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 Martin Luther (2016)

  They tried to get the doctorate declared void and have him fined, on the grounds that he had broken the oath taken when he became a student at Erfurt that he would follow no other university. Luther replied that he had not actually sworn such an oath—it had been overlooked—but the damage had been done. What should have been a joyous occasion was marred by the envious attacks of men who had once been his teachers. Luther was particularly irritated by the fact that the assault was headed by Johannes Nathin, the man who had probably been his companion to Rome; this bitter betrayal may be another reason why his memories of Rome became so dark. Two years after the doctoral celebration, he was still complaining about his treatment, and objected in a letter to the Erfurt monastery to a new missive from Nathin, composed “as if in the name of you all,” that accused him of being a shameful perjurer. Luther insisted that he was neither a perjurer nor oath-breaker, and had good reason to be angry at the attack. But just as he had received undeserved blessings from the Lord, so now he wanted to set aside the bitterness his opponents deserved and accord them cordiality. 53 The incident was deeply wounding, but may have had more to do with the politics of the order than the location of Luther’s studies. He had undertaken the doctorate because of Staupitz, whose more conciliatory line within the Augustinians Nathin had opposed. He may have seen Luther as a turncoat, which would explain the depths of resentment and the refusal to come to the celebration. 54 Luther had been caught up in a fight over different visions of the order’s future. Luther would have spent time with his confessor both in Erfurt and Wittenberg; they would also have met on their travels across the region. Luther claimed, “I got everything from Staupitz,” 55 and, after his death, he recalled his former mentor as a good and comforting presence. In 1518, in the letter he sent with his explanations of the Ninety-five Theses to Staupitz, he reminded him of a conversation about “true repentance” that had pierced him like an arrow, in which the older man had said that it must begin “with the love of God and righteousness.” Indeed, in a letter to Elector Johann Friedrich in 1545, he wrote of his debt to his confessor, saying that he must praise him “if I don’t want to be a damned, ungrateful papist ass,” because he was “my father in this teaching who gave birth to me in Christ.” 56 Yet rather like his relationship with Johannes Braun in Eisenach, which also grew cold, Luther seems often to have projected qualities onto Staupitz that were not actually there, and while he later recalled Staupitz’s sayings in his table talk and writings, he often repeated the same remarks, as if his image of Staupitz had become ossified.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Melancholy also played a part in his friendship with Bugenhagen, or as Luther liked to call him, “Dr. Pommer,” a former teacher and priest who was pastor of Wittenberg from 1523 (with interruptions) and acted as Luther’s confessor until the reformer’s death. The son of a town councilor in Pomerania, he was one of the few of Luther’s followers to come from a region where Low German was spoken, and he was therefore sent to implement the Reformation in Pomerania as well as in Braunschweig, Hamburg, Lübeck, and even Denmark.21 Crucially important in comforting Luther during his breakdown in 1527, he repeatedly provided the pastoral care Luther craved during his periods of melancholy, just as Staupitz had done.22 Amsdorf was another close friend on whom Luther relied, and whose intellectual formation was similar to his own. He was of noble birth, the nephew of Staupitz, and his father was a courtier of Friedrich the Wise. At Wittenberg, in a job Staupitz had secured for him, he had taught the philosophy of Duns Scotus, Staupitz’s favored philosopher.23 He and Luther had first met in 1508 but Amsdorf was particularly drawn by Luther’s theses, which his student Bartholomäus Bernhardi defended in 1516; from then on, he became a doughty and determined supporter of the Reformation, devoting his entire energies to spreading Luther’s message.24 He apparently remained a bachelor, though Katharina von Bora reputedly insisted she would marry only Luther or him.25 Neither Amsdorf nor Bugenhagen, around Luther’s age, could be considered his intellectual peers, and otherwise he seems to have found it easier to sustain close friendships with younger men who could not even pretend to be on equal terms with him. Johann Agricola, Jonas, and Melanchthon, for example, were all a good decade younger. Luther knew how to attract the young: From his time in the monastery, he was used to employing assistants to whom he could delegate. His secretaries Veit Dietrich (who became his confidant during his time in Coburg Castle) and Georg Rörer were both central to transmitting the cult of Luther’s memory after his death. Of the rising generation he trusted Caspar Cruciger as an excellent theologian, and in 1539 Luther nominated him to be his successor. He is “absolutely outstanding,” he declared, a model “on whom I’m relying after my death.”26 —SUCH praise and support, however, could be withdrawn the moment Luther was displeased, and opponents mocked the bitter divisions caused by his willingness to turn on friends and allies. A long series of public and painful ruptures punctuated the 1530s and ’40s and the centrality of Luther to the movement made these enmities existential for the Reformation.27

