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.

Page 37 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Satyricon (1)

  “And don’t you get the idea that he buys anything; everything is produced at home, wool, pitch, pepper, if you asked for hen’s milk you would get it. Because he wanted his wool to rival other things in quality, he bought rams at Tarentum and sent ‘em into his flocks with a slap on the arse. He had bees brought from Attica, so he could produce Attic honey at home, and, as a side issue, so he could improve the native bees by crossing with the Greek. He even wrote to India for mushroom seed one day, and he hasn’t a single mule that wasn’t sired by a wild ass. Do you see all those cushions? Not a single one but what is stuffed with either purple or scarlet wool! He hasn’t anything to worry about! Look out how you criticise those other fellow-freedmen-friends of his, they’re all well heeled. See the fellow reclining at the bottom of the end couch? He’s worth his 800,000 any day, and he rose from nothing. Only a short while ago he had to carry faggots on his own back. I don’t know how true it is, but they say that he snatched off an Incubo’s hat and found a treasure! For my part, I don’t envy any man anything that was given him by a god. He still carries the marks of his box on the ear, and he isn’t wishing himself any bad luck! He posted this notice, only the other day: CAIUS POMPONIUS DIOGENES HAS PURCHASED A HOUSE THIS GARRET FOR RENT AFTER THE KALENDS OF JULY. “What do you think of the fellow in the freedman’s place? He has a good front, too, hasn’t he? And he has a right to. He saw his fortune multiplied tenfold, but he lost heavily through speculation at the last. I don’t think he can call his very hair his own, and it is no fault of his either, by Hercules, it isn’t. There’s no better fellow anywhere; his rascally freedmen cheated him out of everything. You know very well how it is; everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and once let business affairs start to go wrong, your friends will stand from under! Look at the fix he’s in, and think what a fine trade he had! He used to be an undertaker. He dined like a king, boars roasted whole in their shaggy hides, bakers’ pastries, birds, cooks and bakers! More wine was spilled under his table than another has in his wine cellar. His life was like a pipe dream, not like an ordinary mortal’s. When his affairs commenced to go wrong, and he was afraid his creditors would guess that he was bankrupt, he advertised an auction and this was his placard: JULIUS PROCULUS WILL SELL AT AUCTION HIS SUPERFLUOUS FURNITURE” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-NINTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Even at an average rate of about twenty miles a day, though, the journey would have taken longer than a fortnight, so he may have taken the odd ride on a passing cart. Years later, Luther began his account of the meeting in the preface to his collected Latin works with the words, ‘So I came to Augsburg, afoot and poor.’ He had been given a mere twenty guilders by the Elector to cover his expenses, and his early biographer Johannes Mathesius reported that along the way he had to borrow a cassock from his old friend Wenzeslaus Linck. When they passed through Weimar, the provisor at the Augustinian monastery warned him: ‘Dear Mr Doctor! Those Italians are learned folk, by God. I’m worried that you won't be able JOURNEYS AND DISPUTATIONS 113 to beat them. And they'll burn you for it.’ Luther, making light of it, retorted that nettles he could bear, but fire would be too hot, a jibe at the ‘nettling’ of the scholastics who were attacking his work.” Luther was an observant traveller who loved nature, and he would have passed through one distinctive landscape after another, such as the forests, gravel and sandy soil around Nuremberg. His route was punctuated by the imperial towns, with their big half-timbered houses, imposing town halls, guild houses and workshops where craftsmen produced outstanding metalware, fabrics and scientific instruments.” The journey that allowed Luther to get to know the country’s rich south probably also strengthened his profound sense of being ‘German’, first imprinted on him during his trip to Rome in 1511. The two travellers reached Nuremberg on 3 or 4 October, and they finally arrived at their destination on 7 October. The pig-headed Luther was forced to change to a wagon about three miles out of Augsburg, because a stomach complaint had made him so weak that he could walk no further. But he quickly recovered, ready to meet with the papal legate four days after arriving in the city.” Augsburg was one of the largest cities of the empire, and would soon surpass Nuremberg as the leading centre of culture and wealth. It was home to the Fugger family, the richest merchants of the day, whose interests stretched from Europe to the New World.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Yet now he returned to Wittenberg, supporting the Elector and Spalatin in their wish to reverse all innovations in line with the imperial mandate. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the “disturbances” in Wittenberg, such as they were, formed a useful pretext for a joint campaign by Luther and the electoral court to bow to the provisions of the imperial mandate. This meant permitting the Catholic bishops to move against evangelical clergy, driving those who had married away from their parishes, imprisoning them, and even threatening them with martyrdom. However, it was important for the Elector not to be seen to support Luther, still less to permit him to return. To this end, Luther did as he promised and wrote another letter, drafted by Spalatin, saying that he was returning against the Elector’s will. Edited by the jurist Hieronymus Schurff, it took at least two and possibly three drafts before they had a serviceable text. It was immediately sent to the Elector’s brother Johann, who was asked to make copies. Again, speed was paramount: Copies were soon sent to influential people at Nuremberg—and one conveniently fell into the hands of Duke Georg. It had the desired effect: Friedrich was exonerated from the suspicion of having allowed Luther to return. 