Humiliation

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 The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Simon Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe. What I emphasize from that text, and throughout the rest of this chapter, is its profoundly political implications. It is not primarily interested in trance, ecstasy, apparition, or revelation, but in authority, power, leadership, and priority. The thrust of that description is not just its emphasis on the risen apparitions of Jesus but its insistence that Paul himself is an apostle—that is, one specifically called and designated by God and Jesus to take a leadership role in the early church. Notice three elements. There is, first of all, the balance of Cephas and the Twelve against James and the apostles . Normally one thinks of the Twelve Apostles with Peter mentioned always in first place. For certain Christian groups, as we saw earlier, the Twelve Apostles represented in microcosm the New Testament just as the Twelve Patriarchs represented the Old Testament. But here the Twelve seem distinct from the apostles. But of course they have to be, or else Paul himself cannot be an apostle. That is why he mentions “to all the apostles” just before mentioning himself as “the least of the apostles.” He cannot claim to be one of the Twelve but can and does claim to be an apostle , one sent (that is what the Greek term apostolos means) by God and Jesus. And despite the admission of belatedness at the end, as well as the insistence on divine grace, that final sentence puts it bluntly: there is I and there is they , but we are all apostles; I am their equal.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Nay but [man] has never yet fulfilled what he has enjoined upon him. Let man, then, consider [the sources of] his food: [how it is] that we pour down waters, pouring it down abundantly; and then we cleave the earth [with new growth] cleaving it asunder, and thereupon we cause grain to grow out of it, and vines and edible plants, and olive trees and date palms, and gardens dense with foliage, and fruits and herbage, for you and for your animals to enjoy. 13 The existence of God is not in question, therefore. In the Koran an “unbeliever” ( kafir bi na’mat al-Lah ) is not an atheist in our sense of the word, somebody who does not believe in God, but one who is ungrateful to him, who can see quite clearly what is owing to God but refuses to honor him in a spirit of perverse ingratitude. The Koran was not teaching the Quraysh anything new. Indeed, it constantly claims to be “a reminder” of things known already, which it throws into more lucid relief. Frequently the Koran introduces a topic with a phrase like: “Have you not seen …?” or “Have you not considered …?” The Word of God was not issuing arbitrary commands from on high but was entering into a dialogue with the Quraysh. It reminds them, for example, that the Kabah, the House of al-Lah, accounted in large measure for their success, which was really in some sense owing to God. The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circumambulations around the shrine, but when they put themselves and their own material success into the center of their lives they had forgotten the meaning of these ancient rites of orientation. They should look at the “signs” ( ayat ) of God’s goodness and power in the natural world. If they failed to reproduce God’s benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with the true nature of things. Consequently, Muhammad made his converts bow down in ritual prayer ( salat ) twice a day. This external gesture would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and reorient their lives. Eventually Muhammad’s religion would be known as islam , the act of existential surrender that each convert was expected to make to al-Lah: a muslim was a man or woman who has surrendered his or her whole being to the Creator. The Quraysh were horrified when they saw these first Muslims making the salat: they found it unacceptable that a member of the haughty clan of Quraysh with centuries of proud Bedouin independence behind him should be prepared to grovel on the ground like a slave, and the Muslims had to retire to the glens around the city to make their prayer in secret.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems to have been a fair system, but the mining income also had to produce enough funds to support the Renaissance palaces looming over the town. It was long after Luther had left home, in the 1520s, that this balance became increasingly difficult to maintain. While the counts continued to squeeze money out of the leaseholders, income from the mines began to decline—the seams were deeper and therefore harder to reach, water had to be pumped out, and they required more machinery. The numbers of smelter-masters shrank and the silver-refining companies ( Saigergesellschaften ) that had been financing the mine operators now began to gain possession of the mines as the smelter-masters became indebted to them. 45 A proud, independent man, by the 1520s Hans Luder himself was unable to pay off his debts and was forced to work for the hated capitalists, in his case the Saigerhandelsgesellschaft at Schwarza, on a salary of fifty guilders a year with, humiliatingly, a supervisor at his side. 46 When he died in 1530 there were no mines for his son in Mansfeld to inherit, only the family property—worth a not insubstantial sum—to be shared equally among the children. 47 While in 1508 there had been forty-two smelter-masters in Mansfeld, by 1536 their number had halved. 48 In the 1560s, by which time the counts were running the Mansfeld mines themselves, the entire mining enterprise went bankrupt. 