"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer." – Voltaire
(If God didn't exit, we would have to invent him.)
"Luther was not unreal.
He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world."
– G.K.Chesteron
Martin Luther, Both King Lear and Malvolio,
and the Ironies of History Part II
In the
opening essay of this two-part series, I pointed out how Luther didn't start the Reformation, but rather a greedy aristocrat prelate did. I'll open this section with the observation that Luther is not the most important figure in Reformation History, either. But then neither was Calvin nor Zwingli nor the Elector Frederick the Wise nor the Emperor Charles V nor any of "the usual suspects". The most important figure of the Reformation was none other than Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu and Fronsac, otherwise known as Cardinal Richelieu. For it was Richelieu who guaranteed the success of the Reformation when the Hapsburgs had it almost finished off in Germany. This is the infamous Trahison de France and it comes at the end of the Reformation story, not its beginning. So it must be a subject for another essay.
The Indispensable Man
In the
previous section of this essay I wrote a bit about the background of Luther's world, and suggested the point that Voltaire made above about God, that
if Luther didn't exist, someone else would have played his role. Forces were at work in the world that demanded State control of the Church. Nationalism, rising Capitalism, trade and manufacturing. The world was changing. G.K.C. obviously believed, on the other hand, in Carlyle's "Great Men" theory of history, that history is shaped indelibly by men and women who are powerful actors, who can chart the course of history by their actions. Which is correct? I suspect both are, to one degree or another. Had Luther not existed...
- A number of other candidates existed who might have arisen (Zwingli, Calvin).
- But he was a German (not Swiss, or French) and thus perhaps Luther's role was pivotal, because Germany is pivotal. (It still is, actually.)
- Thus at he was the indispensable man of the Reformation. Or perhaps, merely, the Germans were.
- Countering that, however, is the old quote (and there's some debate as to who actually said it first) that, "The graveyards are full of men the world could not do without."
- Perhaps, all said and done, he was just a guy carrying a gas can through a smoldering house.
Martin Luther, the Man
He was born in 1483 (102 years before Richelieu's birth, curiously), ten days into the most Saturnine of months, November, the Celtic Mí na Samhna, Samhain, the Celtic New Year, when the dead meet the living. But Luther ("Luder" was the original spelling, but Luther himself changed it) was a German, not a Celt. The best the Germanic people come to Samhain is Walpurgis Night, when witches come out to welcome spring, and it is a very late folklore creation, not something going back to the Dreamtime of the gods, as is Samhain. However, Luther's life
was Novermberish from beginning to end. His parents were very hard on him as a child, indeed, cruel, and his schooling he later described as Hell. H.W. Crocker, in his history of the Catholic Church,
Triumph, asserts that Luther's father wasn't a Christian, "but an occultist who believed in darker Germanic witches, hobgolins, and demons," and that this would "haunt the imagination of Martin Luther..." who all his life asserted he had visions and fights with demonic forces. Maybe he did.
- But I don't want to demonize Luther, as I noted in Part I of this essay. So...
- His parents were "middle class" or "trader class", not peasants, (though ultimately of peasant stock); they had to work very hard to get where they were. And his father held leases on copper mines, after starting out as a miner. He was a man who worked.
- They were ambitious for their son, as well, and sent him to school in 1501 to the University of Erfurt to be a lawyer, and were not happy when he decided to become a monk.
- There's the famous story of Martin being caught in a thunderstorm, but
why he made his decision, we'll probably never know for sure. Maybe he
didn't know why, himself.
- Academically, in 1501, Martin Luther entered the University of Erfurt,
receiving a Master of Arts degree (in grammar, logic, rhetoric and
metaphysics). He received a Baccalaureate in 1502 and a Master's in 1505.
- In July of 1505, during a storm, he supposedly resolved to become a monk, and though thereafter in cloister, stayed at the University of Erfurt through ordination and received his doctorate in Theology in 1512.
- The he went to the new (founded 1502) Wittenberg University to teach theology. There he succeeded his mentor Johann von Staupitz as chairman of the Theology department in 1512. He was almost 29 years old.
