Introduction

Very naturally he [Martin Luther] is a controversial figure. The multitudinous portrayals fall into certain broad types already delineated in his own generation. His followers hailed him as the prophet of the Lord and the deliverer of Germany. His opponents on the Catholic side called him the son of perdition and the demolisher of Christendom. The agrarian agitators branded him as the sycophant of the princes, and the radical sectarians compared him to Moses, who led the children of Israel out of Egypt and left them to perish in the wilderness. But such judgments belong to an epilogue rather than a prologue. The first endeavor must be to understand the man.

One will not move far in this direction unless one recognizes at the outset that Luther was above all else a man of religion. The great outward crises of his life which bedazzle the eyes of dramatic biographers were to Luther himself trivial in comparison with the inner upheavals of his questing after God….(end quote).

These are amongst the opening words of Roland H. Bainton’s “Here I stand! a life of Martin Luther” and who am I to disregard the advice of one of the most revered biographers of the great Reformer.

What we are going to talk about today

With that, hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 240: Martin Luther’s “Anfechtungen”

In this episode we will look at the first 35 years of Martin Luther’s life, from his birth in 1483 to a moment sometime between 1512 and 1519 when he achieved his great theological breakthrough. This is a crucial period in the history of the Reformation, a time when Luther struggled with what he called his “Anfechtungen”. Anfechtungen is one of these untranslatable German words like Schadenfreude and Gemütlichkeit. It is something more than a trial or tribulation, more of an existential assault on faith itself — an overwhelming, often visceral experience of doubt, terror, and despair before God, in which the sinner feels utterly exposed to divine judgment and abandoned by grace. Sounds quite painful. It was these “Anfechtungen” that brought about the cornerstone of his creed, that salvation is to be obtained through faith alone. It is the story how Protestantism is born in the head of just one man.

And this story is usually told around three, sometimes four, pivotal events, a thunderstorm in July 1505 that frightened young Luther so much, he vowed to join a monastery, then the day when he celebrated his first mass and the subsequent challenge to these choices by his father, then his visit to Renaissance Rome in 1510 or 1511 and finally, the “tower experience” where Luther is supposed to have had his intellectual breakthrough whilst sitting on the loo…

We know about all these events not from a diary or contemporaneous letters, but from documents drawn up much, much later. One main source are the so-called table talks. These were records of what Martin Luther said at casual dinners in his home in Wittenberg in the 1530s and 1540s, taken by his student lodgers. The other key source is his brief autobiography that he published as a foreword to an edition of his complete works in 1545, so towards the end of his life.

I guess you can see where I am heading with this. We have a historical figure that is – still today – extraordinarily controversial, we have a time period that sits at the heart of a seismic shift in the religious, cultural and political landscape of Europe and we have primary sources drawn up 30 years later. No cigars for guessing what follows. Forests upon forests have been felled to debate the veracity, sequence and significance of these events.

And your humble podcaster now finds himself in the middle of a paper storm. Please do not shoot me.  As always I will give you the version of the story I find most plausible. And that may well be a version that goes against what some of you believe. But given the above, “here I stand and I can do no other”. If you want to dig deeper into the competing views, I recommend the biographies of Roland H. Bainton, Lyndal Roper, Heinz Schilling and Richard Friedenthal and of course Diarmaid McCulloch’s: Reformation. 

Announcements

But before we start, let me thank you all for your feedback on the changes to the show. It seems that you find me just funny enough – which is in a way reassuring but also not. The other point you were making was that you do not mind the episode length creep, but you are somewhat saddened about the step from weekly to biweekly. I will take that feedback on board . The former is easily implemented, I just keep droning on, as for the latter. I will see whether there is any way to return to weekly – though for now I cannot see how.

Talking about promises, I am so astonished and flattered that you all stayed on as patrons during this long podcast drought. I had expected some serious attrition, but no. You guys are truly special! And if there are still some of you willing to join this group of very special people and get priority booking for the next History of the Germans Tour – oh yes – the good ship Iris will be back provided someone can refill the Rhine. So sign up at historyofthegermans.com/support and receive the announcement early and get a better chance to join us.

And with that, back to the show.

Not so special after all

So, let me start with something controversial. I do not think there is anything particularly unusual about Martin Luther’s life before he turned 21, or arguably even before he turned 35. I know this flies in the face of almost any biography I have read. After all, he was an earthshattering figure and hence he must have been exceptional right from the beginning. Well, let’s have a look. 