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Agricola put the subjective feelings of the believer at the heart of salvation—something that Luther refused to do—and his theology, with its concern for troubled consciences, moved too quickly to focus on the forgiveness of sin and to relieve the individual’s misery. The reaction was harsh: When Agricola published three sermons with Luther’s own printer, Hans Lufft, in July 1537, they were seized, and the hapless printer was imprisoned. 39 Next Luther published Agricola’s theses on the law (which had been circulating secretly and were rumored to be critical of Melanchthon) in a broadsheet, much to Agricola’s alarm. Pointedly, Luther dedicated his refutation to Caspar Güttel, the preacher at Eisleben, and it was to Güttel, too, that Luther dedicated Against the Antinomians, which he published in 1539; it attacked Agricola and denounced those who rejected the Law as binding on Christians. 40 The dispute dragged on for several years, with passionate reconciliations followed by equally passionate denunciations. At one point, Agricola even sought Luther out in the church, begging for forgiveness. To his friends at table, Luther confided how he felt: “As God is my witness, I loved you and still loved you,” while Agricola insisted that he “had always considered [Luther] as my father in God’s place, through whom I too became a Christian and a child of God.” But for the past three years, Luther had walked all over him, “and I crawled after him like a poor little dog.” 41 Agricola’s difficulty was that he continued to depend on Luther—without his goodwill, he stood no chance of an ongoing job or even of getting his salary paid by the Elector. 42 In 1538, Luther revoked Agricola’s permission to lecture at the university, telling him that he had only been allowed to lecture so he would stop wasting time and annoying people. 43 Then Luther reversed direction and made peace with him, persuaded the Elector to permit him to preach again, and publicly declared his honor to the university. That reconciliation only lasted a short while, however, and Agricola then formally appealed to the university and to Bugenhagen, next to the clergy of Mansfeld, the town of Eisleben and all its inhabitants, and finally to the Elector himself, threatening to publicize how unfairly he had been treated.

• From Satyricon (1)

  At our first opportunity of exchanging confidences, she revealed to me what she had discovered and I candidly confessed, telling her of the coldness with which I had always met his advances. The far-sighted woman remarked that it would be necessary for us to use our wits. It turned out that her advice was sound, for I soon found out that complacency to the one meant possession of the other. Giton, in the meantime, was recruiting his exhausted strength, and Tryphaena turned her attention to me, but, meeting with a repulse, she flounced out in a rage. The next thing this burning harlot did was to discover my commerce with both husband and wife. As for his wantonness with me, she flung that aside, as by it she lost nothing, but she fell upon the secret gratifications of Doris and made them known to Lycas, who, his jealousy proving stronger than his lust, took steps to get revenge. Doris, however, forewarned by Tryphaena’s maid, looked out for squalls and held aloof from any secret assignations. When I became aware of all this, I heartily cursed the perfidy of Tryphaena and the ungrateful soul of Lycas, and made up my mind to be gone. Fortune favored me, as it turned out, for a vessel sacred to Isis and laden with prize-money had, only the day before, run upon the rocks in the vicinity. After holding a consultation with Giton, at which he gladly gave consent to my plan, as Tryphaena visibly neglected him after having sapped his virility, we hastened to the sea-shore early on the following morning, and boarded the wreck, a thing easy of accomplishment as the watchmen, who were in the pay of Lycas, knew us well. But they were so attentive to us that there was no opportunity of stealing a thing until, having left Giton with them, I craftily slipped out of sight and sneaked aft where the statue of Isis stood, and despoiled it of a valuable mantle and a silver sistrum. From the master’s cabin, I also pilfered other valuable trifles and, stealthily sliding down a rope, went ashore. Giton was the only one who saw me and he evaded the watchmen and slipped away after me. I showed him the plunder, when he joined me, and we decided to post with all speed to Ascyltos, but we did not arrive at the home of Lycurgus until the following day. In a few words I told Ascyltos of the robbery, when he joined us, and of our unfortunate love-affairs as well. He was for prepossessing the mind of Lycurgus in our favor, naming the increasing wantonness of Lycas as the cause of our secret and sudden change of habitation. When Lycurgus had heard everything, he swore that he would always be a tower of strength between us and our enemies.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Tiring of the debate, Luther recommended that the villagers read his books. Then he and his supporters “hurried to their wagon”—accompanied, Luther later said, by shouts of “Go in a thousand devils’ name, so you break your neck before you get out of town.”37 Two or three days later, Karlstadt reportedly rang the church bells for more than an hour to summon his parishioners from the surrounding area. Luther, he preached, had “unfortunately kicked the gospel under the bench,” the same accusation the cobbler had made. “Oh dear brothers and sisters, men and women citizens of God! 