Tenderness

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 A History of God (1993)

  We can see the religious impulse behind this startling divinization of Jesus by looking briefly at some developments in India at about the same time. In both Buddhism and Hinduism there had been a surge of devotion to exalted beings, such as the Buddha himself or Hindu gods which had appeared in human form. This kind of personal devotion, known as bhakti, expressed what seems to be a perennial human yearning for humanized religion. It was a completely new departure and yet, in both faiths, it was integrated into the religion without compromising essential priorities. After the Buddha had died at the end of the sixth century BCE, people naturally wanted a memento of him, yet they felt that a statue was inappropriate, since in nirvana he no longer “existed” in any normal sense. Yet personal love of the Buddha developed and the need to contemplate his enlightened humanity became so strong that in the first century BCE the first statues appeared at Gandhara in northwest India and Mathura on the Jumna River. The power and inspiration of such images gave them a central importance in Buddhist spirituality, even though this devotion to a being outside the self was very different from the interior discipline preached by Gautama. All religions change and develop. If they do not, they will become obsolete. The majority of Buddhists found bhakti extremely valuable and felt that it reminded them of some essential truths which were in danger of being lost. When the Buddha had first achieved enlightenment, it will be recalled that he had been tempted to keep it to himself, but his compassion for suffering humanity had compelled him to spend the next forty years preaching the Way. Yet by the first century BCE, Buddhist monks who were locked away in their monasteries trying to reach nirvana on their own seemed to have lost sight of this. The monastic was also a daunting ideal, which many felt to be quite beyond them. During the first century CE, a new kind of Buddhist hero emerged: the bodhisattva, who followed the Buddha’s example and put off his own nirvana, sacrificing himself for the sake of the people. He was ready to endure rebirth in order to rescue people in pain. As the Prajna-paramita Sutras (Sermons on the Perfection of Wisdom), which were compiled at the end of the first century BCE, explain, the bodhisattvas do not wish to attain their own private nirvana. On the contrary, they have surveyed the highly painful world of being, and yet desirous of winning supreme enlightenment, they do not tremble at birth-and-death. They have set out for the benefit of the world, for the ease of the world, out of pity for the world. They have resolved: “We will become a shelter for the world, the world’s place of rest, the final relief of the world, islands of the world, lights of the world, the guides of the world’s means of salvation.”11

• From A History of God (1993)

  In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: “I am the Truth!” According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God’s Incarnation in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al-Hallaj’s ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God, and it was idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems: I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I: We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If thou seest me, thou seest Him, And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both. 34 It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called ’fana. Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death. When he was brought to be crucified and saw the cross and the nails, he turned to the people and uttered a prayer, ending with the words: “And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favors, forgive them, O Lord, and have mercy upon them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed to them that which Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done; and if Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou hast hidden from them, I should not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou willest.” 35 Al-Hallaj’s cry ana al-Haqq: “I am the Truth!” shows that the God of the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly subjective. Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated. Because there is no reality but al-Lah—as the Shahadah maintains—all men are essentially divine. The Koran taught that God had created Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate himself as in a mirror. 36 That is why he ordered the angels to bow down and worship the first man.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  On the same principle scapegoats are provided, upon whose helpless heads we pour our failures and our fears. The attitude of respect for personality presupposes that all the individuals involved are within what may be called the ethical field. The privileged man must be regarded as being within the area in which ethical considerations are mandatory. If either privileged or underprivileged is out of bounds, the point has no validity. It is important now to ask how Jesus used this attitude. How did he spell it out? One day a Roman captain came to him seeking help for his servant, for whom he had a profound attachment—a Roman citizen seeking help from a Jewish teacher! Deep was his anguish and distress; all other sources of help had failed. That which would have been expected in the attitude of the Roman growing out of the disjointed relationship between them and the Jews was conspicuously lacking here. The fact that he had come to Jesus was in itself evidence to warrant the conclusion that he had put aside the pride of race and status which would have caused him to regard himself