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 Martin Luther (2016)

  The German BibleWithout question, the largest of the projects Luther now faced was translating the entirety of the Bible into German. The manuscript of the New Testament translation that he brought back from the Wartburg in early March was breathtakingly impressive, although not quite finished. Luther knew that it still required the close and rigorous attention of Melanchthon. This linguistic savant knew the Greek better than anyone alive and now spent many weeks carefully combing through the text for nits, which he and Luther picked out. Luther also required extraordinary help with the very end of the book. In fact, it was with the penultimate chapter of the ultimate book, Revelation, that he needed assistance. In that chapter the New Jerusalem is described as having foundations covered with every kind of jewel. But how in the world to figure out the German word equivalents of such rare gems as chrysoprase, chrysolite, jasper, beryl, and carnelian? For this conundrum, he turned to his friend Lucas Cranach, who was creating twenty-one original illustrations—which were heavily influenced by Dürer—for the book of Revelation, which would be published with the New Testament itself. Cranach in turn appealed to his friend Frederick, asking whether he and Luther could borrow some of the gems from his treasury, which they did, enabling them to identify each one by color. Cranach’s illustrations were a powerful selling point for the book, which was printed in September and came to be known as the September Testament. Unbound copies of this tremendous literary sensation sold for half a gulden, while bound copies sold for a gulden, which Cranach’s biographer Steven Ozment tells us was roughly the price of a slaughtered hog.20 [image file=image_rsrc6M0.jpg] The whore of Babylon wears the three-tiered papal tiara. Showing his own theological leanings in his illustrations, Cranach slyly placed on the head of the whore of Babylon the distinctive and recognizable three-tiered papal tiara. When Duke George saw this, he once more blew his everlasting stack, condemning the tiara in no uncertain terms and demanding that his wayward cousin see to it that this triple crown be duly plucked from the whore’s head by the next printing. Luther sent early copies of the Bible to Spalatin and Frederick, as well as to Frederick’s brother Duke John and to John’s son Duke John Frederick, both of whom were at this time living in Weimar.* Three thousand copies were initially printed, all of which sold quickly. The second printing of an additional two thousand copies occurred in December, at which point the tiara had indeed been left at home. But the popularity of this epochal and groundbreaking book was so extreme that three months after the second printing, all copies had sold, at which point the price going forward was tripled.

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

  Your native genius is finding potential pitfalls. What a terrific thing to have someone on the team who can find holes in our plans, who can look at the underbelly.” While some managers might lament that Brian was a downer, a talent magnet would market his native genius to the team as a quality they needed. “We are going to use Brian whenever we are considering launching something major.” Adds Wiseman, this creates a real appreciation of diversity, and becomes incredibly engaging for the employee. “It’s a pretty good gig when you can go to work and your boss and peers understand and appreciate your natural brilliance,” she said. “And when a boss does that, she earns the right to say, ‘You know, Brian, we also could use a little more from you here,’ or ‘I need you to do this differently.’” The results for talent magnets can be astonishing, and they become widely recognized around a company. Ryan Westwood, CEO of Simplus, told us proudly of one of his employees: “He was in our marketing group as a graphic designer. He said he’d like to dip his toe into Salesforce consulting and get a certification. Two years later, he was the most certified person we had, with twenty-four, and he was considered one of the top one hundred Salesforce architects in the world. He became director of our solution department and started building intellectual property. All this because he was interested and ambitious and we opened up possibilities for him.” In contrast, one of Adrian’s first jobs after earning his undergraduate degree was at a monthly magazine where he was hired as an editorial assistant. The promotion structure had been in place since the days of Gutenberg (it seemed). Editors were expected to remain in a role for about seven years, advancing like the march of a regimented clock from editorial assistant to assistant editor to associate editor. When he expressed interest in learning more and growing—he had an interest in leadership—Adrian was told the only opportunity for a higher-level job was to become the assistant managing editor, typically in your fifties, and then hope that the managing editor would quit or retire. He stayed only a short time and moved on to a company with actual opportunities, where those with ambition could aspire to follow their motivators. To best understand what drives your people, we recommend having them take the Motivators Assessment, or at the very least take the time to observe and discuss what they seem to be most interested and engaged in at work. Again, this only happens when managers take the time to have more frequent assessments of skills and motivations with their people, and have honest discussions about what’s realistic and what might not be.

