Resentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  For Israel, that meant revival of the laws of the Torah and especially of the book of Deuteronomy, that final and climactic text of the “Five Books of Moses.” Among those Deuteronomic laws is this one: No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt. (Deut. 23:3–4a) According to the tradition of the exodus, Israel escaped from Egyptian bondage and entered the promised land from the eastern desert just north of the Dead Sea. That meant traveling through the tribal territories of Moab and Ammon. Those peoples were naturally suspicious, unhelpful, and somewhat hostile to Israel in transit through their lands. Hence that eternal edict against any Ammonite or Moabite ever becoming a convert to the people of Israel. I move next from general legal theory to specific historical practice. During that post-Babylonian Persian restoration, between, say, 550 and 450 BCE , Ezra and Nehemiah focused on one specific problem to preserve the ethnic identity of their people. They demanded an immediate end to all Israelite marriages with foreign women . Listen to this drumbeat of the term “foreign women or wives”: We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land,…trespassed and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel…. Separate yourselves from the foreign wives…. Let all in our towns who have taken foreign wives come at appointed times,…all the men who had married foreign women,…descendants of the priests who had married foreign women…. All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children. (Ezra 10:2, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 44) They separated from Israel all those of foreign descent…. Foreign women made even him [Solomon] to sin…. Shall we…do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?…I cleansed them from everything foreign. (Neh. 13:3, 26, 27, 30) The ethnic reforms of Nehemiah are even more precise than those of Ezra. Before that last quotation comes this specification based on that text of Deuteronomy 23:3–4a cited above: On that day they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people; and in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God, because they did not meet the Israelites with bread and water [during their desert exodus from Egypt]…. When the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. (Neh. 13:1–2) Since this proscription was ethnic rather than religious, foreign wives and their children could probably not have become “converts” to Israel. But even if some others could do so, Ammonites and Moabites could not do so—ever.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I can’t accept the fact that Warren’s family ethos reflects Andrew Carnegie’s old saw about how inherited money has to be held back at the risk of withering ambition, but I sit in silence. The plane flies on, carrying us in its hull. Warren stares off into the distance the rich enter when talk of money comes up. But a woman whose third eye has begun to stare at some invisible baby is incapable of dropping the subject. So at the Labor Day clambake in the Rhode Island beach house—itself four times the size of what I grew up in—after intermittent nagging from me, Warren walks up to the white wicker chair containing his father and asks the old man about helping us when I get pregnant. Only on the drive home will Warren even say aloud that the talk took place. But any details about it stay sealed in that head of his. He’ll help us, Warren says. The car passes a long stretch of beach roses in bloom. How? I say. I don’t want to go into it. It’s private. I’m your wife, I say. At a stoplight before the freeway, he puts the car in park and stares at me, saying, You got what you wanted. Now get off my back. (Don’t think he spoke to me this way often. He didn’t, which is why—unfairly—it sticks.) At that instant, I stop drinking cold turkey. I don’t remember it being hard. In fact, it’s the last easy quit I’d have. I give up liquor and cigarettes to purify myself for the baby taking cherubic shape in my head long before my body gets to it. In some ways, I believe conception will be hard for me. One of God’s little prototypes, Hunter Thompson once said of some ne’er-do-well pal—never even considered for mass production. I pore over books about getting knocked up as if it weren’t standard order for every creature from cat to cockroach. Warren knows I’m logging my morning temperature, a sharp rise being a sign that you’ve dropped an egg into the chute. The first slightly overheated morning, it so happens that Hurricane Gloria has ripped down the phone lines on our block and shut down the library. Warren takes the bus home early like a man summoned to battle, and a month later, I miss my period. Already? he says, staring at me across the huge steaks I’ve splurged on, the half-empty bottle of nonalcoholic wine. You’re not excited, I say. He considers the burgundy fizz in the glass. Tastes like grape syrup. Not about the wine, you bonehead, I say. About the bun in the oven. Baby Otis? Warren says. It’s great. Pouring him more nonalcoholic wine, I say, You’re upset. You’re not excited. He stares across the candlelit table. No, he says. I mean, yes. It’s just... I’ve Ziploc-bagged the telltale pregnancy thermometer and stuck it in a vase between us, tying it with a ribbon like a daisy.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But then, overnight, something happened that would cause a change in plans. Some troublemakers had under cover of darkness posted a number of placards around Worms. Most of them featured the image of the Bundschuh, the peasant’s shoe, which was the symbol of the working classes and stood in contrast with the high boots worn by the nobles. The inevitable political implications of Luther’s stand had at last forced them into the wider conversation. The posting of these placards around Worms was clearly a threat. Or so many believed. The message was “Beware! If you convict Luther, we shall rise up!” There were other placards too. The one that most boldly had been posted on the door of the city hall itself read, “Bundschuh! Bundschuh! Bundschuh!” Another placard read, “Woe to the land whose king is a child.”3 There were even verses lampooning the papal nuncios Glapion and Chièvres, and they spoke of a force of four hundred horsemen and a thousand foot soldiers. This was hardly the work of a single troublemaker.