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 —KARLSTADT 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. Indeed, in finding Melanchthon a wife who would further tie him to Wittenberg, Luther had bound the younger man every bit as much as Luther’s own father had tried to trap him. Although there is warmth and engagement in his letters to Melanchthon, Luther also maintained a certain distance. As he tried to force Melanchthon to take charge of the Reformation in Wittenberg, he cajoled and bullied him, by turns flattering his intellectual gifts, fretting about his delicate constitution, and castigating him for giving in “too much to your emotions,” when he ought to be building up the “walls and towers” of Jerusalem.34 This was a very different kind of friendship from that with Karlstadt, who could not be bullied. By publishing this extraordinary preface, however, which established the narrative of his divine election, Luther strengthened his charismatic authority as the leader of the movement. According to Freud, Oedipal struggles are universal because the path to sexual identity lies through experiencing murderous hatred and passionate love for our own parental figures. Whether one agrees with him or not, it is remarkable how Luther put his struggles—of which he was unusually aware—to the service of his theology. His relentless sense of the drama of his relations with his own father led him to the most profound understanding of God. In his theology, Luther contrasts God’s absolute power with human beings’ childlike inability to do anything to earn salvation—as well as the believer’s frustration at his or her childlike helplessness. Luther’s theology made God’s paternal relationship to the Christian the pattern of theological truth. If he is less able to transmit a sense of God’s fatherly care for the believer, he certainly conveys the awesome distance that lies between God and human beings. It is the distance, rather than the personal closeness, of God that lies at the center of Luther’s theology. Luther would not boast of a direct line to Jesus. Ever mistrustful of those who claimed that God talked to them, he spoke instead of his conversations with the Devil.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The celebration at Segrehna was an attempt at reconciliation between the two men, now tied to each other anew by the bonds of godparenthood. And it seems that Karlstadt’s family exploited the occasion to the full. A few days later, Luther interceded with the Elector on behalf of Karlstadt’s wife’s uncle, the miller at Segrehna, while another of her relatives lodged in Luther’s house for several months while she recovered from the plague. In November, Karlstadt himself wrote from Berkwitz, to say that he had lost seven horses, had little livestock left and would have to sell up: could Luther ask the Elector to let him move to Kemberg? Luther frequently interceded for others with the Elector, but there is something odd in his punc- tilious insistence on doing everything Karlstadt requested — asking the Elector repeatedly to allow him to live in Kemberg, and mediating for his relatives — as if he was proving his devotion despite a hidden antipathy.‘ Luther was able to keep an eye on Karlstadt, but could not control those beyond the orbit of Wittenberg. One by one, many of his former supporters went over to the sacramentarian position of denying that Christ was physically present in the Eucharist. The loss of Oecolam- padius had been bad enough; but then Nikolaus Gerbel, who had been Luther’s loyal lieutenant in Strasbourg, wrote that Martin Bucer had also adopted a version of the Swiss position. Bucer and the Strasbourg preachers tried to maintain unity with Luther and, realising that discus- sions by letter were unlikely to succeed, they instead sent an envoy to hold long discussions with him. There was no agreement, however, and even Gerbel concluded that the sacramentarians, not the papists, were now the main enemy.’ As he had no stomach for such a fight, Gerbel wished to dedicate himself to academic work.° In Augsburg, the leading preacher Urbanus Rhegius, once a Lutheran loyalist, also seemed to be open to some of Karlstadt’s arguments.’ Augsburg was one of the foremost cities in the empire with a strong populist evangelical movement, so its theological orientation mattered. But by the summer of 1526, only Stefan Agricola, Caspar Huber and Luther’s old friend Johannes Frosch, in whose monastery Luther had stayed during the discussions with Cajetan in Augsburg, were still persuaded by Luther's position. Leadership of the evangelical 310 MARTIN LUTHER movement in Augsburg had passed to men like Michael Keller, Johann Landsperger and Urbanus Rhegius, who preached a more communalist model for the Reformation. Luther knew how dangerous this shift was. In the autumn, in what seems to be the first letter to his friend in many years, he wrote exhorting Frosch to ‘remain firm’. In Nordlingen, Luther had relied on his solid ally Theobald Billican, but now Billican too was leaning towards the Swiss in some respects;” while in Ulm, Conrad Sam switched to the sacramentarian position.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s influence spread through his personal connections and was limited by them as well. They are thus highly important for understanding his achievements; not only friendships but also the many bitter fights with allies and enemies alike were integral to the nature and development of the Reform movement. Georg Witzel is a good example—a former acolyte, he turned on Luther and published a stinging attack in 1532, which tried to outdo his former mentor’s style. Luther, he wrote, “maintains, furthers and drives it all alone, and according to his brain, makes and unmakes, turns and reverses, says and lies, appoints and sacks everything according to his inclination and pleasure.” He was driven by his “raging, stormy, inconstant proud head, [and] bloodthirsty heart.”9 Luther’s world was primarily focused on the university. He was at once part of Wittenberg society and yet he did not think of himself as an ordinary citizen, in the way that Zwingli, for example, had done in Zurich. His exemption from the Türkensteuer in 1542, a levy on every inhabitant of the Reich to finance the campaign against the Turks, was an evident demonstration of this.10 Every other Wittenberg clergyman paid up without demur, but Luther was permitted to estimate the value of his properties himself, and the Elector paid the tax he owed. It is significant that in his letters from Coburg, Luther envisaged his son playing with Melanchthon’s and Jonas’s sons, or with the other children in the monastery—but not with those of the Wittenberg citizens.11 His milieu consisted of those lodging with him, his acolytes and dependents, and the guests he invited to dinner. He called the members of the household—who would have numbered between forty and fifty people at any given time, including servants, lodgers, and visitors—his “Quirites,” a classical Latin term for Roman citizens.12 A dig at the “Roman” Pope, it suggested that, unlike the papal court, his was a community of equals, despite the patriarchal structure he had in fact created.13