51 When he arrived in Wittenberg on March 6, Luther set about turning the clock back. 52 Meeting with Amsdorf, Jonas, and Melanchthon, he did little else for the first two days but take counsel. With the faction sympathetic to the Elector now dominant in the council, the councilors soon also fell into line, and with unintentional irony, the council made the returning Luther a present of cloth for a new cowl: The knight was to be clothed as a monk once more. On March 9, Luther began to preach a series of eight sermons, which became known as the “Invocavit Sermons,” in the parish church—“his” pulpit and the one from which Karlstadt had been banned. There was a new certainty and confidence in his style. Didactically clear, Luther’s sermons mixed humor, insult, and biblical exegesis. There was no hiding his scorn for the preachers—“Dr. Karlstadt, Gabriel and Michael”—who had convinced the Wittenbergers of their own godliness. Anyone can teach people the right phrases, Luther stated—even an ass can do that—but the true works of faith are deeds, not words. He insisted on the power of Scripture: The Word did everything, he said, “while I drank Wittenberg beer with my Philipp [Melanchthon] and Amsdorf.” 53 From the outset, Luther reminded his parishioners that he was the first reformer: “therefore, dear brothers, follow me….I was the first whom God placed on this arena.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “And when it comes to silver, I’m a connoisseur; I have goblets as big as wine-jars, a hundred of ‘em more or less, with engraving that shows how Cassandra killed her sons, and the dead boys are lying so naturally that you’d think ‘em alive. I own a thousand bowls which Mummius left to my patron, where Daedalus is shown shutting Niobe up in the Trojan horse, and I also have cups engraved with the gladiatorial contests of Hermeros and Petraites: they’re all heavy, too. I wouldn’t sell my taste in these matters for any money!” A slave dropped a cup while he was running on in this fashion. Glaring at him, Trimalchio said, “Go hang yourself, since you’re so careless.” The boy’s lip quivered and he immediately commenced to beg for mercy. “Why do you pray to me?” Trimalchio demanded, at this: “I don’t intend to be harsh with you, I’m only warning you against being so awkward.” Finally, however, we got him to give the boy a pardon and no sooner had this been done than the slave started running around the room crying, “Out with the water and in with the wine!” We all paid tribute to this joke, but Agamemnon in particular, for he well knew what strings to pull in order to secure another invitation to dinner. Tickled by our flattery, and mellowed by the wine, Trimalchio was just about drunk. “Why hasn’t one of you asked my Fortunata to dance?” he demanded, “There’s no one can do a better cancan, believe me,” and he himself raised his arms above his head and favored us with an impersonation of Syrus the actor; the whole household chanting: Oh bravo Oh bravissimo in chorus, and he would have danced out into the middle of the room before us all, had not Fortunata whispered in his ear, telling him, I suppose, that such low buffoonery was not in keeping with his dignity. But nothing could be so changeable as his humor, for one minute he stood in awe of Fortunata, but his natural propensities would break out the next. CHAPTER THE FIFTY-THIRD.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On the first point, Cajetan accused Luther of denying that the merits of Christ were the treasury of the Church, from which indulgences could be issued to deliver sinners from Purgatory; and that this was counter to the papal bull Unigenitus. This bull was not always included in collec- tions of canon law, and Luther suspected Cajetan of appealing to it JOURNEYS AND DISPUTATIONS II7 because he thought his opponent might not know it.” But he did, and called the cardinal’s bluff, countering that the text of the bull in fact said that the merits of Christ ‘acquired’ the treasury of Christ — and if this was the case, then merits and treasury could not be identical. Tempers became short. The cardinal kept shouting “Recant! Acknow- ledge your error, this is what the Pope wants!’ and Luther, hardly able to get a word in edgewise, started to shout as well: ‘If it can be shown that Extravagante teaches that Christ’s merits are the treasury of indul- gences, then I will recant, as you wish.’ The cardinal then seized the book of canon law, riffling through to find the page, only to discover that the text said that Christ by his merits acquired the treasury of indulgences. Luther triumphantly replied: ‘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, who wrote an account of all this in a masterly letter to Spalatin, could not resist pointing out to his friend that the German monk had proved a better Latinist than Cajetan expected. This may look like semantics; the underlying issue, however, was the relationship between Church and sinner, and the nature of forgive- ness. If the merits of Christ — and those of the saints, that is, their virtuous works — constituted a treasure stewarded by the Pope, then the Church was just a gigantic bank. On this view, because the treasure which had been built up by Christ and the saints exceeded what was needed to ‘pay’ for their own salvation, the ‘excess’ could be sold off as indulgences to the repentant sinner. But if the merits of Christ were not the same as the treasury, then the way was open to rethink the theology of repentance, and to relate Christ's sacrifice on the Cross to the believer through the concept of grace, as Luther was beginning to do.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  His first proper work, however, a translation into German and expos- ition of the seven Penitential Psalms, did not appear until 1517. As Luther explained, his translation drew on the old Latin Vulgate of Jerome but he corrected it by referring to the Hebrew edition of the humanist Johannes Reuchlin, the leading Hebraist of the time. The proud author wrote to Lang that, even if it pleased no one else, it did please him. This work was not, so he wrote to Scheurl in Nuremberg, intended for an academic audience: it was not even aimed at highly educated Nurembergers but at ‘rough Saxons’. Luther was certainly wrong about this, for the price of the book, and its polished literacy, might have made it just about accessible to the Wittenberg elite, but hardly to most Saxons.” On the face of it, it was surprising that Luther so rapidly became a central figure in the new university. He was neither senior in age, nor of higher social class, and before 1517 he had published virtually nothing. One of the reasons may lie in the fact that when he arrived in 1511, there was a group of academics all about the same age, creating more of a level playing field. In addition to Lang, there was Andreas Karlstadt, three years younger, but his academic senior and the man who conferred his doctorate on him. The professor of law, Hieronymus Schurff, was just two years older; Wenzeslaus Linck, prior of the Wittenberg monastery from 1511 to 1515, gained his doctorate in 1511, a year before Luther. Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Staupitz’s nephew and a highly competent dialectician, was just a few months younger; he taught in the philosophy faculty but soon switched to theology. Although they all taught different subjects they formed a cohesive peer group; many of them shared a similar formation and several were Augustinians living together in the Wittenberg monastery which housed about forty monks.“° Another reason for Luther’s rise may have been the effect of his forceful personality in what was still a minor institution. Even in 1536, there were only twenty-two faculty posts at Wittenberg: four each in theology and law, three in medicine and eleven in the arts." Karlstadt, for one, was profoundly influenced by his erstwhile junior colleague and new friend, and rapidly absorbed his ideas. In 1516 Luther’s student WITTENBERG 93 Bartholomaus Bernhardi gave a disputation, part of the customary academic training, and advanced some of Luther’s ideas on grace developed in the lectures on Romans; in its course, Luther publicly stated that he did not believe St Augustine was the author of the treatise attributed to him, De vera et falsa poenitentia. Karlstadt vigor- ously disagreed and immediately procured his own copy from Leipzig.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Listing his various duties in 1516 (by which time he had left Erfurt and was back in Wittenberg), he wrote, ‘I am a preacher at the monastery, I am a reader during mealtimes, I am asked daily to preach in the city church, I have to 62 MARTIN LUTHER supervise the study [of novices and friars], | am vicar (and that means I am eleven times prior), | am caretaker of the fish [pond] at Lietzkau, I represent the people of Herzberg at the court in Torgau, I lecture on Paul, and I am assembling [material for] a commentary on the Psalms.’ But mostly, he complained, ‘my time is filled with the job of letter writing’ — so many that he often forgot what he had already written, asking his friend and fellow Augustinian Johannes Lang to tell him if he was repeating himself. All that — and then, he went on, ‘there are my own struggles with the flesh, the world, and the Devil. See what a lazy man I am!’** Luther might gripe about the administra- tive burdens, but he clearly relished the intellectual work; and he was evidently good at managing people and organising, skills he may have picked up from his father. He could be firm, too. He admonished Lang to send a disobedient monk for punishment to the monastery at Sangerhausen and he ordered the prior in Mainz to send back a runaway.* All this administrative experience, especially his judgement of people, would stand him in good stead when he began to build his own church. His talents began to be recognised from his early years within the Erfurt monastery and more widely in the order. In an attempt to end the long-running struggle over the future direction of the order, Staupitz tried to unite the Augustinians, but seven monasteries, including Erfurt, suspected that his attempts would dilute the values of the observants and therefore tried to secure an exemption. Despite Luther’s close relationship with Staupitz, Erfurt chose Luther and his former teacher Johannes Nathin to put their case, first to the bishop of Magdeburg. The mission was unsuccessful, and so that same year the monastery decided to send a delegation, which included Luther, to appeal to the Pope.** The visit to Rome was by far the longest journey he ever undertook, and his only trip outside German-speaking lands. It seems to have confirmed his sense that he was a ‘German’. Throughout his later work, he unfailingly talks about Italians in negative terms, writing of the papal emissary Karl von Miltitz, for example, that as an ‘Italian’ he was fond of flowery prose, while deceiving him with his warmth and friendliness.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Just how difficult Luther’s followers found his appearance is revealed in Melanchthon’s biography of Luther, when he insisted that he had fasted a great deal, going for days without eating. 98 But Luther hardly resembled the haggard hermit and dedicated scholar Melanchthon wanted to present. Indeed, by that time a new iconography had developed, showing a monumental Luther with giant boots and tiny hands, his stance powerful, rooted to the ground and clutching a Bible. Some images showed a bulky Luther on one side, and a solid Saxon Elector on the other, both kneeling with a crucifix between them, like two giant weights on a pair of scales: There could hardly have been a clearer demonstration of the closeness of Luther’s Reformation to the Saxon ruling house. This image prefaced editions of Luther’s Bible and of his collected works and became an almost official representation of the Reformation. 99 49. Lucas Cranach the Elder, True Portrait of Luther, 1546. By the early 1530s, Luther had filled out, and the memorial images of the reformer produced the year he died show a bulky figure, a substantial man of authority very different from the lean, ascetic-looking young monk. 50. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther and the Saxon Elector in Front of a Crucifix . This image and variations on it became extremely influential. It was used in the 1546 edition of Luther’s New Testament, published by Hans Lufft, and in several volumes of Luther’s collected works on the title pages. The image also underlines the importance of the crucifix in Lutheran devotion, which Karlstadt had repudiated. By the early 1530s, with both his parents now dead, Luther had become “the oldest in my family,” as well as father to a brood of children of his own. He had also become less mobile, intellectually as well as physically, as he ensconced himself in his study and held court at the table. Now a man of substance, his married life had transformed his theology. He had shed asceticism for a remarkably positive conception of human physicality, and a flexible, pastoral attitude toward the marital dilemmas of his parishioners. This vision would separate him not only from the old Church, but also from the rule-bound communitarian moralism of those influenced by the Swiss reformers and their heirs, the Calvinists. Abbreviations CA Confessio Augustana, in Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 7th ed., Göttingen, 1976 HSA Weimar EGA Thüring isches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, Ernestinisches Gesamtarchiv LHASA Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt LW Luther’s Works, Philadelphia, 1957– RTA Reichstagsakten, Jüngere Reihe—Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V., 23 vols., Gotha, 1893– StadtA Witt Stadtarchiv Wittenberg VD 16 Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts Walch Johann Georg Walch, Dr. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften, St. Louis, 1880–1910 (revised version of the Halle Edition, 1740–53) WB D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefe, 18 vols. WDB D.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “At last it came about by the will of the gods that I was master in the house, and I had the real master under my thumb then. What is there left to tell? I was made co-heir with Caesar and came into a Senator’s fortune. But nobody’s ever satisfied with what he’s got, so I embarked in business. I won’t keep you long in suspense; I built five ships and loaded them with wine--worth its weight in gold, it was then--and sent them to Rome. You’d think I’d ordered it so, for every last one of them foundered; it’s a fact, no fairy tale about it, and Neptune swallowed thirty million sesterces in one day! You don’t think I lost my pep, do you? By Hercules, no! That was only an appetizer for me, just as if nothing at all had happened. I built other and bigger ships, better found, too, so no one could say I wasn’t game. A big ship’s a big venture, you know. I loaded them up with wine again, bacon, beans, Capuan perfumes, and slaves: Fortunata did the right thing in this affair, too, for she sold every piece of jewelry and all her clothes into the bargain, and put a hundred gold pieces in my hand. They were the nest-egg of my fortune. A thing’s soon done when the gods will it; I cleared ten million sesterces by that voyage, all velvet, and bought in all the estates that had belonged to my patron, right away. I built myself a house and bought cattle to resell, and whatever I touched grew just like a honeycomb. I chucked the game when I got to have an income greater than all the revenues of my own country, retired from business, and commenced to back freedmen. I never liked business anyhow, as far as that goes, and was just about ready to quit when an astrologer, a Greek fellow he was, and his name was Serapa, happened to light in our colony, and he slipped me some information and advised me to quit. He was hep to all the secrets of the gods: told me things about myself that I’d forgotten, and explained everything to me from needle and thread up; knew me inside out, he did, and only stopped short of telling me what I’d had for dinner the day before. You’d have thought he’d lived with me always!” CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “And don’t you get the idea that he buys anything; everything is produced at home, wool, pitch, pepper, if you asked for hen’s milk you would get it. Because he wanted his wool to rival other things in quality, he bought rams at Tarentum and sent ‘em into his flocks with a slap on the arse. He had bees brought from Attica, so he could produce Attic honey at home, and, as a side issue, so he could improve the native bees by crossing with the Greek. He even wrote to India for mushroom seed one day, and he hasn’t a single mule that wasn’t sired by a wild ass. Do you see all those cushions? Not a single one but what is stuffed with either purple or scarlet wool! He hasn’t anything to worry about! Look out how you criticise those other fellow-freedmen-friends of his, they’re all well heeled. See the fellow reclining at the bottom of the end couch? He’s worth his 800,000 any day, and he rose from nothing. Only a short while ago he had to carry faggots on his own back. I don’t know how true it is, but they say that he snatched off an Incubo’s hat and found a treasure! For my part, I don’t envy any man anything that was given him by a god. He still carries the marks of his box on the ear, and he isn’t wishing himself any bad luck! He posted this notice, only the other day: CAIUS POMPONIUS DIOGENES HAS PURCHASED A HOUSE THIS GARRET FOR RENT AFTER THE KALENDS OF JULY. “What do you think of the fellow in the freedman’s place? He has a good front, too, hasn’t he? And he has a right to. He saw his fortune multiplied tenfold, but he lost heavily through speculation at the last. I don’t think he can call his very hair his own, and it is no fault of his either, by Hercules, it isn’t. There’s no better fellow anywhere; his rascally freedmen cheated him out of everything. You know very well how it is; everybody’s business is nobody’s business, and once let business affairs start to go wrong, your friends will stand from under! Look at the fix he’s in, and think what a fine trade he had! He used to be an undertaker. He dined like a king, boars roasted whole in their shaggy hides, bakers’ pastries, birds, cooks and bakers! More wine was spilled under his table than another has in his wine cellar. His life was like a pipe dream, not like an ordinary mortal’s. When his affairs commenced to go wrong, and he was afraid his creditors would guess that he was bankrupt, he advertised an auction and this was his placard: JULIUS PROCULUS WILL SELL AT AUCTION HIS SUPERFLUOUS FURNITURE” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-NINTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Perhaps Luther’s most lasting achievement was the German Bible. After the fevered translation of the New Testament in 1522, he worked with colleagues to produce the full Bible of 1534, illustrated with