* It had been the case for some time—and was greatly underscored as Luther made his triumphant procession to Worms—that the common German people had found in Luther a champion and now were clearing their throats to announce themselves. They had for several years read Luther’s works and had talked about his ideas, and his heroic stand against the tyranny of Rome was what they had been waiting for. He spoke for them—with the wit and fire of the common man—and they would certainly not stand aside while some Spanish emperor and Italian papal flunkies strove to crush one of their own. They despised the unquestioned power of the church and had seen the rank abuses of that power, and the hypocrisy of much of the clergy, and the fat monks begging for money, and they had had enough. The elites had had their day, and now Luther like a German Hercules had risen up to smite them, and they would be his passionate allies. He had struck a blow for the common man in demanding that they were equal to the priests and could take both the bread and the wine, just as the priests could, and the unmistakably egalitarian implications of Luther’s theology were now elbowing their way to the fore.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In what he now said and did in Wittenberg, Luther even won over some old foes. Fabricius Capito, who was a representative of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, had been one of the severest critics of Luther, so much so that Luther had called him a “virulent beast.” But when Capito heard that Luther was back in Wittenberg, he paid a visit to hear him preach and was moved by all he saw and heard. “Already,” Capito said, “the people are flowing together as if into a procession and then continuing on into the liberty of Christ.”13 He would within a year’s time leave his post with the archbishop and become a leader of the new evangelical movement in Strasbourg. Luther’s relationship with Karlstadt, however, was badly damaged. He was three years Luther’s senior and did not easily swallow Luther’s public rebukes of what he had been doing in Wittenberg. Zwilling, who was younger, rather quickly took Luther’s criticisms to heart and indeed mended his ways, but Karlstadt was more inclined to want to prove that Luther was wrong. He clearly smarted from being told by the elector he could no longer preach and from having been at the center of a burgeoning movement one moment and suddenly being put in the dunce’s corner and watching Luther lead the class. Karlstadt understandably became embittered at the turn of events, in which Luther was suddenly telling people that what Karlstadt said they must do they must in fact not do. “The honey-lined net,” Karlstadt wrote bitterly, “was more effective than the unyielding fetter.”14 At one point, he wrote a series of theses that he hoped he would be able to debate with Luther publicly, but the university forbade him even to have them printed. It is hard not to think that Karlstadt was at least in some ways a convenient scapegoat for all that had happened and that had been allowed to happen and even fomented by Melanchthon, Amsdorf, and the city council. Karlstadt began spending less time in Wittenberg and eventually became the pastor of a tumbledown parish in rural Orlamünde, from which he began writing pamphlets critical of Luther and where he would be free to put into action those things he had been forbidden to do in Wittenberg. He would conduct all services in German and without vestments; he would give Communion in both kinds; and he would utterly forbid images and infant baptism. Luther’s idea that God’s Word—that the good news of the Gospel—would have its way and needn’t be forced or rushed is at the heart of most of his theology. In one of his Invocavit Sermons, he preached,

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But on the other hand, there had now arisen a new version of the same problem, as extreme in the other direction as ever the papal errors had been. It was far on the other side of freedom, where sweet freedom became license and then bondage. The papal church had become so powerful that it had cozied up to the power of the state to the extent that no one could tell them apart; they seemed to have become one iron oppressive state, albeit with one part having more religious gilt besprinkled over its unyielding surface. It was a case of the church keeping no distance whatever from the state. But in Müntzer, there was a utopianist urge to utterly nullify all state authority, and therefore to usurp all that was political by assuming it into the church community. In either case, authoritarianism and bloodshed must be the result. To tell the larger story concerning how things spun far out of control with Müntzer, we first have to backtrack to Karlstadt in Orlamünde. It’s hard to avoid the impression that at least to some extent Karlstadt had repaired thither in order to lick his wounds and have some measure of the freedom denied him in Wittenberg by Luther and Frederick. It is not unreasonable that he should have felt resentment toward Luther, who was allowed to play the role of the bearded Moses descending from the Sinai of his Wartburg to mete out judgments and exile Karlstadt for doing what Karlstadt doubtless thought of as God’s good work. To some extent, Karlstadt was the victim of guilt by association. He had allowed the mad Zwickau prophets into Luther’s henhouse, and before coming to Wittenberg, they had been influenced by the increasingly febrile Thomas Müntzer, so the shadow of their collective unhinged utopianism unavoidably fell on Karlstadt. He had also allowed an atmosphere that ended in the burning of images and the destruction of altars. Even though Karlstadt never came close to the excesses of the Zwickau prophets or Müntzer, he had nonetheless preached against images and other things with such vigor that he could rightly be accused of legalism. But even in Orlamünde, he aroused Luther’s suspicions. He was said to have eschewed the world and weeds of academia for those of the peasantry. He no longer allowed people to call him Dr. Karlstadt, but preferred the somewhat pretentious egalitarian sobriquets of “Dear Neighbor” and “Brother Andreas.” He was also sartorially transformed, now presenting himself as a clodhopping son of the German soil. He had swapped his previous finery for shapeless rural duds: a gray peasant’s uniform and a bumpkin’s felt hat.