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  47 Yet Karlstadt never set himself up as a rival to Luther; had he done so, the story of the Reformation might well have been different. Luther seemed well aware of just how much was at risk, and it is an indication of his concern that he replied to the letter of the Strasbourg preachers not with a manuscript missive, but with a printed public letter, which he duly dispatched via their messenger. 48 The delay in his response, caused by printing his letter, had far-reaching consequences. The Strasbourgers had written to Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich at the same time; Zwingli now also denied the Real Presence in the sacrament, and his handwritten letter arrived before Luther’s printed reply. Martin Bucer, previously inclined to Luther, was persuaded by Zwingli’s views “with hand and foot,” as a delighted Capito reported. 49 In his response, Luther mused unwisely, “I confess, that if Dr. Karlstadt or someone else had been able to instruct me five years ago, that there was nothing but bread and wine in the sacrament, he would have done me a great service. I suffered such great temptations at that time and twisted and struggled, because I saw well that this would have been the biggest coup against the papacy.” The letter may well have lent credence to the rumors that Karlstadt had gotten the idea from Luther himself. 50 In a letter to Spalatin in October 1524, Luther referred to Karlstadt as his “Absalom,” the man who stole away the hearts of the Israelites. But the term also hinted at the depths of his feeling for Karlstadt: Absalom was David’s handsome son, whose rebellion broke his father’s heart, because he was forced to act against the child he loved so much. 51 Increasingly Luther linked Müntzer and Karlstadt, but his most hostile rhetoric was reserved for Karlstadt alone, as is evident in Luther’s monumental Against the Heavenly Prophets, the first part of which was published in late 1524. The treatise articulated what Luther believed to be the indissoluble links between an emphasis on the spirit, denying the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament, destroying images, and engaging in sedition. He was determined to put as much clear water as he could between his views and any form of rebellion or violence. — F OR the rest of his life, Luther’s rhetoric about Karlstadt and Müntzer would become a fixed formula. They were Schwärmer, literally “the swarmers,” as if they were a swarm of madly buzzing bees, “enthusiasts” who claimed to be led by the spirit. “He wants to be thought the highest spirit, who has swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all,” is how Luther famously satirized Müntzer’s spiritualistic theology. 52 Time and again, Luther punctured the heightened emotionality of the Schwärmer by translating their high-flown claims into crude physical terms, using earthy reality to deride abstraction.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Why did it take Luther so long, when so many of his associates had gone to the altar years before? Bartholomäus Bernhardi had married in August 1521. In Luther’s immediate circle, Karlstadt followed later that year, and Justus Jonas in February 1522: 15 Johannes Bugenhagen, a more recent arrival in Wittenberg, married on October 13, 1522; Wenzeslaus Linck, the vicar general of the Augustinian order, on April 15, 1523; 16 and Johannes Lang had tied the knot by 1524. Just about all Luther’s old comrades, apart from Spalatin and Amsdorf, were now married men. It seems that the end of the Peasants’ War and the death of Friedrich the Wise marked a point of transition. Karlstadt and he had now moved into a settled enmity. And then there was the death, in late 1524, of his old confessor. In his last letters, Johann von Staupitz had written of his love for his former protégé, “surpassing that of women.” 17 As monks, nuns, and priests broke their vows by marrying, he castigated Luther for letting fleshly lusts have their sway under the cover of the gospel—this was not what he had meant by Gelassenheit . Although he sent Luther a young monk to be instructed in the ways of the gospel—a sign of his trust—he clearly saw Luther as having chosen a different path. For his part, Luther was still raw from Staupitz’s decision to leave the Augustinians for, of all things, a fat prebend as a Benedictine abbot. Indeed, when the news came of Staupitz’s death, Luther commented waspishly that the old man had had little time to enjoy his plum posting. There is no doubt that Staupitz would have been appalled by Luther’s marriage, and to a nun—a double violation of oaths of chastity. Perhaps it was only when Staupitz had died that Luther, freed from the man who had been his spiritual father, finally felt able to become a father. 