God in the following verses: “Of Bacchus and the nymphs, companion boon, Whom fair Dione set o’er forests wide As God: whom Lesbos and green Thasos own For deity, whom Lydians, far and wide Adore through all the seasons of the year; Whose temple in his own Hypaepa placed, Thou Dryad’s joy and Bacchus’, hear my prayer! To thee I come, by no dark blood disgraced, No shrine, in wicked lust have I profaned; When I was poor and worn with want, I sinned Not by intent, a pauper’s sin’s not banned As of another! Unto thee I pray Lift thou the load from off my tortured mind, Forgive a light offense! When fortune smiles I’ll not thy glory shun and leave behind Thy worship! Unto thee, a goat that feels His primest vigor, father of the flocks Shall come! And suckling pigs, the tender young Of some fine grunting sow! New wine, in crocks Shall foam! Thy grateful praises shall be sung By youths who thrice shall dance around thy shrine Happy, in youth and full of this year’s wine!” While I was engaged in this diplomatic effort in behalf of the affected member, a hideous crone with disheveled hair, and clad in black garments which were in great disorder, entered the shrine and, laying hands upon me, led me {thoroughly frightened,} out into the portico. CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FOURTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For their part, the Lutheran reformers regularly chose one another as godparents, underlining the intimate ties between them. 13 The practice contributed to the increasing tendency for the evangelical pastorate to become set apart from the rest of society, a close-knit group that intermarried and recruited its successors from among its own descendants. The Catholic clergy had never constituted a caste in this sense, because its members were supposed to be celibate. Yet despite the centrality of baptism to his theology, and his conservative attitude to the rite, Luther was less certain how to treat Anabaptists. He had been happy to agree during the Augsburg negotiations that Anabaptists, like sacramentarians, should be treated as heretics, but until then he had also consistently maintained that no one should be executed for their faith; heretics would suffer in hell, and only if they were guilty of insurrection and rejecting secular authority were they to be punished. 14 But Melanchthon, in line with the imperial mandate against Anabaptists of 1528, began to take the view that all Anabaptists were guilty of the crime of sedition, and that secular authorities ought to punish Anabaptists “on body,” rather than just with fines. While Luther still argued in 1528 that Anabaptists should not be executed, because “[i]t is not right, and it pains me greatly, that people kill, murder and burn these poor folk so horribly,” by February Melanchthon had begun to advocate their execution, and the following year Luther was agreeing that “although it seems cruel to punish them with the sword, they themselves are being even more cruel in damning the ministry of the Word.” 15 Even if Luther felt queasy about it, he did not object to harsh punishment. When Fritz Erbe in the village of Herda near Eisenach refused to baptize his son in 1531, he was jailed. Imprisoned a second time in 1533, his fame spread and he became something of a celebrity in the town, so he was moved to the Wartburg, where Luther had stayed after the Diet of Worms. Here he was held in isolation from 1540 until his death in 1548, in a prison cell underground. Luther would have known about Erbe and his miserable fate. 16 Then, in 1534, a group of Anabaptists actually gained power in Münster, with consequences that would appall contemporaries. Reform had started there in a fairly conventional manner. As in so many towns across the empire, Lutherans had grown in numbers and been successful in council elections. But what had begun as a politically conservative Lutheran reformation suddenly changed as the leading preacher Bernhard Rothmann fell under the influence of sacramentarianism, and began to espouse a radical populism.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For his part, Karlstadt became more and more adamant about the distinction between flesh and spirit. In early 1525 he wrote of how we must “choke lusts and desires through affliction and persecution which befall us and by living daily according to the will of God.” Martyrdom, achieved through Gelassenheit and spiritual humility, remained a key component of his thought. Where Luther talked of spiting the Devil by getting married, Karlstadt wrote, “We, too, must overcome the Devil through suffering and through the truth which we have come to know. Through suffering we must subdue, break, and subordinate to the spirit our untamed flesh in order to assist hope, strengthen faith, and firm up the word.” Replying to Luther’s attack on him for wearing peasant gray, Karlstadt mocked the reformer’s predilection for wearing “scarlet, satin, brocade, angora cloth, velvet, and gold tassels”—a well-chosen barb, for Karlstadt knew how irritated Luther had been in 1519 at the Leipzig Debate when the citizens had given Eck the fine angora cloth that Luther had longed for. 53 Karlstadt, the former provost of All Saints who had once driven a hard bargain over how much his chaplain should pay him from the income of the Orlamünde property, now wrote: “Would to God that I were a real peasant, field laborer, or craftsman, that I might eat my bread in obedience to God, i.e., in the sweat of my brow. Instead, I have eaten from the poor people’s labors whom I have given nothing in return. I had no right to this nor could I protect them in any way. Nonetheless, I took their labors into my house. If I could, I should like to return to them everything I took.” 54 In 1524 he was not only idealizing peasant life: He was now also reaping the consequences of his theology for social relations, realizing how as a priest he had been complicit in the exploitation of the poor. For him, the Reformation was becoming a movement of liberation of the common people. He was not alone. W ITHIN W ITTENBERG, L UTHER had no direct institutional power; he held no positions other than that of town preacher and professor in the theology faculty. But he did have direct access to the Elector and other members of the ruling family, 1 and he had his loyal inner circle—Justus Jonas, Johannes Bugenhagen, Philipp Melanchthon, Veit Dietrich, Georg Rörer, the young theologian Caspar Cruciger—whom he called the “Wittenbergers.