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s story is a testament to how things beyond him shaped his course and the course of the Reformation in general. If the emperor hadn’t been distracted by his wars with France, Italy, and the Muslim Turks, the Edict of Worms would have been enforced with far greater vigor, and Luther would never have had these four years to continue spreading his ideas. If Pope Leo hadn’t been as myopic—and not merely literally—Luther and his vials of doctrinal nitroglycerin would have been handled with kid gloves rather than hammers. Also, the death of Pope Leo in December 1521 had an effect. Leo was succeeded by Adrian VI, who, like Erasmus, was a Dutchman and very much wanted to drain the papal swamp. It would be a new day, and everyone was excited that the sixth of the six popes from hell had at last taken his leave, presumably having shipped off to whatever eternal fate he had himself officially decreed. But after only twenty months in office, Adrian VI died, and as we know reformation from the inside had not gotten very far. Nonetheless, upon his election in January 1522, Erasmus wrote Adrian a congratulatory letter letting him know that he could count on his fellow Dutchman to do whatever would be helpful to him. And this is when Adrian joined Henry VIII in saying that Erasmus could be most helpful if he took up his famous pen to do battle with Luther. Erasmus had never before openly spoken out against Luther, but the time had come. The pope had made Erasmus an offer he couldn’t refuse. So this is most likely what finally pushed him to write on the subject of free will, which he believed was the principal and underlying issue between Martin Luther and himself. But there are more specifics to how Erasmus’s pen was put to paper. Luther’s letter against Henry VIII, following Henry’s harsh criticisms of Luther, seemed to Erasmus grotesquely indecorous in its harsh tone, and he felt obliged to let it be known that he felt this way. Then the pro-Reformation Humanist Ulrich von Hutten wrote very harshly against Erasmus in his Expostulatio, accusing this greatest of scholars of being cowardly, vain, and greedy for his own glory. He also categorized Erasmus’s relationship to the Reformation as opportunist and worse. So Erasmus was deeply offended and felt obliged to write a reply, which he did, titled Spongia adversus aspergines Hutteni (The Sponge* Against the Aspersions of Hutten). In it he said that his role in dealing with the Reformation had mostly to do with trying to parry Luther’s “obstinate assertiveness”4 and complained that he was abused for his stance by both sides of the controversy. He clarified that he desperately wanted to help preserve the unity of the church, so things such as what Hutten had written were unhelpful, to say the least.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Their bottomless cool—their cynical postures grown from privilege they were ungrateful for—could make me hate them. Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and think they hit a home run. But by God, I could outdrink the little suckers, and when the dashed lines around my body felt sharp enough to be visible, I might take up a held-out bottle. Faced with a boy I had a crush on—a bow-legged Missouri cowboy with the face and form of young Marlon Brando—I eagerly took the tequila his friend handed me. Forgoing lime and salt, I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed back a shot. As that one went down like bleach, I was holding up my glass for another. Whoa, Brando said, looks like you’ve done this before. Absolutely, I said. She’s from Texas, a kid from my physics class said. Texas girl? Brando said over his shoulder, before turning back to the two girls who’d presented themselves to him like dinner mints. I threw back another shot, which scalded a little channel through me. The boys cheered. By the third shot, the tequila seemed less poisonous. By the fourth, I felt a cool blue moon rising in my chest. Though I’d vowed not to drink that week (I had an anthro paper to finish), I’d spied Brando doing shots with his pals and wedged into the group. He cut me a smile before squatting down to unlatch his guitar case, and as he started to strap on the instrument, I saw in the case’s blue velvet bottom a weathered copy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, which felt like a further sign that we were carved from the same wood. That novel was one I innately knew to be unreservedly great, and whose first paragraph somebody started slurrily to recite: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. Next thing I knew, I was earping onto the frozen earth, then girls were steering me loop-legged to my door. Which was the end of that night and more than a few others. Come Christmas, I caught a ride to Dallas, then took the silver bullet-shaped bus into the Leechfield station, where Daddy stood in creased khakis with comb marks in his black hair. The neck I threw my arms around had gone loose and leathery. For the first time, he smelled old. He took my duffel bag, saying, You could use a few pounds.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Dev’s teary response, which Warren reported— You’re a big fat man with a red nose —proved Dev had enough Texan in him to take the patriarch in a verbal tussle. Other couples in our orbit had such easeful abundance inside their families. One took a pensione in Rome owned by somebody’s aunt who’s married to Lord Suck-on-This of the foreign service. Another woman’s uncle gave her a house down payment . It’s the most amazing piece of luck … It’s not luck! I want to scream. You’re rich! You’re rich, and your parents are rich. Of course the Whitbreads were, too, and none of them ever had a cavity that ached in the mouth like a rotted cypress stump for weeks on end. Nor did they have to scrounge nursery furniture from a garage sale. The only clothes Dev gets are handed down from my sister’s kid. That Lecia sends her son’s outgrown slick leather jackets and that fancy loafers come free never strikes me as fortune. Nor does my subsidized rent. Nor the fancy Harvard doctors Dev has through Warren’s job. Nor the Minks’ ongoing calls and letters. I have a gaze that blanks out luck any time I face it, like a black box over the eyes of a porn star. Whap and thunk . I compose my Christmas list for my in-laws, who always give exactly what you ask for—nothing more, nothing less. This year I’ve asked for a crockpot, but I secretly long for a Smith & Wesson. The machine jams. I resist the urge to step back five yards and head-butt it repeatedly. By fumbling around on the side, I locate some kind of handle and pull. I stare at the machine’s innards. For one thousand years I could ponder here before any useful action came to me. There appears behind me another young poet with tortoiseshell glasses and a striped scarf. He’s a real professor with the right to get his copies done who therefore knows how to clear the machine jam with a few arcane moves. It hums to life again. Celery-green light starts sliding across my face, and I can feel how massive my pores must look—real moon craters. Exfoliate, I think. When did I last exfoliate? Buy a scrub or grind up some almonds—was it almonds? An autodidact from a poor Irish family, yards smarter than I am, this young prof sports the countenance of an choirboy . You can jump in, I say. But he says I should go ahead before the secretary gets in and runs me off. Then he asks when my poetry book will be out, and it’s like he’s bringing up a wart or goiter I’ve secretly had taken off, since the book came out two years ago, with grossly underwhelming response. Even I barely noticed, being stuck in the muddy trench of Dev’s sleepless infancy when the box hit the porch.