Luther’s childhood

Martin Luther was born into a family that was on the way up. His father, Hans Luder came from a well-to-do peasant family, but due to local law, did not inherit the farm. Instead he was given a cash payout which together with the dowry and the family connections of his wife Margarethe formed the basis of his business success. Hans Luder moved his family to Mansfeld in the Harz mountains, modern day Sachsen-Anhalt, when Martin was just 1-year old. Mansfeld was a small town with a rapidly developing copper mining industry. And one of Margarethe’s relatives was the Berggraf, the administrator of the mining rights in the county of Mansfeld which must have made it easier for Hans Luder to acquire rights to operate mines and smelters in the county.

Mining was, as we have mentioned several times, the leading industrial technology in Europe at the time. And German miners as well as the bankers who funded them, were at the forefront of this technology. They had developed the Saiger process whereby silver could be separated from the copper ore, dramatically improving the economics of the industry. It was a fiercely competitive industry that had no guilds protecting incumbent operators. And it was an industry where expertise, risk appetite and self-confidence were key success factors. Hans Luder had all of this in abundance, plus a pugilistic streak that seemed to run in the family. He once knocked out a man with a beer stein and his younger brother ended up dead after a brawl in the pub.

Martin Luther would later make a big deal of his modest roots, claiming his father went down the mines and his mother had to bring the firewood in from the forest on her back. This may have been tales from the early days in Mansfeld when it was all hands on deck and the was money tied up in investments. But excavations near the home of Hans Luder had discovered remains of a prosperous household where meat was eaten regularly and servants did most of the domestic chores. At one point Hans Luder owned several mines and smelters and became a member of the city council. So no poor peasant after all.

Several biographers elaborate at length on the corporal punishment young Martin experienced during his youth. There is a story of him being so afraid of his father, he hid in the forest for a day, and an incident where his mother beat him bloody for stealing a nut. Lyndel Roper in particular makes the case that Hans Luder was an overbearing, sometimes terrifying presence in Luther’s early life, which may explain his belief that God himself was an unyielding, terrifying judge of the sinners. We do have a picture of both parents towards the end of their lives. And I must say, in particular Hans Luder looks like a man you do not want to get in an argument with.

But whether that alone explains what happened to friar Martin during his life as a monk feels a bit far-fetched. We should not compare parenting styles in the 16^th century with our modern standards. And let us not forget, these standards we have today are very modern. I had teachers in school who reminisced about the good old days when they could cane students for minor vocabulary infringements. After all, most children were beaten at the time, even beaten as hard as Luther had been, but only one of them caused the Reformation.

Luther’s education

Given what Luther achieved in terms of theology, language and music, there is little doubt that he was exceptionally gifted.  However, he was only a good student, not an exceptional one. His Latin, which was the main focus of the curriculum, was never more than decent.

He went to the local school in Mansfeld until he was 14. Then he went to Magdeburg where he spent a year in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life. It is surprising that he barely mentioned this institution. The brethren were a community of lay people who tried to live in the footsteps of the apostles. One of their convictions was that quote “It is not learned discourse but a life of virtue that brings you close to God.” And they embraced the idea of “love thy neighbour” and “do not think of yourself as better than others, however obviously wicked they may seem”. Their spiritual preceptor was Thomas à Kempis, whose book, the Imitation of Christ features in the top 10 on the eternal bestseller list. His preferred place was apparently in “hoexkens ende boexkens” meaning in a nook with a book. That is a man after my heart, though seemingly not after Martin Luther’s!

From Magdeburg he then went to Eisenach where he completed his schooling whilst living with relatives of his mother. Eisenach lies below the Wartburg, the mighty castle of the Landgraves of Thuringia and the place where he would later spend a few years as Junker Jörg, translating the Bible into German.

During these school days, he heard rumors of a monk called Johann Hilten, who had been imprisoned by his own order for predicting the end of all monastic life for the year 1516. Eerily close to 1517 and something that was later woven into the protestant narrative. How much of that he actually related to himself at the time is unknown, but best guess, nothing at all.