49 By the end of the century, the seams were exhausted and German silver production had given way to competition from the silver of the New World. Hans Luder and his contemporaries tried to make sense of economic relationships that no one could understand or control, and which were eventually to destroy them. They had no economic theory and little understanding of how wealth was created: No one knew why the capitalists in Nuremberg and Leipzig profited while the mine owners suddenly became impoverished. Economic thought was based on the assumption that wealth was limited. If one person had wealth, another could not get it. Metals, it was believed, resulted from the mixing of quicksilver and brimstone and were shaped by the influences of the planets. Mining was a matter of luck. There were diviners, and there were printed advice books, but no one knew where the rich seams might lie. Small wonder that the figure of Fate should have been so ubiquitous in the Mansfelders’ lives. There was a rich mining folklore that left its mark on Luther. With water essential to the process of smelting, he grew up with the belief in “nixes,” or water sprites, mischievous creatures who played tricks on humans. The fossils found in the mines were said to be drawings made by the spirits of the earth and of the air, and strange uncanny lights were believed to point to the rich seams.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Ostensibly the theses were addressed to Karlstadt, but all of them aimed at key points of Luther’s theology.“ Luther rose to the bait and replied to them himself. In any other man, the combination of aggression, ambition and intellectual gifts would have ensured preferment to high church office, a bishopric or perhaps even a cardinal’s hat; and it may be that this was what Eck hoped for by taking on Luther. Indeed, he considered the key issue underlying the dispute to be obedience to the Pope. He would be awarded the title of ‘papal legate’ in 1520, but the bishopric, if hoped for, never materialised, and Eck spent the rest of his life as a pastor and professor in Ingolstadt on a modest salary. He later wrote that all he had ever wanted in life was to ‘remain a schoolmaster’. But he preached assiduously in his parish; again like Luther, he was deter- mined that his preaching should reach the common man, and he published five volumes of sermons in the vernacular because he thought priests were being driven to use Lutheran sermons for lack of anything serviceable from their own side. Eck’s parishioners found his sermons tough going, however: intellectually challenging, they made no concessions. Like Luther, Eck translated the Bible, publishing in 1537 a German New Testament based on Hieronymus Emser’s text, translating the Old Testament himself.” * Just what a mistake Luther had made in agreeing to meet in Leipzig was evident from the start. Held at the height of summer when, as Luther’s friend and chronicler Friedrich Myconius put it, the weather was good for hiking, the debate attracted large crowds from all around. Eck got there first, timing his arrival for the day before Corpus Christi, and was entertained by the mayor, with whom he lodged. He was therefore able to take part in the town’s Corpus Christi procession alongside the town dignitaries. As the festival, during which the bound- aries of the parishes are reaffirmed, was an important celebration of local identity, this was a shrewd move.” 132 MARTIN LUTHER Luther arrived on the Friday after Corpus Christi, 24 June, having travelled to Leipzig with Karlstadt and Melanchthon, this time not on foot but by open wagon. On this occasion, there was no need to demonstrate his humility in contrast to papal pomp. Karlstadt had insisted on bringing a whole reference library with him but his books were so heavy that his wagon got stuck in the mud, breaking the axle, just as it was about to enter the city gate. This was hardly a good omen for the man who had tried to ridicule his opponent with his ‘wagon cartoon’; it seemed that it was Karlstadt’s cart rather than Eck’s which was bound for disaster.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  While he lived under Luther’s roof, Karlstadt was compelled to write a full recantation of his views on the Last Supper, again printed at Wittenberg and once more prefaced by Luther. 36 Luther conceded that Karlstadt’s treatises on the subject had been presented as theses, matters for discussion, not as statements of truth; but like others, Luther said, he had forgotten the form in which they had been issued and taken them to be statements of his real views. Turning Karlstadt’s emphasis on the spirit against him, Luther insisted that it was clear that his views were not “of the spirit,” because the spirit made people certain and bold; Karlstadt and his ilk, on the other hand, spoke only out of craziness and human darkness, and therefore everyone should be warned against his views. This was humiliating enough, but in early September, Karlstadt was writing to Luther as Luther’s “slave,” apologizing for disturbing his “sweet dream” and begging him to get the Elector to permit him to live in Saxony, preferably in Kemberg. He knew, he groveled to “your reverend lordship,” that it lay in Luther’s “might, not to say, power” to have his exile lifted. 37 Luther duly wrote to the Elector but, possibly on Spalatin’s advice, the Elector refused to permit Karlstadt to reside in Kemberg, because it was on the road to Leipzig and thus “suspicious” travelers might pass through and spread his message. He was to live only in “villages and hamlets” within three miles of Wittenberg, securely marooned in the country and away from the town and the university, but still under the authorities’ watchful eye. 38 The wellsprings of Karlstadt’s intellectual life—colleagues and students, a printer and a pulpit—were all denied him. It seems that he was now condemned to work as a farmer. It left Karlstadt a broken man. He kept his word, publishing virtually nothing once he returned to the Wittenberg area. He did manage to move to Kemberg, however, from where he journeyed to meet sympathetic figures like the noblemen Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Crautwald in Silesia. A few years later, he moved to Basle, where he found a more congenial intellectual home, but he did not publish much. His theology continued to develop the idea of Gelassenheit, and when he died in 1541, he was in the process of composing a major synoptic work on theology in which Gelassenheit would have played a central role. It is puzzling that he failed utterly to capitalize on either the Peasants’ War or on the support his ideas were gaining in the cities of southern Germany. The man who wanted to engage in honest toil like a peasant found himself attacked and hunted by peasants who saw him as a learned grosser Hans, just another “big Jack.”

