The entire program of the Reformation is contained in the reference to unpurchasable and unmanipulable penance, in which no one can stand in for another. From then on Luther has the privilege of being certain of his orthodoxy. What remains is formalities. It requires almost no effort to dismantle the industry of indulgences in the papal church as a suspect fabrication, concocted by hypocrites for the use of hypocrites.
“Man” is even more starkly reduced to a single point when he experiences how horror [the horror] of dying anticipates horror of the purgatorial fire. In the terror of the last hour, the otherworldly flames encroach upon this world. Here Luther indirectly picks up on the motif of humans gaining wisdom when it is too late. The fifteenth thesis leaves no doubt about the gravity of the situation: Hic timor et horror satis est se solo … facere penam purgatorii, cum sit proximus desperationis horrori. “This fear or horror is sufficient in itself … to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair.”26 We cannot say for certain whether, at the time of writing this, Luther had already stood at the bedside of someone dying. What is certain is that he is speaking of himself in this passage. His effort to find a strong foothold in the abyss culminates in the sixteenth thesis, where he brings the problem of penance to a head:
Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ the same as despair, half despair, and assurance of salvation.
Videntur infernus, purgatorium, celum differe sicut desperatio, prope desparatio, securitas differunt.27
The reduction hits the target with this distinction between different grades of despair. The seemingly harmless prope (“near,” “well nigh,” “nearby”) turns out to be the cardinal point in the radicalized interpretation of faith. Because near despair on Earth is distinct from complete despair in hell, even if only slightly at first blush, there is still a remainder of hope for later security. Whenever such hope is alive, the human being moves about in a middle zone. What one calls faith is actually the oscillation between extremes. Pastoral ministry has a term for it: Anfechtung [affliction, trial, tribulation]. The possibility of the human’s salvation is hidden away in the inconspicuous word “near.” Whoever only almost despairs can just as well undertake to be confident.
The successful reduction immediately gives rise to a dissolution of boundaries: If human existence is to become an integral exercise in penance, the purifying event will already be occurring, here and everywhere. Besides baptism no special access is needed. The cobbler, the smith, the farmer – they are all ordained priests and bishops. The spiritual privilege of the monastic form of life falls to the wayside. Luther democratizes the state of semi-despair. He indicates that the cleric is not saved a priori – not an ounce more than laypeople are. Now the motto holds: Purgatory for all, and right away at that, not after death! The extremes of heaven and hell, together with their reflections in definitive certainty and complete despair, lose all their lifeworld and everyday practical meaning. They remain the province of eschatological speculation and artistic depiction.
The Reformation is thus based on a relocation of the purgatorial function to the earlier stage of earthly existence. Concomitant with this is an expansion of penitential existence. If the cloister and the lifeworld have become one, it no longer makes sense to join a monastery. The clergy is no longer an independent estate. This is related to the observation that the later Luther still speaks of purgatory only rarely, and in the end almost not at all. In a sense, he is in a position where he no longer needs it; for it has been replaced by existence in the flames of the everyday. He no longer feels the dogmatic pressure to presuppose it as an established third location in the otherworldly realm either. Moreover, God himself would turn out to be a protector of ecclesiastical hypocrisy if he tolerated the emergence, from either–or, of an all too comfortable both–and. Purgatory is indeed a compositum mixtum, a mixed compound that serves as an antechamber to heaven ontologically, all the while resembling hell phenomenologically. The older Luther seems to think that, if such a place were to exist, it could only be demonstrated in human life. Human existence is in fact the intermingling of pre-hell and pre-heaven. Whoever knows the proper fear of death has no need of a transcendent purgatory. In 1928, Martin Heidegger said that Dasein means being held out into nothingness – as though, for the last time, we can hear in this an echo of Luther’s admonition that, when properly conceived of, existence qua existence is a purifying fire.
In his final years Luther seemed tacitly to come closer to Calvin’s positions. In his Institutio of 1536, Calvin completely rejected the idea of purgatory as a fiction concocted from “heresies.” He thus restored the implacability of the initial either–or – which inevitably made him the honorary chairman in the world congress of hypocrisy, as the harsh either–or could be borne only with help from the self-hypnotizing fiction of belonging to the flock of the saved (keyword: “Innerworldly askesis”).
It has been occasionally remarked that the annulment of monastic life in Luther’s work removed the East from the western culture of religion. It would be more appropriate to say that his reductionism stripped religious virtuosity of its foundations. The loosening of eccentric tension contributed to the routinization of religio. Minimizing the cult led to the internalization of the interaction with the Highest. Internalization led to privatization; and privatization led to an assimilation under profane worldliness. The rest is pedagogical Christendom. The entire process was accompanied by the inevitable generalization of hypocrisy. For the model of a human existence oriented toward the command to do penance could not be sustained for long.
Luther anticipated the problem of a Protestant hypocrisy and attempted to temper it with the formula simul iustus et peccator [righteous and sinner at once]. His precaution turned nothing from the direction of development. It was inevitable that the condensation of existence into a single point should fail, because eccentric positionality cannot be eliminated, not even after reduction. Who would be capable of distinguishing the justified sinner from the hypocrite relocated to eternity? The penitential imperative lost its plausibility to such an extent that the expectation of the imminent Last Judgment petered out. In Luther, belief in the approaching judgment was still paired with a rock-solid certainty; it was surpassed only by his conviction about the omnipresence of the devil.
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When we take stock of the Reformation, the first thing we are compelled to notice is that Luther’s impulses were essentially restorative much more than revolutionary. His interventions in the papal church followed the schema of a conservative revolution where innovation presents itself as restoration. Luther preached a Christian salafism, as it were. He never lost the conviction that his reading of the holy text was more catholic than every Catholicism and more evangelical than all scholastic theology; and this all the more as the conceited theologians had given undue pride of place to the master thinker of the pagans, Aristotle. Luther’s slogan could have been: Rise up, you Christians, onward into the past!
2.4 Protestant entropy
Luther belongs among the rare figures of cultural evolution of which we can say that they were lucky in terms of the history of ideas. In this field, being favored by luck means finding successors who are better than one deserves. In the case of Martin Luther, his unmerited successors include – and I will content myself with the shortest of lists – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Schweitzer, Gotthard Günther, and Martin Luther King: here Luther’s universe resonates like a world history in first names.
When we do history of ideas, we devote ourselves to the attempt to do justice to the asymmetries of what was said “earlier” and what was said “later.” Cultural evolution runs its course in a manner that is asymmetrical per se. This can be gleaned from