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As we have seen, for some time Luther had been uncomfortable with Karlstadt. He pointedly did not correspond with him from the Wartburg and he wanted Melanchthon to become the leader of the movement in Wittenberg, a snub to the older and more experienced man. In fact, Melanchthon turned out to be less clear-thinking, more mercurial, and less constant.56 Yet there is no sign that Luther blamed Karlstadt for what had happened in Wittenberg until after his return from the Wartburg. Then he rapidly personalized developments: It had all been the fault of Zwilling and Karlstadt. Their headstrong preaching had caused the populace to riot and had undermined civic order. This was of course the line that the forces of reaction—the conservative canons of All Saints—had been pushing for some time, presenting minor disruptions of church services as serious breaches of public order. As Luther set about restoring this “order,” his indebtedness to them became clear. He repeated their slur about people taking the sacrament after drinking brandy, although he had them drinking after they had taken Communion; and he told the story about the hosts that dropped on the floor, exclaiming that the sacrament was treated with such disrespect “that it is a surprise that thunder and lightning didn’t strike you into the ground.” Taking the wafer in your hands, Luther reckoned, does not make one a good Christian—at that rate, a sow would be the perfect Christian because it could pick it up with its snout.57 Zwilling rapidly fell into line. He apologized and recanted so fully that Luther recommended him to Altenburg for a post as pastor, getting him safely out of the way but putting him under the Elector’s supervision in a town dominated by one of Friedrich’s castles. That left Karlstadt alone with his head in the noose, as he later put it.58 The ban on preaching, to which Karlstadt had already agreed, was reinforced and when he tried to publish, he found the university censor would not permit him to have his work printed.59 It is hard to resist the conclusion that Karlstadt was a convenient scapegoat. While Luther forgave Zwilling with remarkable speed, he did not readily forgive Karlstadt, to whom he had been much closer. In Luther’s narrative the events in Wittenberg were transformed into the story of a broken friendship, and a personal betrayal by Karlstadt. He was the first in what would become a long line of former acolytes who were seen to have betrayed their leader. There is something chilling about the no-holds-barred nature of Luther’s hatred. In the Invocavit Sermons, he had refrained from criticizing Karlstadt directly, but there is no mistaking the note of sarcasm as he called his former colleague “Dr. Karlstadt.” Very soon, however, Luther was linking him with the Devil: It was Satan who, in the shape of Karlstadt, turned against Luther to shatter the Reformation. Karlstadt was an “angel” who had become an “angel of light”—that is, he was of the Devil.60

• From A History of God (1993)

  All violence was forbidden in the sanctuary, the sacred area around the Kabah, so that in Mecca the Arabs could trade with one another peacefully, knowing that old tribal hostilities were temporarily in abeyance. The Quraysh knew that without the sanctuary they could never have achieved their mercantile success and that a great deal of their prestige among the other tribes depended upon their guardianship of the Kabah and upon their preservation of its ancient sanctities. Yet though al-Lah had clearly singled the Quraysh out for his special favor, he had never sent them a messenger like Abraham, Moses or Jesus, and the Arabs had no scripture in their own language. There was, therefore, a widespread feeling of spiritual inferiority. Those Jews and Christians with whom the Arabs came in contact used to taunt them for being a barbarous people who had received no revelation from God. The Arabs felt a mingled resentment and respect for these people who had knowledge that they did not. Judaism and Christianity had made little headway in the region, even though the Arabs acknowledged that this progressive form of religion was superior to their own traditional paganism. There were some Jewish tribes of doubtful provenance in the settlements of Yathrib (later Medina) and Fadak, to the north of Mecca, and some of the northern tribes on the borderland between the Persian and Byzantine empires had converted to Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity. Yet the Bedouin were fiercely independent, were determined not to come under the rule of the great powers like their brethren in Yemen and were acutely aware that both the Persians and the Byzantines had used the religions of Judaism and Christianity to promote their imperial designs in the region. They were probably also instinctively aware that they had suffered enough cultural dislocation, as their own traditions eroded. The last thing they needed was a foreign ideology, couched in alien languages and traditions. Some Arabs seem to have attempted to discover a more neutral form of monotheism not tainted by imperialistic associations. As early as the fifth century, the Palestinian Christian historian Sozomenos tells us that some of the Arabs in Syria had rediscovered what they called the authentic religion of Abraham, who had lived before God had sent either the Torah or the Gospel and who was, therefore, neither a Jew nor a Christian. Shortly before Muhammad received his own prophetic call, his first biographer, Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767), tells us that four of the Quraysh of Mecca had decided to seek the hanifiyyah , the true religion of Abraham. Some Western scholars have argued that this little hanifiyyah sect is a pious fiction, symbolizing the spiritual restlessness of the jahiliyyah , but it must have some factual basis.