18 The delay was also connected with deep changes within Luther himself. It took several years for him to accept that he, too, had fleshly desires. He had always claimed that continence was not his problem as a monk—the “real knots” were to do with salvation. Nor had he greeted the first marriages of priests with unalloyed joy, but rather had fretted that Bernhardi, the first evangelical priest to marry, would be expelled and then “two stomachs” along with “anything that came out of them” (Luther was referring darkly to children) would suffer want. 19 Indeed, Luther’s conviction of the pervasiveness of sin had remarkably little to do with a sense of sexual frustration. Although by 1520 he had advocated that priests should be allowed to marry, he did not at first think that monks were in the same situation, as they had taken vows of chastity of their own free will and could not therefore break them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  George, he also helped found the local Marian brotherhood, and a fragment of a horn from Aachen, found in the house, shows that someone in the family may have undertaken this famous seven-yearly pilgrimage: The horns were blown when the relics were displayed. 54 But it is doubtful that Luther’s intense spirituality came from his father: Hans Luder was a man used to relying on his own ability to get things done, who had chosen not to work for others, but to assume responsibility himself. We know that Luther was surprised to find out about his extensive kinsfolk on his father’s side when he visited them in Möhra after the Diet of Worms in 1521, so Hans had evidently not kept in touch with his wider family once he had struck out on his own. 55 He had acquired his skills and talents himself, and not through inheritance. Yet even if his family background gave him some basic knowledge of mining, this could not have taught him how to run a substantial mining enterprise, manage large amounts of capital, or discipline a difficult workforce. This irascible, competitive man, who knew how to make his way in a rough man’s world, would have made an exacting father. It seems that he was unable to accept that his son wanted to pursue a path in life different from his own. The bitterness of the conflict between father and son that ensued when Martin entered the monastery suggests how closely Hans had identified with him, and how deeply he was hurt by Martin’s rejection of the life he had planned for him. Luther, who inherited his father’s determination to succeed, might seem like a classic eldest son, although he may have had an older brother who died. 56 The Luder household was full of children. Luther’s younger brother Jacob seems to have been a close companion, and their mother is reported as saying, “There was always such mutual good feeling between the two brothers so that neither of them preferred any companion to the other brother, nor took any delight in any food or any game without the other.” 57 Perhaps, like many eldest children, Martin felt the arrival of the new siblings keenly, envying how they monopolized his mother’s attention—infants were normally suckled for a couple of years.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He distin- guished between the ‘inner’ reception of the sacrament and its ‘outer’ material form, the bread; and because he was emphatic that only the spiritual dimension mattered, he was drawn to argue that the divine could not be inherent in material objects.* Karlstadt’s Eucharistic theology also informed his views on morals, gender and politics. Committed to the communal Reformation, he rejected everything that smacked of priestly tyranny — the elevation of the Host, Communion in one kind, confession before Communion, the priest placing the wafer in the communicant’s mouth — while his admiration of mysticism, prophecy and the power of the spirit enabled him to be more open to women’s role in the Church. Aiming to escape his intellectual formation, and to reach for a purer emotional mysticism, he found his outlook difficult to express within the constraints of a traditionally written and argued pamphlet, the form at which Luther excelled. He tried several other genres, including dialogues, in which he put words into the mouths of his opponents so that he could refute them, but as he rejected images, and was neither a poet nor musician, he had no other practical outlet. Whilst Luther’s rhetorical style was becoming ever clearer and more rebarba- tive, Karlstadt pushed the pamphlet format to its limit, eschewing intellectual, linear thinking. The result was a manner of writing which seems unfinished and obscure. So, for example, he could write in The Meaning of the Term ‘Gelassen’: ‘However, we must be on guard constantly that this same yielded egoism or self-absorption is seriously judged and surrendered, for the Devil sits in wait of unsurrendered yieldedness as a fox looks out for chickens which he plans to devour.’ He is clearly striving for emotional honesty as well as memorable imagery, but achieves this at the cost of clarity. MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH 293 The suffering and rejection Karlstadt experienced — Luther had made him feel ‘anxiety, envy, hatred, and disgrace’ — enabled him to reach Gelassenheit.* As he wrote in a dialogue which dealt line by line with Luther’s Against the Heavenly Prophets: “Through such suffering we must subdue, break, and subordinate to the spirit our untamed flesh in order to assist hope, strengthen faith, and firm up the word. For tribulation brings about patience and patience leads to a certain knowledge and experience.’ This, he insisted, had nothing to do with the ‘works of love’, the self-mortification and asceticism practised by the monks, with which Luther identified his ideas.* What both men had in common, however, is that they invoked experience. For Luther, the story of his heroic stance at Worms was proof that he alone was the touchstone of truth, while Karlstadt regarded his own persecution and suffering as unique: it was something which Luther, living in his secure professorship in Wittenberg, could never understand.