Martin Luther

Catholic Dissident

Peter Stanford

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473621688
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

'A compelling biography of one of the greatest men of the modern age. Stanford is particularly brilliant on the tensions inside Luther's private and spiritual life. This is a very fine book, written with a flourish.' Melvyn Bragg The 31st of October 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther pinning his 95 'Theses' - or reform proposals - to the door of his local university church in Wittenberg. Most scholars now agree that the details of this eye-catching gesture are more legend than hammer and nails, but what is certainly true is that on this day (probably in a letter to his local Archbishop in Mainz), the Augustinian Friar and theologian issued an outspokenly blunt challenge to his own Catholic Church to reform itself from within - especially over the sale of 'indulgences' - which ultimately precipitated a huge religious and political upheaval right across Europe and divided mainstream Christianity ever after.A new, popular biography from journalist Peter Stanford, looking at Martin Luther from within his Catholic context, examining his actual aims for Catholicism as well as his enduring legacy - and where he might fit within the church today. 'Peter Stanford makes the life of Luther into a thrilling narrative, told from a modern Catholic perspective' Antonia Fraser

PART ONE:

Friar Martin

‘Luther was a rather endangered young man [who] found a spiritual solution.’

Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (1958)

Chapter One

Growing Up: A Lawyer in the Making

‘I am the son of peasants. My great grandfather, grandfather and father were all simple farmers.’

Martin Luther, Table Talk¹

For one who in later life enjoyed talking about himself at length and apparently unguardedly, Martin Luther left behind very few clues as to his childhood. The six volumes of his Tischreden, or Table Talk – all recorded in his Wittenberg home from 1531 onwards by his admirers, making notes as the most famous man in Europe part reconstructed, part embroidered his own biography – provide much more detail about Luther’s life than is available for any other early sixteenth-century public figure. Yet, in them, the references to his upbringing are scant.

When they do surface, they can be misleading. Take Luther’s claim, which opens this chapter, that he was from peasant stock. His father, Hans, did indeed hail from a poor, rural, farming background in Möhra, in Thuringia, a wooded, hilly region that sits in the centre of modern Germany. Back then it was part of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, a loose assembly of territories of differing sizes, each with their own ruler. Those who have delved into Hans Ludher’s family history, though, paint him as one step above what was usual for rural ‘peasants’ who eked out a subsistence existence on the land.² ‘Yeoman farmer’ might capture it better. And there is evidence, too, that Luther’s mother, Margarethe Lindemann, was connected by birth to the emerging merchant class in towns and cities where fledgling capitalism was displacing the prevailing late medieval system.³ She had a nephew who was a priest and a cousin who taught medicine at Leipzig University. She was even, some have suggested, sufficiently educated to instil in her son a precocious love of words and reading in what was an age of widespread illiteracy.⁴

This was not the impression Luther was seeking to convey when, in January 1533, he remarked at table: ‘In my youth, my father was a poor miner. My mother carried all the wood needed on her back. That is how I was raised.’⁵ He might just as well have added that they were bent double and had no teeth. Not only was he from peasant stock, Luther was asserting, he also had a peasant upbringing, but the truth is rather different.

According to the custom of the day, Hans, as the eldest son, didn’t inherit the yeoman Ludher family’s agricultural lands in Möhra. Instead, they went to a younger brother, leaving Hans to find work in the copper and silver mines that ran through the hills of Thuringia like rabbit burrows. By dint of hard graft, commercial acumen and good fortune in what were notoriously dangerous working conditions, Hans prospered. He ended up owning the extraction rights to six mineshafts as well as two copper smelters, and employing his own workforce. So well respected did this ‘peasant’ become that he is recorded as one of four ‘lords’ on his town council.

So why would Luther claim humbler origins for himself than he had – especially when, as a young friar, he had apparently been intent on travelling in the opposite direction, swapping the coarse-sounding Ludher in favour of the more refined, Latin- and Greek-influenced Luther? Those who rise from modest beginnings are often prone as they grow older to exaggerate their lowly start in life, conveying just how far they have risen up the social scale (‘if you think you’re having it hard, when I was a child . . .’). Luther has few rivals in this regard. By the time he shared his description of his downtrodden mother and father, his name was known all over Europe, he counted princes among his friends, and he lived in style in a large former monastery, the four-storey Black Cloister in Wittenberg.

There may, though, have been a more specific purpose behind his caricature of his roots. His revolt against the Catholic Church had initially drawn widespread support from the peasant classes, who regarded him as one of their own and their champion. In his words they read not just a spiritual message but one that echoed their economic and social grievances. Yet in 1524, when they rose up against their rulers to right those grievances, expecting Luther’s support, he had sided with the German princes. So here he was, nine years on at his table in Wittenberg, trying to heal the breach by insisting to the peasant class that he was still essentially one of them.