memorable images by Cranach.47 It was not just that his prose shaped the German language, creating the modern vernacular as we know it.48 Each book of the Bible was prefaced with a short and brilliantly clear introductory exegesis, so that the reader encountered the text through Luther’s understanding of it. And because his authorship was not clearly indicated, his explanation appeared indistinguishable from Scripture itself. Luther always maintained that the Word of God was absolutely plain and did not need interpretation, thus avoiding the question his very first opponents had raised: How do you decide between rival interpretations of biblical passages, and should not Church tradition therefore be the guide? His conviction that the Word of God was clear prompted ordinary people for centuries to come to read the Bible for themselves—even if Luther would not have always agreed with what they took from it. At the same time, his insistence on aligning his own authority with God’s Word helped give rise to a church of pastors who were theologically trained, academics whose authority rested on their intellectual command of religion, demonstrated in their sermons. At the heart of Luther’s theology lay his insistence that Christ was truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This is one aspect of his thinking that is difficult to understand today and where the gulf that separates our world from his seems at its greatest. In this book I have tried to show why it mattered. Luther’s theological legacy was a view of human nature that escaped the split between flesh and spirit that has dogged so much of the history of Christianity, and has given rise to a profound suspicion of sexuality and an unbending moralism. Not so with Luther: Whatever else he was, he was no killjoy. He saw sexuality as sinful but only in the way that all our actions are sinful, and this perspective freed him to be remarkably positive about the body and physical experience.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther may have complained to Braun years before about his reluctance to study the discipline, but he had evidently mastered its methods. As his biographer Melchior Adam put it, “he fell upon the crabbed and thorny Logick of that age,” and the skills he acquired gave him a confidence in debate that came from knowing its techniques inside out. 52 — T HEN, on October 31, 1517, Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses. If they were seriously intended to bring about a disputation, their formal function was soon an irrelevance: Nobody ever took up the challenge. Written in the style of his theses against scholasticism, they have a cumulative rhetorical force that is far removed from dispassionate academic writing. The opening insistence on the importance of penance and repentance postulated a whole new religious outlook, not an academic debate, mounting to a crescendo indicting the entire system of devotion based on the calculus of indulgences. The placard print of the theses, its closely printed type covering a whole nearly A3-size sheet, is a powerful document. 53 And yet it is something of a puzzle that the Ninety-five Theses were known as such: Of the two surviving placards, one numbered the theses in batches of twenty-five, and the other presented “Eighty-Seven” theses, because the printer made several mistakes in numbering them. There must have been other printings now lost. Luther insisted later, in a letter to his Nuremberg humanist friend Christoph Scheurl, that he never intended them to be published or read more widely beyond a small circle, and some scholars have taken this as evidence that he did not arrange for them to be printed. But Luther was also explaining why he had omitted to send Scheurl a copy, as he should have done, so his statement is hardly conclusive evidence. 54 When he sent the theses to Johannes Lang in Erfurt, he did not ask his friend to restrict circulation to a small circle. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Luther, even though he later insisted that “the Word did it all,” may have helped things along a little. Certainly it strains credulity that he should have arranged for the theses to be copied out laboriously by hand so many times to send them to his various friends. 55 His letter to Lang, dated with some significance as St. Martin’s Day, November 11, seethes with emotion, announcing that he is sure the theses would not please “your theologians” and defending himself against any accusations of pride and temerity. 56 Written by an unknown German professor in an intellectual backwater, the Ninety-five Theses nonetheless gained widespread attention with startling speed. It was indeed, as Luther wrote to Lang, “unprecedented.” In just two months they were known all over Germany, and were already being met with refutations. In Augsburg the cathedral preacher Urbanus Rhegius remarked that Luther’s “disputation note” was available everywhere.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was proof of God’s anger. 55 The Luther biographer and psychologist Erik Erikson was no doubt right when he argued that Luther’s difficult relationship with his father was reflected in his theology: God became Luther’s father, far more powerful than Hans Luder could ever be. 56 But there was more to it than this. Luther’s understanding of God grasped the distance that separates humans from Him, stressing the essential unknowability of God, and his hiddenness in suffering on the Cross. He emphasized the whole gamut of the fatherly aspects of God’s nature; not for him the cozy evangelical view of Jesus as one’s friend. Luther’s notions of manhood and fathers were forged by the rough world of Mansfeld as well as in his relationship with his father. Nor was Luder the only person to shape his son: His mother was profoundly important, as were his siblings. Nonetheless, Luther’s revolt would inevitably bring him up against authorities, including the Pope and the emperor, which at the time were understood as forms of paternal authority. His ability to speak out against such figures had to come from within, and the first step was the rebellion against his father. “I AM THE SON of a peasant,” Luther averred, “my great-grandfather, grandfather and my father were all true peasants.” 