• From Satyricon (1)

  Driven to the last extremity, I could no longer keep back the tears. “Madame,” I burst out, “is this the night-cap which you ordered served to me?” Clapping her hands softly she cried out, “Oh you witty rogue, you are a fountain of repartee, but you never knew before that a catamite was called a k-night-cap, now did you?” Then, fearing my companion would come off better than I, “Madame,” I said, “I leave it to your sense of fairness: is Ascyltos to be the only one in this dining-room who keeps holiday?” “Fair enough,” conceded Quartilla, “let Ascyltos have his k-night-cap too!” On hearing that, the catamite changed mounts, and, having bestridden my comrade, nearly drove him to distraction with his buttocks and his kisses. Giton was standing between us and splitting his sides with laughter when Quartilla noticed him, and actuated by the liveliest curiosity, she asked whose boy he was, and upon my answering that he was my “brother,” “Why has he not kissed me then?” she demanded. Calling him to her, she pressed a kiss upon his mouth, then putting her hand beneath his robe, she took hold of his little member, as yet so undeveloped. “This,” she remarked, “shall serve me very well tomorrow, as a whet to my appetite, but today I’ll take no common fare after choice fish!” CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH. She was still talking when Psyche, who was giggling, came to her side and whispered something in her ear. What it was, I did not catch. “By all means,” ejaculated Quartilla, “a brilliant idea! Why shouldn’t our pretty little Pannychis lose her maidenhead when the opportunity is so favorable?” A little girl, pretty enough, too, was led in at once; she looked to be not over seven years of age, and she was the same one who had before accompanied Quartilla to our room. Amidst universal applause, and in response to the demands of all, they made ready to perform the nuptial rites. I was completely out of countenance, and insisted that such a modest boy as Giton was entirely unfitted for such a wanton part, and moreover, that the child was not of an age at which she could receive that which a woman must take. “Is that so,” Quartilla scoffed, “is she any younger than I was, when I submitted to my first man? Juno, my patroness, curse me if I can remember the time when I ever was a virgin, for I diverted myself with others of my own age, as a child then as the years passed, I played with bigger boys, until at last I reached my present age. I suppose that this explains the origin of the proverb, ‘Who carried the calf may carry the bull,’ as they say.” As I feared that Giton might run greater risk if I were absent, I got up to take part in the ceremony. CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Fanning herself with a branch of flowering myrtle, she lay, stretched out with her marble neck resting upon a golden cushion. When she caught sight of me she blushed faintly; she recalled yesterday’s affront, I suppose. At her invitation, I sat down by her side, as soon as the others had gone; whereupon she put the branch of myrtle over my face and emboldened, as if a wall had been raised between us, “Well, Mr. Paralytic,” she teased, “have you brought all of yourself along today?” “Why ask me,” I replied, “why not try me instead?” and throwing myself bodily into her arms, I revelled in her kisses with no witchcraft to stop me. CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SECOND. The loveliness of her form drew me to her and summoned me to love. Our lips were pressed together in a torrent of smacking kisses, our groping hands had discovered every trick of excitation, and our bodies, clasped in a mutual embrace, had fused our souls into one, (and then, in the very midst of these ravishing preliminaries my nerves again played me false and I was unable to last until the instant of supreme bliss.) Lashed to fury by these inexcusable affronts, the lady at last ran to avenge herself and, calling her house servants, she gave orders for me to be hoisted upon their shoulders and flogged; then, still unsatisfied with the drastic punishment she had inflicted upon me, she called all the spinning women and scrubbing wenches in the house and ordered them to spit upon me. I covered my face with my hands but I uttered no complaint as I well knew what I deserved and, overwhelmed with blows and spittle, I was driven from the house. Proselenos was kicked out too, Chrysis was beaten, and all the slaves grumbled among themselves and wondered what had upset their mistress’s good humor. I took heart after having given some thought to my misfortunes and, artfully concealing the marks of the blows for fear that Eumolpus would make merry over my mishaps or, worse yet, that Giton might be saddened by my disgrace, I did the only thing I could do to save my self-respect, I pretended that I was sick and went to bed. There, I turned the full fury of my resentment against that recreant which had been the sole cause of all the evil accidents which had befallen me. Three times I grasped the two-edged blade The recreant to cut away; Three times by Fear my hand was stayed And palsied Terror said me nay That which I might have done before ‘Twas now impossible to do; For, cold with Fear, the wretch withdrew Into a thousand-wrinkled mare, And shrank in shame before my gaze Nor would his head uncover more. But though the scamp in terror skulked, With words I flayed him as he sulked.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Fanning herself with a branch of flowering myrtle, she lay, stretched out with her marble neck resting upon a golden cushion. When she caught sight of me she blushed faintly; she recalled yesterday’s affront, I suppose. At her invitation, I sat down by her side, as soon as the others had gone; whereupon she put the branch of myrtle over my face and emboldened, as if a wall had been raised between us, “Well, Mr. Paralytic,” she teased, “have you brought all of yourself along today?” “Why ask me,” I replied, “why not try me instead?” and throwing myself bodily into her arms, I revelled in her kisses with no witchcraft to stop me. CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SECOND. The loveliness of her form drew me to her and summoned me to love. Our lips were pressed together in a torrent of smacking kisses, our groping hands had discovered every trick of excitation, and our bodies, clasped in a mutual embrace, had fused our souls into one, (and then, in the very midst of these ravishing preliminaries my nerves again played me false and I was unable to last until the instant of supreme bliss.) Lashed to fury by these inexcusable affronts, the lady at last ran to avenge herself and, calling her house servants, she