And, in fairness to Luther, there may have been more than a grain of truth in that hard-pressed picture of childhood he conveyed. At least in the early days of their marriage, his parents would have been thrifty. Hans was setting out to make his fortune, and Margarethe supported him by running a tight household for their expanding family.⁶ Why waste money on fuel when there was plenty to be gathered simply by walking around the forests that covered large swathes of the neighbourhood? It was what many people did.

Johannes – always shortened to Hans – and Margarethe had married in her hometown of Eisenach in 1479, aged 20 and 16 respectively. By the time Martin came along on 10 November 1483,⁷ the couple had moved to Eisleben. The only portraits that survive of them date from much later, shortly before their deaths. Both are by Lucas Cranach the Elder, court painter to the Electors of Saxony and a close friend and supporter of Martin Luther. He affords neither sitter any airs and graces.⁸

Hans Ludher has the rough countenance of one who has fought his way to get where he is, from his crooked nose, fiery, impatient eyes and ill-kempt hair to the battered, earthenware hands that sit awkwardly in his lap, at odds with the plush fur trimming on his jacket collar, symbol of the hard-won respectability he has acquired. Margarethe, by contrast, is dressed with stark simplicity, as any woman back then working in the fields might have been, though her clothes are clean and pressed. Her hair and brow are covered by a crudely woven peasant scarf, and her hollow cheeks are browned by the sun. Unlike her husband’s, her eyes are still and passive, her whole demeanour one of stoicism in the face of all that this world could throw at her.

Four years separate their marriage from Martin’s birth. They may have had other children before he came along, who did not live long, but records are opaque. Infant mortality was common in the late medieval age. The resulting fear that their newborn son might not survive caused the Ludhers to follow the prevailing custom and baptise Martin as soon as possible after his arrival. Church teaching was explicit that any child not christened (and therefore cleansed of the stain of original sin that all humans carry because of the misdeeds of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) would be denied salvation in heaven and consigned to limbus puerorum (‘Limbo of the Infants’). So within twenty-four hours of his arrival, the Ludhers presented their baby son for baptism at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Eisleben. They chose for him the name of the saint whose feast day occurred on 11 November – Martin de Tours, a fourth-century martyr, traditionally depicted cutting his cloak in half to share it with a beggar.

Within a few months, baby Martin and his parents had shifted again, this time the ten miles to the town of Mansfeld, in the heart of the mineral-rich Harz Hills, where there were opportunities aplenty for an ambitious miner such as Hans, keen to provide for his family. Some speculative accounts suggest that he had been sacked from his job in Eisleben (and even that Margarethe worked in a brothel) but they are based on too literal a reading of the personal insults and slights casually flung about by both sides at the height of the Reformation’s war of words.⁹

Social mobility

Crucially for their son’s future, the Ludhers became – by their own efforts – sufficiently well-heeled to pay for education; in effect, in Hans’s case, and like many a father since, ensuring that his offspring enjoyed a better start in life than he had. Young Martin began in the local school in Mansfeld, which would have run the standard curriculum of the time in Latin, music and grammar. The emphasis was on learning by rote, memory and recitation, with mistakes ironed out by corporal punishment. ‘Some teachers are as horrible as hangmen,’ Luther recalled. ‘Even I one morning was whipped fifteen times because I had not learned to decline and conjugate.’¹⁰

If the regime sounds brutal, it was unremarkable for the time, and Luther did not appear any more traumatised by the experience than his classmates. Indeed, he was ever after a passionate proponent of education. That ‘even I’ hints at a good and diligent pupil.

The true mark of the Ludhers’ affluence – or at least of their willingness to scrimp and save in order to be in a position to pay – was shown at Easter of 1497, when Martin was able to continue his studies beyond the age of thirteen, a privilege available to only a small percentage of boys of his age and only a tiny number of high-born girls. He was sent north as a boarder to a school in the cathedral city of Magdeburg on the River Elbe. He was later to describe the school as linked to the Brethren of the Common Life, a significant lay movement of Dutch origin within the Catholic Church. Its devotees lived together in community, sharing their goods, but without taking religious vows. They adhered to the ‘Devotio Moderna’ – or ‘Modern Devotion’ – which stressed simplicity above all, as well as the importance of penance, meditation and prayer in building a personal relationship with God. Such beliefs were the basis of the curriculum the Brethren offered in schools across northern Europe. These provided greater opportunities for learning to the sons of those from modest backgrounds. The best known among their alumni was Thomas à Kempis, whose Imitation of Christ, a book of devotional meditations on the life and teaching of Jesus, was popular in the late medieval ...