Pride

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)

  Now I admit that none of these is extraordinary, but each of them is good when undertaken out of conscious determination. [To Anaxilaus] I have recently come to recognize myself to be Agamemnon, since for a scepter I have my staff and for a mantle the double, ragged cloak, and by way of exchange, my leather wallet is a shield. [To Agesilaus] Life has a sufficient store in a wallet . [To Crates] Remember that I started you [Crates] on your lifelong poverty…. Consider the ragged cloak to be a lion’s skin, the staff a club, and the wallet land and sea, from which you are fed. For thus would the spirit of Heracles, mightier than every turn of fortune, stir in you. The term wallet is probably a most unfortunate translation since for us it connotes money. The Greek word is always p [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] ra in those letters, as it is in Luke 10:4 and Mark 6:8, and a good translation, for us, would be “knapsack” rather than “wallet” or “bag.” What it symbolized for the Cynics was their complete self-sufficiency. They carried their homes with them. All they needed could be carried in a simple knapsack slung over their shoulders. Similarly with the staff. It represented their itinerant status, the fact that they had no fixed abode in any place, that they were always spiritually on the way elsewhere. The two items taken together underlined their itinerant self-sufficiency. The Jesus missionaries, in contrast, are told precisely to carry no knapsack and hold no staff in their hands. Why this striking difference? Since a reciprocity of healing and eating is at the heart of the Jesus movement, the idea of no-staff and no-knapsack is symbolically correct for the Jesus missionaries. They are not urban like the Cynics, preaching at street corner and marketplace. They are rural, on a house mission to rebuild peasant society from the grass roots upward. Since commensality is not just a technique for support but a demonstration of message, they could not and should not dress to declare itinerant self-sufficiency but rather communal dependency. Itinerancy and dependency: heal, stay, move on. Poverty and Royalty I conclude this section with a series of quotations from the philosopher Epictetus, not to argue about who influenced whom but simply to show how poverty and royalty could be combined not just by Jesus within Judaism but by Epictetus within Greco-Roman paganism. Epictetus was born the slave son of a slave mother and lived between 55 and 135 C.E . He was allowed by his master to study philosophy, was eventually freed, and was banished from Rome along with other philosophers by the emperor Domitian in 89 C.E . Here is a justly famous passage from “On the Calling of a Cynic” in his posthumously transcribed Discourses 3.22.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He proudly wrote about it to Staupitz, telling the old man just how final his break with Rome was: “I have burned the books of the Pope and the bull, at first with trembling and praying; but now I am more pleased with this than with any other action of my life for [these books] are worse than I had thought.” 58 The spectacle was followed by a student festival of antipapal activity. With Karlstadt, Melanchthon, and Luther having left, the students staged a play based on their initiation ritual, the Beanus rite. A trumpeter in tow, several hundred students mocked the bull, cut it up and turned it into flags, stuck one on a sword, and processed around with it, then stuffed others into a giant barrel, which they drove about on a wagon. To great laughter they read aloud from the works of Eck and Hieronymus Düngersheim von Ochsenfahrt as well as from the bull, and then they too built a fire, on which they burned bull, books, and barrel. They picked up the ashes like trophies, and in the afternoon they wandered about the town with their trumpets and sang funeral Masses for the bull. This was a definite escalation of the morning’s spectacle. No longer were events being safely performed outside the city walls: The students were attempting to involve the townsfolk and seize the public space of Wittenberg as a theater for their protest. Once again, Luther claimed he had nothing to do with it; by the time the festival took place he had returned to the monastery. But their rowdy support provided the muscle that transformed a university event into something that involved the entire town. 59 So delighted were the students with their impromptu carnival that they put on a similar performance at New Year, with a mock Pope and ecclesiastical procession around the town, celebrating the event with a printed poem. 60 Just as he had allowed the gang of armed Wittenberg students to accompany him to Leipzig, Luther tacitly exploited student power to help his cause. Above all, he knew the value of laughter. A year later, he was still poking fun at the bull. As a New Year’s prank for 1522, he published a mock version complete with glosses of the bull In coena Domini, issued regularly by the Pope at Easter to condemn heresy. Luther, of course, condemned the “bull-sellers, cardinals, legates, commissaries, under-commissaries, archbishops, bishops, abbots, provosts, deacons, cathedral clergy, priors…and who can list the gang of all these rascals, which the Rhine would hardly be big enough to drown?” 61 Although his adversaries wrongly accused him of having fomented sedition and falsely alleged that he had taught that there was no need to obey secular authority, they were not wrong to scent the potential for social disturbance in Luther’s message. 33. A woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger, depicting Luther as the German Hercules, with a cudgel, c. 1519.