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  32. WB 5, Sept. 9, 1529 (Graf Albrecht of Mansfeld), Sept. 9, 1529 (Agricola); Kawerau, Agricola, 110–15. Passavant dedicated his attack to the Mansfeld counts. 33. WB 5, 1473, Sept. 9, 1529, 151:12–18. 34. Ratzeberger, Die handschriftliche Geschichte, 97. 35. Kawerau, Agricola, 168–71. He left behind a letter to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, to whom he owed his position in Eisleben, in which he poured out his frustration at his “low” salary. The count responded in kind, accusing him of drunkenness, failure to perform his teaching duties, and preaching more against his colleagues than against the papists. 36. Kawerau, Agricola, 172–73; see WT 4, 4043 (1538). He later moved to the house of Melanchthon’s mother-in-law. 37. Förstemann, Urkundenbuch, I, 298; see also Ernst Koch, “ ‘Deutschlands Prophet, Seher und Vater.’ Johann Agricola und Martin Luther. Von den Enttäuschungen einer Freundschaft,” in Peter Freybe, ed., Luther und seine Freunde, 63. 38. WB 8, 3175, Sept. 2, 1537, 122:6–11. German translation in Koch, “Deutschlands Prophet,” 66. 39. WB 8, 3254, Aug. 1538, 279:20. The letter suggested that Luther’s writings contained two different views on sin and forgiveness. Agricola later noted on his draft copy that the letter “which I wrote out of pure simplicity” had “set the Rhine on fire.” Next, Agricola wrote a letter of total prostration to Luther promising never to deviate in the slightest from Luther’s teaching (WB 8, 3284, Dec. 26, 1538(?), 342–43). On the attempted reconciliation in the Church, 342. Koch argues that Agricola’s position was more in line with Luther’s earlier views, and that Luther’s emphasis on law now followed Melanchthon’s position. Part of what was at stake in this dispute therefore concerned the relationship between Melanchthon and Luther. 40. See Kawerau, Agricola, 174–79; WS 39, 1, Die Thesen zu den Disputationen gegen die Antinomer, 334–58; WS 50, Wider die Antinomer, 1539, 461–77. 41. WT 6, 6880, 248:33–34, at the end of Jan. 1539, just before the disputation on Agricola’s theses; Förstemann, Urkundenbuch, I, 319. 42. Humiliatingly he had to write to Georg von Dolzig to beg him not to cancel his salary, appealing on behalf of his sick wife and nine children: WB 8, 3284, Dec. 22, 1538, Introduction; letter, Kawerau, Agricola, 196, 342. 43. WB 8, 3208, Jan. 6, 1538. 44. WS 51, Bericht auff die Klage M. Johannis Eissleben, 1540, 429–43, 431b:5–6; 436b:6–9; and see WS 50, Wider die Antinomer, 1539, 461ff. 45. See WB 9, 3460, April 7, 1540; 3533, Sept. 3, 1540 (Luther reported it to Güttel). 46. Kawerau, Agricola, 211–15; Melanchthon had drafted a revocation in 1539, and now he warned Agricola of Luther’s anger. Indeed, Luther was inexorable. At table, he said Agricola must confess “that I [that is, Agricola] have been a fool, and have done injustice to those of Wittenberg, for they teach rightly, and I have attacked them unfairly” (WT 5, 5311, Oct.–Nov.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Then he and his supporters “hurried to their wagon”—accompanied, Luther later said, by shouts of “Go in a thousand devils’ name, so you break your neck before you get out of town.” 37 Two or three days later, Karlstadt reportedly rang the church bells for more than an hour to summon his parishioners from the surrounding area. Luther, he preached, had “unfortunately kicked the gospel under the bench,” the same accusation the cobbler had made. “Oh dear brothers and sisters, men and women citizens of God! 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.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Phileros had his say and Ganymedes exclaimed, “You gabble away about things that don’t concern heaven or earth: and none of you cares how the price of grain pinches. I couldn’t even get a mouthful of bread today, by Hercules, I couldn’t. How the drought does hang on! We’ve had famine for a year. If the damned AEdiles would only get what’s coming to them. They graft with the bakers, scratch-my-arse-and-I’ll-scratch-yours! That’s the way it always is, the poor devils are out of luck, but the jaws of the capitalists are always keeping the Saturnalia. If only we had such lion-hearted sports as we had when I first came from Asia! That was the life! If the flour was not the very best, they would beat up those belly-robbing grafters till they looked like Jupiter had been at them. How well I remember Safinius; he lived near the old arch, when I was a boy. For a man, he was one hot proposition! Wherever he went, the ground smoked! But he was square, dependable, a friend to a friend, you could safely play mora with him, in the dark. But how he did peel them in the town hall: he spoke no parables, not he! He did everything straight from the shoulder and his voice roared like a trumpet in the forum. He never sweat nor spat. I don’t know, but I think he had a strain of the Asiatic in him. And how civil and friendly-like he was, in returning everyone’s greeting; called us all by name, just like he was one of us! And so provisions were cheap as dirt in those days. The loaf you got for an as, you couldn’t eat, not even if someone helped you, but you see them no bigger than a bull’s eye now, and the hell of it is that things are getting worse every day; this colony grows backwards like a calf’s tall! Why do we have to put up with an AEdile here, who’s not worth three Caunian figs and who thinks more of an as than of our lives? He has a good time at home, and his daily income’s more than another man’s fortune. I happen to know where he got a thousand gold pieces. If we had any nuts, he’d not be so damned well pleased with himself! Nowadays, men are lions at home and foxes abroad. What gets me is, that I’ve already eaten my old clothes, and if this high cost of living keeps on, I’ll have to sell my cottages! What’s going to happen to this town, if neither gods nor men take pity on it? May I never have any luck if I don’t believe all this comes from the gods! For no one believes that heaven is heaven, no one keeps a fast, no one cares a hang about Jupiter: they all shut their eyes and count up their own profits. In the old days, the married women, in their stolas, climbed the hill in their bare feet, pure in heart, and with their hair unbound, and prayed to Jupiter for rain! And it would pour down in bucketfuls then or never, and they’d all come home, wet as drowned rats. But the gods all have the gout now, because we are not religious; and so our fields are burning up!”