He entered the university of Erfurt in Spring 1501. Erfurt was by far the largest city he had yet lived in and would ever live in. It was prosperous for two reasons. It lay on the crossroads of the Via Regia from eastern Europe to Frankfurt and the road connecting Nürnberg and Northern Europe. It was also the major producer of woad, an indigo-blue dye much sought after in the textile industry. With about 10,000 citizens it was five times the size of Mansfeld and its university was one of the oldest in the empire.

Over the subsequent four years young Martin diligently passed his exams until he got his Master of Arts in January 1505. Again, he did alright, but not exactly top of the list.

According to his father, young Martin was now to study law. Law was by then the springboard for ambitious young men. There were open positions galore in the emerging administrations of the imperial principalities, lawyers were sought in the expanding system of law courts, including the two imperial courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat we discussed in episode 225. And even the church was stuffed full of lawyers. Arguably at this point the church was the most advanced bureaucracy in Europe.  Many, if not the majority of the popes of that period had been lawyers, including friend of the podcast Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, aka pope Pius II.

In other words, having a son moving into the legal profession was a dream come true for an upwardly mobile family like the Luders. Hans Luder, despite his troll-like appearance was a modern man, who believed in progress, meritocracy and a world where ambition could be rewarded with aristocratic titles and permanent social uplift. In his excitement he splashed out on a full copy of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, including commentaries, for his son – a considerable expense.

However, Hans Luder’s dream hit the buffers just 6 months later.

The Thunderstorm

What happened then has been recounted a thousand times. No need for me to devise my own version. Here is Roland Bainton telling it: quote: “As he returned to school after a visit with his parents, sudden lightning struck him to earth. In that single flash he saw the denouement of the drama of existence. There was God the all-terrible, Christ the inexorable, and all the leering fiends springing from their lurking places in pond and wood that with sardonic cachinnations they might seize his shock of curly hair and bolt him into hell. It was no wonder that he cried out to his father’s saint, patroness of miners, “St. Anne help me! I will become a monk.” End quote

And that was that. Two weeks later Martin Luther presented himself at the door of the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, demanded to be admitted as a novice monk setting in motion a sequence of events that would end in the collapse of the unity of Christendom.

What drama – There is a young student of law, la di da walking home thinking of nothing in particular. And the heavens open, thunder struck and bang – the great reformer is born. It does remind one of Saul falling from his horse and turning into St. Paul.

Most appropriately, In 1917 a lady from Erfurt had a stone erected on that very spot with the inscription; Hallowed earth – the watershed of the Reformation

My problem is not so much with the veracity of this event, though there are some who doubt the whole story on the grounds of being a bit too neat. Where I struggle is whether this was an exceptional event and whether this was indeed the crucial moment when Luther’s life took a new turn.

Situations where men and women vowed to become monks or nuns in a moment of existential and sometimes even non-existential fear were common as muck in the Middle Ages, even as late as the 1500s. As far back as the 6^th century when St. Benedict devised the rules of monasticism, there was already the need for a safeguard against such vows made in haste. And that safeguard still exists today. It is called the Novitiate. To become a monk you have to live under the monastic rule for a year and a day before you could be admitted. And in that year the novice and the monastery can figure out whether there is a real vocation here or just a panicked commitment. Both novice and monastery can end the novitiate at any time and for any reason. Novices who returned to secular life were explicitly released from their vows, experiencing no repercussions neither here nor in the afterlife.

Therefore the crucial moment was not the thunderstorm or the moment he requested entrance to the monastery, the crucial moment was when he asked to take his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience a year later. And about that moment we have no information, no primary, no second hand information. Nothing.

Some scholars have argued that Luther had no interest in the law with its inbuilt ambiguity nor did he have an appetite for the career path or interest in money and titles.  Hence he saw entering a monastery as a great way to get out of a university degree he had been forced into and it offered an opportunity to spite his overbearing father to boot.

Well, that would be going quite far for a run-of-the-mill father-son conflict. As I mentioned several times before, life under the monastic rule was hard to the point of unbearable. Praying 8 times a day, never a full nights sleep, poverty, aka a having just one poorly made habit and sleeping in a tiny bare cell, chastity and total obedience to the abbot, that is rough. Now, not all monastic communities lived like that. Contemporary literature is full of lazy monks who granted themselves exceptions from prayer, allowed luxury goods, including great food into the monastery. Just take a look around the great baroque abbeys in Austria or Bavaria with their luxurious chapter houses and apartments.