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Let man, then, consider [the sources of] his food: [how it is] that we pour down waters, pouring it down abundantly; and then we cleave the earth [with new growth] cleaving it asunder, and thereupon we cause grain to grow out of it, and vines and edible plants, and olive trees and date palms, and gardens dense with foliage, and fruits and herbage, for you and for your animals to enjoy.13 The existence of God is not in question, therefore. In the Koran an “unbeliever” (kafir bi na’mat al-Lah) is not an atheist in our sense of the word, somebody who does not believe in God, but one who is ungrateful to him, who can see quite clearly what is owing to God but refuses to honor him in a spirit of perverse ingratitude. The Koran was not teaching the Quraysh anything new. Indeed, it constantly claims to be “a reminder” of things known already, which it throws into more lucid relief. Frequently the Koran introduces a topic with a phrase like: “Have you not seen …?” or “Have you not considered …?” The Word of God was not issuing arbitrary commands from on high but was entering into a dialogue with the Quraysh. It reminds them, for example, that the Kabah, the House of al-Lah, accounted in large measure for their success, which was really in some sense owing to God. The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circumambulations around the shrine, but when they put themselves and their own material success into the center of their lives they had forgotten the meaning of these ancient rites of orientation. They should look at the “signs” (ayat) of God’s goodness and power in the natural world. If they failed to reproduce God’s benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with the true nature of things. Consequently, Muhammad made his converts bow down in ritual prayer (salat) twice a day. This external gesture would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and reorient their lives. Eventually Muhammad’s religion would be known as islam, the act of existential surrender that each convert was expected to make to al-Lah: a muslim was a man or woman who has surrendered his or her whole being to the Creator. The Quraysh were horrified when they saw these first Muslims making the salat: they found it unacceptable that a member of the haughty clan of Quraysh with centuries of proud Bedouin independence behind him should be prepared to grovel on the ground like a slave, and the Muslims had to retire to the glens around the city to make their prayer in secret. The reaction of the Quraysh showed that Muhammad had diagnosed their spirit with unerring accuracy.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Back to the Black Bear Inn, Aetatis 40Later that August of 1524, Luther was dispatched to the town of Jena to preach a sermon. He had been sent on a preaching tour by the Saxon princes, to determine where Karlstadt’s and Müntzer’s “enthusiasm” had spread, with the idea of scotching it by pointing out its theological faults. Of course Karlstadt did not take kindly to being lumped in with the murderous Müntzer, so when Luther preached at St. Michael’s Church in Jena, which was close to his village of Orlamünde, Karlstadt traveled thither, slipped into the church, and—wearing the unconvincing “disguise” of his felt bumpkin’s hat—slumped in a pew to listen. Luther thundered against all of the things that separated him from the likes of Karlstadt and Müntzer. He took on the issues of “images,” infant baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Luther had now moved from his position of being ambivalent about images to saying that churches should in fact display them. He saw that the Schwärmer, as he called them, tended toward legalism—which Luther saw as directly opposed to the message of grace in the Gospel—and he linked legalism with the Law of the Old Testament, and therefore with Pharisees and with Jews. That there was a prohibition against images in synagogues therefore made sense to him, and thus he was now against both legalism and any prohibition of images. He also implied that the fruits of all these things must logically lead to the murderous evil of Müntzer’s insurrection. When he was through, he returned to his lodgings at the Black Bear Inn, the same place where two years earlier he had snookered the students on his return journey from the Wartburg. But Karlstadt had had enough and wanted to have it out with his old friend. So he wrote him a letter at the inn and asked for a meeting. Luther agreed to the meeting and some hours later greeted Karlstadt in the inn’s parlor. Luther was traveling with a number of Saxon court officials, and Karlstadt had with him his brother-in-law and two colleagues. Karlstadt opened aggressively by objecting to being attached in Luther’s sermon to those “riotous murdering spirits” in Müntzer’s camp. “He who wants to . . . put me in the same pot with such murdering spirits,” he said, “ascribes that to me without truth and not as an honest man.”13 This was a very strong statement to make in a public setting in those days, but Karlstadt was hardly through. He then poured forth the pain of having been prohibited from preaching in Wittenberg and even of having his books kept from being printed, both of which he not entirely incorrectly saw as Luther’s doing.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The bond may have had as much to do with shared misery as with shared boyhood pleasures, and Luther was scathing about the teaching his generation had received: “Everywhere we were obliged to put up with teachers and masters who knew nothing themselves, and were incapable of teaching anything good or worthwhile. In fact, they did not even know how to study or teach.”6 He wrote this in 1524, and some of the bitterness that lay behind his words may be related to another reminiscence: that at school he “was once beaten fifteen times one after another in one morning.” One must beat and punish children, Luther conceded, “but at the same time one should love them.”7 It was surprising that Mansfeld, a small mining town, should have had its own Latin school and it suggests the cultural aspirations nursed by its elite. Whatever its deficiencies, the school must have at least succeeded in imprinting Latin in the young boy’s consciousness, since his later ability to play with the language, to use Latin to express a whole gamut of emotions, and to form ideas with precision can only have developed through a very long familiarity with it. Latin was the language of scholarly debate and intellectual discussion across Europe, and learning it was the first step into an exclusive world; girls mostly did not learn it. But for those who had the language, there was the whole of classical literature to encounter, a world of heroes, soldiers, goddesses, and fables. The further Luther proceeded down this path, the more he moved out of his father’s orbit: He had a language the older man could not understand, and access to knowledge and intellectual analysis that Hans Luder could not guess at. And yet in one sense this was exactly what his father wanted for him. When the two lads set out for Magdeburg, they appeared to be on a path that would lead to a starry future together. But barely a year later, in 1498, Martin was moved from Magdeburg to school at Eisenach, a town that would play an important role again later in his life. On the face of it, the move was strange, for the Eisenach establishment was neither particularly famous nor large, and the town with its three thousand to four thousand inhabitants could not rival Magdeburg in wealth or prestige. At the turn of the fourteenth century Eisenach had backed the wrong side in the Wettin wars, hoping to gain independence from its Saxon rulers. As a result, it lost its status as the preferred residence for the Wettin dukes, who began to favor Gotha and Weimar instead. The plague also hit the town repeatedly in the fourteenth century, and there were pogroms against the Jews, who were expelled. Conflicts among the ruling elite, the creation of a new high court for Saxony at Leipzig, which undermined Eisenach as a legal center, declining wealth, and increased taxes all contributed to the town becoming a backwater.8