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

  To offer constructive feedback, we steer leaders away from the commonly recommended “sandwich” approach of offering a negative between two positives. In these cases, the constructive suggestions can get suffocated under a pillow full of praise, or employees may focus only on the negatives. No, the best constructive feedback includes specific ideas for improvement, instead of generalities, along with meaningful praise in the right measure. One of our coaching clients admitted he had never been good at giving feedback but was game to try again. One of his first attempts was with an employee who had been missing some deadlines. He recounted to us a private conversation with her. He said, “I’ve noticed some changes in the way you are working and your results over the past few weeks. I know how focused and driven you normally are, so I wanted to see if there was anything at all you are having trouble with that I could help with.” That was terrific, we told him. He got to the point and acknowledged the issue openly without hedging, but he also let her know how valued her work was to the team. He also offered to work together with her to fix the problem. The employee admitted to some personal struggles outside the job, and the manager was able to empathize. After listening, he offered her a couple of afternoons off to address the challenges, and together they worked on prioritizing her assignments for the coming weeks. They kept meeting weekly, and soon after she delivered a project ahead of time. We encouraged him to publicly reward that achievement, and he did in his next staff meeting. He said how proud she’d been to share with the team how she’d pulled off the win. When we ask leaders why they aren’t living up to their employees’ expectations in giving clear feedback, they often tell us that it is not only uncomfortable but time-consuming. “No one wants to hear what they are doing wrong,” they say. We understand. We had an employee in our corporate days who we tried to coach to collaborate better with his peers, but the fellow didn’t believe he had a problem. He was a friend of the CEO, so we had to tread lightly. In our next coaching session, we gave him specifics about the kind of behaviors we were expecting, and we offered facts about when he hadn’t lived up to expectations with actual things said about him by peers around the company (with their permission). The employee was still skeptical. Why hadn’t these colleagues told him themselves? He left the meeting and over the next few hours confronted each person we’d quoted. Each recanted like a prisoner on the Spanish Inquisition rack. They agreed that, yes, he was a terrific collaborator, and, yes, we must have misinterpreted what they’d said. Our employee gladly returned to his delusions. We recognize that there is a small percentage of the human population who will never accept coaching.

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

  He took action as an ally, using his position of privilege to sponsor me. His shout-outs made a difference, and definitely made me feel great.” What we learn from this is twofold. First, Digby Horner is probably the coolest name ever. And second, more on point, when allies take on the role of sponsor, they vocally support the work of colleagues from underrepresented groups in all contexts, specifically in situations that will help boost their reputation. This can’t be pandering but has to be honest promotion of people’s expertise. The goal for leaders is to support and promote those from oft-marginalized groups. For example, for several years Adrian has been asked to deliver keynotes on corporate culture at the Women’s Foodservice Forum, an industry group with the goal of advancing female leaders in foodservice. Three thousand attendees arrive each year to hear messages from luminaries such as Brené Brown and Maya Angelou. Adrian has been inspired by those attending and found it significant that about 10 percent of the attendees are senior male leaders—there to learn and champion the women in their organizations to greater success. These men are not benevolent benefactors, but wise leaders who intentionally invest in and rely on the skills of their protégés to achieve greater things for their organizations. Method 3: Stand Up Good allies don’t hide in the shadows, says Isaac Sabat, assistant professor of organizational psychology at Texas A&M University. Instead, they show their support through actions, even by seemingly small things like attending events, adding comments on Slack, or affixing stickers to their cubicles. He said, “Research shows that confronting bad behavior in the moment—responding to someone’s insensitive remark or calling attention to the lack of representation in the room—can be more effective when it comes from an ally.” If a person of color, for instance, calls out a microaggression, other teammates might see them as complaining or self-serving, he added, but when allies initiate a similar confrontation, others typically view it as objective. “If you can signal your allyship identity, then it shows people that you are supportive and that you are there for them if something goes down.” Yet Sabat notes that stepping up once isn’t enough, and allyship is a journey that grows throughout a leader’s career. “Be open to criticism and feedback,” he adds. “If someone calls you out on the way you [respond to a situation], or if you said something problematic, be open to learning and growing.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Erfurt, Aetatis 17In 1501, when he was seventeen, it came time for Luther to enter the university. His father had by now prospered enough in his mining business to be able to afford to pay his son’s way. So it must have been a moment of tremendous pride for Hans Luther to send his eldest off to the great university at Erfurt. “My dear father,” Luther later recalled, “maintained me there with loyal affection, and by his labour and the sweat of his brow enabled me to go there.” This was in many ways the culmination of all of his father’s efforts. In a few years, when Luther could go on to take his law degree, it would further crown these achievements, for then Luther would be able to return to Mansfeld, take a suitable wife from among the respectable families of their region, and at last begin his practice of law, much of which would consist of aiding his father in his business affairs. By our own standards, life at the university was quite regimented, with students arising at 4:00 a.m. for devotions and going to bed at 8:00 p.m. All students lived in a residential college called a bursa,* of which there were six in Erfurt. Students paid for room and board. Two meals per day were served, the first at 10:00 a.m., after four hours of exercises and lectures. After the first meal, there were more exercises and lectures until 5:00 p.m. Luther seems to have been in the Heaven’s Gate bursa, where the entire Psalter was prayed through every fifteen days during the early morning devotions, so he would certainly have become closely familiar with the Psalms during his four years at Erfurt. Also, during both meals of the day the students listened quietly as someone read aloud passages from the Vulgate Bible. Sometimes the Postillae of Nicholas of Lyra were read aloud too. These were exegetical Bible commentaries of which Luther thought so well that he praised them highly many years later, and when he was writing on the book of Genesis, he used them extensively. It’s therefore only logical to assume that Luther was at this early age deeply affected by what he heard. This must have been one important factor that impelled him to consider matters of God far more than the average Erfurt philosophy student, and we cannot doubt that even if he had never thought of it before then, he would during these years first have begun considering the idea of a life in holy orders.