But Martin Luther did not choose one of those. He went hardcore – the observant Augustinians. These guys did take their vows seriously and they did live by the rule. And Luther made his life even harder by even more praying, fasting and religious exercises than his colleagues.

Nobody can tell me that was just to annoy his father, who by the way does not strike me quite as awful as that anyway.

The other argument is that indeed he had been terrified to die right there, on that July evening near Stotternheim. That confrontation with mortality opened up his lingering fears of the final judgement, a terrifying God on a rainbow pointing towards eternal damnation with his sword.  This argument can be further supported by the deaths of two law professors and a student friend during a renewed outbreak of the Plague in 1505. Finally, Luther had recently suffered a self-inflicted injury when he nearly cut an artery in his leg with a sword or dagger.

So he was afraid of death. Everybody in that period was afraid of death. And death meant first purgatory and then the final judgement with a chance of ending in eternal hellfire. There were dozens and dozens of depictions of the horrors that awaited the sinner in the churches of Mansfeld, Magdeburg, Eisenach and Erfurt, many of them in the rapidly spreading technique of oil painting that made them even more realistic and more terrifying. No wonder that many young men and women sincerely committed to the monastic life. After all, life expectancy for those who had survived early childhood was maybe another 40 to 50 years, whilst purgatory stretched for millennia and paradise was forever. So just arithmetically, the life of an observant monk, hard as it was, had a better long term pay-out than that of a successful lawyer.

Luther’s fear of death may well have been real, and very much justified, and it may well have been the reason he joined the monastery for real. But that still does not make him exceptional. After all, the church was the largest organization in Europe by a wide margin, in scale only comparable to the public sector in today’s world. It was financed and staffed to a large extent through that fear of the afterlife. In a place like Erfurt the church employed maybe a thousand people and the monks themselves counted maybe several hundred. Luther was just one of them.

The First Mass

This first year at the monastery was one that Luther described as fairly happy. The devil was unusually quiet as he wrote later. And no wonder. He had joined a religious order, and the observant branch of that order that took its vows seriously. If his motivation had been to escape hellfire, by the prevailing wisdom of the time, he was doing everything right. In fact he was already going above and beyond his calling, adding prayers and fast days to improve his chances. When he had been 14 years old, he had seen prince Wilhelm von Anhalt quote “who went in a friar’s cowl on the highways to beg bread.”  And had turned into “a corpse of mere skin and bones” and had died young. Though Luther mentioned him years later as an example of why monasticism, even heroic ascetic exercises, did not work, he still admitted that “No one could look upon him without feeling ashamed of his own life.” He was clearly impressed by this athlete of Christ who was taking the gates of paradise by storm, and tried to emulate him.

The Augustinian order was a mendicant order like the Franciscans and Dominicans. They were based in cities, were active in the ministry, preaching, teaching or looking after the sick.  They weren’t monks who lived in Abbeys secluded from the rest of society.  So, when Martin Luther entered the convent, it was decided that he should first join the priesthood.

It does not seem that Luther was unduly perturbed by this task, even though he was more than aware of its significance. Mass was the focal point of the church’s means of Grace. On the altar the bread and the wine become the flesh and blood of God, and the sacrifice of Calvary is re-enacted. And only a priest can perform this miracle. He has a power that goes beyond that of kings and emperors, even angels cannot do it. And to perform it, everything has to be present and correct, the vestments, the state of the priest’s soul, his performance of the rite, the strength of his voice and so on and so on. Transgressing any of these conditions was – as Luther said – seen as worse than any of the seven deadly sins. Even though any such transgression would not invalidate the act, as long as the celebrant intended to perform it correctly.

In 1517 he had completed his training and a date was set for his first mass. The celebration of the liturgy by a new priest was of course a grand occasion. Luther was allowed to invite friends and family , including his parents. He had joined the convent without telling his mother and father beforehand, which caused much frustration for his father, but their relationship seemed to have recovered. His father came to Erfurt in magnificent style, accompanied by twenty riders and made a generous donation of 20 gulden to the monastery, probably equivalent to Martin’s inheritance.

It should have been joyous celebration of a major milestone in in brother Martins life as a friar.

And it started well. Luther confessed, put on his gear the right way round, went through the actions he was about to perform in his head, and approached the altar. All went well until he came to the point in the rite where he said: “We offer unto thee, the living, the true, the eternal God”. He later related that: “At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? The angels surround him. At his nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say ‘I want this, I ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God”  end quote.