gave orders for me to be hoisted upon their shoulders and flogged; then, still unsatisfied with the drastic punishment she had inflicted upon me, she called all the spinning women and scrubbing wenches in the house and ordered them to spit upon me. I covered my face with my hands but I uttered no complaint as I well knew what I deserved and, overwhelmed with blows and spittle, I was driven from the house. Proselenos was kicked out too, Chrysis was beaten, and all the slaves grumbled among themselves and wondered what had upset their mistress’s good humor. I took heart after having given some thought to my misfortunes and, artfully concealing the marks of the blows for fear that Eumolpus would make merry over my mishaps or, worse yet, that Giton might be saddened by my disgrace, I did the only thing I could do to save my self-respect, I pretended that I was sick and went to bed. There, I turned the full fury of my resentment against that recreant which had been the sole cause of all the evil accidents which had befallen me. Three times I grasped the two-edged blade The recreant to cut away; Three times by Fear my hand was stayed And palsied Terror said me nay That which I might have done before ‘Twas now impossible to do; For, cold with Fear, the wretch withdrew Into a thousand-wrinkled mare, And shrank in shame before my gaze Nor would his head uncover more. But though the scamp in terror skulked, With words I flayed him as he sulked.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This pasquil went out under the name of Duke Georg of Saxony but was actually written by Luther’s long-standing enemy Cochlaeus. He repeated it in his prefatory letter to his biography of 442 25. 26. 27 28. 29. MARTIN LUTHER Luther, which was more widely read and appeared in 1549. The same accusation had also been made by Georg Witzel, and by Petrus Sylvius, Die Letzten zwey beschlisslich und aller krefftigest biichleyn M. Petri Sylvii, so das Lutherisch thun an seiner person... Leipzig 1534, lan Siggins, “Luther's Mother Margarethe’, Harvard Theological Review 71, 1978, 125-50, 132. Siggins, ‘Luther’s Mother’, 133: he referred to it again in 1543 in On the Jews and their Lies; and see WT 3, 3838: in 1538 Luther recalled how Duke Georg called his mother a bath maid and him a wechselbalck, referring to the pamphlet written by Cochlaeus under the name of Duke Georg in 1533. LW Letters, I, 145; WB 1, 239, 14 Jan. 1520, 610:20-3. Topp, Historia, 8: there were of course other versions of this story. Ibid., 6-32; Bergmann, Kommunalbewegung, 11-15; 33-7. Topp, Historia, 10-13; see also Stadtarchiv Eisenach, Bestand Chroniken, 40.1/9.1 Chronik Joh. Michael Koch. Chronik Eisenachs bis 1409 (ed. H. Helmbold), 27-40; Kremer, Beitrdge. WB 1, 157, 24(?), Feb. 1519, 353:29-30; WT 3, 3626: 3653. Topp, Historia, 15. Topp recounts the story of a statue of the Madonna and child in St Paul’s monastery in the town, where, if one prayed before the image, Jesus would turn his back as if rejecting the sinner. But if one promised a donation to the monastery, Jesus would turn his face, and if one offered more money, he would bless the worshipper: Topp, Historia, 1y. LW 44, 172; WS 6, 438:18-22; WB 2, 262, 29 Feb. 1520. The discomfort about begging was long-standing: Luther later reminisced how, back at Mansfeld, with a fellow pupil, he went begging for sausage at carnival as was customary, but when a burgher teased them they scarpered, and the householder had to run after them with the sausages: WT 1, 137: Luther uses this story as a parable of the believer's relationship to God; and he couples it, interestingly, with the story of his terror of the sacra- ment when Staupitz carried it in procession at Eisleben. Brecht, Luther, I, 18. The family gave so many donations to the monastery that it was locally known as the ‘Collegium Schalbense’. See Kremer, Beitrdge, esp. 69 and 89. Scherf, Bau- und Kunstdenkmale, 9. Ratzeberger, Die handschriftliche Geschichte, 43-4: Ratzeberger, not a reli- able source, attributes this to Joannes Trebonius, but it is unclear whether such a man existed, or whether the anecdote refers to the Eisenach humanist Trebelius, not a teacher of Luther’s, or whether this anecdote is about another teacher at the school, Brecht, Luther, I, 19. The story is repeated in Paullini, Historia Isenacensis, 125-6. 30. 3 32s 33- 34.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —EARLY biographies of Luther described his life as a monk as a period of drudgery. Johannes Mathesius, whose biography published in 1566 was one of the first full-length works, wrote of how he was forced to do menial tasks, even cleaning the latrines, and Luther himself remembered that he had to beg and clean the privies when he was already a master of theology.16 These are of course partisan accounts, written to show his sufferings at the hands of the envious and cruel monks, and to account for his later hatred of monasticism. Even so, they may contain some truth. Like all novices, Luther had to undergo a period of transition into the new life and this involved doing domestic labor. This experience must have been a shock for a mine owner’s favored son, sent off to school and university from a home where servants and the mistress of the house would probably have done most of the domestic chores. Only after he had begun to lecture on the Psalms was he relieved of these duties, but the order’s concern with the sin of pride suggests that making a former law student clean the latrines was designed to teach him humility. By the time he had been in the monastery for several years, however, others seem to have provided for his basic needs, while on the orders of his mentor Johann von Staupitz, a fellow monk even acted as secretary.17