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther Burns the BullThus, on December 10—sixty days after Luther had read the bull himself—on the same wooden door where Luther had three years earlier posted his historic theses, Philip Melanchthon posted an invitation to an event, the likes of which had never taken place in Christendom. The poster described it as “a pious and religious spectacle, for perhaps now is the time when Anti-christ must be revealed.”7 But to what could this advertisement be referring? It referred to a book burning, but not of Luther’s works, as the papal bull against Luther had commanded. Rather it referred to the papal bull itself. In its way, it was what in the 1960s was called a “happening”—a theatrical event staged to make a public statement. And Luther’s fiery statement was that he was turning the tables by himself now symbolically excommunicating the false church that had thought to excommunicate him. One of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s avid students, Johannes Agricola, had been the one to organize the event, which was to take place outside the city gate, very close to the place where animals were butchered and on the very spot where the ghastly clothes and rags of those who had died of the plague were burned. Here by the repugnant carrion pit, Agricola and others had erected a pyre, and on the hour appointed—9:00 a.m.—after several hundred fellow professors and students had assembled as witnesses to this great moment, Luther cast into the flames one after the other the writings of the false church. Papal decrees were now defiantly hurled into the fire, and even a book of canon law found its way into the flames, and then the writings of Eck and Emser “the goat” too. Agricola had hectored his fellow Wittenberg students to contribute a copy of Duns Scotus’s commentary on the Sentences and Aquinas’s Summa. But in the end, none would part with their copies of these expensive books, else these prime examples of Scholastic teaching too would have fed the bonfire. And then, as these other works burned, Luther with a sense of drama like some magician reached into his cloak and produced the very papal bull that threatened to excommunicate him. He spoke the words from Psalms 21:10—on which he was during this time lecturing—“Because you have confounded the truth of God, today the Lord confounds you. Into the fire with you!” And then, in a final flourish, brazen and wild he flung the papal decree into the raging flames.8

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

  She had noticed one of her customers wearing a knee brace and, without being asked, called an attendant in the back and asked for the customer’s rental car to be brought up front so the person wouldn’t have to walk through the lot. The story took only thirty seconds to tell, and we noted the energy in the pre-shift huddle starting to build. Best of all, Delana knew that her managers were paying attention and grateful of her attention to detail. Aguilera presented her with an on-the-spot award. “And we make sure each accomplishment is posted on the bulletin board,” Aguilera told us later. It was the little things like this that kept his people energized. He was trusted, communicated well, and spent an inordinate amount of time with his high-potential people. When we studied Aguilera, he had the highest employee engagement scores in the entire twenty-six-thousand-person company. And what he learned to do can be replicated. Method 2: Match Gratitude to MagnitudeWe certainly encourage managers to recognize small accomplishments on a regular basis. But when a team member does something big, leaders need to make sure gratitude is commensurate with the accomplishment. When a reward for an achievement is not aligned with the impact, it might do more harm than good. “In the past, one department had implemented a program where they gave a ten-dollar gift certificate to recognize extra effort and say thank you,” said Shari Rife, manager of creative process and facilitation for Rich Products Corporation, a $4 billion food company in Buffalo, New York. It didn’t matter what action was being recognized; the recognition remained the same. “It was very informal, without much criteria surrounding it,” she told us. “And it caused real frustration with associates because someone who cleaned out the supply cabinet was recognized in the same way as someone who implemented a huge project. Because they both got the same gift card, it actually became de-motivating.” When leaders align rewards with the level of achievement, they help those who are anxious make more positive assumptions about their work. For small steps forward, verbal praise or a note of thanks is appropriate, but bigger achievements require a tangible reward presented in a timely manner. These include actions that bring a financial benefit to the organization, save or win a big client, improve a major process, or make the organization better in a substantial way.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  EPILOGUEThe Man Who Created the FutureIN THE YEAR after Luther’s death, Emperor Charles V rode his horse into the Wittenberg Castle Church and guided his mount toward the pulpit, the fountain of heresy from which Luther had so often preached. From that imperious height, the emperor was able to gaze down at the grave of the superlatively pesky fellow whose legacy now lay in ruins. This was because a month earlier, in April 1547, Charles had finally been able to break free from his other military duties and deal decisively with the Schmalkaldic League, at long last bringing these wayward Protestant children to heel. Joining with his brother, Ferdinand, their Catholic armies at Mühlberg soundly defeated Saxony’s John Frederick and Philip of Hesse. Protestant Germany no longer existed on any maps. Both leaders were arrested and imprisoned, and it seemed the Protestant revolution was at an end. As he sat on his horse overlooking the place where Luther’s mortal remains lay, Charles weighed whether to exhume his posthumously humiliated opponent and have his decomposed remains publicly burned, as befit every heretic. The most reliable stories say it was Charles’s hot-blooded Spanish soldiers who demanded this but that the noble and cooler-headed Hapsburg declined the suggestion, declaring, “I do not make war on dead men!” Thus the emperor let the arch heretic lie where he lay and lies at this very moment, then rode out of the great stone edifice and out of the troublemaking city of Wittenberg, never again to return. It was a fact that the imperial forces won the Schmalkaldic War and laid waste to much of Saxony, but by 1547 Luther’s ideas had spread too wide and sunk too deep into the lives of too many for the Reformation to be thus defeated. What might have sufficed a decade or two earlier did not suffice now. There followed resistance and more resistance until at last in 1555 the emperor was forced to accept the Protestant territories as such. He capitulated when that year he signed the Peace of Augsburg, formally granting status to the Protestant territories. Europe would never be a united Catholic territory again, and the next year Charles V abdicated his throne.