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

  I asked them to feel the shock of that opening, with its abrupt juxtaposition of pope and pimp at prayer in St. Peter’s. I was—and still am—rather proud of my line’s elegant p alliteration. But when my editor read the manuscript, he asked me—and I agreed—to remove my modern rephrasing because, he said, it might offend Roman Catholic readers. That was, of course, exactly my intention. Well, not so much to offend my audience as to indicate with a modern instance how challenging, how offensive, how downright provocative Jesus’s original juxtaposition would have been to his audience. Even before they heard the rest of the parable. THAT MINOR MEMORY IS my overture for this chapter. Granted, from Chapter 3, that the Good Samaritan parable is neither riddle nor example, but rather challenge parable along the lines of those seen from the biblical tradition in Chapter 4, here are the questions for this present chapter. Is Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable an exceptional case or were challenge parables the regular type preferred by Jesus? Were more, most, or all of his parables such challenges? This chapter will answer that question in three steps. The first step looks at two other parables by Jesus—the Pharisee and the Tax Collector as well as Lazarus and the Rich Man. These have exactly the same Good Samaritan structure of traditional “good guys” failing and traditional “bad guys” succeeding. In those cases the challenge to the audience—the lure to think, the enticement to debate—is fairly overt and clearly evident. They are clearly challenge parables. The next step and the next two parables, the Vineyard Workers and the Master’s Money, present challenges that are much more subtle, but still just as strongly present. They too attempt to raise consciousness in an oral situation of audience interaction. The third and final step, before this chapter’s concluding summary, is to glance more widely across the parables of Jesus. After all, we will have by then only looked at two parables in Chapter 3 and another four in this present chapter. But how do I plan to widen the sweep within the limited space available in part of one chapter? That will require a special strategy, namely, an emphasis on the clash between the normalcy of format and the radicality of content within Jesus’s parabolic repertoire—within the general anthropological expectations of popular storytelling. AFTER THAT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SNIPPET in my overture, the Pharisee and Tax Collector is the obvious parable with which to start the discussion. Watch, once again, how Luke—who is our only source for this parable—frames it with interpretation at start and finish: [A1] Opening frame from Luke: He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. (18:9) [B] Parable from Jesus: Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

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

  That is my second, internal, and far more definitive reason for accepting Jesus as a historical figure—no matter how creatively he has been portrayed in parable in small ways and large throughout the four gospel versions. Here is the point: If you are inventing a nonhistorical figure, why invent one you cannot live with, but must steadily and terminally change into its opposite? In other words, I find it much more likely that Jesus was an actual historical figure whose radical insistence on nonviolent distributive justice was both accepted and negated by the tradition it engendered. I conclude that Jesus was an actual, factual, historical figure and not a metaphorical, symbolic, or parabolic invention by his first-century Jewish contemporaries. For those two reasons, one external and one internal, and along with the consensus of modern scholarship, I conclude that Jesus really existed, that we can know the significant sequence of his life—from John the Baptist to Pilate the prefect—but that he comes to us trailing clouds of fiction, parables by him and about him, particular incidents as miniparables and whole gospels as megaparables. My second concluding question is: What, if any, difference would it make for the Christian vision if we discovered—with absolute certainty—that Jesus was never a historical figure? Apart from accusations of original lies or inaugural conspiracies, what if “Jesus” had been as deliberately and honestly invented as was, say, the “Good Samaritan” or the “Prodigal Son”? What—if anything—would have been lost to Christianity? Nothing more or less than an actual life of nonviolent distributive justice as the revelation of the character of God. But could you not get that just as well from a nonhistorical figure in a magnificent parable? Not really. But why? What is at stake? Imagine if the “Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.” had been simply a nonhistorical character whose life and ideas were portrayed in a New York Times bestseller novel, a fictional tale that won all types of prizes and immediately became a motion picture. Its vision would have been absolutely valid for American destiny, but could have been dismissed with the offhand comment that it was all very lovely, but would not work—not now, not here, and maybe not anywhere, ever. It was just fictional entertainment, a dream from which one woke to a reality that negated it even as a human possibility. People, it might have been objected, would always strike back—at least by the second or third day, at least by the second or third murder. But because Dr. King was an actual person who did it—rather than just a character in a parabolic novel who imagined it—his vision could not be so easily dismissed. If it were done, it could be done again—and by others. That, of course, is the challenge of Jesus as an actual, factual, historical figure. If any one human being can do anything in life and death, other human beings can do likewise.