Here, as in Renaissance Italy, political struggles were difficult to disentangle from economic rivalries and conflicts. Just as German princes relied on their political and military dominance for access to the revenues derived from cities and especially from peasant labour, so too was the success of the commercial cities dependent on their ‘extra-economic’ powers and privileges. The commercial dominance of the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe, for instance, relied on the League’s coercive powers, the capacity to enforce monopolies, embargoes and blockades, which might require military interventions up to and including outright war. The League’s dominance was threatened not so much by the purely ‘economic’ superiority of its commercial rivals – the kind of competitive advantage enjoyed by cost-effective capitalist producers – as by their more effective geopolitical reach and military power.
In 1519, the Habsburg King Charles I of Spain became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His reign would be marked by intense and varied conflicts with German princes and municipal authorities, to say nothing of the peasant revolt. Charles was constantly distracted by the Empire’s rivalries with other rising states, as well as Spain’s project of imperial expansion, revolt on Spanish soil and the ever-present Turkish threat. He never succeeded in subduing local powers in the German territories. His reign would play a decisive role in the life of Martin Luther and in the Reformation, which flourished in the context of the Holy Roman Empire, not only because the emperor’s attacks on Luther helped to concentrate the theologian’s mind but because Lutheran doctrine proved so useful to various protagonists in the rivalries among competing powers.
Born in 1483 into a reasonably comfortable family, Luther was intended for the law; but he soon gave up his legal education for the Church and became an Augustinian monk. The monastic life seems to have generated little but doubt and despair. The Christianity he had learned from preachers and a very pious mother was obsessed with sin, repentance and the wrath of God. It did, to be sure, suggest that repentant sinners can make some contribution to their own salvation; and theology appeared to teach that, even if salvation is a matter of God’s grace and not just a simple reward for a virtuous life, believers can and must engage in a constant struggle to cooperate with God – always, of course, with the help of the Church. But, to Luther, this appeared to mean that, torn between virtue and sin, between God and the devil, we can in this life never know whether all our efforts are enough to please God. Not even the extreme asceticism he adopted in the monastery could offer any certainty or comfort. As he described his own experience, it only turned his soul upon itself. He began to break free from this tormented struggle when his superior, Johann Staupitz, convinced him that repentance is not a matter of seeking God’s love, which is already evident in the sacrifice of Christ, but, on the contrary, begins with our own love of God.
Luther was also persuaded by Staupitz, who was dean of the new University of Wittenberg, to pursue an academic career in biblical theology; and it was not as any kind of activist but as professor of theology that Luther launched his attack on the corruptions of the Church. He would later attribute his theological innovations to a transformative moment, a rebirth, which came to him while grappling with the doctrine of St Paul. ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith:’ said Paul in Romans 1: 17, ‘as it is written: the just shall live by faith.’ Luther would later recount that, while lecturing on the Psalms, he finally came to understand this passage to mean that the righteousness of God was not revealed by punishment. Instead, in his grace, he declared the sinner righteous – or ‘justified’ him – by means of faith alone. Salvation was not, in other words, the uncertain outcome of a lifelong human effort but a free and loving gift of God.
Luther never resolved the question of predestination, and debate still rages about what he meant on this score. Lutherans would come to distinguish themselves from Calvinists on the grounds that, while both theologians believed in election by God, only Calvin insisted on a ‘double’ predestination, according to which God also chose those who are damned. Luther, they maintain, never taught that some were predestined to eternal damnation. Yet, if this is so, some would argue, Luther remained caught in an irreducible contradiction, which undermined belief in God’s total sovereignty. It might be better simply to accept that Luther deliberately refused to confront the conundrum of predestination, because preoccupation with this issue was, in his eyes, a distraction from acknowledging our sinfulness and from unwavering faith in God’s grace and salvation through Christ. This would also, as we shall see, have the effect of strengthening Luther’s doctrine of obedience to secular authority.
Whether or not Luther’s revelation was as sudden as he later made it out to be, the doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ represents a revolutionary moment in the history of Christianity. It is true that St Augustine had elaborated a doctrine of salvation that seemed to leave very little scope for repentance and good works as the road to salvation. For him, too, salvation was a free and unearned gift of God through grace; and he had a particularly uncompromising view of predestination. But Luther, as influenced as he was by St Augustine, was convinced that, once he had experienced his revelation on St Paul, he had put Augustine behind him.
For Augustine, justification by God’s grace was not something that happened all at once. It was a process that occupied a lifetime in this world and could only be completed in the next, while, for Luther, it was God’s immediate and unconditional gift in this life. Augustine may have been no less intent than was Luther on emphasizing that salvation was an unearned gift from God; but his formulation may have seemed open to the interpretation that human beings could in their lifetime, at least in some small way, cooperate in their own transformation by divine grace. In any case, whatever St Augustine had intended, the authority of the Catholic Church clearly depended on maintaining the sinner’s role in achieving salvation, with, of course, the necessary help of sacramental interventions by the Church; and Augustinian theology would be interpreted by medieval popes, such as Gregory the Great (590–604), in just this way. Luther would have none of that – not on the grounds that Christian virtue and good works meant nothing to him, but on the grounds that, while they should be undertaken freely for the love of God, they had nothing to do with earning God’s love and the free gift of justification. Sinners are saved not by their own righteousness but, all at once and in this life, by the righteousness of God, which means that, even while remaining sinners, they are ‘justified’ by faith alone. This doctrine had fatal implications for the sacramental functions of the Church, but its implications for obedience to secular authority may have been even greater.
Whenever Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith reached maturity – and commentators disagree on when and how it happened – Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church did not at first depend on it. The most famous moment in his career, which is conventionally depicted as the Reformation’s true beginning, was his attack on the corruptions of the Church, and especially the practice of indulgences, in his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly called the 95 Theses, which he issued in 1517, nailing them, as tradition (if not historical evidence) tells us, to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. His target was the pope’s claims to powers that were, for Luther, God’s alone: the power to award salvation or to affect the scope and duration of penance in the afterlife. This attack on the pope did not require, nor did Luther invoke, the doctrine of justification by faith as he would later formulate it.
Luther would soon be threatened by a papal ban, which would lead to his excommunication; and his personal fate became enmeshed in public conflicts between the Church and secular authorities over the distribution of