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This was an era in which individuals were much more important than the formal offices they held and in which politics was intensely personal, so those who had access to a ruler wielded enormous power themselves. Not only did Spalatin give Luther an opening to Friedrich and his court, he also introduced him to a circle of Nuremberg humanists, which provided essential support in the early years of the Reformation. Although Staupitz had long had a group of admirers in Nuremberg, it was Spalatin who introduced Luther to Christoph Scheurl, the powerful civic secretary of the city and a brilliant legal mind, who had also spent time at Wittenberg’s 88 MARTIN LUTHER law faculty. This connection to the wealthy south of Germany took Luther for the first time out of the narrow horizons of a world bounded by Erfurt, Mansfeld and Wittenberg. He later acknowledged how much he owed his cultured Nuremberg friends, who became some of his most important supporters. There was much to be accomplished at the new University of Wittenberg. The buildings still had to be completed, its courses of study firmly established, staff hired and students attracted.* And although it was a new foundation, Wittenberg swiftly invented its own traditions, which Luther would come to cherish. Shortly after it was established, the university found its own publicist, Andreas Meinhardi, whose Latin dialogue in its praise was published in 1508. Though this work did not win him the academic post he craved, it secured him a 17. Portrait of Christoph Scheurl by Lucas Cranach the Elder. WITTENBERG 89 position as civic secretary to the town council, a post he held until his death. Meinhardi described the rituals through which new students were admitted, and they were probably not unlike initiation rituals elsewhere in Germany. The initiate would be surrounded by a troupe of old hands, his face would be blacked with soot and dirt, his beard (if he had one) would be tugged, pig’s bristles would be wiped across his face, he would be anointed with ‘what people leave behind hedges’, and he would be ‘baptised’ with wine. The so-called ‘Beanus’ would have to host a celebratory meal for the professors while bound with chains and ritually humiliated. His hair would be washed with ‘horse eggs’, horns would be placed on his head and his teeth filed; his learning would be mocked, and he would be teased first about girls and then quizzed about the quality and extent of his anus. It is hard to imagine a more complete humiliation, or a more searing introduc- tion to academic hierarchy, as those who had experienced it would later inflict it on someone else.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  When the two sides met again the next day, on May 23, Luther asked whether each of the visitors “would recant what he taught and spread about against the Lord Christ, Scripture and the teaching and view of the Church,” and whether they would henceforth “constantly and in one spirit teach the true presence of the body of Christ in or with the bread of the Communion of the Lord.” Bucer and Capito were compelled to make this humiliating admission of error, after which Luther and his followers left the room to discuss what to do next. They then demanded that the sacramentarians concede that the unworthy, not just the believers, received the true body and blood of Christ in Communion; that is, the Lutherans wanted them to admit that Christ was really present in the sacrament, not just “present” depending on the faith and worthiness of the believer.25 Luther had gotten the recantation he had longed for. He then heaped a further humiliation on the visitors, asking each of them to repeat his confession individually, including that the sacrament was present to the unworthy. Finally the longed-for agreement had been reached and Bucer and Capito were weeping when the theologians all shook hands. Luther advised them to introduce the new teaching to their congregations gradually, so they would not notice—a rather cynical counsel and a gross underestimation of ordinary people’s investments in theological issues. The next day—Ascension Day—he preached on Mark 16:15: “Go out into all the world and preach the gospel to all creatures.” The chronicler Myconius, who heard the sermon, wrote, “I have heard Luther preach often, but at that time it seemed to me as if it was not just him speaking, but that he thundered out of the heavens themselves in the name of Christ.”26

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —THERE was much to be accomplished at the new University of Wittenberg. The buildings still had to be completed, its courses of study firmly established, staff hired, and students attracted.28 And although it was a new foundation, Wittenberg swiftly invented its own traditions, which Luther would come to cherish. Shortly after it was established, the university found its own publicist, Andreas Meinhardi, whose Latin dialogue in its praise was published in 1508. Though this work did not win him the academic post he craved, it secured him a position as civic secretary to the town council, a post he held until his death. Meinhardi described the rituals through which new students were admitted, and they were probably not unlike initiation rituals elsewhere in Germany. The initiate would be surrounded by a troupe of old hands, his face would be blacked with soot and dirt, his beard (if he had one) would be tugged, pig’s bristles would be wiped across his face, he would be anointed with “what people leave behind hedges,” and he would be “baptized” with wine. The so-called Beanus would have to host a celebratory meal for the professors while bound with chains and ritually humiliated. His hair would be washed with “horse eggs,” horns would be placed on his head and his teeth filed; his learning would be mocked, and he would be teased first about girls and then quizzed about the quality and extent of his anus. It is hard to imagine a more complete humiliation, or a more searing introduction to academic hierarchy, as those who had experienced it would later inflict it on someone else.29 [image "Gm_2332 0001" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_020_r1.jpg] [image "Gm_2332 0001" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_020_r1.jpg] 17. Portrait of Christoph Scheurl by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Thus suffering must also be part of the Christian life: ‘It is impossible for a person not to be puffed up by his good works unless he has first been deflated and destroyed by suffering and evil until he knows that he is worthless and that his works are not his but God’s.’ Luther elaborates the idea of the ‘hidden God’ (Deus absconditus), God hidden in suffering, which would become a powerful theme of his theology in his debate with Erasmus: the God who is not inside us, and who can never be fully known by humans. Surprisingly, the theses make no mention of indulgences and they once again expound a theology rather than deducing an argument from propositions. The themes of Luther’s thought were moving well beyond what he had set out in the Ninety-Five Theses; and the full implications of his attack on ‘philosophy’ were becoming evident.’ JOURNEYS AND DISPUTATIONS 107 At the meeting in Heidelberg on 25 April 1518 Luther’s theses were presented in front of Bernhard von Usingen and Jodokus Trutfetter, his former teachers in philosophy. Trutfetter was one of the leading logicians of his day, whose Summulae had synthesised all the latest thinking about modal logic — that is, logic which considers not only what is actually the case, but also what is possible. Trutfetter’s text- book, printed at Wittenberg, presented sequences of binding syllo- gisms, or logically valid arguments, in visual, tabular form, making them a powerful tool with which not only to understand thought itself but also to overwhelm an opponent in debate. Luther reported to Spalatin that everyone had been persuaded by his disputation — except one newly minted doctor, who had exclaimed, much to the hilarity of the audience that, ‘if the peasants heard this, they would stone you to death’. And except for Usingen and Trutfetter. As Luther noted later, his former teachers were revolted ‘to death’ by his views. In fact, when he left Heidelberg after the meeting, Usingen had joined him in his wagon, and during their journey to Erfurt, Luther had tried to persuade him round. But there was no budging either of them, and now, he told Spalatin on 18 May, he was going to leave them behind, just as Christ had left behind the Jews — a mean- spirited equation.’