as superior to Jesus. He placed his need directly and simply before Jesus, saying, “Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.” By implication he says, “It is my faith that speaks, that cries out. I am stripped bare of all pretense and false pride. The man in me appeals to the man in you.” So great was his faith and his humility that when Jesus said that he would come to his home, the captain replied, “I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof; but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” It was the testimony of Jesus that he had found no such faith in all Israel. The Roman was confronted with an insistence that made it impossible for him to remain a Roman, or even a captain. He had to take his place alongside all the rest of humanity and mingle his desires with the longing of all the desperate people of all the ages. When this happened, it was possible at once for him to scale with Jesus any height of understanding, fellowship, and love. The final barrier between the strong and the weak, between ruler and ruled, disappeared. In the casual relationships between the privileged and the underprivileged there may not be many occurrences of so dramatic a character. Naturally. The average underprivileged man is not a Jesus of Nazareth. The fact remains, however, that wherever a need is laid bare, those who stand in the presence of it can be confronted with the experience of universality that makes all class and race distinctions impertinent. During the great Vanport, Oregon, disaster, when rising waters left thousands homeless, many people of Portland who, prior to that time were sure of their “white supremacy,” opened their homes to Negroes, Mexicans, and Japanese.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  I AM INVITED one night to the apartment of a young society couple, the H’s. It is like being on a boat because it is near the East River and the barges pass while we talk, the river is alive. Miriam is a delight to look at, a Brunhilde, full-breasted, with sparkling hair, a voice that lures you to her. Her husband, Paul, is small and of the race of the imps, not a man but a faun—a lyrical animal, quick and humorous. He thinks I am beautiful. He treats me like an objet d’art. The black butler opens the door. Paul exclaims over me, my Goyaesque hood, the red flower in my hair, and hurries me into the salon to display me. Miriam is sitting cross-legged on a purple satin divan. She is a natural beauty, whereas I, an artificial one, need a setting and warmth to bloom successfully. Their apartment is full of furnishings I find individually ugly—silver candelabra, tables with nooks for trailing flowers, enormous mulberry satin poufs, rococo objects, things full of chic, collected with snobbish playfulness, as if to say “We can make fun of everything created by fashion, we are above it all.” Everything is touched with aristocratic impudence, through which I can sense the H’s fabulous life in Rome, Florence; Miriam’s frequent appearances in Vogue wearing Chanel dresses; the pompousness of their families; their efforts to be elegantly bohemian; and their obsession with the word that is the key to society—everything must be “amusing.” Miriam calls me into her bedroom to show me a new bathing suit she has bought in Paris. For this, she undresses herself completely, and then takes the long piece of material and begins rolling it around herself like the primitive draping of the Balinese. Her beauty goes to my head. She undrapes herself, walks naked around the room, and then says, “I wish I looked like you. You are so exquisite and dainty. I am so big.” “But that’s just why I like you, Miriam.” “Oh, your perfume, Mandra.” She pushes her face into my shoulder under my hair and smells my skin. I place my hand on her shoulder. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Miriam.” Paul is calling out to us, “When are you going to finish talking about clothes in there? I’m bored!” Miriam replies, “We’re coming.” And she dresses quickly in slacks. When she comes out Paul says, “And now you’re dressed to stay at home, and I want to take you to hear the String Man. He sings the most marvelous songs about a string and finally hangs himself on it.” Miriam says, “Oh, all right. I’ll get dressed.” And she goes into the bathroom. I stay behind with Paul, but soon Miriam calls me. “Mandra, come in here and talk to me.” I think, by this time she will be half-dressed, but no, she is standing naked in the bathroom, powdering and fixing her face.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This sense of an immanent God helped Jews to see humanity as sacred. Rabbi Akiva taught that the mitzvah “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was “the great principle of Torah.”99 Offenses against a fellow human being were a denial of God himself, who had made men and women in his image. It was tantamount to atheism, a blasphemous attempt to ignore God. Thus murder was the greatest of all crimes because it was a sacrilege: “Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image.”100 Serving another human being was an act of imitatio dei: it reproduced God’s benevolence and compassion. Because all were created in God’s image, all were equal: even the High Priest should be beaten if he injured his fellow man, because it was tantamount to denying the existence of God.101 God created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world; similarly to save a life was to redeem the whole world.102 This was not just a lofty sentiment but a basic legal principle: it meant that no one individual could be sacrificed for the sake of a group during a pogrom, for example. To humiliate anybody, even a goy or a slave, was one of the most serious offenses, because it was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious denial