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On one outing, he scooped up the hare and wrapped the injured animal in his sleeve to protect it from the dogs, but they bit right through his cloak, broke the hare’s leg, and choked it to death. Luther, ever the preacher, turned the incident into a theological metaphor. The hare was the Christian soul, attacked by the Pope and Satan. In heaven, the tables would be turned, and the noble hunters who so loved eating game would become Christ’s prey. Stuck in the castle, where he would remain for ten months, Luther evidently did not relish being a victim, incapable of fighting back. For all his distaste for hunting, he would rather be a hunter than a hare. 4 Hans von Berlepsch, the castellan, treated him well, but it was difficult to keep the secret about the mysterious guest. The wife of one of the Elector’s notaries had let Luther’s location slip, and since this rumor originated at court, it was credible. Moreover, Berlepsch was convinced that Luther’s whereabouts were already general knowledge. Not for the first time, therefore, Luther determined on a ruse to fool his enemies—and like many of his other cunning plans, this one was a little too clever. He wrote to Spalatin in mid-July 1521 enclosing another letter in his own hand, that purported to have been sent from “my quarters” in Bohemia. He asked Spalatin to “lose” it “with studied carelessness”: “I hear a rumor is being spread, my Spalatin, that Luther is living in the Wartburg near Eisenach….Strange that nobody now thinks of Bohemia,” he wrote. He “would love the ‘hog of Dresden’ ” (that is, Duke Georg) to find the letter, Luther wrote in his accompanying note. It was obvious that the letter has no point apart from where it was supposedly sent. It would have fooled nobody. Worse, for many, it would have confirmed that he was indeed in the Wartburg, the letter too eager to deny the rumor in the first line. 5 The letter also revealed how much Luther blamed Duke Georg, the Elector’s cousin, under whose patronage the Leipzig Debate had been held, for the problems he and his supporters now faced within the empire. Straight after his appearance at the Diet, in the exhilaration of having gotten out of Worms alive, Luther had written to Cranach of how he would “have preferred to suffer death at the hands of the tyrants, especially those of the furious Duke Georg of Saxony,” but had listened to the advice of others. 6 This enmity would last until Georg died in 1539, and it would elicit some of the most bitter and baroque of Luther’s invective. As so often, Luther was reducing a complex pattern of political opposition to his movement within Germany as a whole to a simple fight against “the hog of Dresden,” whom he could hate with gusto.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. In the following years, the agents of Saxony and of Mainz continued to fight for dominance, each manipulating the urban factions. For their part, the Saxons tried to get the town put under imperial ban. 11 The archbishop of Mainz, on the other hand, supported a new constitution that excluded the patricians, and in 1514 a much more radical council was able to secure the fall of a group of leading politicians. 12 The clergy and monastic institutions in the town were sucked into the turmoil, partly because they were major creditors and stood to lose financially if the town defaulted. During this unrelenting sequence of bloody infighting, most of the monasteries joined the town’s elite in supporting the Saxon interest, as these years revealed the archbishop of Mainz at his most vicious. All this would have done little to enthuse Luther about the civic unity and urban freedoms on which Germany’s imperial cities prided themselves. 13 8. Erfurt in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik of 1493.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Live coals are more readily held in men’s mouths than a secret! Whatever you talk of at home will fly forth in an instant, Become a swift rumor and beat at the walls of your city. Nor is it enough that your confidence thus has been broken, As rumor but grows in the telling and strives to embellish. The covetous servant who feared to make public his knowledge A hole in the ground dug, and therein did whisper his secret That told of a king’s hidden ears: this the earth straightway echoed, And rustling reeds added that Midas was king in the story. “Every word of this is true,” I insisted, “and no one deserves to get into trouble more quickly than he who covets the goods of others! How could cheats and swindlers live unless they threw purses or little bags clinking with money into the crowd for bait? Just as dumb brutes are enticed by food, human beings are not to be caught unless they have something in the way of hope at which to nibble! (That was the reason that the Crotonians gave us such a satisfactory reception, but) the ship does not arrive, from Africa, with your money and your slaves, as you promised. The patience of the fortune-hunters is worn out and they have already cut down their liberality so that, either I am mistaken, or else our usual luck is about to return to punish you!” CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIRST.