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He later acknowledged how much he owed his cultured Nuremberg friends, who became some of his most important supporters. — T HERE was much to be accomplished at the new University of Wittenberg. The buildings still had to be completed, its courses of study firmly established, staff hired, and students attracted. 28 And although it was a new foundation, Wittenberg swiftly invented its own traditions, which Luther would come to cherish. Shortly after it was established, the university found its own publicist, Andreas Meinhardi, whose Latin dialogue in its praise was published in 1508. Though this work did not win him the academic post he craved, it secured him a position as civic secretary to the town council, a post he held until his death. Meinhardi described the rituals through which new students were admitted, and they were probably not unlike initiation rituals elsewhere in Germany. The initiate would be surrounded by a troupe of old hands, his face would be blacked with soot and dirt, his beard (if he had one) would be tugged, pig’s bristles would be wiped across his face, he would be anointed with “what people leave behind hedges,” and he would be “baptized” with wine. The so-called Beanus would have to host a celebratory meal for the professors while bound with chains and ritually humiliated. His hair would be washed with “horse eggs,” horns would be placed on his head and his teeth filed; his learning would be mocked, and he would be teased first about girls and then quizzed about the quality and extent of his anus. It is hard to imagine a more complete humiliation, or a more searing introduction to academic hierarchy, as those who had experienced it would later inflict it on someone else. 29 17. Portrait of Christoph Scheurl by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The university was to be part of the new learning, but although several famous humanists and scholars visited and gave lectures, in the first few years none stayed long. In fact, the university was scholastic in orientation and its first rector, Martin Pollich von Mellerstadt, was an old conservative who adhered to the via antiqua and resisted any departure from the teachings of Aristotle and Duns Scotus. Against Mellerstadt’s influence, Staupitz and others strove to introduce the via moderna, but the humanist ideas that were exciting so many in Europe at this time were not on their agenda. Theology held pride of place in the university, and many of its professors—including Mellerstadt himself—had moved from other disciplines into what was regarded as the queen of the sciences to make it the university’s intellectual powerhouse. Within the theological faculty, Andreas Karlstadt was a follower of Thomas Aquinas. Johannes Lang lectured on moral philosophy. Lang had mixed in humanist circles at Erfurt and learned Greek and Hebrew so he could read the Bible in the original languages; Luther had studied Hebrew with him. It was an immensely productive friendship.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  While he lived under Luther’s roof, Karlstadt was compelled to write a full recantation of his views on the Last Supper, again printed at Wittenberg and once more prefaced by Luther. 36 Luther conceded that Karlstadt’s treatises on the subject had been presented as theses, matters for discussion, not as statements of truth; but like others, Luther said, he had forgotten the form in which they had been issued and taken them to be statements of his real views. Turning Karlstadt’s emphasis on the spirit against him, Luther insisted that it was clear that his views were not “of the spirit,” because the spirit made people certain and bold; Karlstadt and his ilk, on the other hand, spoke only out of craziness and human darkness, and therefore everyone should be warned against his views. This was humiliating enough, but in early September, Karlstadt was writing to Luther as Luther’s “slave,” apologizing for disturbing his “sweet dream” and begging him to get the Elector to permit him to live in Saxony, preferably in Kemberg. He knew, he groveled to “your reverend lordship,” that it lay in Luther’s “might, not to say, power” to have his exile lifted. 37 Luther duly wrote to the Elector but, possibly on Spalatin’s advice, the Elector refused to permit Karlstadt to reside in Kemberg, because it was on the road to Leipzig and thus “suspicious” travelers might pass through and spread his message. He was to live only in “villages and hamlets” within three miles of Wittenberg, securely marooned in the country and away from the town and the university, but still under the authorities’ watchful eye. 38 The wellsprings of Karlstadt’s intellectual life—colleagues and students, a printer and a pulpit—were all denied him. It seems that he was now condemned to work as a farmer. It left Karlstadt a broken man. He kept his word, publishing virtually nothing once he returned to the Wittenberg area. He did manage to move to Kemberg, however, from where he journeyed to meet sympathetic figures like the noblemen Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Crautwald in Silesia. A few years later, he moved to Basle, where he found a more congenial intellectual home, but he did not publish much. His theology continued to develop the idea of Gelassenheit, and when he died in 1541, he was in the process of composing a major synoptic work on theology in which Gelassenheit would have played a central role. It is puzzling that he failed utterly to capitalize on either the Peasants’ War or on the support his ideas were gaining in the cities of southern Germany. The man who wanted to engage in honest toil like a peasant found himself attacked and hunted by peasants who saw him as a learned grosser Hans, just another “big Jack.”