1 This was only half the truth. If he came from peasant stock, Luther grew up in a mining town, and his upbringing was to have a profound influence on him. Martin’s childhood was spent in Mansfeld, a small mining town in the territory of the same name, where wagonloads of charcoal would file along the muddy roads, and where the smell of the fires of the smelters hung on the air. He would remain loyal to Mansfeld throughout his life, referring to himself as “from Mansfeld,” enrolling at the University of Erfurt as “Martinus ludher ex mansfelt,” and corresponding with the counts of Mansfeld until he died. 2 In 1546, he set out, ill, on what was to be his final journey to Eisleben, trying to settle yet another dispute between the counts. He knew that the trip could cost him his life, and it did: He died still trying to put matters right in Mansfeld. Yet this deep connection has been almost completely obliterated in the image of Luther we have today. 3 Most biographies have little to say about Luther’s childhood. Unlike his birthplace Eisleben, and unlike Wittenberg, where he spent most of his life, Mansfeld never became a site of Lutheran pilgrimage. But to make sense of Luther, one has to understand the world from which he came. There had been mining in the Mansfeld area since about 1200 but in the mid-fifteenth century a new process of refining allowed silver and pure copper to be separated after the initial process of smelting.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He was aware that Duke Georg was behind the imperial mandate, and that electoral Saxony’s interests were directly at risk. He warned the Elector not to protect him: ‘I am going to Wittenberg under a far higher protection than the Elec- tor’s. | have no intention of asking Your Electoral Grace for protec- tion. Indeed I think I shall protect Your Electoral Grace more than you are able to protect me. And if I thought that Your Electoral 232 MARTIN LUTHER Grace could and would protect me, I should not go. And since | have the impression that Your Electoral Grace is still quite weak in faith, I can by no means regard Your Electoral Grace as the man to protect and save me.’ In a postscript he offered to write any letter the Elector would like, to make it clear that it was his wish alone to return to Wittenberg. Luther later remarked that this was the harshest letter he had written to any prince. And yet it marked a complete capitulation to the Elec- tor’s point of view. Up to mid-January 1522 Luther appeared to have been very satisfied with how the Reformation was proceeding in Wittenberg. ‘Everything else that I see and hear pleases me very much. May the Lord strengthen the spirit of those who want to do right’, he had written to Spalatin in early December, even though he knew that there had been disturbances in the city church the day before he reached Wittenberg. As late as 13 January, he had congratulated Karl- stadt on his forthcoming wedding. He had not condemned the removal of images, the abolition of private Masses, the institution of Communion in both kinds, or even the rejection of the adoration of the sacrament. Yet now he returned to Wittenberg, supporting the Elector and Spalatin in their wish to reverse all innovations in line with the imperial mandate. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the ‘disturbances’ in Witten- berg, such as they were, formed a useful pretext for a joint campaign by Luther and the electoral court to bow to the provisions of the imperial mandate. This meant permitting the Catholic bishops to move against evangelical clergy, driving those who had married away from their parishes, imprisoning them and even threatening them with martyrdom. However, it was important for the Elector not to be seen to support Luther, still less to permit him to return. To this end, Luther did as he promised and wrote another letter, drafted by Spal- atin, saying that he was returning against the Elector’s will. Edited by the jurist Hieronymus Schurff, it took at least two and possibly three drafts before they had a serviceable text. It was immediately sent to the Elector’s brother Johann, who was asked to make copies. Again, speed was paramount: copies were soon sent to influential people at Nuremberg — and one conveniently fell into the hands of Duke Georg.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Far from confirming his obedience to his father, therefore, the letter marks his full independence. “Therefore—so I am now absolutely persuaded—I could not have refused to obey you without endangering my conscience unless [Christ] had added the ministry of the Word to my monastic profession,” Luther concluded. This was what gave him “liberty,” a word ambiguous between Christian freedom and the “liberty” from paternal power that is realized when one comes of age. He concluded by reminding his father of the danger in which his son now found himself. While the Devil might try to wring his neck, it was the Pope who might truly burn or strangle him, should God consider him worthy of martyrdom. 31 Luther was frank about the rage and anger on both sides—his own “hardened heart” that will not permit the “flow” so important to the body; his father “implacable,” full of “wrath” and “indignation against me.” His father had planned to tie him down in marriage but Luther managed to evade this destiny by becoming a monk. But now his conscience was freed, and “[t]herefore I am still a monk and yet not a monk.” Now that he is a “free” monk, however, he is also free not to marry. Luther concludes his “letter” not by asking for a paternal blessing but by blessing his father himself. It seems that he had won the Oedipal struggle and achieved manhood, while simultaneously managing to refuse to become a married man and father himself. He had also secured the last word. This was a letter to which his father could literally not respond. 32 The preface to On Monastic Vows, which had grown out of his letter to Melanchthon, may also reflect Luther’s changing relationships with his closest friends, in particular Melanchthon and Karlstadt. His friendship with the latter had by now clearly cooled; it is significant that Karlstadt had not been among those whom Luther took with him to Worms. So far as we know Luther did not write a single letter from the Wartburg to the man who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in Leipzig, and he never asked to pass on his greetings in any of the letters he wrote to the other Wittenbergers. 