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

  Funny that research also shows some 65 percent of today’s workers feel shortchanged when it comes to receiving individualized feedback from their bosses. To offer constructive feedback, we steer leaders away from the commonly recommended “sandwich” approach of offering a negative between two positives. In these cases, the constructive suggestions can get suffocated under a pillow full of praise, or employees may focus only on the negatives. No, the best constructive feedback includes specific ideas for improvement, instead of generalities, along with meaningful praise in the right measure. One of our coaching clients admitted he had never been good at giving feedback but was game to try again. One of his first attempts was with an employee who had been missing some deadlines. He recounted to us a private conversation with her. He said, “I’ve noticed some changes in the way you are working and your results over the past few weeks. I know how focused and driven you normally are, so I wanted to see if there was anything at all you are having trouble with that I could help with.” That was terrific, we told him. He got to the point and acknowledged the issue openly without hedging, but he also let her know how valued her work was to the team. He also offered to work together with her to fix the problem. The employee admitted to some personal struggles outside the job, and the manager was able to empathize. After listening, he offered her a couple of afternoons off to address the challenges, and together they worked on prioritizing her assignments for the coming weeks. They kept meeting weekly, and soon after she delivered a project ahead of time. We encouraged him to publicly reward that achievement, and he did in his next staff meeting. He said how proud she’d been to share with the team how she’d pulled off the win. When we ask leaders why they aren’t living up to their employees’ expectations in giving clear feedback, they often tell us that it is not only uncomfortable but time-consuming. “No one wants to hear what they are doing wrong,” they say. We understand. We had an employee in our corporate days who we tried to coach to collaborate better with his peers, but the fellow didn’t believe he had a problem. He was a friend of the CEO, so we had to tread lightly. In our next coaching session, we gave him specifics about the kind of behaviors we were expecting, and we offered facts about when he hadn’t lived up to expectations with actual things said about him by peers around the company (with their permission). The employee was still skeptical. Why hadn’t these colleagues told him themselves?

• From A History of God (1993)

  A brilliant, lucid intellectual, he was no dried-up pedant. He was also a sensualist and was said to have died at the quite early age of fifty-eight because of excessive indulgence in wine and sex. Ibn Sina had realized that Falsafah needed to adapt to the changing conditions within the Islamic empire. The Abbasid caliphate was in decline, and it was no longer so easy to see the caliphal state as the ideal philosophic society described by Plato in the Republic. Naturally Ibn Sina sympathized with the spiritual and political aspirations of the Shiah, but he was more attracted to the Neoplatonism of Falsafah, which he Islamized with more success than any previous Faylasuf. He believed that if Falsafah was to live up to its claims of presenting a complete picture of reality, it must make more sense of the religious belief of ordinary people, which—however one chose to interpret it— was a major fact of political, social and personal life. Instead of seeing revealed religion as an inferior version of Falsafah, Ibn Sina held that a prophet like Muhammad was superior to any philosopher because he was not dependent upon human reason but enjoyed a direct and intuitive knowledge of God. This was similar to the mystical experience of the Sufis and had been described by Plotinus himself as the highest form of wisdom. This did not mean, however, that the intellect could make no sense of God. Ibn Sina worked out a rational demonstration of the existence of God based on Aristotle’s proofs which became standard among later medieval philosophers in both Judaism and Islam. Neither he nor the Faylasufs had the slightest doubt that God existed. They never doubted that unaided human reason could arrive at a knowledge of the existence of a Supreme Being. Reason was man’s most exalted activity: it partook of the divine reason and clearly had an important role in the religious quest. Ibn Sina saw it as a religious duty for those who had the intellectual ability to discover God for themselves in this way to do so, because reason could refine the conception of God and free it of superstition and anthropomorphism. Ibn Sina and those of his successors who put their minds to a rational demonstration of God’s existence were not arguing with atheists in our sense of the word. They wanted to use reason to discover as much as they could about the nature of God. Ibn Sina’s “proof” begins with a consideration of the way our minds work. Wherever we look in the world, we see composite beings that consist of a number of different elements. A tree, for example, consists of wood, bark, pith, sap and leaves. When we try to understand something, we “analyze” it, breaking it up into its component parts until no further division is possible.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1532, watching his own pregnant wife, Katharina von Bora, feed their young son Martin, Luther remarked, “It is hard to feed two guests, one in the house, the other at the door.” 58 When their fifth child, Paul, was born in 1533, Luther held him in his arms and mused “how much Adam must have loved his firstborn son Cain, and yet he became his brother’s killer.” At one level, this was a conventional recognition that fathers love their children no matter what they do, but the off-kilter remark may also reveal that he knew how envious a displaced firstborn can feel. 59 Whether or not Luther ever had an older brother, it was his education in which his father chose to invest, and this special treatment would have made him proud and confident of his ability to succeed like his father. 7. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Luder, 1527. But it may also have made him feel guilty toward his siblings, and worried about their envy. Luther knew the price of his university education: Two years of smelting had to pay for his studies at Erfurt, something his father doubtless made sure he never forgot. 60 He also knew that this was money not spent on his brothers and sisters. Seven or possibly eight children, five of whom survived into adulthood, had to be trained or found dowries—all to be funded from Hans Luder’s mining operations. The structure of the family economy, where the children were meant to make their way from the income of the Mansfeld ores, was likely to have fostered a sense of common purpose, and the family seems to have remained close-knit throughout Luther’s life. 61 When his parents died there was some bad feeling over the inheritance, which was to be equally divided, an irritation that perhaps revived conflicts from the past. Luther, as the eldest, acted as peacemaker and drew up the contract of division, insisting that now all “dislike and unwillingness” be set aside. 62 But Martin’s privileged position may have left occasional envy and bitterness as well. Luther’s almost allergic reaction whenever he thought others envied him would become a settled feature of his character. Whereas most of Luther’s generation of scholars came from the craft towns, and many were familiar with the large imperial towns and their elegant fashions and civic pride, Luther’s character was forged in a very different and much rougher world.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The very idea of a priest’s wife was radically new; those who lived with priests had previously been denounced as priests’ whores, excluded from honorable society, and their children considered bastards. Indeed, not everyone hailed the wedding. A pamphlet of a mock “wedding Mass” was published, which called Karlstadt a “fisherman of wives” when he should have been, like the disciples of Jesus, a fisher of men. 26 A man who liked to give splendid parties, Karlstadt spent fifty guilders on the wedding feast held on January 19, even traveling to Leipzig for special spices: He clearly intended the banquet to be a public statement. There was a large guest list, including the whole town council and the university, while his invitation to the Elector was even printed. Spiteful stories about the wedding soon circulated among the Reformation’s opponents. Cochlaeus told the tale of Karlstadt’s neighbor who was asked to procure the prized game for the wedding feast, and killed “the miller’s donkey” instead. The guests only discovered what they were eating when they came across its cloven hooves. 27 — T HE pace of reform in Wittenberg further accelerated. On January 6, 1522, the Augustinian order met in the town. From the sidelines, Luther had written to Linck and Lang, admonishing them to follow the gospel and support reform. The meeting was not very well attended but it reached radical conclusions: The chapter decided that any who wished to leave the order might do so, and that begging and Masses for the dead should be abolished. The prior of the Wittenberg house, his authority undermined by the charismatic preaching of Zwilling, received no support from the order, which refused to punish those monks who had left. Then, on January 10, the remaining Wittenberg Augustinians went even further and, probably under Zwilling’s leadership, “made a fire in the cloister square, went into the church, broke the wooden altars, and took them with all the paintings and statues, crucifixes, flags, candles, chandeliers, etc. to the fire, threw them in and burnt them, and cut off the heads of the stone statues of Christ, Mary and other saints, and destroyed all the images in the church.” 28 Karlstadt too now turned his attention to images, writing a treatise on begging and the removal of images—not a chance combination. At one level, the tract, published in late January in Wittenberg, rejected images on biblical grounds: The First Commandment condemned the worship of idols.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The meaning was clear to those who had gathered to witness the spectacle: He was breaking not only with the authority of the Pope, but also with the entire tradition of canon law, built up over centuries to cover all kinds of religious issues. Once again, Luther had staged a “happening,” a public act that conveyed his theological convictions irrevocably and memorably. 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Luther was determined not to compromise. As he wrote to Spalatin, if the emperor was going to summon him to Worms just to recant, he would not go; but if he were to be summoned to be condemned as an outlaw and killed, “I would offer myself to go”—the carefully chosen grammatical form (offeram me venturum) styling himself as a martyr.13 In another letter, to an unknown correspondent, he wrote that he had no care for himself, but that the great adversary of Christ, “the universal author and teacher of murders,” was doing everything to destroy him, adding that “my Christ will give me the spirit so that living I shall defy those ministers of Satan and dying I shall be victorious.” In the next breath he returned to more mundane matters, reminding his correspondent that he had not yet sent the money he owed to “your brother Peter, as he told me: make sure you do.”14 In the midst of it all Luther also found time to answer a query from the seventeen-year-old Duke Johann Friedrich about whether Christ normally