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Fluent not only in Latin and Greek but also, unusually, in Hebrew, he was numbered amongst the ‘humanist theologians’ by the Augsburg civic secretary and fellow humanist Conrad Peutinger.' Eck had become pro-chancellor at the University of Ingolstadt in 1512, where he introduced a number of reforms. His students included men like Urbanus Rhegius, who later became an influential cathedral preacher in Augsburg, and who praised his teacher as someone whose sheer intellectual brilliance incited the envy of others, and blinded ‘the horde of those suited to evil darkness’? Not only did Eck defend Johannes Reuchlin against the Dominicans but he also invited him to Ingolstadt, where he stayed from late 1519 to the spring of 1521; Eck regarded the lectures Reuchlin gave there as amongst his major intellectual influences.’ The Leipzig Debate had originated in Karlstadt’s reply to Eck’s refu- tation of the Ninety-Five Theses, the ‘Obelisks’, in late spring 1518. Eck had tried to prevent a debate on the grounds that his ‘Obelisks’ were intended for private discussion only, but by then Karlstadt’s 406 theses had already been printed. The Elector issued Karlstadt with a safe conduct to engage Eck in disputation. In the meantime, insults had begun to fly — Luther predicted that Karlstadt would leave Eck ‘a dead lion’ — and the temperature of the discussion became unusually heated.‘ In January 1519, Karlstadt teamed up with Lucas Cranach to produce a giant satirical cartoon which soon became known as Karlstadt’s Wagon, depicting Eck driving a wagon all the way into the fires of hell. The cartoon was published first in Latin, and then, in a sign of the times, in German. As visual propaganda, it was not exactly a success. So many words litter the drawing that the viewer can hardly discern the image: even the figure of God the Father is hidden by text. Indeed, even Karlstadt’s supporters told him that they could not understand its message. In response, the intellectual Karlstadt produced more words, writing a fifty-five-page treatise of explanation.’ Still, the cartoon had some impact: it was one of Eck’s major complaints to the Elector. The humanist theologian was particularly insulted by the fact that his likeness had been labelled ‘own will’, mocking his belief in the role of the individual in reaching salvation as though he were just determined to have his own way. Eck, however, wanted to tangle with the master himself, and had suggested such a possibility when he met Luther in Augsburg.° Luther THE LEIPZIG DEBATE 129 too was eager to debate with Eck in public and had no wish to leave it to Karlstadt.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He can often appear to be the ultimate spokesman of patriarchy, and it is easy to plunder his works for sexist aphorisms. His table talk was peppered with sexist banter, which was part of sociability at table where largely men were present, yet where Katharina was visible and perhaps within earshot. These were men who after all had been socialized in the all-male cultures of school, monastery, and university. For most of the years when Luther’s table talk was recorded, Katharina was pregnant or caring for small infants. “Let them bear children to death” is often cited to suggest that Luther saw women as nothing but baby machines. But he was insisting that the pains of childbirth were natural and pleasing to God, and he was arguing against a widespread belief that a woman giving birth was under the sway of the Devil, and that if she were to die before being churched, she could not be buried in the churchyard. Luther lived in a society where women ran household workshops, looked after apprentices and journeymen, and even engaged in the production processes. Women could incur debts, invest, and in some areas do business on their own account. Yet his comments assumed a sharp division of labor that simply did not accord with most people’s lives in the sixteenth century. Instead they reflected academic life, where a radically gendered division of labor made it possible for a man like Luther to write and read undisturbed while Katharina provisioned the household, saw to the accounts, and organized the student lodgers, who were a major source of income. 34 Katharina and the servants thus provided the invisible labor that allowed Luther to devote himself to study. As part of her responsibilities Katharina purchased land at Zülsdorf near Wittenberg to grow produce, in addition to the garden the family owned just outside the town walls close to the pig market. She was famed for her beer brewing, a necessity in a period when water was not safe to drink. 35 The marriage infuriated his opponents beyond measure. They soon turned their fire on Katharina herself, and in 1528 two young graduates from Leipzig wrote a couple of scurrilous pamphlets. Johann Hasenberg’s letter-cum-dialogue, addressed to “Martin Luther disturber of the peace and of piety,” called on him repeatedly to “convert, revert,” and was twinned with an offering by Joachim von der Heyde. His pamphlet called on Katharina to leave her “damned and shameful life,” and insulted her as a nun who had donned lay clothes and tripped off to the university at Wittenberg like a “dance girl.