- What we do know, from his writings — and Luther is one of those writers who "reveals all" about himself, more than we would normally want to know, though in his case, we're glad to have it since he became such an important historical figure — is that Martin Luther was ill-suited for religious life. ✔
- He was actually also ill-educated, from a number of different viewpoints. 1. He spent his academic life in only a couple of institutions, and one of them new, in which he himself was chair of theology. Both these institutions was wholly in the Nominalist camp (see previous essay) and thus, one can honestly say, Luther was simply badly educated for someone who would later boast he knew more about the Bible than popes and Church Councils! (See below.) And 2, he was promoted terribly fast through the ranks. Clearly, people thought a lot of him, but just as clearly, such head-long advancement could easily breed hubris.
- Worst of all, Luther had no pastoral experience; he was clueless all his life about the effects his ideas would have on the common people and the social life of "just folks" in society.
✔All his life, he lived in a deep
Sturm und Drang sort of mindset, and many have suggested he was bi-polar. Certainly he could be up, up, emotionally high all the way to the stars, and then down, deep down in the abyss of the soul. He was fated, the old ones would say, to be unhappy. His confessor in the monastery, Johann von Staupitz, is supposed to have told him, "Martin, God is not angry at you; you are angry at God." Luther was also foul-mouthed. Indeed,
scatological. But that — in the sense of "cussin' and swearin'" doesn't bother me in itself. I grew up among German-American farmers as neighbors and can, myself, should it be required, cuss and swear to a degree that I've found most people can't abide. Even would-be bullies or unspeakable bores. But in my neighborhood, it was just standard fare. (In the sense of being too interested in certain body parts and their functions, it is more troublesome, though one should remember that Mozart had the same, er, interest.) However:
- Unlike Calvin, that severe, pinched, beady-eyed soul, Luther might be someone you wouldn't mind going on a bar-crawl with.
- He had wit.
- One comment I remember: he said that there wasn't a German peasant who could read, who had read a line or two of his German New Testament, but who "set himself up as a doctor of theology, and who thought he had swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all."
- Luther had no small amount of music appreciation and musical ability, either. He wrote 37 hymns, it is said. (But then he sort of had to, since taking things out of the Mass left a lot of room for something, and preaching couldn't take all of the space. By the time he died, 60 hymnals had been published; 25,000 in the 60 years after his death.)
The Essential Luther
But the essential thing to know about Luther was he felt sinful, and as part of that, at
no time in his life (or not for long) did he feel he was forgiven by God, after Confession; he never felt the "new creation in Christ" that St. Paul talks about.
- The gist of the Historical Church, the Eastern and Western Orthodoxies, is that God became a man so Man's nature could be elevated to God, so that Theosis, or Divinization, could occur. (The Eastern Churches have kept the stress of this, but since Augustine, curiously enough, considering Luther was an Augustinian, the Western Church has de-emphasized it, although the second link above takes you to the relevant section of the Catechism.)
- Our very nature is to be transformed in Christ, so that, as St. Paul says in Romans 8, we becomes adopted sons of God, partakers of the divine nature (as St. Peter writes in 2 Peter 1:4).
- And this is why an obscure line in St. Paul makes sense, in First Corinthians, 6:3: "Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!" I would be embarrassed to even think such a thought, but the point is that God's Incarnation has set us up for a major change in status in the Heavenly Hierarchy.
- Protestantism denies, and strenuously denies, this idea, even though it is plainly obvious from Scripture (see first link below).
I write in some detail about this
here, but the point about Luther is he never really remotely felt this essential point of the Faith, and thus didn't believe it. Hence von Staupitz's admonishment to him. In the end, so worked up, so driven to despair was Luther,
that he in essence recreated the Christian religion in his own image: he taught that our natures never change, that we were, are, and always will be a dunghill, but that God would cover us with his grace as a dunghill is covered with snow. (God doesn't look on
our sin, you see, but on Christ's righteousness which He earned by the Cross,
if we believe in Christ, that is.) And that that was how we go into Heaven, as guano heaps, but guano heaps covered with snow.
Now, C.S. Lewis writes in his 20th letter in
Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, that such an idea is (shall we say) pretty awful.
I quote Lewis here.