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  16 Postal Partum Let him be happy from time to time, and leap over abysses. —Wislawa Szymborska, “A Tale Begun” (trans. Stanislav Baranczak) Y ou think having a baby is a big dang accomplishment, and the nurses smile, and the doctor seems distractedly glad, and you’re lying there not even minding overmuch how you’re torn from stem to stern because you’re so proud to have laid your egg, then the nurse comes in and hands you a round plastic pee catcher shaped like a matador’s hat—itself piss-yellow in color—to sit over the toilet seat, for really, all anybody in the hospital wants you to do is pee. Forget the baby, that’s all anybody’s waiting for: You pee, you go home. I couldn’t. It’s an indelicate thing to have to confess, but the long labor had distended my bladder or hurt my urethra’s muscle tone or blah blah blah. They give me a pee bag and a catheter, but since the gallons of IV fluid they’d pumped into me over more than a day had seeped into my tissues, I stay swollen like a prize pig. People on the ward ask me more than once when I’m due, which shocks me, for without my baby bump, I feel lithe as Miss America, puzzled when my old skinny jeans can’t shimmy over my dimpled knee . The doctor stares at his clipboard, saying, It happens with incompetent labor. Or a doctor’s incompetent delivery, I snap. Mare! Warren says. Why can’t you stick up for me? I burst out. I’m tired and sore, and my abruptly massive boobs have hardened into bricks as the milk floods in. Mare, incompetent ’s a medical term, not personal disparagement. Spoken like a man who went home and slept all night, I say, dabbing at my eyes. The doctor predicts it might be a day or two until I can pee, and they’ll keep me till then. He shakes Warren’s hand and leaves the room, and Warren announces—almost in passing—that he’s taken his paternity leave that week. Problem being, when the baby and I come home, I’ll fly solo. All right, I say—what choice do I have, and so besotted am I with the baby, I almost don’t care—I’ll get Mother to come. At the bank of elevators, Warren pushes the button. I sit in my wheelchair with the geriatic pee bag taped to my leg and our squinty son in my arms. The silver door slides open. Hold the elevator, a voice cries out, and from behind us skitters up a couple from our natural childbirth class. Warren moves aside while they get on. The new mom has a paper cone of roses in her lap, and the grandmother holds the baby while the grandfather videotapes the whole thing. Wave goodbye to your first home, Spenser, Grandpa says. The grandmother flaps Spencer’s limp paw. While Warren holds the door for them, I ask him when he’ll be back. Tomorrow about five. The doors begin to close.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For example, the quintessentially modern idea of the individual—and of one’s personal responsibility before one’s self and God rather than before any institution, whether church or state—was as unthinkable before Luther as is color in a world of black and white; and the similarly modern idea of “the people,” along with the democratic impulse that proceeds from it, was created—or at least given a voice—by Luther too. And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, and self-government all entered history through the door that Luther opened to the future in which we now live. Luther is principally known for two iconic events that precipitated all else. The first, in 1517, was his posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the great wooden doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church, criticizing the then wildly popular practice of indulgence. The second was his unyielding courage at the imperial diet that was held in the city of Worms in 1521. It was there, before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and an impressive array of German nobles—and perhaps most important, before the pope’s representative, Thomas Cajetan—that Luther took his implacable stand and made the statement in which he immediately vaulted from the medieval cosmos into the modern. When he made it clear that he feared God’s judgment more than the judgment of the powerful figures in that room, he electrified the world. How dare anyone, much less a mere monk, imply there could be any difference between them? Since time immemorial, such men had spoken for God and for the state. But Luther defied them, humbly but boldly, in a watershed moment in world history. Those of us in the West have lived on the far side of it ever since. What followed ended up scrambling the landscape of Western culture so dramatically that it’s hardly recognizable from what it was before. Luther was the unwitting harbinger of a new world in which the well-established boundaries of what was acceptable were exploded, never to be restored. Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Cranach was renowned for his speed in painting and therefore given the Latin appellation pictor celerrimus (the swiftest of all painters), so one must assume the winged serpent was somehow meant to convey this too. Cranach also went along with the Humanist fashion of taking a Greek version of his name, so Cranach became Chronos, which is the Greek word for “time” and was obviously meant to reinforce this notion of speed. History can never know whether Cranach truly liked what he saw when Frederick presented the gift to him in 1508. Of course he had little choice in the matter, and the prestige of receiving a coat of arms must have outweighed the immediate shock of seeing something he might have thought aesthetically unfortunate—and which he must invariably be saddled with, and pretend to like, for the rest of his days. Dürer had been the first to “sign” his artworks with the famous glyph of his initials, and Cranach began to do the same in his early years as Frederick’s court painter, but as time passed, he eventually began to use the serpentine coat of arms as his official signature, so one assumes he either actually did like it or at least grew to accept it. In any case, already by 1514 he was proudly using it almost everywhere. Apart from that of Frederick himself, Cranach’s