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  The various branches of the Shiah traced the divine succession differently. “Twelver Shiis,” for example, venerated twelve descendants of Ali through Husayn, until in 939 the last Imam went into hiding and disappeared from human society; since he had no descendants, the line died out. The Ismailis, known as the Seveners, believed that the seventh of these Imams had been the last. A messianic strain appeared among the Twelvers, who believed that the Twelfth or Hidden Imam would return to inaugurate a golden age. These were obviously dangerous ideas. Not only were they politically subversive, but they could easily be interpreted in a crude, simplistic way. The more extreme Shiis developed an esoteric tradition, therefore, based on a symbolic interpretation of the Koran, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their piety was too abstruse for most Muslims, who regarded this incarnational idea as blasphemous, so Shiis were usually found among the more aristocratic classes and the intellectuals. Since the Iranian revolution, we have tended in the West to depict Shiism as an inherently fundamentalist sect of Islam, but that is an inaccurate assessment. Shiism became a sophisticated tradition. In fact, Shiis had much in common with those Muslims who attempted to apply rational arguments systematically to the Koran. These rationalists, known as Mutazilis, formed their own distinctive group; they also had a firm political commitment: like the Shiis, Mutazilis were highly critical of the luxury of the court and were frequently politically active against the establishment. The political question inspired a theological debate about God’s government of human affairs. Supporters of the Ummayads had rather disingenuously claimed that their un-Islamic behavior was not their fault because they had been predestined by God to be the kind of people they were. The Koran has a very strong conception of God’s absolute omnipotence and omniscience, and many texts could be used to support this view of predestination. But the Koran is equally emphatic about human responsibility: “Verily, God does not change men’s condition unless they change their inner selves.” Consequently the critics of the establishment stressed free will and moral responsibility. The Mutazilis took a middle road and withdrew (i’tazahu, to stand aloof) from an extreme position. They defended free will in order to safeguard the ethical nature of humanity. Muslims who believed that God was above mere human notions of right and wrong were decrying his justice. A God who violated all decent principles and got away with it simply because he was God would be a monster, no better than a tyrannical caliph. Like the Shiis, the Mutazilis declared that justice was of the essence of God: he could not wrong anybody; he could not enjoin anything contrary to reason.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was published in Wittenberg, Augsburg, and Strasbourg. The opening brief letter of dedication spoke of the “hatred and envy” directed against the Wittenbergers. 5. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 49–50; 59–64. 6. Ibid., 55; 42–66; Bubenheimer, Consonantia 26–33. Sider, Karlstadt, 8–9: His was the second-highest income of the sixty-four clerics in Wittenberg. He earned 127 fl per year; Barge, Karlstadt, II, 530. He pressed Spalatin for one rich soon-to-be-vacant benefice, and then even tried facilitating a petition from his students; Barge, Karlstadt, I, 88–89. When Henning Göde died, Luther lobbied Spalatin to get Karlstadt named provost in his place; WB 2, 370, Jan. 22, 1521, only to rescind this “foolish” suggestion the following week; WB 2, 372, Jan. 29, 1521. Karlstadt then asked Spalatin on February 3 more modestly for one of the vacant benefices of Göde, so he could employ a secretary. 7. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 57; Sider, Karlstadt, 14. 8. Sider, Karlstadt, 8–10; Barge, Karlstadt, I, 9–31; Bubenheimer, “Gelassenheit und Ablösung,” 258. 9. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 72–85. 10. LW 31, 9; Barge, Karlstadt, I, 87, n.56: Karlstadt, Thesis 60: “Corruit hoc quod Augustinus contra hereticos loquitur excessive”; Luther, Thesis 1: “Dicere, quot Augustinus contra haereticos excessive loquatur, est dicere, Augustinum fere ubique mentitum esse.” 11. WB 1, May 18, 1517, 99:8, “Theologia nostra et S. Augustinus” 45, Sept. 4, 1517; in the letter to Lang of November 11, 1517, however, he reverts to “me” and “mine”: WB 1, 52; 64, March 21, 1518, “studium nostrum”; “iniuria homini a nostris illata,” 155:35 (in which he includes the students); WB 1 74, May 9, 1518, esp. 170:20–29; WS 1, preface to the complete edition of the Theologia deutsch, 1518, “uns Wittenbergischen Theologen,” 378:24. 12. Barge, Karlstadt, I, 75; 104–7. 13. They also shared an attachment to Staupitz. In 1519, Karlstadt had dedicated his treatise on Augstine’s De spiritu et littera to none other than Luther’s mentor Staupitz [VD 16 A 4237]; while the debt Luther owed Karlstadt was clear when he dedicated his “In epistolam Pauli ad Galatas” of early 1519 to Petrus Lupinus and Karlstadt, WS 2, 437. 14. They were Johann Dölsch of Wittenberg; Bernhard Adelmann von Adelmannsfelden from Augsburg; Willibald Pirckheimer and Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg; and Johannes Egranus of Zwickau. See Bubenheimer, Consonantia, 186. Eck had been permitted to add names to the bull, and he included several he suspected of being his opponents. 15. Freunde in the German of this period can mean kin. It begins by wishing them peace, joy, and a strong faith—a very personal opening from a man who usually chose his dedicatees carefully to advance his interests. 16. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 28–30; Missiue von der aller hochsten tugent gelassenhait, [Augsburg] [1520], [Grimm and Wirsung] [VD 16 B 6170], fos. A i (v), A i (v), A ii (r), A ii (v); A iii (v). 17. Furcha, ed. and trans., Carlstadt, 38, 139, 138; Karlstadt, Missiue, fo. B iii (v); Karlstadt, Was gesagt ist, fos.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Even so, Erfurt was not what it had once been. The city had never gained the civic freedoms it longed for. It wanted to be an imperial free city, like the fabled cities in the south—Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, Strasbourg—that were subject to no lord but the emperor and were able to make their own laws. But it was caught between two rival powers, Saxony and the archbishopric of Mainz, both of which wanted to exploit its wealth. When the two were at loggerheads, the city could play them off against each other, but unfortunately for Erfurt, the election of Adalbert of Saxony to the archbishopric in 1482, and the absorption of the Thuringian lands into the patrimony of electoral Saxony, meant that the two now often acted in concert. Forced to pay a crippling indemnity and annual “protection money” to Saxony in 1483, its citizens were left burdened with taxes for a generation; by 1509 its civic debt had swelled to half a million guilders. To make things worse, a fire had destroyed large parts of the city in 1472, adding to the financial strain.9 In such circumstances, it was easy for the clergy, who were exempt from taxation, to become the scapegoats for the town’s woes. Just how deep Erfurt’s anticlericalism ran would be revealed in the early years of the Reformation, when the town saw some of the earliest and most destructive anticlerical riots. It was also a town with turbulent internal politics. In 1509 there was a citizen revolt, as Erfurt became split between the patrician elite, who mainly supported Saxony and wanted its protection, and the populace, who inclined to Archbishop Uriel of Mainz. The archbishop had his agents in the town who successfully fomented unrest among the citizenry, alienated by the high taxes and the city’s financial woes. Ruled over by a tiny oligarchy of patricians, neither the economically important woad merchants nor the guilds folk wielded real political power. When the populace realized the extent of the financial misery of the town, the mayor tried to ride the storm, insisting that “we are all one community,” pointing at himself. This was a major blunder—it looked as if the “common good” meant his self-interest—and he soon met his end, strung up on the gallows outside the city.10 Refused an honorable burial, he was left to swing in the wind in his fox fur coat—a final humiliation, for fox was the cheapest fur.