It was this idea of Luther's that all the other Reformers picked up, and it has survived to this day. Calvin famously stressed, as his contribution to this, Predestination. (
See here for a modern Calvinist defense of the idea.) And oddly, while both Luther and Calvin stressed one needed to be baptized, and be a regular Church communicant (in their particular churches, I hasten to add), no Protestant today, or very few, believe anything but a public affirmation of belief in Jesus is necessary. At the time, though, in the 16th century the end result was a truly, profoundly, unutterably grim religion. Chesterton writes:
It is not, as the moderns delight to
say, a question of theology.
The Protestant theology of Martin Luther
was a thing that
no modern Protestant would be seen dead
in a field with;
or if the phrase be too flippant, would
be specially anxious
to touch with a barge-pole. That
Protestantism was pessimism;
it was nothing but bare insistence on
the hopelessness
of all human virtue, as an attempt to
escape hell.
That Lutheranism is now quite unreal;
more modern phases of
Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but
Luther was not unreal.
He was one of those great elemental
barbarians, to whom it
is indeed given to change the world.
Luther as Lear
Martin Luther is often said to have not wanted to start a new Church. You may have seen articles with a title like that. In a sense, that's true. He wanted to remake the entire Catholic Church in his own soul's dark image. (Again, the suggestion of hubris is rankly strong.) Same with Calvin, who considered himself a special apostle commissioned directly by God to recreate the Church. But Luther's preaching on "Christian Freedom", by which he meant — and asserted — that one could sin with impunity if one was indeed saved by God's grace, for it couldn't be taken away — had tragic consequences.
If you are a preacher of mercy, do not
preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must
therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are
only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly),
but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the
victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here,
for this life is not a place where justice resides.1
Luther often stressed one's freedom as a Christian, and wrote that the true Christian is most definitely NOT a St. Francis-like saint who leaves all to follow God and serve his fellow men, but a guy who eats and drinks well and fornicates as the mood takes him, because believing in Christ gives one assurance of Salvation and Salvation cannot be taken away, whatever you do. (You can see where Calvin harped "predestination" to that song.) Thus, one is "free".
At the end of his life, Luther would lament, much like Lear, on the state of things, and that the Germans were worse off now, in his last days, than they were before he began his revolution. He seemed honestly puzzled by that, truly confused. Thus Luther revealed a deeply stupid streak in himself: he couldn't see how his disastrous preaching paved the way for wide-spread moral failure.
The Peasants' Revolt, which was essentially encouraged by his ideas, he repudiated and wrote that the peasants had to be treated with fire and sword.
They were. Over 100,000 peasants were slaughtered, at least.
King Lear's fault was an arrogant pride, indeed, true hubris. Martin Luther did demonstrate this in his denseness noted immediately above and also his insistence on the Bible Alone, or
Sola Scriptura. In defense of his ideas; at the Imperial Diet held in Worms, on April 19, 1521, he said:
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear
reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is
well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound
by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of
God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right
to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.
This had to draw gasps from the room. It is obvious that if you open a Bible and lay in on the table or podium before you, it is not going to start speaking itself. No voice will ring out what it means.
Someone has to read it and interpret it. So here is the scene: Luther saying that
no pope and
no Church Council, which is a congress or parliament of Churchmen, after all, gathered from a wide array of intellectual and spiritual backgrounds, can know as much about Holy Writ as a youngish Augustinian friar with a rather restricted education.
Luther as Malvolio
Finally, Luther as fool. The German princes played him like a violin. He needed their support and they
did support him, keeping him alive and giving him lodging, even, after he was married, they gave him him his former friary as his own residence! (His family had to move after he died.)
One prince, in particular, made a fool of him. Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, a major Reformation supporter, got Luther to approve of his bigamous marriage. Apparently Luther's right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon, also approved, and in general, this is a discreditable mess that has taken a bit of the luster off of Luther's reputation.
But it shows how Luther was hemmed in by his saviors. They couldn't have had much respect for him. In fact, they were a lot like Malvolio's "friends": Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria. "Being played" had to gall him, but there it was. The Catholics, had they got a hold of him, would have finished him quick. He was stuck.
So, one could say that all his life, from early home life, through grammar school, and on and on till the end, Luther was in Hell (as he himself called his early schooling).
He's a tragic figure, both in himself and in the untold, uncountable horrors he released on the world. And a fool, of sorts, for just
not getting it.
An Préachán
1. A Letter From Luther to Melanchthon, Letter no. 99, 1 August 1521, from the Wartburg
major