wealth and prestige in Wittenberg were unparalleled. In 1512, the year Luther arrived for good in Wittenberg, Cranach had decided he had had enough of living in the somewhat cramped apartment in the elector’s castle. He wanted to get married and have a family and would obviously need more space. So that year he married Barbara Brengbier of Gotha, who bore him five children in seven years. To prepare for his new and expanding family, and also to construct the huge workshop that would be the hub of his various businesses, Cranach purchased two significant properties on Wittenberg’s main street. One of them was the most impressive piece of real estate in the town, and over a period of five years he would remodel it extensively. Records reveal that in 1512 alone Cranach purchased a whopping 11,500 bricks and 6,000 roof tiles. In the five years that he created his mansion at 1 Schlossstrasse, he and his family lived in his second house, less than two hundred feet down the street, which he also remodeled extensively. By the time the mansion was finished in 1518, it boasted a staggering eighty-four rooms—all with heating capacity, which was itself remarkable at the time—plus sixteen kitchens. It was so impressive that in 1523, when the king of Denmark had to flee his country, having failed to establish the Lutheran Reformation there, he came to Wittenberg and took up refuge in Cranach’s capacious and luxurious home. Cranach also owned numerous other properties throughout Wittenberg, many of which he rented, and his holdings and presence in the city increased steadily through the decades.8

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I can illustrate with a non-sex example. The average height of adult women is five feet four and the average height of adult men is five feet ten, a six-inch difference between the two groups’ averages. But height varies more within each group than between the groups. If you measured the heights of a thousand random people—five hundred men and five hundred women—you’d find that nearly all the women would be between five feet and five feet eight—an eight-inch difference within the group—and nearly all the men would be between five feet four and six feet four—a twelve-inch difference. Notice three things: There’s more difference within each group (eight or twelve inches) than between the two groups (six inches); there are four inches of overlap between the groups; and one or two hundred people among the thousand would be outside even these wide ranges!12 The same goes for sex. Within each group we find a vast range of diversity—and I don’t mean just anatomically. I mean in sexual orientation, sexual preferences, gender identity and expression, and—the subject of the rest of this book—sexual functioning: arousal, desire, pleasure, and orgasm. We also find overlap between the two groups, and we find folks who vary wildly from the “average” while still being perfectly normal and healthy. Some authors argue that the differences between men and women are more important than the similarities. Others say that the similarities are more important than the differences. My view is that the basic fact of homology—all the same parts, organized in different ways—is more important than either. And variety may be the one and only truly universal characteristic of human sexuality. From our bodies to our desires to our behaviors, there are as many “sexualities” as there are humans alive on Earth. No two alike. Here’s the kind of conversation you have when you’re a sex educator out drinking with your friends: LAURIE: “This woman I know told me if she ever has kids, she’ll have plastic surgery on her ladybusiness right after she gives birth, because she thinks it won’t look good anymore.” CAMILLA: “Did you tell her that the cosmetic medical-industrial complex paid a lot of money to make sure she felt that way about her body, so that they could profit from her needless self-criticism, despite the fact that there’s no unbiased evidence that it improves sexual functioning?”13 LAURIE: “No, I told her that once you have kids, your partner is just glad if they ever get to see your business, whatever it looks like.” EMILY: “Let’s invent a ritual where women celebrate the transition into their postpartum bodies. I mean, it’s not just its appearance that changes, it’s what your body means, to yourself and to the world.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  But remember from chapter 1 how height varies between men and women, but it varies more within each group than between the groups? Women in particular vary from one another in terms of their brakes and accelerator. A lot. Ask a thousand women how often they would ideally like to have sex and their answers will range from never to multiple times a day, and all of those answers are normal. A more important difference than simply the sensitivity of the accelerators and brakes of men and women is the relationships of these two mechanisms with other aspects of men’s and women’s psychologies— especially mood and anxiety. For example, about 10 to 20 percent of both men and women report an increase in their sexual interest when they’re anxious or depressed.11 But a guy who wants sex more when he’s anxious or depressed may have less sensitive brakes. A woman who wants sex more when she’s anxious or depressed may have a more sensitive accelerator. What this shows us is that there’s more than just a population-level difference in the average sensitivities of brakes and accelerator between men and women; there also seem to be a difference in how these two systems relate to the other motivational systems in the brain, particularly the stress response system. (We’ll really get into this in chapter 4.) But hey, look: It’s all too easy to metaphorize the population-level differences in brakes and accelerator, the way previous generations metaphorized our genitals. Like, “Women are easily turned off and difficult to turn on.” Or, “Women want sex less than men.” As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, the reality is nothing like