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There was, therefore, a widespread feeling of spiritual inferiority. Those Jews and Christians with whom the Arabs came in contact used to taunt them for being a barbarous people who had received no revelation from God. The Arabs felt a mingled resentment and respect for these people who had knowledge that they did not. Judaism and Christianity had made little headway in the region, even though the Arabs acknowledged that this progressive form of religion was superior to their own traditional paganism. There were some Jewish tribes of doubtful provenance in the settlements of Yathrib (later Medina) and Fadak, to the north of Mecca, and some of the northern tribes on the borderland between the Persian and Byzantine empires had converted to Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity. Yet the Bedouin were fiercely independent, were determined not to come under the rule of the great powers like their brethren in Yemen and were acutely aware that both the Persians and the Byzantines had used the religions of Judaism and Christianity to promote their imperial designs in the region. They were probably also instinctively aware that they had suffered enough cultural dislocation, as their own traditions eroded. The last thing they needed was a foreign ideology, couched in alien languages and traditions. Some Arabs seem to have attempted to discover a more neutral form of monotheism not tainted by imperialistic associations. As early as the fifth century, the Palestinian Christian historian Sozomenos tells us that some of the Arabs in Syria had rediscovered what they called the authentic religion of Abraham, who had lived before God had sent either the Torah or the Gospel and who was, therefore, neither a Jew nor a Christian. Shortly before Muhammad received his own prophetic call, his first biographer, Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767), tells us that four of the Quraysh of Mecca had decided to seek the hanifiyyah, the true religion of Abraham. Some Western scholars have argued that this little hanifiyyah sect is a pious fiction, symbolizing the spiritual restlessness of the jahiliyyah, but it must have some factual basis. Three of the four hanifs were well known to the first Muslims: Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was Muhammad’s cousin, Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who eventually became a Christian, was one of his earliest spiritual advisers, and Zayd ibn Amr was the uncle of Umar ibn al-Khattab, one of Muhammad’s closest companions and the second caliph of the Islamic empire. There is a story that one day, before he had left Mecca to search in Syria and Iraq for the religion of Abraham, Zayd had been standing by the Kabah, leaning against the shrine and telling the Quraysh who were making the ritual circumambulations around it in the time-honored way: “O Quraysh, by him in whose hand is the soul of Zayd, not one of you follows the religion of Abraham but I.” Then he added sadly, “O God, if I knew how you wish to be worshipped I would so worship you; but I do not know.”1

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Do not be afraid, but endure until the end, and you will be saved. God has made him [Luther] twist the Scriptures according to what he thinks right.” 38 — K ARLSTADT was fighting for his right to publish, preach, and be heard. Having, as he saw it, won that right after meeting Luther at the Black Bear Inn, he set about rallying support. He now signed his letters and tracts as Andreas Karlstadt, “exiled on account of the truth without a hearing,” or “unheard and unvanquished.” 39 Luther commented wryly that “I who ought to have become a martyr have reached the point where I am now making martyrs of others”—a comment that, despite its irony, betrays a recognition of how far things had moved. 40 In September 1524, however, a few weeks after the events at Jena, the Elector summoned Karlstadt to Weimar to inform him that he was being banished. Forced to leave Saxony, he embarked on a long pilgrimage through southern Germany, which Luther tracked with bitter precision through the letters of his various informants. He headed for Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Basle, and Strasbourg, while his colleague and brother-in-law Gerhard Westerburg traveled to Zurich and then Basle, where he was instrumental in getting Karlstadt’s work published. 41 Back in Orlamünde, Karlstadt’s wife gave birth before being forced to leave as well, and she now joined her husband on his travels. Karlstadt certainly made use of his permission to publish, printing seven tracts in Basle when beyond Luther’s reach. Under Westerburg’s reassuringly patrician patronage, Karlstadt’s ideas gained a new readership; meanwhile his supporter Martin Reinhard had traveled to Cologne to spread his message there as well. 42 There were rumors that Karlstadt had got his views about the sacrament from Luther himself, in secret discussions, and that Luther, who did not yet dare to deny publicly that Christ was truly present in the bread and wine, would soon come out in support. In Strasbourg, Wolfgang Capito and the humanist Otto Brunfels read Karlstadt’s works and agreed with his views on the sacrament; in Basle, the reformer and humanist Johannes Oecolampadius was taking Karlstadt’s side; in Nuremberg too, Karlstadt was finding readers, and in Magdeburg, Königsberg, and even the Netherlands, people were joining in what Luther and his followers would soon denounce as the “spirit of Müntzer and Karlstadt.” 43 Luther’s man in Strasbourg, Nikolaus Gerbel, warned that Karlstadt was distributing copies of his works printed in Basle and gaining supporters; apparently he was telling everyone that he had been banished by Luther because he could not overcome him with Scripture. The Strasbourg preachers wrote collectively to Luther, sending five of Karlstadt’s writings and asking for his advice.