of God’s image.103 The right to liberty was crucial: it is difficult to find a single reference to imprisonment in the whole of rabbinic literature, because only God can curtail the freedom of a human being. Spreading scandal about somebody was tantamount to denying the existence of God.104 Jews were not to think of God as a Big Brother, watching their every move from above; instead they were to cultivate a sense of God within each human being so that our dealings with others became sacred encounters. Animals have no difficulty in living up to their nature, but men and women seem to find it hard to be fully human. The God of Israel had sometimes seemed to encourage a most unholy and inhumane cruelty. But over the centuries Yahweh had become an idea that could help people to cultivate a compassion and respect for their fellow human beings, which had always been a hallmark of the religions of the Axial Age. The ideals of the Rabbis were close to the second of the God-religions, which had its roots in exactly the same tradition.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  You and me’ll sneak off for a strawberry freeze … I start to move away, and he grasps my hand with a lobster grip. I wave Warren over. Daddy, I say, this is Warren. Daddy glances at him. Is that your sweetheart? the lady says. Yes, ma’am. Daddy studies my hand as if it were some codex that needed to be deciphered somehow. He looks up at me, and from a great distance—tens of thousands of miles, decades—it’s as if he’s been fast-forwarded into our presence. Our glances click, and his claw of a hand clings to mine. Murrr , he said. That’s right, Daddy. He shakes his head and purses his lips. He looks around the room as if for help. The lady says, You’re making him mad, little lady. She pats his hand again. Honey, she says—honey, can I get you a Dr Pepper? He half nods. All right then, she says and wheels around. My chiclet engagement ring’s still loose, only held on by the wedding ring I had fitted. Daddy wiggles the ring on my knuckle. He says, Murrr…murr . Married, I finally say. I’m married. Yes, to Warren. He’s my husband. I reach for Warren and draw him over. For a second there, I hold each of their hands, standing like a conduit between them. I’m still looking only at the good half of Daddy’s face. He gives Warren the up and down scrutiny he’d bring to a horse prior to auction, then he glances back at me and rolls his eyes as if to say, jokingly, This yahoo . Then he lets go my hand to shake Warren’s, and I take that in. And that’s it, that instant. My life as I’ve shaped it includes—for that instant only—the daddy I once loved more than beans and rice. The lady wheels back with a Dr Pepper. I help her flip the tab, and she slides a bent straw into it. We take turns buying, she tells me. Daddy takes a sip and winks at her. Then he looks over at me, saying, Looooo . I love you, too, Daddy, I say. At the end of the visit, Warren calls him Mr. Karr and says he’s glad to meet him. And Daddy takes my hand in his and looks down at it and up at Warren. His eyes meet mine, and in a stiff nod, I get his last blessing, since within the year, we’ll come back to bury him.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Such an approach, it could be contended, risks overestimating the role of individual agency in much the same way that sixteenth-century Lutheran hagiography did, making it impossible to understand why Luther’s ideas might have appealed to so many and how they created a social movement. It could be further argued that it also cheapens theology, reducing major ideas to the outcomes of unconscious wishes or conflicts, and making it impossible for us to grasp why ideas about the presence of God in the sacrament or the nature of repentance should have become so urgent. However, the wealth of material that has survived on Luther is so great that we probably know more about his inner life than about that of any other sixteenth-century individual, allowing us to trace his relationships with his friends and colleagues through his corres- pondence and even to examine his dreams. His collected works, the famous Weimar Edition, extend to 120 volumes, including eleven volumes of letters and six volumes of his dinner-table conversations. Where many historians have used this abundance of material to trace his theological development in detail, and to date specific events with greater accuracy, I want to understand Luther himself. I want to know how a sixteenth-century individual perceived the world around him, and why he viewed it in this way. I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in INTRODUCTION II a time before our modern separation of mind and body. In particular, I am interested in Luther's contradictions. Here was a man who made some of the most misogynistic remarks of any thinker, yet who was in favour not only of sex within marriage but crucially that it should also give bodily pleasure to both women and men. Trying to under- stand this apparent paradox is a challenge I have not been able to resist. A man of immense charisma, Luther’s passionate friendships were matched by equally unrelenting rejections of those he believed to be wrong or disloyal. His theology sprang from his character, a connec- tion that Melanchthon, one of the first of his biographers and his closest co-worker, insisted upon: “His character was, almost, so to speak, the greatest proof’ of his doctrine."* Luther’s theology becomes more alive as we connect it to his psychological conflicts, expressed in his letters, sermons, treatises, conversations and biblical exegesis.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Hans Lufft the printer did business for him and occasionally acted as his business agent at the city court, although Luther sharply criticised him over his daughter’s wedding in 1538, famed for its extravagance when Lufft was in financial straits.