slept. The Gospels did not relate absolutely everything that Christ did, Luther explained, but Christ was a natural man and “He certainly prayed, fasted, went to the toilet, preached and did miracles more times than is mentioned in the gospel.” These natural actions pleased the Father just as much as the greatest miracles, he told the young duke: Christ’s humanity was fully physical, encompassing even defecation.15 Finally on March 26, in Easter Week, the summons arrived in Wittenberg, ordering Luther to appear at Worms to give “information about the doctrines and the books…produced by you.”16 It did not specify that he had to recant.17 Luther, who was not a hoarder, chose to keep this document and it would pass down through the family. He knew that this was a historic moment.18 —LUTHER undertook the journey to Worms setting out on April 2 with a group of friends and supporters. There was the fellow Augustinian every brother was required to take with them (Johannes Petzensteiner was chosen); Peter Suave, a young Pomeranian nobleman; probably Thomas Blaurer, an enthusiastic follower of Luther who was studying at Wittenberg; Luther’s old friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf; and Caspar Sturm, the imperial herald, who had traveled to Wittenberg to summon Luther to Worms—he later became a major supporter of the Reformation. This time Luther did not attempt to walk but traveled in an open carriage, provided by the Wittenberg goldsmith Christian Döring. The Wittenberg town council contributed twenty guilders to Luther’s expenses and his old friend Johannes Lang coughed up a guilder, too, although by the time the travelers reached Gotha, the funds had mostly been spent, as Luther confided to Melanchthon.19

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  18 Despite the cheerful summer mood, there was an underlying menace in the Wittenbergers’ behavior, however. Luther’s and Karlstadt’s wagons were escorted by ranks of students, armed with spears and halberds. Armed men were posted to prevent fights breaking out in the lodgings where the students stayed, while seventy-six guards stood watch daily at the castle where the debates took place. 19 The disputation lasted nearly three weeks, beginning on June 27 and concluding on July 15, 1519. It was held in the parlor of the castle, the room having been especially decorated for the event. Two pulpits stood facing each other, one decorated with a tapestry featuring St. George in honor of the Saxon duke, the other, St. Martin. After a festive Mass in the Church of St. Thomas—a new twelve-part Mass had been specially composed for the occasion—the audience adjourned to the castle where Petrus Mosellanus, the university’s professor of Greek, gave a ceremonial speech, admonishing both sides to stick to the substance of the matter and to avoid harshness in their exchanges. 20 The contest was not confined to the debate, however: When Luther was invited to preach by the duke of Pomerania, he attracted such large crowds that the event had to be moved from the ducal chapel to the disputation chamber. Eck felt compelled to preach three sermons in response to the attention his rival was attracting. 21 Appearances mattered, too. Eck, a strong, tall, and vigorous man, was described by some of the humanist onlookers who wrote about the debate as a “soldier” and a “butcher,” a “lion” and a Hercules whose comportment conveyed self-confidence and ease. 22 He presented himself as a man of the people, a “peasant priest” who loved nothing better than to ride across the fields. He would spend the time outside the debate—discussions were held from 7 A.M. to 9 A.M., and from 2 P.M. to 5 P.M. —in his beloved woods, while his opponents sat indoors poring over the last session’s transcripts. Luther, by contrast, was painfully thin after years of mortifying the flesh. Johannes Rubius—who had been a student at Wittenberg but was a supporter of Eck, and who wrote an account of the debate—described him as “pale of face,” while Petrus Mosellanus wrote of Luther’s “thin body, so exhausted by cares and study that if you look closely you can almost count all his bones.” Karlstadt, he said, was the least prepossessing of the three contestants: “He is shorter, his face dark and burned, his voice thick and unpleasant, his memory weaker and his anger more prompt”; another observer remarked on his “repulsive, unbearded face.” Karlstadt had trouble making himself heard and he complained that Eck’s voice was loud, “like an ox.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As he had told Miintzer in 1522: ‘I have said more about visions and dreams than any of the professors.” These people, Luther argued, claim to be so spiritually superior, but they had not fought the Pope as he had. To underline the point, he provided a brief autobiography, including his debate at Leipzig and his appearances at Augsburg and Worms,” presenting himself as the sole Reformation hero while obliterating Karlstadt altogether. The Allstedtian spirits were profiting from Luther's victories ‘though they have done no battle for it and risked no bloodshed to attain it. But I have had to attain it for them and, until now, at the risk of my body and my life.” A thetorical tour de force, Luther here made the touchstone of truth his own physical existence, his preparedness to put his “body and life’ on the line. He equated the evangelical movement with the narrative of his own deeds, even with his physical being. This had already been evident in the words attributed to him at Worms: ‘Here I stand’ — his body implacably the guarantee of his truth and commit- ment. Karistadt’s brush with danger, as Luther well knew, could hardly stand comparison with his own. Yet the ‘martyr’s crown’ was important to both men. It had been the prospect of martyrdom which had impelled Karlstadt’s heightened understanding of Gelassenheit, and with it, the unfolding of his mystical