that—for most people, sexual response depends as much on context as on brain mechanism. Your own brakes and accelerator, and their relationship to your mood or anxiety, are unique and individual. The goal of understanding your brakes and accelerator is not to understand “what men are like” versus “what women are like,” but to understand what you are like. Unique, with great potential for awesomeness. what turns you on?Huge, beautiful bathtubs at a B and B Watching a partner put the kids to bed “Slash fiction” of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy A fantasy about having sex in public Actually having sex in public No one was born responding sexually to any of these, but they’re all things that women have told me turn them on. The dual control model tidily explains how the brain responds to stimuli, to increase or decrease your arousal. The brain notices sex-related stimuli (like fantasies or an attractive partner) and potential threats (like an unappreciative audience), and sends signals accordingly; sexual arousal is the dual process of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. But that doesn’t tell us anything about how your brain figures out what counts as a sex-related stimulus or a potential threat.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So in 1490, the young Frederick began in earnest to lift Wittenberg to the height he thought it deserved. To start, the old Ascanian fortress was razed, and a handsome double-winged new palace began to rise in its place, though this would take twenty years before it was finished. Immediately next to Frederick’s palace, the Castle Church* was now built, and of course this too must be nothing less than magnificent. For one thing, it must be large enough to hold—and at certain times properly display—the impossibly large collection of relics that Frederick would soon be amassing. And it was this new church whose massive wooden doors in just a few years would display the ninety-five incendiary theses that sparked the Reformation. The church’s tower rose nearly three hundred feet and can still be seen for many miles. Frederick knew that to create a palace and a church worthy of serious attention, he must expend great sums on art, which he did, attracting the immortal talents of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, among many others. It would be a particular feather in Frederick’s crown when Cranach himself decided to move to Wittenberg. His home would be the most well-appointed in the town, and his business the most thriving. Frederick would even make him his official court painter—and give him the title pictor ducalis (the duke’s painter).

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In the end the Legate disdainfully flung back my little sheet of paper and yelled again for me to recant. He considered me defeated and refuted by a verbose and long speech which he drew from the stories of St. Thomas.* Almost ten times I started to say something and each time he thundered back and took over the conversation. Finally I started to shout too, saying, “If I can be shown that the [papal bull, Unigenitus dei filius] teaches that Christ’s merits are the treasury of indulgences, then I will recant, as you wish.” O God, how much gesticulation and laughter that caused! The cardinal and those around him obviously thought Luther some straw-headed hick who had no idea with whom he was fencing. The papal decree of 1343 that Cajetan had produced the day before was a relatively obscure one, not always included in canon law, so Cajetan and his crew likely thought Luther would be unfamiliar with it and that he would perhaps gulp to see it and bug his eyes out, realizing that what he had denied was indeed clearly supported in a papal bull. And that would be the end of his confident posturing. But Martin Luther had not spent the last fifteen years shucking corn. He knew the bull very well indeed, and countered brilliantly by informing the cardinal that the bull of 1343 said no such thing as the cardinal was maintaining that it said. Luther’s account continues, Here I interrupted, “See, Most Revered Father, and consider carefully the word, ‘He has acquired.’ If Christ has acquired the treasury by his merits, then the merits are not the treasury; rather, the treasury is that which the merits earned, namely the keys of the church; therefore my thesis is correct.” Luther knew the Latin verb tenses of the papal decree and could hardly be bamboozled so easily. What it said was quite different from what the cardinal was implying it said. Luther continued his account, positively gloating: Here [Cajetan] was all of a sudden confused, and since he did not want to appear confused, he pushed on to other things and shrewdly wanted to bypass this subject. I, however, was excited and interrupted (I am sure quite irreverently), “Most Reverend Father, you should not believe that we Germans are ignorant even in grammar! There is a difference between ‘there is’ a treasury and ‘to acquire’ a treasury.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Escape of the Nimbschen TwelveOn April 8, 1523, only a few months after Luther and Melanchthon had created their inimitably outré pamphlet, Luther wrote to his friend Wenceslas Linck, “Yesterday I received nine nuns from the Nimbschen convent.”1 Before this letter, we have only heard about runaway monks, of which there had been many—so many, in fact, that Luther was overrun with problems of what to do with them. It was one thing for people to escape the bondage of life in a dull monastery and another thing to figure out what they ought to do with themselves once they were out. Of course many of them made their way to Wittenberg, somehow expecting Luther to solve their problems. But it was that much more difficult for nuns to escape than for monks, so in the case of the Nimbschen convent, it was Luther himself who served as proud midwife. It was a genuinely brazen flouting of Duke George’s laws, because the town Nimbschen was within his territories. It’s easy for us to forget how serious such