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It is impossible to tell what Luther really thought at the time. He certainly did not see the city through the eyes of a reformer, but rather through those of a pious Augustinian monk. His determination to secure indulgences for his paternal grandfather suggests how much these meant to him. He even remembered wishing that his parents were already dead so that he could exploit this lifetime opportunity to gain indulgences for them. The rather pat theological message of his later reminiscences suggests that hindsight had blotted out everything he might then have found compelling.45 Despite his critical memories, however, his Rome visit must have been deeply significant to him. He would not otherwise have linked it so closely to his key theological discoveries, or to his lifelong identity as being a “German,” hostile to all things Italian. There are some things Luther does not mention. We do not know the identity of the man who went with him, nor do we hear about their companionship on the way. The negotiations with the papacy, the entire point of the journey, are also completely missing from the story. As a junior member of the order, Luther would not have been the chief negotiator—he knew nothing of how the Curia functioned, and such a serious mission would not have been entrusted to someone so inexperienced. It is possible, as Johannes Cochlaeus later stated, that the monk whom Luther accompanied to Rome was Anton Kress, a patrician from Nuremberg, although it is more likely to have again been his former teacher Johannes Nathin. Nathin was highly experienced, having saved the Augustinian monastery at Tübingen in 1493 by reforming it in accordance with the wishes of the duke of Württemberg. He was a senior academic, a proven negotiator, and he would have had a sure grasp of how the Curia worked. We do know, however, that the negotiations in Rome were a comprehensive failure. The two monks did not secure an exemption for the Erfurt monastery that would have permitted them to continue their observant practices, and they were instead ordered to obey the policy of the vicar of the order, Staupitz. It seems likely that Luther soon embraced Staupitz’s view of the matter, rejecting Nathin’s and the Erfurt monastery’s attempt to safeguard the traditions of the observants. All this must have put him in an uncomfortable position: He had to represent a line that was designed to wreck his confessor’s long-standing plan for the order, a matter very close to Staupitz’s heart.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Our divorce had been final for a few months, and though our house had been awarded to him, my name was still on the deed and mortgage. He kept me posted on his efforts to refinance without me, releasing me once and for all from that obligation. These conversations were cordial but never lasted long. I didn’t have much to say to him and wasn’t interested in hearing about everyone and everything I’d left behind. “Before we hang up, I need to ask one more thing,” said Ross. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I’d just settled in to read the paper and watch TV. “Go ahead,” I said. “Ask away.” “Are you seeing anyone?” he said, and my heart seized up. “No,” came my fast reply—maybe too fast, I thought. “No,” I repeated. And I paused. Earlier that afternoon, I’d returned from a first date with a handsome Italian named Mario. He’d approached me in the grocery store and, after making charming observations about the similar contents in our carts, asked for my phone number. Mesmerized by his wit and deep blue eyes, I’d surrendered to the pickup. We’d met for pizza and had a promising good time. He’d gently kissed my hand good night and asked if he could see me again. I couldn’t tell Ross the truth. Not yet. There was too much at stake for me. “Ross, I’m way too busy with this new job and acclimating to this big city to find time for romance.” “I see,” he said, sounding ragged and worn. There was a long, awkward pause. I leaned against the kitchen wall and slowly slid down to the floor. “Why do you ask me this?” I said. “Because I’m tired,” he said. I could feel his defeat. “I want my life back. I go to work, I keep up the house, go to meetings and out in service. But it’s all drudgery.” I could see his sad blue eyes in my mind and felt the tears that must be welling there. “Everyone’s looking out for me, trying to keep me busy,” he continued. “Socially, I mean.” And he paused for a moment. The conversation became stilted. “Linda, I need to know, is there any hope of us getting back together? Are you ever going to come home?” I shuddered. Could I believe my ears? Did he seriously hope for reconciliation? If he was, it could only be out of a sense of religious obligation, not love. Truer still, I knew he was longing for a physical connection. My insides were rattling with guilt. He was overriding natural desires, clinging to antiquated rules that demanded he live the life of a celibate, while I kicked up my heels. “Ross, I love it here. I can’t imagine I’ll ever live in Portland again.” I sat there for a long while in the silence between us, a silence that contained our despair and anger, at different things for different reasons.