“ Peter Beskendorf, a barber and surgeon, was another long-standing friend, and Luther acted as godparent to his grandchild. He also dedicated a brief treatise on prayer to him: ‘Just as a good barber has to concentrate his thoughts, mind and eyes exactly on the razor and the hair . . . for if he is wanting to chat a lot at the same time, or think or look at something else, he’ll probably cut someone’s mouth and nose or even slit their throat.’® When Beskendorf stabbed and killed his son-in-law at the dinner table in a fit of drunken stupidity only a few months later, Luther loyally interceded for him; Beskendorf was convicted only of manslaughter and exiled." Amongst the town councillors, Luther was acquainted with the Krapp family, and he befriended Tilo Dhen, whose wife died in his arms; Ambrosius Reuter married the niece of Luther’s best friend, Hans Reinicke, thus providing a link between Wittenberg and Mansfeld.” As the university grew in size and as the town became more prosperous, more of the academics became town councillors, entwining the academic and political elites ever more tightly. The university, which had prospered so greatly through Luther's fame, now dominated the town. Luther, who suffered from spiritual struggles all his life, seems to have been particularly adept at drawing to him those who were in FRIENDS AND ENEMIES 367 Axwo ALTAT WE OF 60. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Johannes Bugenhagen, 1532. mourning, or suffering from what we would today call depression, a staple topic of conversation at table." He was, for example, very close to the Weller brothers, Peter and Hieronymus, both former students at Wittenberg, who visited often and stayed in Luther's house when he was at Coburg Castle during the Augsburg Diet in 1530.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  THE SCHOLAR 4B When Melanchthon, Luther’s most important collaborator, wrote the Apology for the Augsburg confession of 1530, the founding articles of the Lutheran faith, he began the section on monastic vows with the life story of Hilten and his maltreatment by the ‘pharisaic bitterness and envy’ of the monks. Melanchthon added that, in an echo of John the Baptist, Hilten had predicted before he died that Another man will come . . . who will destroy you monks . . . him you will not be able to resist.’* The figure of Hilten then made its way into Luther hagiography, and his prophecies were republished in the late sixteenth century and again in the seventeenth. For later Lutherans, Hilten was a prophet and proof that Luther was a man of God. Yet he was also an awkward hero, who reputedly had written letters in blood to a beloved, and whose truculent apocalypticism hinted at mental instability. It may be telling that the Lutheran chronicler Ludwig Rabus, who had lived for a time in Luther’s household, referred to the prophecy but did not include Hilten in his compendium of Lutheran martyrs and the ‘elect of God’. Luther’s conception of the role of childhood in forming an indi- vidual was very different from ours. He paid attention to Hilten not because the monk-seer was imprisoned in the monastery near where he went to school, and therefore formed part of his childhood. Rather, he felt that Hilten verified his own prophetic role and his crusade against the monks. It was not the individual, but the divine scheme which mattered. Yet at the same time, Luther’s interest allows his own emotional landscape to emerge with greater clarity. When he read Melanchthon’s Apology in 1531, he marked Hilten’s name in red, and wrote in the margin how he remembered hearing about the monk when he was a boy ‘aged fourteen or fifteen’ at Eisenach with the Schalbes. The prophecy placed Luther’s battle against ascetic monas- ticism at the very heart of his theology, something which his friend understood. Melanchthon therefore recorded in this important docu- ment of Lutheran theology an intimate truth about the movement's founder. He also indirectly acknowledged the importance of Eisenach and Luther’s mother’s world to the development of Luther's spirituality. Certainly the Schalbes and the group around Johannes Braun appear to have shaped Luther's devotional attitudes.” That piety may have 44 MARTIN LUTHER incorporated a strong feminine side: St Anna and Mary became important figures in Luther’s devotional universe, and the myths and stories surrounding his time in Eisenach hint at a motherless lad far from home and in search of tenderness.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Lucas Cranach the Elder, Johannes Bugenhagen, 1532. 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 — S UCH 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 In 1537, for example, it was the turn of Johannes Agricola, one of Luther’s closest and most long-standing followers. Agricola came from the Harz region and had close ties with Luther’s friends and relatives in Mansfeld.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  [image "57. and 58. Portraits of the Elector and Anna Kasper Dornle. Luther knew that the bachelor Friedrich the Wise had kept a mistress for many years, and it was rumored that he had married her secretly. In 1525, the year he died, the Elector had two nine-inch wooden boxes made. Inside were relief portraits, one box containing his own, the other an image labeled “Anna Rasper [ sic ] Dornle’s Stepdaughter.” The workmanship is of the highest quality. Visible only when the boxes are opened, they are monuments to a secret love. Her hair is braided under a fine hairnet, and she is dressed as a respectable woman. Modeled on the double portraits of married couples that were so popular in the early sixteenth century, they commemorated a partnership that was neither fleeting nor shameful. And as the world in that century was made anew, it was not surprising that reformers might have entertained the idea of regularizing such unions." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_068_r1.jpg] [image "57. and 58. Portraits of the Elector and Anna Kasper Dornle. Luther knew that the bachelor Friedrich the Wise had kept a mistress for many years, and it was rumored that he had married her secretly. In 1525, the year he died, the Elector had two nine-inch wooden boxes made. Inside were relief portraits, one box containing his own, the other an image labeled “Anna Rasper [ sic ] Dornle’s Stepdaughter.” The workmanship is of the highest quality. Visible only when the boxes are opened, they are monuments to a secret love. Her hair is braided under a fine hairnet, and she is dressed as a respectable woman. Modeled on the double portraits of married couples that were so popular in the early sixteenth century, they commemorated a partnership that was neither fleeting nor shameful. And as the world in that century was made anew, it was not surprising that reformers might have entertained the idea of regularizing such unions." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_068_r1.jpg] 57. and 58. Portraits of the Elector and Anna Kasper Dornle. Luther knew that the bachelor Friedrich the Wise had kept a mistress for many years, and it was rumored that he had married her secretly.56 In 1525, the year he died, the Elector had two nine-inch wooden boxes made. Inside were relief portraits, one box containing his own, the other an image labeled “Anna Rasper [sic] Dornle’s Stepdaughter.” The workmanship is of the highest quality. Visible only when the boxes are opened, they are monuments to a secret love. Her hair is braided under a fine hairnet, and she is dressed as a respectable woman. Modeled on the double portraits of married couples that were so popular in the early sixteenth century, they commemorated a partnership that was neither fleeting nor shameful. And as the world in that century was made anew, it was not surprising that reformers might have entertained the idea of regularizing such unions.57

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Elisabeth would remain important in Luther’s life. Years later, he could still rattle off her biography, giving her date of birth and age at death. 22 He never spoke disrespectfully of her, even when other saints became the target of his invective; he also named his first daughter Elisabeth. Eisenach’s reputation as a spiritual town was enhanced, too, through tales of extravagant penances and of powerful figures humbled by sudden spiritual conversion. Hermann, Baron Dreffurt, who had led a life of robbery, whoring, and violence, headed to Eisenach to become a Franciscan monk when he saw the error of his ways in 1329. Before he died nearly twenty years later he insisted on being buried at the place “where the schoolboys had their toilet.” 23 But there was a downside to this febrile spirituality: Both Luther and Melanchthon recalled seeing in Eisenach the worst example of a moving statue. 24 These were statues of saints made with adjustable parts that were intended to fool the credulous into believing that they moved miraculously, inclining their eyes or interacting with the believer. They were part of the devotional culture designed to inculcate powerful emotions in the worshipper, but they also offered a ready target for the skeptical. When Luther arrived, he had to beg for his supper. The young lad had a good voice, and sang in the choir, a gift that could be put to use in begging; it would later flourish in his abilities as a preacher and in the hymns that he composed. Begging was common—for Franciscan monks, forbidden to own property, it was godly work to ask for alms—and it was usual for schoolboys to do the same to pay for their upkeep. But the vehemence with which Luther would later speak out against mendicancy may suggest how uncomfortable he found it. Around 1520 he wrote to a friend that he would rather learn a trade than support himself by begging. Condemning monasticism around the same time, he complained that the monks’ “running about the country has never done any good and never will do any good. My advice is to join together ten of these [monastic] houses or as many as need be, and make them a single institution for which adequate provision is made so that begging will not be necessary.” 25 For four years, Luther lived in his mother’s world, staying in the house of the Schalbe family, well-respected relatives of his mother. Heinrich Schalbe was a town councilor and served as mayor in 1495 and 1499. 26 The family lived a Franciscan life of modesty and good works, and were devoted to a small monastery run by the Minorites, which had originally formed part of an institution founded by St. Elisabeth herself.

• From Satyricon (1)

  CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWELFTH. “But to make a long story short, you know the temptations that beset a full stomach: the soldier laid siege to her virtue with the selfsame blandishments by which he had persuaded her that she ought to live. Nor, to her modest eye, did the young man seem uncouth or wanting in address. The maid pled in his behalf and kept repeating: Why will you fight with a passion that to you is pleasure, Remembering not in whose lands you are taking your leisure? “But why should I keep you longer in suspense? The lady observed the same abstinence when it came to this part of her body, and the victorious soldier won both of his objectives; so they lay together, not only that night, in which they pledged their vows, but also the next, and even the third, shutting the doors of the vault, of course, so that anyone, acquaintance or stranger, coming to the tomb, would be convinced that this most virtuous of wives