a thing was at this time. As the story goes, Luther had finagled things so that on Holy Saturday, April 4, a certain Leonhard Koppe, who was a burgher from the town of Torgau, drove his covered wagon to a nunnery in Grimma, where he typically made deliveries. As the story has been told for five centuries, his wagon at this time contained empty but nonetheless foul-smelling herring barrels. At a certain juncture, twelve nuns suddenly appeared and sprang aboard the wagon, at which point Koppe blasted off, hell-for-leather toward freedom. The decidedly fishy but colorful tale that the sisters were actually crouched inside the filthy barrels is in nearly every biography of Luther, but it is, alas, simply untrue. As we have said, the Nimbschen nunnery was within the borders of ducal Saxony, over which the irascible martinet Duke George held sway. He had expressly outlawed monks and nuns leaving their orders, so to be sure this was a daring escape. Three of the twelve castaways were immediately hustled to relatives, while the other nine were four days later delivered to Luther in Wittenberg. Because there was almost no way for a woman to support herself in the 1520s, situations had to be found for each of the nine, and the simplest path forward was to find them husbands, which is its own story and weaves itself into Luther’s tale rather dramatically.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Although I know full well and hear every day that many people think little of me and say that I only write little pamphlets and sermons in German for the uneducated laity, I do not let that stop me. Would to God that in my lifetime I had, to my fullest ability, helped one layman to be better! . . . I will most gladly leave to anybody else the glory of greater things. I will not be ashamed in the slightest to preach to the uneducated layman and write for him in German. Although I may have little skill at it myself, it seems to me that if we had hitherto busied ourselves in this very task and were of a mind to do more of it in the future, Christendom would have reaped no small advantage and would have been more benefitted by this than by those heavy tomes and those questiones which are only handled in the schools among learned schoolsmen.3 So as far as this went, Luther could play at being the simple “son of a miner” and joke earthily with the common laborer in a way that far outstripped the scholarly and witty Erasmus. But unlike Erasmus, Luther had a German fussiness over theological order and correctness, and it was this that occasioned the great explosion between them. We might see this as where Luther departed from Humanism, or where Humanism departed from Luther. This was the divide, in the end: How far could Humanism and its adherents—principal among them the “Prince of the Humanists,” Erasmus—ride along with Luther? Did Erasmus at some point realize he was riding along on the back of a tiger and simply want off? We should recall that without the intellectual movement known as Humanism, it is unlikely that the phenomenon known as Martin Luther could have happened. Without Erasmus’s restored Greek New Testament, it would hardly have been thinkable for Luther to translate that book into a German so fresh and accessible that it dramatically changed German-speaking people forever, making them a people of the Book in a way they had never been before. And we must remind ourselves that it was that great Humanist Reuchlin who helped Melanchthon become who he was, and who in turn cast all of Wittenberg in a Humanist mold.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was then escorted out of the chamber by two men from the imperial entourage. Many in the great hall assumed he was being taken prisoner and said so as the escorts moved past with Luther, but the imperial escorts made it clear this was not the case. But then as Luther was led down some stairs, he was followed by a group of taunting Spaniards who had come to Worms with the emperor. They spat that Luther should be hurled into the flames for his opinions. Of course Luther had heard this many times before. When he was at last returned to the bosom of his friends, he threw up his hands as German soldiers did to proclaim a victory, and smiling, he shouted, “I’ve come through! I’ve come through!”19 Later that night, Frederick the Wise spoke with Spalatin. “Dr. Martin spoke wonderfully before the emperor, the princes, and the estates in Latin and in German,” he said, “but he is too daring for me.”20 Frederick meant not that he disapproved of what Luther said but that he was concerned for how Luther had come across to the emperor and about the verdict that would follow. CHAPTER ELEVENAn Enemy of the EmpireI am resolved that I will never again hear him talk . . . and to act and proceed against him as against a notorious heretic. —Emperor Charles V THERE ISN’T A historian the last five centuries who could argue against the idea that Luther’s stand that day at Worms—before the assembled powers of the empire, and against the theological and political and ecclesiastical order that had reigned for centuries, and therefore against the whole of the medieval world—was one of the most significant moments in history. It ranks with the 1066 Norman Conquest and the 1215 signing of the Magna Carta and the 1492 landing of Columbus in the New World. And in its way, it far outweighs all of those historic moments. If ever there was a moment where it can be said the modern world was born, and where the future itself was born, surely it was in that room on April 18 at Worms. There can be no question that what happened that day unequivocally led to all manner of things in the future, among them the events 254 years and one day later, on April 19, 1775, when the troops at Lexington and Concord took a stand for liberty against tyranny. So much followed from that moment and so much has been made of it that it bears our taking a closer look at what exactly happened at Worms, and what did not.