He turned round to the senior priest who always accompanied the newbies on these occasions and said, I need to go, I cannot do it. But the  older man pushed him back on to the altar, and Luther, in anguish and terror went through the rest of the motions.

Afterwards there was a celebratory dinner for the brothers and for Luther’s guests, including his mother and father. Given all the trauma earlier in the day, Luther now needed his father to fully reconcile with him and approve of his choices. And as he asked him why he had been so against him becoming a monk. Did he not see how quiet and Godly this life was?

That was when father Hans lost it. In front of all the monks and doctors of the church he turned on his son. Had he not heard of the fifth commandment – you should honour your father and mother. Now you leave your aged parents all alone to fend for themselves. And when Martin responded saying that he had been terrified to death by a thunderstorm and God had called him to join the monastery, Hans Luder answered – “God grant it was not an apparition of the devil”.

And that was when Luther’s famous “Anfechtungen” began for real. His father sank the seed of doubt into his mind. What if Satan had lured him to the monastery whilst God had intended that he obeyed his father and mother. And now he was not just touching the holy, but performing the act that turned mere bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, he a worthless sinner, just dust and ash, a man who had gone against God’s commandments.

And in his worldview there was no way to recover from this sin. The God of his imagination was surrounded by angels and “at his nod the earth trembles”, leaving Luther “utterly stupefied and terror-stricken”.

What he would do for the next decade was to seek out any which way he could appease this God-monster, this primed nuclear bomb of judgement that lived in his head.

Monastic Exertions

The church that built up this image of the righteous God who judges the sinners also offered means to appease the deity. One of these were good works. Good works for a monk were prayers, and vigils, and fasting and mortification of the flesh, obedience and poverty.

So Luther went the extra mile and some. More prayer, fasting three days straight, throwing away the blanket he was allowed during the night so that he nearly froze to death, more fasting, more praying. He would later relate that if he had continued with this, he would have found his way to an early grave.

He was a perfect monk, but somehow he never felt he had done enough. Could he not have done more praying, more painful exercises?

Some have argued that Luther must have been a great sinner if he needed that many good works to balance the books. But that is a total misunderstanding. Luther wanted to be absolutely sure that what he did was enough. It did not matter to him that he was the most devoted, most ardent worshipper in the already very devoted and very ardent community of the observant Augustinians. What he was looking for was a sign from God that he was chosen, that he had done enough. And no such sign appeared…

The Journey to Rome

If one’s own efforts weren’t enough, there was the option of pleading with the virgin or the saints to step in on one’s behalf. The idea was that the saints and the virgin had amassed so much merit through their good works and exemplary lives, they had much to spare. This treasure of merit was administered by the church, and specifically by the pope. He could allocated this spiritual relief to individual sinners, thereby shorten their time in purgatory. One way to gain access to this treasure was by praying to the saints, and most effectively by praying before the remains of the saint, i.e., their relics.

And the greatest storehouse of such relics was Rome. In just one of the catacombs, St. Callistus, we find the remains of 9 early popes and thousands of martyrs. There are the graves of St. Peter and of St. Paul, the major and minor basilicas filled to the brim with the remains of the early saints etc., etc.

Martin Luther went to Rome in 1510 or 1511. It was not primarily a pilgrimage, but a diplomatic mission. Internal conflict had broken out within the Augustinian order in Germany and Luther was chosen as an emissary to the general of the order who was based in Rome to plead their case.

Whilst in Rome he did the obligatory circuit of the seven major basilicas, as well as the Scala Santa, the stairs of the palace of Pontius Pilate where Jesus had been presented to the people and that had been transferred to Rome by angels. Climbing these on your knees, saying a Pater Noster on every step and kissing each, gave you the right to release one soul from purgatory. Martin Luther chose his grandfather, regretting that his parents were still alive and hence could not benefit from this blessing.

Did that alleviate his “Anfechtungen”, his perennial terror of God as judge who may send him down to hell for eternity? No, it did not. Though he did not arrive at the top of the stairs declaring that “the just should live by faith” as some protestant propaganda once claimed, but the whole process only added to his doubts as to the effectiveness of these exercises.