33 The relationship between Luther and Karlstadt had always been one of equals; Luther’s friendship with Melanchthon, by contrast, was founded on the older man’s patronage of the scholar he had worked so hard to lure to Wittenberg.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Because viewing each relic gave the pilgrim a certain number of days off Purgatory, Friedrich’s collection offered straightforward competition to papal indulgences. Its highlights were a monstrance containing a thorn from Christ’s crown and the entire corpse of one of the Holy Innocents, the young male children executed by Herod. 12 With 117 reliquaries and 19,013 fragments of saints’ bones, by 1520 Friedrich’s relics collection rivaled that of Albrecht of Mainz. 13 Friedrich refused to permit indulgences to be sold in his territory, partly because he feared that the Wittenberg pilgrimage trade might be endangered if indulgences were preached in other churches in Saxony. The money the pilgrims brought was not the only reason why Friedrich was so keen to acquire ever more relics, however. 14 Piling them up was a way of making Saxony a holy place, so that its people did not have to travel to Rome but could gain grace on home soil. Relics thus inculcated local patriotism, and the more, the better: this kind of religiosity had its own in-built expansionist dynamic. 15 Popular piety could also be put to good use for the dynasty. Those who knelt before the reliquary shrine containing the holy thorn and prayed for the souls of Friedrich, his brother Duke Johann, and their ancestors—as well as those who contributed to the rebuilding of Friedrich’s church or remembered it in their wills—gained a hundred days of indulgence. 16 It was good business. In 1490, Friedrich and Johann had even secured a papal “butter letter,” which allowed Saxons to eat dairy products in Lent if they paid an annual sum to their rulers; the money was then used to pay for building a new stone bridge over the Elbe. 17 Relics were also designed to overwhelm the viewer with the beauty and ingenuity of the reliquary that housed them. These were made of the most costly metals, gold and silver, and studded with gleaming jewels. They were intimidating statements of a ruler’s access to treasure—and grace—and unlike the later collections of princely precious objects, they were periodically displayed for all the prince’s subjects, not kept in a private curiosity cabinet. Friedrich ordered his court artist Lucas Cranach the Elder to produce a printed and fully illustrated catalog of his treasures, a work of art in itself, which appeared in 1509. Albrecht of Mainz copied it two years later, going one better by having the title page graced with a portrait of himself by Germany’s premier artist, Albrecht Dürer. 18 14., 15., and 16. Illustrations by Lucas Cranach from a book advertising Wittenberg’s Castle Church and its treasures. The etching shows Elector Friedrich and his brother, Duke Johann; the woodcut depicts the Castle Church. Each relic was illustrated and the lower picture shows St.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It had the desired effect: Friedrich was exonerated from the suspicion of having allowed Luther to return.* KARLSTADT AND THE CHRISTIAN CITY OF WITTENBERG 233 When he arrived in Wittenberg on 6 March, Luther set about turning the clock back.* Meeting with Amsdorf, Jonas and Melanch- thon, he did little else for the first two days but take counsel. With the faction sympathetic to the Elector now dominant in the council, the councillors soon also fell into line, and with unintentional irony, the council made the returning Luther a present of cloth for a new cowl: the knight was to be clothed as a monk once more. On 9 March, Luther began to preach a series of eight sermons, which became known as the ‘Invocavit Sermons’, in the parish church — ‘his’ pulpit and the one from which Karlstadt had been banned. There was a new certainty and confidence in his style. Didactically clear, Luther's sermons mixed humour, insult and biblical exegesis. There was no hiding his scorn for the preachers — “Dr Karlstadt, Gabriel and Michael’ — who had convinced the Wittenbergers of their own godliness. Anyone can teach people the right phrases, Luther stated, even an ass can do that: but the true works of faith are deeds, not words. He insisted on the power of Scripture: the Word did everything, he said, ‘while I drank Wittenberg beer with my Philipp [Melanchthon] and Amsdorf’.® From the outset, Luther reminded his parishioners that he was the first reformer: ‘therefore, dear brothers, follow me . . . I was the first whom God placed on this arena. It was also me to whom God first revealed to preach these his words.’ He concluded the first sermon imagining ‘how would it be, if I had brought my people to the “Plan” [that is, field of combat] and I (I who was the first to persuade them to come) wanted to flee death and not wait joyfully: how the poor flock would have been led astray!’ Those who make radical changes in religion, he argued, forget that you have to raise children first with milk, then pap, then eggs and soft food.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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 scrupu- lous financial record-keeping. Much of his work, however, concerned personnel matters, promoting people within the order and transfer- ring 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.’* 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.* A humanist WITTENBERG 87 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 amongst 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.* 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. A new circle of friends beyond as well as inside the Augustinian order solidified around him. Georg Spalatin — secretary, librarian and later confessor to Friedrich the Wise — was one of the most important, as he made the Reformation possible by securing the Saxon ruler’s protection. In the years up to 1525 he became Luther's most frequent correspondent, and the interlocutor to whom he revealed his daily preoccupations and deepest anxieties. Their friendship began by the circuitous route common amongst humanist circles: Spalatin knew Johannes Lang, and had him secure an introduction to Luther. As the Elector’s librarian, Spalatin was responsible for the university library and also advised on university policy, so the two men had to work together.” Spalatin had unlimited access to the Elector and all correspondence ran through him: he had Latin, whereas the Elector was truly comfort- able only in German.