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Dan had said he was gonna karate Dev’s block off, and Dev had said, You go ahead and hit me first, adding, When I hit you, you’re gonna topple like a pine. End of discussion.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Thus, after his brother had taken the better part of the lands, what remained for Ernest was an inelegant, positively scrawny strip of territory, too long and thin to have any actual center—and most annoyingly lacking Leipzig. In fact, the only town it had worth bothering about was Wittenberg, a jerkwater burg that was nothing more than a humiliating embarrassment. Still, despite getting the short end of the geographical stick, Ernest cannily obtained something else that was of enormous potential value. The Holy Roman Empire at that time was a lumpy quilt of three hundred territories, of which seven were ruled by nobles, called electors. They were called electors* because it was they alone who held the privilege of choosing the Holy Roman emperor. So apart from the emperor himself, these seven electors were by a great margin the most powerful figures in the empire. And as a sop for receiving the awkward, gerrymandered strip of territory, Ernest now became one of them. With the political power he would have in this role came a great opportunity for amassing yet more power. Who knew what an ambitious man might make of it? History would soon find out, but that ambitious man would be not Ernest himself but his son Frederick. That’s because in 1486, just a year after all of this had been settled, Ernest died as a result of a fall from his horse; he was forty-five. So it was to his son Frederick that the responsibilities of this new and important position now fell. [image file=image_rsrc6KM.jpg] Albrecht Dürer’s portrait of Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony. Frederick was only twenty-three years old at that time, but he seemed to know what to do to make the most of the opportunity that presented itself, and he immediately took his new role as elector very seriously. Whenever there was an assembly—called an imperial diet—of the various rulers in the empire, Frederick assiduously attended and learned the political ropes as quickly and as well as anyone could have hoped to do. In a few years, all of this would pay off handsomely, as we shall see. He also decided that he would transform Wittenberg into a place fully worthy of its important status as an electoral capital, and here he succeeded too. His fierce ambition in all these things would end up playing a crucial role in his decision to protect Luther in the years to come.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was as a student at Erfurt that Luther’s genius first began to shine. Before this, nothing very remarkable is said of him, at least nothing that has survived. After only three semesters at Erfurt, Luther attained his baccalaureate degree, passing the examination on September 29 (Michaelmas Day), 1502. But the more serious studies now began as he aimed for the master’s degree. Many years later, his future colleague Melanchthon reported that according to a number of Luther’s fellow students from that time Luther’s talent was then “the wonder of the whole university.” He was ready to take the master’s exam as early as December 1504, but to receive a master’s, one must be at least twenty-two years old. Because Luther did not know his exact year of birth, this rule was probably waived for him. If he was born in 1483, as we have surmised, he would have turned twenty-one the previous month. Luther took these exams in January 1505, just after Epiphany.13 When Luther was awarded the master of liberal arts (magister artium) degree, he was ranked second among the seventeen that day receiving it. He was given a master’s ring, along with the coveted red-brown biretta. Achieving the master’s degree was a spectacular achievement for the son of a hardworking smelter. In fact, this degree now placed Luther in a special category within his own family, for his own father had certainly not attended a university, nor had any of the forebears on his father’s side. But now this son of Hans Ludher had achieved academic distinction in one of the finest universities in the world. On a more personal note, because of his new status, Luther’s own father would no longer use the informal du when addressing his son but would henceforth use the formal ihr. “What a moment of majesty and splendor was that,” Luther recalled years later, “when one took the degree of Master, and torches were carried before, and honor was paid one. I consider that no temporal or worldly joy can equal it.” It made a lifelong impression on him, the blazing fire of the torches and the procession of horses, the grandness and pomp of it all. It was an august yet genuinely joy-filled memorial to all that had been achieved, and still many years later he said, “That is how we should still be able to celebrate!”14

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Oddly enough, we know that Luther took an especial delight in the scandalous outrage that marrying a nun was bound to occasion. He spoke of wanting to spite the devil—and the pope too—by doing such a thing. And yet he did not do it only out of spite. To someone for whom spiritual warfare was quite real, the act of marrying a nun was as though he had delivered a whirling roundhouse kick to the devil’s own snout. He knew that this act would have meaning and very real power in the spiritual realm. It was an act of worship to God as much as anything anyone could ever do, and its spiritual significance was tremendous. Luther was in his person and with his own body countering the falsely pious antipathy to the physical, and specifically to the erotic. God had created the physical and the sexual as good, and he had redeemed them from their broken fallenness via marriage. Thus not only was there nothing dirty about this, but the opposite was true. Luther thought unnatural celibacy to be of the devil and natural and healthy marital sex to be something that glorified God. Whoever is ashamed of marriage is also ashamed of being and