theology. However, by ‘spirit’ — so important to his understanding of how the Bible should be read — Karlstadt did not mean the spirit of violence, but the spirit of God with which the soul should seek union, through Gelassenheit, and in preparedness for martyrdom. No wonder Karlstadt was so angry by the time he met Luther at the Black Bear Inn. * While Karlstadt was establishing his church at Orlamiinde, matters at Allstedt were proceeding apace. In March 1524 a nearby pilgrimage 252 MARTIN LUTHER chapel was burnt to the ground — and if Miintzer had not been involved, he had also not disapproved, believing the pilgrimage to be godless idolatry that had to be brought to an end. In June, the atmos- phere in Allstedt became tense when villagers from nearby Sanger- hausen fled to the town after Catholic persecution, and as passions mounted over how the arsonists would be punished. Miintzer became convinced that the Last Days were imminent.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1519, Luther had stated in passing that, in the face of death and necessity, every priest is a bishop and pope.” He had not yet reached the point of articulating the priest- hood of all believers. But in 1520, in On the Freedom of a Christian he writes with breathtaking simplicity: ‘Hence all of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings in Christ, as I Pet. 2[:9] says: “You are a chosen race, God’s own people, a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.”’* The writings of 1520 reflect a new, relaxed style, in spite of the pressure he was under. They radiate confidence and certainty. Up to this point Luther had specialised in writing theses — compact, pointed and well-defended sets of propositions — lectures and sermons. Now he developed a form of writing which could breathe and engage the reader. Partly he achieved these effects by employing techniques he took from preaching, such as numbering his different points, using memorable similes and deploying humour. But above all he addressed the readers directly, pulling them into the argument and leading them through the steps by which he had reached his own position. Condemning papal pomp in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, for example, he expostulated ‘Dear readers, how does such satanic pride compare with Christ, who went on foot, as did all his disciples?’ Or, examining the clergy’s immunity from secular courts, he wrote: ‘consider for a moment how Christian is the decree which says that the temporal power is not above the “spiritual estate” and THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN 157 has no right to punish it. That is as much as to say that the hand shall not help the eye when it suffers pain. Is it not unnatural, not to mention unchristian, that one member does not help another and prevent its destruction?’ He concluded that if temporal power were to be prevented from doing its job, ‘then the tailors, cobblers, stonemasons, carpenters, cooks, innkeepers, farmers, and all the temporal craftsmen should be prevented from providing pope, bishops, priests, and monks with shoes, clothes, house, meat and drink, as well as from paying them any tribute’.* The fact that many of these tracts were often illustrated with pictures of Luther on the front not only made the man and his message Wa S= HERNA IPSE SVAE MENTIS SIMY E><primiT-aT WITVS CERA LVCAE OCCIDVOS ‘MD x: x: 98. Lucas Cranach the Elder's etching of Luther that was sold at the diet and became hugely influential. An earlier verison had shown a more confrontational Luther.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Indeed, in finding Melanchthon a wife who would further tie him to Wittenberg, Luther had bound the younger man every bit as much as Luther’s own father had tried to trap him. Although there is warmth and engagement in his letters to Melanchthon, Luther also maintained a certain distance. As he tried to force Melanchthon to take charge of the Reformation in Wittenberg, he cajoled and bullied him, by turns flattering his intellectual gifts, fretting about his delicate constitution, and castigating him for giving in “too much to your emotions,” when he ought to be building up the “walls and towers” of Jerusalem. 34 This was a very different kind of friendship from that with Karlstadt, who could not be bullied. By publishing this extraordinary preface, however, which established the narrative of his divine election, Luther strengthened his charismatic authority as the leader of the movement. According to Freud, Oedipal struggles are universal because the path to sexual identity lies through experiencing murderous hatred and passionate love for our own parental figures. Whether one agrees with him or not, it is remarkable how Luther put his struggles—of which he was unusually aware—to the service of his theology. His relentless sense of the drama of his relations with his own father led him to the most profound understanding of God. In his theology, Luther contrasts God’s absolute power with human beings’ childlike inability to do anything to earn salvation—as well as the believer’s frustration at his or her childlike helplessness. Luther’s theology made God’s paternal relationship to the Christian the pattern of theological truth. If he is less able to transmit a sense of God’s fatherly care for the believer, he certainly conveys the awesome distance that lies between God and human beings. It is the distance, rather than the personal closeness, of God that lies at the center of Luther’s theology. Luther would not boast of a direct line to Jesus. Ever mistrustful of those who claimed that God talked to them, he spoke instead of his conversations with the Devil. The very intensity of his struggle with his father no doubt prepared Luther to attack the Pope with such enormous energy. It also enabled him to write so compellingly about the “freedom” of the Christian—after all, his own independence had been fought for very bitterly and at huge emotional cost.