had expired upon the body of her husband. As for the soldier, so delighted was he with the beauty of his mistress and the secrecy of the intrigue, that he purchased all the delicacies his pay permitted and smuggled them into the vault as soon as darkness fell. Meanwhile, the parents of one of the crucified criminals, observing the laxness of the watch, dragged the hanging corpse down at night and performed the last rite. The soldier was hoodwinked while absent from his post of duty, and when on the following day he caught sight of one of the crosses without its corpse, he was in terror of punishment and explained to the lady what had taken place: He would await no sentence of court-martial, but would punish his neglect of duty with his own sword! Let her prepare a place for one about to die, let that fatal vault serve both the lover and the husband! ‘Not that,’ cried out the lady, no less merciful than chaste, ‘the gods forbid that I should look at the same time upon the corpses of the two men dearest to me; I would rather hang the dead than slay the living!’ So saying, she gave orders for the body of her husband to be lifted out of the coffin and fastened upon the vacant cross! The soldier availed himself of the expedient suggested by this very ingenious lady and next day everyone wondered how a dead man had found his way to the cross!” CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEENTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The former courtier had just retired from the Elector’s service and was finding his feet in a new post as preacher at Altenburg, where he was facing bitter opposition from Catholics. Instead, Luther said, he would think of his friend and “love my Käthe through the same act as you” on the night that he calculated his friend would wed. 27 However, while Luther had no fear by now that he might be unable to “love” his wife, Spalatin, forced to live in a household with his mother-in-law with whom he did not get on, proved unable to have children for the first six years of the marriage, a failure that made him the butt of Catholic jokes. 28 — W HAT kind of relationship did Luther and Katharina von Bora have? There is something rather chilling in Luther’s insistence that Katharina always address him as “Mr. Doctor” and that she use the polite “you.” In the will he wrote in 1537, when he expected to die from an attack of stone, he wrote, “She served me not just as a wife, but even as a servant.” But since famulus was the word Luther used for his academic secretaries, men who went on to important careers in the Church, he may have meant this as a term of respect. 29 Nonetheless, the apparent distance and obsession with hierarchy is symptomatic of the contradictory mixture of warmth, jokiness, and a certain condescension, even cruelty in his interactions with others. 30 He could also be wittily earthy. Writing to Wenzeslaus Linck in Nuremberg shortly after his marriage, Luther punned that “I am bound and captured in chains [ Ketten ] / Käthe, and I lie on the Bora / bier [ Bahre ], as if dead to the world.” 31 But although he might have pretended to be a reluctant bridegroom, he evidently relished married life, remarking that “[m]an has strange thoughts the first year of marriage. When sitting at table he thinks, ‘Before I was alone; now there are two.’ Or in bed, when he wakes up, he sees a pair of pigtails lying beside him which he hadn’t seen there before.” 32 Katharina regularly became pregnant and gave birth every one to two years, suggesting that the couple enjoyed a full sexual life. Luther had none of the instinctive revulsion for the female body that characterized so many monks, perhaps because he had grown up with younger sisters. He would often joke about sex, even remarking that “pious Christ himself” had committed adultery three times—once with Mary Magdalen and once with the woman at the well, and once with the adulteress whom he let off so lightly. 33 This remark was extraordinary: One cannot imagine Huldrych Zwingli or John Calvin saying such a thing. But Luther loved to tease, especially those who considered themselves righteous. When it came to the proper roles of women and men, Luther was always inclined to turn to the Old Testament.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The monk who was now famous throughout the empire had returned to where, as a schoolboy, he had stolen strawberries in the woods, and where his mother’s family still lived.’ The kidnapping had been staged by the Elector, who feared the emperor's wrath for harbouring a man the Edict of Worms had now declared a ‘stubborn schismatic and public heretic’.* So he was kept in the Wartburg in disguise. Dressed in the clothes of a knight, Luther let his tonsure grow out, and was no longer clean-shaven. The figure- hugging attire, with hose designed to show off well-turned legs, fine linen shirt, doublet and showy codpiece, must have been a shock for a monk used to wearing a shapeless woollen cassock belted at the waist. When he secretly returned to Wittenberg in December six months later, his friends did not at first recognise him: in his riding coat he looked like a nobleman with ‘a thick beard over his whole mouth and cheeks’. Luther did not make much of a knight, however. He had not found the ride from Altenstein to the Wartburg easy — he was used to trav- elling in wagons, not to riding and the muscular control it required. 196 MARTIN LUTHER IMAGO D MARTI LVTHERI, £0 HABITY EXPRESSA, QVO RE RSVS ESTEXPATHMO WE TKEERGAM, ANNO M DOXXIL \\ \, wut AY Querfirus coties cones cibi Roma petitus, Va nuht tpeseft, quo aon fraudabor, Tes vs, En ego per Chriftum viuo Lucherus adhue. Hunc mthi dum tencam, perfida Roma vale, ANNYVS CONFESSIONIS ANNVS Patumt, AN NV SREDITYVS @x Vi rmans 15 tt. THs te Pubes 5 23 (rt Cafes ance peDies, or oCeves flesh ante potentes, A Riens properans Cap be bend ConfCla Path MU CarL la DU of F's Tas aD SsXons colin CP ACCL QhG Rhenl Fong be Ll adh, Tre, Pape fPiglensretta fr MCs, prtle, Ea CLV Xa ler Pif f rok ofabor” WIT EB ERG AE lobinne: Sch wertel excudehst , Anno 37. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther as Junker Jorg, 1522. Noble life was not much to his taste either. He tried hunting, but his instincts were all wrong: he wanted to protect the quarry. 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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 Even so, he knew some townsfolk well. His close friendship with Lucas Cranach stretched back to his early days in Wittenberg. Hans Lufft the printer did business for him and occasionally acted as his business agent at the city court, although Luther sharply criticized him over his daughter’s wedding in 1538, famed for its extravagance when Lufft was in financial straits. 14 Peter Beskendorf, a barber and surgeon, was another longtime friend, and Luther acted as godparent to his grandchild. He also dedicated a brief treatise on prayer to him: “Just as a good barber has to concentrate his thoughts, mind and eyes exactly on the razor and the hair…for if he is wanting to chat a lot at the same time, or think or look at something else, he’ll probably cut someone’s mouth and nose or even slit their throat.” 15 When Beskendorf stabbed and killed his son-in-law at the dinner table in a fit of drunken stupidity only a few months later, Luther loyally interceded for him; Beskendorf was convicted only of manslaughter and exiled. 16 Among the town councilors, Luther was acquainted with the Krapp family, and he befriended Tilo Dhen, whose wife died in his arms; Ambrosius Reuter married the niece of Luther’s best friend, Hans Reinicke, thus providing a link between Wittenberg and Mansfeld. 17 As the university grew in size and as the town became more prosperous, more of the academics became town councilors, entwining the academic and political elites ever more tightly. The university, which had prospered so greatly through Luther’s fame, now dominated the town. Luther, who suffered from spiritual struggles all his life, seems to have been particularly adept at drawing to him those who were in mourning, or suffering from what we would today call depression, a staple topic of conversation at table. 18 He was, for example, very close to the Weller brothers, Peter and Hieronymus, both former students at Wittenberg, who visited often and stayed in Luther’s house when he was at Coburg Castle during the Augsburg Diet in 1530. Hieronymus and his sister Barbara suffered from melancholy and from Anfechtungen, and some of Luther’s most moving letters of spiritual comfort were written to them: “I know the sickness well and have lain in that hospital until I nearly suffered eternal death,” he wrote to Barbara. If she started to worry about whether she was elected or not, he told her to spit those thoughts out, “just as someone immediately spits it out if dung falls into his mouth.” 19 But he thought sufferers had a duty to repulse melancholic thoughts—“you can’t stop the birds flying over your head, but you don’t have to let them nest in your hair.” 20 60.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Shortly afterward, in late November 1525, Spalatin also finally married, possibly the young woman on whom he had had his eye since 1524.26 The wedding was held in Altenburg in December, but Luther was unable to attend. He wrote explaining that his wife would not let him travel because of the danger of the journey: He had taken in yet more nuns and their furious parents would be out to attack him. For whatever reason, Luther did not seem especially inclined to attend. There seem to be too many explanations in this letter, as Luther described Katharina’s tears and talked about how busy he was with his reply to Erasmus, an excuse that must have wounded Spalatin. The former courtier had just retired from the Elector’s service and was finding his feet in a new post as preacher at Altenburg, where he was facing bitter opposition from Catholics. Instead, Luther said, he would think of his friend and “love my Käthe through the same act as you” on the night that he calculated his friend would wed.27 However, while Luther had no fear by now that he might be unable to “love” his wife, Spalatin, forced to live in a household with his mother-in-law with whom he did not get on, proved unable to have children for the first six years of the marriage, a failure that made him the butt of Catholic jokes.28

• From Satyricon (1)

  The tears poured forth again, after this appeal, and, shaken by deep sobs, she buried her whole face and breast in my bed; and I, moved by pity and by apprehension, begged her to be of good cheer and to make herself perfectly easy as to both of those issues, for not only would we not betray any secrets to the rabble, but we would also second divine providence, at any peril to ourselves, if any god had indicated to her any cure for her tertian ague. The woman cheered up at this promise, and smothered me with kisses; from tears she passed to laughter, and fell to running her fingers through the long hair that hung down about my ears. “I will declare a truce with you,” she said, “and withdraw my complaint. But had you been unwilling to administer the medicine which I seek, I had a troop in readiness for the morrow, which would have exacted satisfaction for my injury and reparation for my dignity! To be flouted is disgraceful, but to dictate terms, sublime Pleased am I to choose what course I will, Even sages will retort an insult at the proper time. Victor most is he who does not kill.” Then she suddenly clapped her hands, and broke into such a peal of laughter that we were alarmed. The maid, who had been the first