The friars kept a hard and rigorous house. In his theological and spiritual education, Martin saw little evidence of the degradation and corruption which were supposedly among the root causes of the Reformation. He moved on to the small town of Wittenberg, with its equally small university, which had been founded only a few years earlier by the Elector of Saxony. Wittenberg was an unsophisticated place compared with Erfurt. But Luther was to flourish there. He became a lecturer, popular with his students, and then in 1512 he became professor of Holy Scripture, succeeding a notably sensitive and supportive scholar called Johannes von Staupitz.
In the years between 1506 and 1512, Luther was undergoing a protracted personal crisis. He was excessively self-absorbed. He was introspective – and, despite his ability to relate to those whom he taught, he felt himself utterly alone. He could not find God. Indeed, he felt God had rejected him. He was in danger of slipping into a mire of self-loathing.
He was an original; he was trying to work out his own theology – but, although he was a clever man, his mind lacked the logic of his great successor Calvin. There was an imaginative imprecision about him. Indeed, as his hymns and some of his prose writings show, he had a lot of the poet in him. He thought and studied hard, but his conscience kept challenging his thought processes. He remained an earnest and scrupulous friar. Yet his mind was in constant torment.
Staupitz, who was vicar-general of the Augustinian friars in Saxony, did his best to help. He had been Luther’s confessor; sometimes Luther’s confessions took several hours, and even the well-disposed Staupitz became impatient. It was Staupitz who steered Luther towards St Paul.
As Luther turned more and more to the writings of Paul, and in particular the Epistle to the Romans, he slowly began to emphasise faith above all else. It was through faith that the grace of God flowed down; this simple insight at last gave him peace of mind. As he was able, with growing confidence, to work out his own theology, the torments eased and arrogance began to appear. In 1517, he wrote to a friend saying that his, Luther’s, theology was becoming dominant in the university. On the other hand, the great Aristotle was going downhill! Perhaps the Greek would ‘go all the way to hell’.
For some time, Luther had been vexed by a commonplace Church scam, the cynical sale of indulgences. It affronted him that ordinary decent people thought they could avoid penitence simply because they had purchased an indulgence. Pope Leo X had authorised a massive sale of indulgences across Germany, a fruitful country for this kind of fund-raising. The chief salesman was a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, whose pitch was crude and effective. Indeed, he was a spiritual snake-oil salesman of the worst kind. Like many high-profile salesmen, he was very well paid, with a substantial salary, generous expenses and – if he sold sufficient indulgences – huge bonuses. People listened to Tetzel. They enjoyed being frightened by him. After all, if they bought an indulgence, they would have escaped the fires of hell – or so they believed.
Meanwhile, as Luther’s personal spiritual crisis eased, his career progressed. His main concern remained his academic work, but he was also in charge of the castle church in Wittenberg, where he preached every Sunday. He had a further responsibility: the running of various convents.
By 1517, Tetzel was conducting his hard sell not in Wittenberg itself, but nearby. The Elector, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, had banned Tetzel from his own territories, which included Wittenberg. But Luther became aware that some of his own congregation had crossed the River Elbe to places where they were free to purchase indulgences. He was appalled, but he was also measured. At this point, the 33-year-old Professor Luther was far from being some latter-day Savonarola, inciting the masses with his fiery preaching. He had become something of a Church careerist; the last thing he would have wanted was to tear his Church apart, though that was exactly what he was about to do.
Luther dealt with his concern about indulgences in a cautious, academic, restrained way. He was dealing with a specific abuse of the Church’s power. He was not drawing up a vast programme for reform, a masterplan to modernise the Church. In late October 1517, he drafted a series of theses in which he did not neglect to argue that the pope himself was being slandered by the preaching of men like Tetzel. He sent the theses to the Archbishop of Mainz (somewhat naïvely, because Mainz had subcontracted Tetzel) and to the Bishop of Brandenburg. He also distributed them to various friends and colleagues at the university.
It was on the final day of October that one of the most famous and momentous events in human history took place. Or did it? Luther announced that he was convening a debate on his theses at the university the next day. He then pinned the ninety-five theses on the main door of the castle church. So what? This was a routine way of making an announcement, of alerting people to a forthcoming event. Luther was not trying to instigate a rebellion, far less a revolution. The theses were written in Latin, not German, and they had been penned by a loyalist who was steadily making his way in the Church.
It is not known whether or not the debate at the university took place. Indeed, it is not certain that the theses were actually pinned by Brother Martin to the door of the church. The only person to claim that they were was Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s first biographer (the first of hundreds), who was not even in Wittenberg at the time. In Luther’s own copious writings, there was no reference to pinning the theses to the church door.
If the theses were publicly displayed, this might well have caused a local stir. But what really mattered was that they found their way into the hands of a printer and were translated into German. This undoubtedly happened. And it probably happened without Luther’s knowledge or approval. The printed theses were soon being distributed through Germany and beyond its border. Sir Thomas More was studying them in England early in 1518.
Even then, there was no great likelihood of anything other than an essentially academic controversy, albeit a bitter one. What first fired the great conflagration in the crucial year of 1518 was the sheer stupidity of two men: Tetzel himself, and then the man who was supposedly the foremost theologian in Germany (and a sometime friend of Luther’s). This academic, John Eck of the University of Ingolstadt, was guilty of particularly foolish over-reaction.
Tetzel – who commanded the attention of ordinary people – ferociously denounced Luther as a heretic. He bragged that Luther would be burned to death within weeks. This was quite in keeping with his character. But he also had intellectual pretensions, and he decided to write a long series of ‘counter-theses’. When they arrived in Wittenberg, Luther’s students got hold of them and burned them publicly. (It was very much an era of burning, of documents and books as well as people.) Eck, supposedly more refined and intellectual, was almost as outspoken as Tetzel, calling Luther among other things rebellious, impudent, simple-minded and – most dangerously – ‘a despiser of the pope’.
Luther had in fact been careful not to attack the pope directly. In any event, Leo X was not a cerebral man – he was basically a hedonist dilettante – and had no grasp of theological matters. More significantly, he had no political antennae. In December 1517, the Archbishop of Mainz forwarded Luther’s theses to Rome, indicating that Leo would no doubt know how to deal with ‘such error’. As it turned out, the pope had not the slightest notion of how to cope. An aged, obscure and pompous theologian – a man called Sylvester Prierias, the Commissioner of the Sacred Palace, and a Dominican – was asked to provide the public response to the insolent Augustinian. Prierias took precisely the wrong tack, blustering, abusing, threatening, ignoring the arguments in the theses and instead reiterating the claims of the infallible papacy.
Rome was reacting in the worst possible way. In Germany, Luther was now receiving fervent support from his own students and guarded support elsewhere. He was emerging as an unlikely public hero. The turning point, when Luther received the personal endorsement he probably needed to pursue his case, came in April 1518 when his own order held a meeting at Heidelberg. While the theses themselves were not debated, Luther was acclaimed. A young friar called Martin Bucer was especially impressed. Bucer was to become a leading