being called human, tries to improve on what God has made. Adam’s children are and remain human; that is why they should and must beget more men. Dear God, we see daily the effort it costs to live in a marriage, and to keep the marital vows. And we try to promise chastity as if we were not human, had neither flesh nor blood. But it is the God of the world, the Devil, who so slanders the marital state and has made it shameful—and yet allows adulterers, whores, and dissolute knaves to survive in high esteem all the same—that it would be fair to marry in order to spite him and his world and to accept his ignominy and bear it for God’s sake.8 In 1522, in Against the So-Called Spiritual Estate, he wrote, A young woman, if the high and rare grace of virginity has not been bestowed upon her, can do without a man as little as without food, drink, sleep, and other natural needs. And on the other hand: a man, too, cannot be without a woman. The reason is the following: begetting children is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking. That is why God provided the body with limbs, arteries, ejaculation, and everything that goes along with them. Now if someone wants to stop this and not permit what nature wants and must do, what is he doing but preventing nature from being nature, fire from burning, water from being wet, and man from either drinking, eating, or sleeping?9

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The whole enterprise to free them had been a wild and daring one, but now it had been successful too. Luther so sincerely felt he was doing God’s work that he chose to blast the good news of the escape to the world immediately. With typical speed, he wrote up his account the very next day—framing it as an open letter to Koppe, the brave man who had sacrificed his name and more to do this valiant deed. It was titled Why Nuns May, in All Godliness, Leave the Convents: Ground and Reply. He wanted the whole world to know that everything had been arranged so that the young women’s reputations would be protected from the vile gossipmongers and slanderers who were sure to smell blood in such a story. Luther also wanted it to be an example to encourage others—and this it surely was. Luther’s central role in all of this is often forgotten. He was not merely the recipient of nine escaped nuns—one until death do them part—but he was the one who had managed the details of their genuinely dangerous escape, knowing that if it was successful, it would be a dramatic victory over the forces of darkness and a bold defiance of the devil and his various henchmen such as Duke George, who must have been steaming indeed when he realized what had just taken place. Luther took the plight of those trapped in holy orders very seriously, and that of nuns especially so. He knew many of them had been put in convents as girls and had never had the slightest say in whether they wished to stay. Many were unhappy and had never voluntarily taken any vows, so the idea that it should be illegal for them to leave struck Luther as immoral. Luther also was far ahead of his time in taking the sexuality of women seriously and in believing and saying that they were entitled to husbands and to sexual activity. That they might be kept in forced celibacy was a sin against the manifest order of God’s creation of men and women with desires for each other, which in turn created families. To deny them this was itself a sin. Largely as a result of the Nimbschen escape and the attendant publicity that came as a result of Luther’s writing about it, many nuns were inspired to leave their convents in the next years. One of them, Ursula von Münsterberg, was the cousin of Duke George himself. In fact, it was she who led an effort to attract a chaplain to her convent who was open to Luther’s ideas, and she was even able to smuggle Lutheran writings into the convent, which was in Freiburg. In 1528, when she was forced to flee her convent, she stayed with the Luthers in the Augustinian cloister in Wittenberg.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Part of Luther’s appeal came from his escalating outspokenness. Just when he said one thing that everyone insisted no one must ever say, he said another and then another. It was as if the zeitgeist itself could barely keep up with him. The reason for this was that as Luther’s sense of his own danger increased, so did his boldness. He thought, what do I have to lose? I am speaking the truth and therefore my life is in danger, so I might as well say what I can while I have breath in me. His willingness to go further and further, wherever he felt the truth led him, became breathtaking. For example, in a sermon he published in December 1519, Luther proclaimed—in German, so all could understand—that he advocated that the church should allow the laity to take both the bread and the wine at Communion. Hus had argued the same thing, so by doing this Luther was taunting all those who had accused him of being a Hussite, especially Eck. The implications were staggering. Luther was in effect reestablishing the biblical idea that everyone who has faith in Christ is equal and that the church’s position that priests are somehow different from the people in the pews is wrong. For him, the Scriptures established the idea of “a priesthood of believers,” and anyone who truly believed was a Christian equal to any other Christian, so why should only the priests take the wine at Communion? The Greek Orthodox and other Eastern churches had not done this for fifteen centuries, and the early Christians themselves had not done it either. Why should anyone do it? Where did the idea come from? Because Luther published the sermon in German, it was read and talked about far and wide. The laypeople’s persistent sense of grievance against the clerical class had found a specific issue and in a way had found a voice. Indeed it was this very issue that became one of the main ways the Reformation spread from parish to parish, as more and more believers demanded that they too receive the wine along with the host.