What may have contributed to the disillusionment was the way the Roman prayer factories operated. For a man who had been terrified of making the slightest mistake in the celebration of his first mass, the carelessness with which the Roman clergy ran through the prescribed motionss, shocked him. This was not yet the moment he dismissed the papacy in its entirety, as is often said. He saw the corruption and knew these weren’t serious people. But as long as the church administered the treasure of merit, even if done badly, she remained the source of grace.

The Perennial Confession

The most promising tool to reconcile a sinner to the almighty God was however the sacrament of confession. The terror-stricken, overpowered Luther was naturally heading for a gold medal in confessing. He would confess daily, sometimes several times a day, on one occasion for 6 hours straight. Such assiduous confessing should have cleared all major and even most minor transgressions and should have brought him solace. But it did not. Every time he left the confession box, his mind immediately turned to search for any misdeed he might have forgotten or was committing right at that moment.

What was almost as impressive as his endurance in investigating and recounting every minutiae of his failings was the patience of his confessor.

And this confessor, Johann von Staupitz, is one of the most sympathetic figures in this entire tale. He was a nobleman, a childhood friend of  the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, a doctor of theology and the vicar general of the observant Augustinians in the Holy Roman Empire, effectively, Martin Luther’s superior.

Staupitz had a soft spot for this earnest and industrious monk. As an experienced ecclesiastical leader, he was used to the religious fervour and doubts his younger colleague displayed. He listened patiently to the endless litany of minor infringements that so perturbed Luther. But even a man of Staupitz’ character and stamina can hit the buffers. After one of these gruelling sessions he sighed at his charge quote; “if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive – parricide, blasphemy, adultery – instead of all these peccadillos” end quote.

Staupitz had a point, but he completely missed Luther’s point. Luther’s problem wasn’t that he thought his trifling contraventions were major sins. He was questioning the effectiveness of confession itself.

Confession, or more accurately the sacrament of penitence is a three step process. First the sinner must repent his or her offence, then they need to confess this offence to their priest and finally the priest determines a form of religious penance to be undertaken, like prayer, fasting, pilgrimage etc. That sounds pretty straightforward and effective.

But Martin Luther had found a massive logical flaw. This is where we see the first glimpse that he might be different. Most of us – including myself – go through life using an 80-20 approach. If I get 80% of what I do right, then things will turn out fine, probably even quite a bit better than fine. Luther wasn’t 80-20, he was 100 or nothing. And if you want to confess 100% of your sins, you need to know 100% of the times you breached whatever, even minor rule. And that, he concluded, was impossible..

The human memory was simply not accurate enough to record every single failure, in particular when you did not realise that there was a rule that could be broken. And since penance required the sinner to repent, it did not work for sins that had slipped one’s mind. He pointed to Jonah who slept soundly and would never have repented, had he not been made aware of his sins by the storm that God had sent.

As far as Luther was concerned, no recollection meant no confession and no confession meant no forgiveness and no forgiveness meant eternal damnation. One can see why he got so agitated, since frankly I can barely remember what I did last week, let alone what unforgivable sins I might have committed in my 20s.

And again, because Luther was a 100 or nothing man, he took the thought one further. If God could set up a system that left a sinner without a chance to gain forgiveness, was God actually just? Maybe he wasn’t. According to the latest scholastic theories, God was absolute, above any laws, even the ones he had given himself, in fact God could do what God wanted. God could be capricious, God could be cruel.

30 years later Luther described his state of mind at that time as follows: “But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, “Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?” This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience” end quote.

As Staupitz saw his charge spiralling out of control, he concluded that what Luther needed was a distraction. So he asked him to resume his studies and gain a doctorate in theology. He involved him in senior positions in the administration of the order and when Luther had gained his license to teach, made him professor of Bible studies at the University of Wittenberg.

The Tower Experience

The University of Wittenberg was brand, brand new. The Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise had decided to make Wittenberg one of his main residences. He rebuilt the ancient castle, erected a new church adjacent to it and founded an Augustinian friary. But the jewel in the crown was his university, which was first opened in 1502.

Johann von Staupitz, as an eminent Theologian and senior member of a religious order as well as a childhood friend of the Elector, had been instrumental in the setting up the new university. Wittenberg came about during a period that saw dozens of universities springing up in the Holy Roman Empire mainly designed to satisfy the gigantic appetite for lawyers and administrators in the consolidating principalities.