• From Satyricon (1)

  Psyche had already enveloped the child’s head in the bridal-veil, the catamite, holding a torch, led the long procession of drunken women which followed; they were clapping their hands, having previously decked out the bridal-bed with a suggestive drapery. Quartilla, spurred on by the wantonness of the others, seized hold of Giton and drew him into the bridal-chamber. There was no doubt of the boy’s perfect willingness to go, nor was the girl at all alarmed at the name of marriage. When they were finally in bed, and the door shut, we seated ourselves outside the door of the bridal-chamber, and Quartilla applied a curious eye to a chink, purposely made, watching their childish dalliance with lascivious attention. She then drew me gently over to her side that I might share the spectacle with her, and when we both attempted to peep our faces were pressed against each other; whenever she was not engrossed in the performance, she screwed up her lips to meet mine, and pecked at me continually with furtive kisses. [A thunderous hammering was heard at the door, while all this was going on, and everyone wondered what this unexpected interruption could mean, when we saw a soldier, one of the night-watch, enter with a drawn sword in his hand, and surrounded by a crowd of young rowdies. He glared about him with savage eyes and blustering mien, and, catching sight of Quartilla, presently, “What’s up now, you shameless woman,” he bawled; “what do you mean by making game of me with lying promises, and cheating me out of the night you promised me? But you won’t get off unpunished! You and that lover of yours are going to find out that I’m a man!” At the soldier’s orders, his companion bound Quartilla and myself together, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, and thigh to thigh; and not without a great deal of laughter. Then the catamite, also at the soldier’s order, began to beslaver me all over with the fetid kisses of his stinking mouth, a treatment I could neither fly from, nor in any other way avoid. Finally, he ravished me, and worked his entire pleasure upon me. In the meantime, the satyrion which I had drunk only a little while before spurred every nerve to lust and I began to gore Quartilla impetuously, and she, burning with the same passion, reciprocated in the game. The rowdies laughed themselves sick, so moved were they by that ludicrous scene, for here was I, mounted by the stalest of catamites, involuntarily and almost unconsciously responding with as rapid a cadence to him as Quartilla did in her wriggling under me. While this was going on, Pannychis, unaccustomed at her tender years to the pastime of Venus, raised an outcry and attracted the attention of the soldier, by this unexpected howl of consternation, for this slip of a girl was being ravished, and Giton the victor, had won a not bloodless victory.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Margarethe, named after her mother, married Heinz Kaufmann, who between 1508 and 1512 ran only one “fire,” but would later go into partnership with his father-in-law, as would Martin’s younger brother Jacob (whose name his family pronounced “Jacuff”). The third sister married Claus Polner, who, like Luder, belonged to the group of mine owners without secure leases. 44 Yet all Hans Luder’s careful calculations and long-term strategies would eventually come to nought. The Mansfeld mines were collectively administered by the five counts, with the exercise of jurisdiction alternating among them. It seems to have been a fair system, but the mining income also had to produce enough funds to support the Renaissance palaces looming over the town. It was long after Luther had left home, in the 1520s, that this balance became increasingly difficult to maintain. While the counts continued to squeeze money out of the leaseholders, income from the mines began to decline—the seams were deeper and therefore harder to reach, water had to be pumped out, and they required more machinery. The numbers of smelter-masters shrank and the silver-refining companies ( Saigergesellschaften ) that had been financing the mine operators now began to gain possession of the mines as the smelter-masters became indebted to them. 45 A proud, independent man, by the 1520s Hans Luder himself was unable to pay off his debts and was forced to work for the hated capitalists, in his case the Saigerhandelsgesellschaft at Schwarza, on a salary of fifty guilders a year with, humiliatingly, a supervisor at his side. 46 When he died in 1530 there were no mines for his son in Mansfeld to inherit, only the family property—worth a not insubstantial sum—to be shared equally among the children. 47 While in 1508 there had been forty-two smelter-masters in Mansfeld, by 1536 their number had halved. 48 In the 1560s, by which time the counts were running the Mansfeld mines themselves, the entire mining enterprise went bankrupt. 49 By the end of the century, the seams were exhausted and German silver production had given way to competition from the silver of the New World. Hans Luder and his contemporaries tried to make sense of economic relationships that no one could understand or control, and which were eventually to destroy them. They had no economic theory and little understanding of how wealth was created: No one knew why the capitalists in Nuremberg and Leipzig profited while the mine owners suddenly became impoverished. Economic thought was based on the assumption that wealth was limited. If one person had wealth, another could not get it. Metals, it was believed, resulted from the mixing of quicksilver and brimstone and were shaped by the influences of the planets. Mining was a matter of luck. There were diviners, and there were printed advice books, but no one knew where the rich seams might lie.