• From Shunned (2018)

  If you ever decide to make your peace with Him, you’ll have our full support.” Comments like that are what make this easy for me. I’ll miss my family, but I won’t miss being pounded with these warped ultimatums . Can this be love? She said goodbye and gave the phone to my dad. He must have been sitting nearby, because she didn’t need to call out for him. “I gather the news is not good,” Dad said. “I’ll write you both every once in a while, Dad, so you know what I’m up to and don’t have to worry about me.” “Don’t forget our phone number,” he said, resigned and forlorn. “Nor you mine.” “Mom wants the phone back. Goodbye, Lindy.” Goodbye. Goodbye. In the background, I heard him scold her for rushing him. “Lindy,” Mom said, “be sure to call your sister.” “Yes, Mother. I plan to.” “You owe her that after all the support she’s given you.” “I’ll do it, Mother, because I want to, not because I owe her.” I was tempted to quote her the Scripture ‘do not you people be owing anyone a single thing except to love one another’ but thought better of it. It was no time to quibble. After she hung up the phone, I sat mesmerized by the dial tone in my ear. It became hollow and distant as it followed her and Dad on their way, like those white lines left in the sky behind airplanes, blurring in the blueness, eventually fading. [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] My sister was out of town, and we were not able to speak for several days. I was at the office when we finally connected. I slipped into an empty conference room to use the phone. By the time I reached her, I knew Mom would have delivered the news. I was disappointed when Ove answered the phone. I’d hoped to avoid speaking with him. “You’re denying Jehovah and choosing Satan as your god,” he said. Enough already! “And one more thing,” he said, and his voice was softer, as if he’d caught himself. “Your mother is devastated. We all are. You must never doubt how much we care for you.” “I’ve never doubted that.” I was not able to meet his moment of vulnerability. I didn’t want his assurances. I knew my family’s experience of love was exactly what drove their actions and made this so awful. I was repressing my anger so I could get through this phase, and also because I’d been taught the folly of anger and the lofty virtue of forgiveness. I had not yet learned that anger has its own wisdom. “I’ll go get your sister,” Ove said. “She’s been a wreck, unable to leave the house. I’ve never seen her like this.” Indeed, when my sister greeted me, her voice sounded hoarse and husky. “I have just two questions for you,” she said.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The letter also revealed how much Luther blamed Duke Georg, the Elector’s cousin, under whose patronage the Leipzig Debate had been held, for the problems he and his supporters now faced within the empire. Straight after his appearance at the Diet, in the exhilaration of having gotten out of Worms alive, Luther had written to Cranach of how he would “have preferred to suffer death at the hands of the tyrants, especially those of the furious Duke Georg of Saxony,” but had listened to the advice of others.6 This enmity would last until Georg died in 1539, and it would elicit some of the most bitter and baroque of Luther’s invective. As so often, Luther was reducing a complex pattern of political opposition to his movement within Germany as a whole to a simple fight against “the hog of Dresden,” whom he could hate with gusto. The danger of discovery meant that Luther became utterly dependent on Spalatin, who was now his chief means of communication with the outside world. The solitude soon irked Luther, and he wrote to his friends complaining of his enforced “leisure,” which made him heavy-headed and inclined to drunkenness.7 In the castle, he rigged up the small chamber he was assigned as a study, and asked Spalatin for books. But this “leisure” also gave him time for reflection, and his letters from this period are among his fullest and most revealing. Not only do they tell us much about the nature of his friendships, but they also show Luther beginning to reassess his own life and especially his relationship with his father as he gradually came to terms with the public figure he had become. Sitting high up in his eyrie, Luther had no way of controlling what was happening in the world below. He had to wait for news from Wittenberg. The pattern of his correspondence betrays the shrinking compass of his world. There are letters to his friend Nikolaus Gerbel in Strasbourg, but remarkably, none that survive to Nuremberg, Augsburg, or Basle, and therefore nothing to suggest that he was increasing his influence in the prosperous south.8 We do not know whether this was because of the difficulty of sending messengers to southern Germany without betraying his hiding place, or because the Nurembergers, once such enthusiastic members of the Staupitz sodality and so keen to spread the word about Luther, now wanted to distance themselves from him. Two of them, the lawyer Willibald Pirckheimer and civic secretary Lazarus Spengler, had been named in the bull of excommunication alongside Luther, but Pirckheimer had humiliatingly sought and received absolution from Eck. Luther’s correspondence network contracted, concentrating on Wittenberg, Saxony, and the mining areas of Mansfeld, and so did his political reach. Beyond it, other reformers emerged who would take his Reformation in different directions.