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s new life barely resembled his previous time in Erfurt. Apparently uncomfortable until he had acquired position and authority, the twenty-eight-year-old was given a public persona by the doctorate he was awarded in October 1512. Whereas in Erfurt he seems to have known virtually none of the citizens, in Wittenberg he quickly became acquainted with the small circle of intellectuals, printers, and artists in this town rising from the mud. His friendship with Cranach, who was one of the first “new men” to penetrate the council in Wittenberg, brought him into contact with the town’s old elite, such as the mayor Hans Krapp, who died in 1515 and whose daughter Melanchthon later married. The goldsmith Christian Döring, who worked with Cranach, became another friend.22 Luther now also enjoyed a more senior place within the Augustinian order. As district vicar, a post to which he was elected for three years after the Gotha sermon in 1515, he was in charge of eleven monasteries. He proved a determined manager. It seems that Luther had inherited his father’s head for business, and he was tenacious in defending the Wittenberg monastery’s income, insisting on scrupulous financial record-keeping. Much of his work, however, concerned personnel matters, promoting people within the order and transferring them from one monastery to another. He unceremoniously sacked the prior at Neustadt an der Orla, telling the monastery that “the whole or prime cause of [the monastery’s] disturbance is the discord with your head and prior, and this is more harmful than when a single brother is in discord with another. Therefore, I command…you Brother Michael Dressel to resign the office and its seal.”23 He certainly did not forget his friends. One of his first acts after he became district vicar in 1515 was to appoint his old companion and fellow monk Johannes Lang to be prior at Erfurt.24 A humanist and close friend of Luther, Lang had followed him from Erfurt to Wittenberg in 1511. Sending him back not only helped a friend; it also stamped Luther’s authority on his former community, a mere two years after the bitter correspondence about the doctorate. Lang was about Luther’s age, and his appointment at barely thirty marked the arrival of the new generation of “Staupitz’s boys.” Luther was aware that Lang’s task would not be easy—he knew there would be “grumblings among the brothers”—and he advised him to keep a budget, noting down all income and expenditure, so that he could work out “whether the convent is more of a monastery than a tavern or inn”—a strategy not likely to smooth his friend’s path.25 Meanwhile, Wenzeslaus Linck, another of Staupitz’s protégés, had been made prior of the monastery at Wittenberg: He would become one of Luther’s lifelong friends.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Some were twinned with a portrait of the area’s local evangelical reformer, showing his conformity to the Lutheran “brand.” The volumes of Luther’s works that now rolled off the presses featured a title page with an image of the Elector on one side, Luther on the other, and a crucifix in the middle, deliberately setting the reformer apart from Karlstadt and the Zwinglian iconophobes. It also yoked the truth of Lutheranism to the political identity of Saxony: The man who had called for a reformation of all Christendom inspired a cult of local patriotism. More of a designer than an artist, Cranach created a lasting visual style for Lutheran church art, changing the environment forever. His altarpieces popularized new iconographies in place of images of saints, like Jesus blessing the children, or visual representations of theological doctrines like law and the gospel, and he developed a didactic style that combined words and images. A whole culture of Lutheran objects developed, from Luther medals to earthenware beer jugs featuring the Pope as Antichrist or mocking stout monks. Luther’s apocalyptic rhetoric had become part of the new material consumption of a wealthy Lutheran middle class. 38 74. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Christ Blessing the Children, 1538. Luther was a brilliant hymn writer, and his introduction of sung hymns into the liturgy, with its engagement of the whole congregation—men, women, and children—transformed the place of music in religion. Hymn melodies became part of German musical culture, and would be intrinsic to the music of Bach. Bach’s Chorales, however, evened out their dancelike rhythms, creating a measured and somber style; Luther’s hymns were anything but dirgelike. 39 In his St. John Passion and St. Matthew Passion, which drew heavily on the tradition of Lutheran music, Bach dramatized Christ’s death in a highly emotional manner. In the St. Matthew Passion the angular melodic line spares the listener nothing of the viciousness of the Jews’ shouts of “Lass ihn kreuzigen” (“Let him be crucified”), and follows this with heartfelt individual meditations on Christ’s suffering; the implicit anti-Semitism of the glorious music can be hard to take. Yet Bach’s legacy shaped German music for centuries, as composers like Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn also turned to this profoundly Lutheran musician for inspiration. 75. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Law and Grace, 1529. Lutheranism was also part of the background to the greatest literary work of the sixteenth century: the story of Dr. Faustus, the scholar who sold his soul to the Devil. This had circulated as a folk tale, but the printed version of 1587 situated the doctor firmly in Wittenberg—and there were real-life parallels. In 1538, when Valerius Glockner, a wayward Wittenberg student, had confessed to making a pact with the Devil, Luther persuaded him to forswear Satan, saving him from a secular trial that might well have ended in his death.