to arrive, did likewise, on one side of us, as also did the little girl who had entered with the madame herself. CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Katharina had originally fallen in love with Hieronymus Baumgartner, a rich merchant patrician from Nuremberg, but his family had better plans for him than marriage to a runaway nun. Luther had then suggested Caspar Glatz, the man who had supplanted Karlstadt at Orlamünde—hardly an enticing prospect, with his tumbledown house and farm. Indeed, the twenty-six-year-old Katharina rejected Glatz out of hand as an old “miser,” and told Luther’s friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf that she would marry either him or Luther, nobody else. 12 However, this account contrasts sharply with Luther’s behavior in all other areas of his life, where he always took the initiative. It seems that on this occasion, he was happy to be seduced, overruled by a strong woman. As he put it in a letter to Amsdorf: “I feel neither passionate love nor burning for my spouse, but I cherish her.” 13 This narrative conveniently defended him against any accusations that he was acting out of lust. Luther claimed that he married in order to please his father and give him “the hope of progeny.” 14 But his choice would hardly have fit into Hans Luder’s dynastic plans. Katharina did not come from the mining elite, and Luder had carefully married all his children into the small circle of mine owners and smelters at Mansfeld, hoping to buttress his position; indeed, his son’s refusal to follow suit was one of the reasons his monastic vocation had been so resented. Nor did Katharina come from an urban family packed with lawyers, which might at least have provided access to the legal expertise Hans Luder had sought when he destined his son for the law. Luther married up by choosing a poor noblewoman, but not in a way that would benefit his family. However, Katharina was, by all accounts, attractive, feisty, and passionate. 45. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora, 1526. These double portraits, of which the Cranach workshop produced scores over the years, show Luther without tonsure, and with his familiar features: the piercing eyes, the kiss curl, and the increasingly heavy jowls. He is depicted as a powerful personality, whose direct gaze addresses the viewer. By contrast, like all of Cranach’s females, Katharina is an identikit woman, with an impossibly narrow waist. Her attire, with the tightly laced bodice, netted hair, and simple ring, is that of a respectable woman, and she is shown sometimes with and sometimes without the wimple worn by married townswomen; she was, after all, a noblewoman and not a burgher. Only the breadth of her cheekbones, tapering to a pointed chin, and her slant, slightly catlike eyes create anything approaching distinctive characteristics; but even then, the various versions the Cranach workshop produced are so different as to be barely depicting the same woman.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Humayun had been much moved by the lectures of the reforming ulema in the early sixties, and had established the husainiyyah to try to reach Iranian youth. In Iran, a husainiyyah was a center of devotion to Imam Husain, and was usually built beside the mosque. The hope was that the Kerbala story would inspire the young who attended classes at the husainiyyah to work for a better society. Iran was also experiencing the swing toward religion that had taken place in the Middle East after the 1967 war, and by 1968, Ayatollah Motahhari, one of the reformers who had helped to set it up, could write that, thanks to the husainiyyah , “our educated youth, after passing through a period of being astonished, even repulsed [by religion] are paying an attention and a concern for it that defies description.” 54 None of the lecturers made as great an impact as Shariati. Students rushed to hear him during their lunch hour or after work, inspired by the passion and vehemence of his delivery. They could relate to him. Shariati dressed as they did, shared their dilemma of torn cultural allegiance, and some felt that he was like an older brother. 55 Shariati was a creative intellectual, but he was also a spiritual man. The Prophet and the Imams were real presences in his life, and his devotion to them was obvious. His was a truly mythical piety. The events of Shii history were not merely historical incidents of the seventh century, but timeless realities that could inspire and guide people in the present. The Hidden Imam, he used to explain, had not disappeared like Jesus. He was still in the world, but concealed; Shiis could encounter him in that merchant or this beggar. He was waiting to make his appearance, and Shiis must live in constant expectation of hearing the sound of his trumpet, ready at all times to respond to the Imam’s summons to the jihad against tyranny. Shiis must look through the concrete, perplexing realities that surrounded them in their everyday lives to catch a glimpse of their secret essence ( zat ). 56 Because the spiritual was not in a realm apart, it was, therefore, impossible to separate religion from politics in the way that the regime was attempting. Human beings were two-dimensional creatures; they had a spiritual as well as a corporeal existence, needed mythos as well as logos , and every polity must have a transcendent dimension. That was the real meaning of the doctrine of the Imamate: it was a symbolic reminder that a society could not exist without an Imam, a divine guide, to help the people achieve their spiritual as well as their earthly objectives. To split religion and politics was to betray the principle of tawhid (“unification”), the cardinal tenet of Islam, which should help Muslims to achieve an integrity that reflected the divine unity.