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s mother later became a target for Catholic polemicists who wanted to show that the reformer was the scion of the Devil. Johannes Nas, for one, a Catholic controversialist of the second half of the sixteenth century, alleged that Luther’s mother had been working as a bath maid—a dishonorable profession and a byword for loose morals. She had been seduced by a stranger dressed in luxurious red, who promised her that she would never suffer want and would catch a rich husband if only she would give herself to him. Thus Luther was the outcome of a liaison with what must have been the Devil himself. This was a throwback to sexual slurs that the Catholic Johannes Cochlaeus, a contemporary originally sympathetic to Luther’s ideas and then his determined antagonist, had cast as early as 1533: that Luther was “a lousy runaway monk and rascally nun’s fanny who had neither land nor people, an ignoble changeling who was born of a bath maid as they say.”15 Luther laughed off these attacks: Either he was a bath maid’s son or he was a changeling, he quipped. He could not be both. But although he affected not to care, he remembered the insult and quoted it several times.16 —HOWEVER much in decline from its glory days, Eisenach was very different to his hometown. While Mansfeld was a town of slag heaps and taverns, Eisenach boasted churches, monasteries, and books. Many of Luther’s relatives on his mother’s side were university graduates who had made careers as doctors, academics, administrators, and lawyers. This was the background that would have prompted him to think of attending university, and to become active in public life. Significantly, when he angrily refuted suggestions in 1520 that his parents were from Bohemia—intended to taint him with connections to Hussite heretics—he referred to Eisenach and his relatives there: “Nearly all my kinfolk are at Eisenach, and I am known there and recognized by them even today…and there is no other town in which I am better known.”17 It was his mother’s side of the family, not his father’s, that exercised a powerful influence on his scholarly and religious identity. Like Mansfeld, Eisenach nestled in the shadow of a castle, the Wartburg. The townspeople’s relationship to the surrounding nobility was, however, turbulent. In the thirteenth century, Sophie of Brabant had constructed a fortress in the town that the locals called the Klemme, or clamp, for it was designed to control them—and they destroyed it with glee at the first opportunity.18 There were repeated conflicts, and in 1304 the Eisenachers even demolished the towers of Our Lady’s Church, so as to strengthen their defenses, an act of sacrilege that resulted in the whole town being put under the ban. In 1306–8 the townsfolk tried to gain independence, even storming the Wartburg itself, and when they failed, were besieged themselves. All this history gave the Eisenachers a powerful sense of their own identity, and a belligerent antagonism toward the lords on the hill.19

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The events of Kaiser’s martyrdom followed closely upon Luther’s breakdown. On July 18 he was taken to Passau and again given an opportunity to recant. When he refused, he was ritually defrocked in a ceremony carried out in front of a large crowd, which included Eck. Piece by piece, his priest’s robes were stripped from his body by the bishop of Passau, and he was shaved. Then he was dressed in nothing but a smock, or Kittel, a black slashed beret was put on his head, and, now an ordinary layman, he was handed over to the city judge. This ritual was not the end of his humiliation, however. Kaiser was kept in the castle dungeon for yet another month, and then paraded in chains around the town, before being taken to his home town of Schärding, where he was executed on August 16. Kaiser died true to his Lutheran faith. The original anonymous pamphlet account of his death insisted that his body miraculously refused to burn, but Luther rejected this spurious miracle.46 Instead, in December he composed a pamphlet including a full account of the trial, several letters, Kaiser’s will, and a precise account of the execution sent to him by his friend Michael Stifel: “Thereupon the fire was lit, and several times he shouted loudly: ‘Jesus, I am thine, save me!’ After which his hands, feet and head burnt off and the fire died down. The executioner took a pole and turned the body, then put more wood on the fire, and afterwards he hewed a hole in the body, stabbed it with a sword, stuck a pole in it and put it back on the scaffold and so burnt it.” All this Luther republished in detail, as if determined not to shrink from the full horror of martyrdom.47 And he concluded the pamphlet with a very personal meditation: “Oh Lord God, I wish that I were worthy or might yet be worthy of such a confession and death. What am I? What am I doing? How ashamed I am, when I read this story that I have not long since…been worthy to suffer the same. But my God, if it should be so, let it be so, your will be done.”