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The new Church still needed to be established, and in 1530, Emperor Charles V held another Diet on German soil, this time at Augsburg. It was now clear that there could be no accommodation between Lutherans and the Catholics; but the Reformation itself was by this time also split over Communion, and Luther’s opponents were not given a voice at the Diet. The final years of Luther’s life were dominated by attempts to reach some sort of agreement with the “sacramentarians.” A precarious accord was finally reached, but it left Luther convinced that he had been right all along—a psychological dynamic that stored up future trouble for the movement. At the same time, his antipapal rhetoric became increasingly bitter. His denunciation of the Pope as the Antichrist hardened to a fundamental axiom of his theology, and his declining years were further marked by violent disputes with erstwhile followers and furious diatribes against the Jews. After Luther’s death, splits emerged between different wings of his own movement, leading to a legacy of division within Lutheranism where each side passionately claimed his authority. —THESE are the external facts, but they do not convey Luther’s inner development, which is the abiding focus of this book. How did he have the inner strength to resist the emperor and estates at Worms? What drove him to this point? Why did he break with Andreas Karlstadt, his close supporter in the early years of the Reformation? Why did Luther, time after time, fall out with those with whom he had worked most closely, creating searing enmities and leaving his followers terrified that they might also incur his wrath? How did the man who had been convinced that “they won’t wish a wife on me” become the model of the married pastor? This book charts the emotional transformations wrought by the religious changes Luther set in motion. For Luther’s personality had huge historical effects—for good and ill. It was his remarkable courage and sense of purpose that created the Reformation, and it was his stubbornness and capacity to demonize his opponents that nearly destroyed it. Psychohistory has long had a bad press due to its tendency to explain complex personalities and historical processes in terms of basic patterns set in early childhood. Luther’s life has inspired some of the most famous psychobiographies, including Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther and Erich Fromm’s chapter on the reformer in his The Fear of Freedom. Both men were psychoanalysts.14 Erikson was also a developmental psychologist who worked with adolescents, and his lively book, published in postwar America, remains a classic; but one of the most important features of Luther’s Reformation is that it was not that of a young man. As this book will argue, although Luther’s relationship to his father was fundamental to his personality and his religiosity, and although his understanding of paternal relations pervades his theology, father figures were only part of what shaped him.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Martin Luther, Eyn Sermon von dem Hochwirdigen Sacrament, Wittenberg, 1519. The demand of the cup for the laity was clearly signaled in the illustrations, too. The very first page showed a ciborium, the container in which the Host was kept and displayed to the people. When the page was turned, the reader saw the cup containing the wine, and facing it, Luther’s provocative statement: “For my part, however, I would consider it a good thing if the Church should again decree in a general council that all persons be given both kinds, like the priests.” 48 The sacrament, Luther argued, was instituted by Christ and it consisted of two elements, bread and wine, and so laypeople, not just the clergy, must receive both. By calling for this publicly, and in German, Luther had made a demand that could be easily grasped by laypeople. Duke Georg immediately alerted the Elector to Luther’s latest pronouncement, writing also to the bishops of Merseburg and Meissen. 49 This was Bohemian poison: The cup for the laity was exactly what Jan Hus had advocated. Demanding the sacrament in both kinds was more radical, and heretical, than anything Luther had said in Leipzig. And unlike the insistence on the sinfulness of human works, or the attack on indulgences, this was not a theological argument but a simple demand for practical reform that could be taken up by ordinary people and would lead to far-reaching changes in every parish. Although Luther was careful to concede that those who were given only the bread still received the whole sacrament, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. 50 It was the call for Communion in both kinds that popularized the early Reformation as parish after parish demanded to be given the wine as well as the bread. It was also a frontal attack on the status of the clergy as a separate, priestly estate, who therefore merited receiving the whole sacrament and not just the bread. It would only be a matter of time before Luther launched his attack on the nature of the priesthood itself. His criticisms of indulgences had attacked papal authority and the Church hierarchy; now he was questioning something basic to every parishioner’s experience. Not only that, but he went on to attack brotherhoods, the most important of lay religious organizations, which underpinned the whole system of indulgences, with the practice of Christians praying for each other to ensure salvation. These brotherhoods, Luther wrote, were nothing more than excuses for “gluttony, drunkenness, useless squandering of money, howling, yelling, chattering, dancing, and wasting of time….If a sow were made the patron saint of such a brotherhood she would not consent.” 51 Luther was beginning to develop a distinctive German prose style—vivid, energetic, bursting with repeated verbs, and as earthy as Bruegel’s pictures. There was a growing market for such writing. In the months after the Leipzig Debate, printing suddenly exploded.