Theology was not the focus, more of a bauble. So Staupitz was given almost free reign in the design of the curriculum, as long as it would add to the reputation of the university. Staupitz was not only stringent in his ideas about the observance of monastic rules, he was also somewhat outside the mainstream. Bible studies as such was not part of the classic curriculum in the early 16^th century. Theologians spent most of their time with secondary texts, the church fathers, papal bulls, decisions of the church councils, cannon law etc. Many had never even read the Bible. So a dedicated course on the Bible itself was a novelty, exactly the sort of thing that would attract students.

And it was also exactly what Luther needed. As you know, I am not a theologian, in fact I am just a seriously lapsed Catholic. But over the last few years – thanks to the podcast – I have read quite a bit of the New Testament and as far as I can make out, Jesus is a lot more about forgiveness, love thy neighbour and turning the other cheek than about judgement and hell.

And unsurprisingly, as Luther dived deep into the original text, he found the answer to his “Anfechtungen”, his anguish and his terrors. And rather than trying to say it in my words, here is the man himself quote:

“Meanwhile in that same year, 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced, since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul’s Letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the Letter to the Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: “The justice of God is revealed in it.” I hated that word, “justice of God,” which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: “The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: ‘The just person lives by faith.'” I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “The just person lives by faith.” All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. I exalted this sweetest word of mine, “the justice of God,” with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise.

Afterward I read Augustine’s “On the Spirit and the Letter,” in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted “the justice of God” in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified.”

End quote.

That is the great breakthrough, the evangelical experience, the tower experience, or as we Catholics claim, the latrine experience since in some telling he may have had this revelation on the loo.

Where he had it does not matter. What he had found was a way to banish his terrors. He had slain the God-monster, had defused the nuclear bomb of judgement in his head. The impact was not just psychological, but also physical. The emaciated monk, weakened by his eternal fasting and perennial confessions gradually turned into the well-padded, solid, imposing figure that you see in Cranch’s paintings and every Luther statue from Worms to Washington. He apologised to his father for his disobedience and they were finally fully reconciled.

But was his view of salvation really that unprecedented? As he said himself, Augustine had the same idea a thousand years before him, Jan Hus and his followers were on a very similar trajectory and I am sure better read listeners can point out dozens of predecessors to the idea of salvation through faith.

So, once again, Martin Luther was not that exceptional.

But, and this is now my own hypothesis, one of the reasons he was so successful was the fact that he wasn’t a man of astounding religious experiences like St. Francis, nor a fountain of truly unheard of, incredibly learned ideas, like Marsilius of Padua.

He wasn’t the first man to join a monastery out of fear of death, he wasn’t the first to overdo his religious exercises, he certainly wasn’t the first to go on pilgrimage to Rome. Arguably his pilgrimage was more of a business trip with religious sightseeing. And he wasn’t the first to drive a confessor round the bend. He was a model monk, but he did not destroy his bowels with fasting like Bernard of Clairvaux, he had not gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, nor had he bricked himself into a cell like Julian of Norwich. He sure made the dean’s list at monk school, but he wasn’t a full blown saint.

But what he was, was extremely relatable to his fellow monks. He had tried for salvation doing all the things required and some, and then he stood up and said – guys – this did not work. And there were dozens, or as we will see hundreds and thousands of monks, nuns and clerics who felt that same desperation, that their efforts had gone nowhere. They had not found that reassurance they hoped for. And here was a guy who had gone further than they had, still had failed and now said out loud what they had only been thinking.

And he had a solution, backed up by arguments in scripture. A solution that was novel and complex but not totally new and not terribly complex. And having generated this, not from dry scholastic argument, but out of a serious inner struggle, he was – as we say today – authentic.

So in a way the fact that Luther wasn’t really that exceptional was the most exceptional thing about him.

As I said, this is my read of this, there are tons and tons of other ways people have looked at these events, people with humongous scholarship and far more time than I had. So take this as nothing more than another little voice in the grand chorus of opinions. If you go to my website historyofthegermans.com and follow the links to the transcript for this episode, you will find further links to various books and sources that give you these different takes. And of course this is where you can sign up as a patron under the support tab.

Next time we will dive into that other sequence of events that developed almost in parallel to the interior developments inside Martin Luther, the spread of indulgences and the Reformer’s response. As Bainton said in the beginning, these dramatic events “bedazzle the eyes of dramatic biographers [but] were to Luther himself trivial in comparison with the inner upheavals of his questing after God. So, get ready to be bedazzled….