There was no sense that the prevalent anticlericalism was about to explode into a great revolt by the lay people. There was much corruption and cynicism and abuse of privilege. People complained about it bitterly, yet they also tolerated it. What was about to happen was unlike, for example, the American Revolution, or the French one or the Russian one. It was a revolution all right, but it had not been anticipated. It was not picked over, discussed and predicted before it happened. One of the reasons was that the genius who precipitated it was in many ways an extraordinarily conservative man, a German peasant-scholar who most certainly did not want to break up the Church he loved. And so this huge, diffuse and ramshackle Church had held together, and it had retained much that was good. Not least among its virtues was its ability to educate. It is too often forgotten that Martin Luther, fine theologian and scholar as he was, owed much to the excellent training he received from the old Church.
The rise of humanism and secularism was meanwhile helping to create a mental climate that in turn created diversity. Power was soon to be based on more than the military prowess and ambitions of kings, which had so dominated the medieval period. In the future, wars, far too many of them, would be fought over religion as often as not. Violent and spectacular reform, when it came, would arrive not in one spectacular tempest but in a tumultuous succession of fierce squalls and storms that each bore its distinctive character. For example, the Reformation in England predated Scotland’s Reformation by quite some time. And they were completely different in character, though the English helped the Scots to secure their Reformation.
But first we must turn to Germany.
PART 1
Luther
CHAPTER 4
Luther the Man
MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546) was a colossus, a life-force, at once the perfect revolutionary and the imperfect man. They say that more books have been written about him than about anyone other than Christ. For nearly 500 years, he has invited huge claim and angry counter-claim. He must inevitably and justly dominate any book about the Reformation. The moving and tempestuous story of his life, with its fear, its darkness, its constant travails, its heroism, its hope, its brilliance, its extraordinary vitality, and at times its sheer badness, is a story of quintessential human struggle.
For some, such as the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, Luther was the ultimate hero; for others, even those you would expect to approve of him, he produces responses of disdain or worse. I know of one leading figure in the Church of Scotland who shudders with distaste every time his name is mentioned. There was always something vulgar about Martin Luther – a coarseness, a boorishness. He once concluded a letter to his wife: ‘I got drunk like a German. God be praised.’ He attacked his many enemies and critics with abuse and, at times, hysterical exaggeration. Luther was proud of the fact that he was German. While both the Christian Church and the new vogue for humanism were essentially transnational, Luther was very much a German nationalist.
If we contrast him with Desiderius Erasmus, the most fastidious intellectual of his time, we can understand at least something of Luther’s essence. Erasmus, like Luther, was an especially clever man who, despite his cleverness, thought that theology, and indeed Christianity itself, should not be too complex. Both men believed that religion should be kept simple and that Jesus Christ was both human and humane. Both men were concerned about the corruption of the Church. But there were crucial differences between them. Above all, Erasmus was an eminently reasonable man; Luther was often anything but reasonable.
At first, Erasmus gave Luther cautious support, though he detested violence and force. In his own words, he was ‘averse to any action which might lead to commotion and uproar’, whereas commotion and uproar were Luther’s constant companions. If you wanted a quiet life, you stayed well away from Martin Luther. Erasmus was a cool and detached man – yet when the break came, it was bitter. ‘I shall not oppose it if they roast or boil him’, wrote Erasmus, with uncharacteristic vehemence, in 1521. Three years later, the break was complete. Erasmus was appalled by Luther’s brutish, wicked response to the German peasants’ revolt. He desired moderate, steady change; he certainly did not want to see the Church smashed to bits. He called Luther, in a gentler and more typical phrase, ‘a harsh and severe doctor’.
Erasmus died in Basle in 1536, a rather lonely man. He was rejected by many Catholics for helping to foment the Reformation, and rejected by many of the new Protestants for not joining it. By contrast, when Luther died, he was surrounded by adoring friends and colleagues and, above all, by his wife Catherine, who had come to love him so much that, even two months after his death, she still could not eat or sleep. His great friend and disciple, Philip Melanchthon, said that the world had lost not just a prophet but its father. ‘We are entirely poor, wretched, forsaken orphans who have lost our dear noble man as our father’, he said at Luther’s funeral.
The prophetic man, the most significant figure in the extended birth of the modern world, was dead – but the debates raged on. They still do. Has any man been so many-sided? Paradoxes abound. The man who could write with vicious venom was venerated for his kindness. The man who single-handedly unleashed an era of giddy change was deeply conservative. The man with the refined, clear intelligence could behave like the most egregious boor. His spirituality did not signify solace. He was sometimes, in his own words, ‘angry with God’.
Luther’s last recorded words were: ‘We are all beggars.’ Neither a king nor an emperor, neither a warlord nor a politician, but a rumbustious, earthy, flawed human being and above all a prophet, he had had an impact on humanity that was, and remains to this day, gargantuan. Despite his frequent crassness, he always had his sensitive, introverted side, and at the close he was humble and spiritually alone as he prepared to meet his Maker. But then this was the man who had said: ‘They threaten us with death; they would do better to threaten us with life.’
Though he came from German peasant stock, Luther’s background was quite comfortable. Unlike many Europeans of his time, he did not grow up amid grinding poverty. Indeed, the part of Germany where he was brought up and where he became a noted scholar and teacher was one of the more prosperous parts of early sixteenth-century Europe. Germany as a whole was comparatively affluent and confident.
Luther’s grandfather was a modest farmer, a sort of senior peasant; his father Hans became a copper miner and then founded his own small business, a foundry. Martin was born on 10 November 1483. His upbringing was tough. Both his parents beat him; this was normal in those times. Life, despite the comparative prosperity, remained violent and chancy. Death was always near; the plague was a constant threat.
Martin was the eldest child. Hans soon realised that he was very clever. Rather than apprentice him, Hans decided to ensure that he had a good education. First locally in Mansfeld, then at Magdeburg forty miles to the north, then at Eisenach, Martin went to school. And then, in May 1501, he went on to university in the large Saxon town of Erfurt (population 20,000).
Although very bright, Martin took some time to flourish academically. He struggled to gain his first degree. As he studied for his second, the MA, he gradually began to fulfil his early promise. He came second out of seventeen students. At the same time, he suffered from persistent depression. One of his consolations was music, which he adored; he was to become one of the greatest hymn-writers of all time.
The next academic stage was to prepare for the law. One day, in the summer of 1505, when he was walking back to Erfurt from Mansfeld – he had been allowed home for a few days to celebrate the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin – he approached the gates of the university town with thunder booming around him. Then lightning suddenly flashed, and a bolt struck the ground beside him. He fell over, terrified and shouted: ‘Beloved St Anne – I will become a monk.’ (Anne was the patron saint of miners, and he had often heard his parents praying to her.)